tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36805046755184351952024-02-06T21:58:53.892-08:00NEWSPAPERMANBecky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-55659380784843342742010-01-23T20:38:00.000-08:002010-01-23T23:16:41.722-08:00The City's Chinese Art Coup<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjETxt6SxDKrsfHWHcvZkBSSeQY0bZU1jfXSCayTV9rnF6oVta76Hakbqt34MILmOzgaS7U4X3_wvXRHvlyizw9GCGNkPXr_I0L0iE1eqmmM0KqOqw5iz7apMSWDxYW_tKe4t6cVs5yerU/s1600-h/art+coup.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjETxt6SxDKrsfHWHcvZkBSSeQY0bZU1jfXSCayTV9rnF6oVta76Hakbqt34MILmOzgaS7U4X3_wvXRHvlyizw9GCGNkPXr_I0L0iE1eqmmM0KqOqw5iz7apMSWDxYW_tKe4t6cVs5yerU/s200/art+coup.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5430175599719570610" /></a><br /><b>by Tom Emch </b><div><b><br /></b></div><div>When the exhibit of the Archaeological Finds of the People's Republic of China opened yesterday morning at theAsian Museum, it proved the impossible sometimes can be accomplished with perseverance and time.</div><div><br /></div><div>It took two years of delicate behind-the-scenes negotiations by dozens of people to find the key to this incredibly complicated Chinese puzzle, to solve it and bring perhaps the world's foremost collection of antiquity to San Francisco.</div><div><br /></div><div>You see, the People's Republic had never intended the exhibit be shown here. The U.S. State Department had never intended to recommended inclusion of the city on the exhibit's itinerary; at one point, the State Department had even attempted to discourage San Francisco's private negotiations with the Chinese government.</div><div><br /></div><div>But San Francisco prevailed, and therein lies the story. It is a story with a large cast of characters that includes the director-curator of the museum, its commissioners, the Mayor, an architect, some bottles of California wine, and the city's indefatigable chief of protocol, Cyril Magnin. Add to this a half dozen Chinese art curators, the Chief of the Chinese Liaison Office in Washington, D. C. and several Asian experts in the State Department, and you have a fine brew of personalities.</div><div><br /></div><div>The priceless collection - 385 art objects and artifacts ranging from the paleolithic time to the fourteenth century - was originally scheduled to be exhibited (one city to a country) in Paris, London, Stockholm, Vienna, Toronto and perhaps Washington, D. C. and then return to Peking, never to leave China again.</div><div><br /></div><div>April, 1973. Enter Bernice Behrens, director of the State Department's Reception Center here, and Cyril Magnin. As official representatives of the U.S. and San Francisco, respectively, they are at the airport to meet the Chinese delegation on the way to Washington to set up the Chinese Liasion Office.</div><div><br /></div><div>Both of them mention to the Chinese chief of delegation, Han Hsu, that San Francisco would very much like tohave the exhibit and the Chinese nod non-committally. The Chinese stay overnight at he St. Francis Hotel and are escorted back to the airport he next morning. At this point even Washington, D. C. is not on the exhibit's itinerary.</div><div><br /></div><div>August, 1973. Yvon d'Argence, director-curator of the Asian Art Museum, is on vacation in Paris where the collection is being shown. "I made contact with the U.S. Embassy for help to see the Chinese curltural attache at the Chinese Embassy in Paris," says d'Argence. "I had heard that there were twelve cities in the U.S. who were on the State Department list, all competing for the exhibit." Again the Chinese were polite but non-committal.</div><div><br /></div><div>September, 1973. By this time it was learned that not only Washington was getting the exhibit, but Kansas City, also Mayor Alioto asks Cyril Magnin to get involved and find out why San Francisco was being excluded. Magnin travels to the capital with William Goetze, chairman of the Asian Art Museum commission and a vice president of the Bank of America.</div><div><br /></div><div>They arrange a luncheon at the Madison Hotel for some State Department protocol people and ask the White House curator to set up a meeting with the Chinese, who are at the Mayflower Hotel.</div><div><br /></div><div>A meeting with Han Hsu is arranged and Magnin and Goetze have tea with the Chinese. More politeness but no commitments. Before leaving Washington, the San Franciscans go to see John Richardson Jr., Assistant Secretary of the State for Cultural Affairs. They are told "there is no chance" of San Francisco getting the exhibit.</div><div><br /></div><div>"It is not possible," says Richardson. "Anything's possible, Mr. Richardson," replies Magnin. There is no visible progress, but they learn that the Chief of the Liaison Office, Ambassador Huang Chen, will be coming to San Francisco.</div><div><br /></div><div>Also in the fall of 1973, d'Argence writes to Peking requesting the exhibit, and Charles Yost, the president of the National Committee on U.S. China Relations, visits San Francisco, and his help is enlisted. </div><div><br /></div><div>But in May, 1974, the roof falls in. The museum receives a letter from John Richardson indicating that he exhibit will definitely not come to San Francisco, but will return to Peking from Kansas City's William Rockhill Nelson Gallery after conclusion of the show in June of 1975.</div><div><br /></div><div>"I must tell you that most people gave up," says d'Argence. "But Cyril didn't."</div><div><br /></div><div>In the fall of 1974, Magnin kept up the pressure with letters to Washington. Haydn Williams, one of the museum's commissioners and the U.S. Ambassador to Micronesia, traveled to Washington to apply pressure to State. Then Magnin goes to Washington to meet with Huang Chen, the ambassador. His letter of introduction is from William Goetze.</div><div><br /></div><div>In December, there is a turnabout. The curators of the exhibit arrive suddenly in San Francisco and are entertained by the museum commissioners, the Mayor and Magnin.</div><div><br /></div><div>Goetze recalls: "There was a luncheon at the museum, a typical American buffet: corned beef sandwiches, beer and wine." There were several toasts exchanged by the Mayor and the head of the delegation Liu Yang-ch'iao. "They went away impressed with the competence of our museum staff," says Goetze.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the answer was still no. And as a matter of fact, one course says that the curators sent a negative report to Peking.</div><div><br /></div><div>Both Goetze and Mrs. Berhens of the State Department say the reason given for the choice of Kansas City was that it was felt the East and West Coasts had Asian art collections available to the public and the Midwest had relatively little exposure to Chinese culture. Thus Kansas City.</div><div><br /></div><div>The breakthrough came in January of 1975, when Ambassador Huang Chen came to San Francisco at the invitation of Magnin. On January 22 Magnin hosted a party at the Top of the Mark in a closed off section of that room.</div><div><br /></div><div>In attendance were seven Chinese, the Mayor, Mrs. Behrens, William Dauer, executive vice president of the Chamber of Commerce, Tommy Hsieh, the architect, Magnin's daughter and son-in-law and the host.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Mayor was dazzling, recalls Mrs. Behrens: "He presented the key to the city to the ambassador and offered a toast." She says she remembers the toast as follows. "We suggest to the ambassador that inanimate objects might get tired on their long journey back to China and we would suggest that a place be found were they could rest."</div><div><br /></div><div>She says that everyone in the room began to applaud and say, "San Francisco, San Francisco." In reply the ambassador said that enjoyed the warm hospitality of San Francisco, and called it the Golden City.</div><div><br /></div><div>At the end of the party, Magnin announced that the ambassador had told him "there was a good chance" San Francisco would, after all, get the exhibit. But there was still no commitment.</div><div><br /></div><div>The following day, a tour of the wine country was arranged by Tommy Hsieh. The seven Chinese, Hsieh, Mrs. Behrens and Magnin boarded a charter bus, complete with stocked bar, and went to the Franciscan Winery for a barbeque. They ended up at the Inglenook Winery sampling California vintages, which the ambassador took a liking to.</div><div><br /></div><div>During the day, Magnin kept hammering away at the ambassador about how both San Francisco and China needed each other. And sometime that day Ambassador Huang Chen told Magnin that he would see to it that San Francisco would get the exhibit.</div><div><br /></div><div>Less than a week later the chairman of the Chinese Archaeological Exhibition delegation wrote to Goetze:</div><div><br /></div><div>"...I conveyed to the proper authorities your desire to show the Chinese exhibit in San Francisco and to strengthen the ties of friendship between the people of San Francisco and the people of China. </div><div><br /></div><div>"Everybody agrees that you should be given full consideration. Consequently, I would suggest you take the matter up with your government. Your government would then approach, formally, our minister of foreign affairs through our representative in Washington. It is my belief that if you follow this approach, there is a good chance that he hope of the people of San Francisco will materialize..."</div><div><br /></div><div>The letter was signed: "Liu Yang-ch'iao."</div><div><br /></div><div>The letter amounted to a commitment, although not yet official. </div><div><br /></div><div>Goetz recalls: "That was some exciting moment in my life. I was in the desert recovering from an illness and one of our commissioners, William P. Scott Jr., read it to me over the phone. I"ll never forget it."</div><div><br /></div><div>Goetz says that at the State Department in Washington they "couldn't believe that these things were going on." He says they were flabbergasted, and cautioned about bruised feelings in Los Angeles, which was also maneuvering to get the exhibit.</div><div><br /></div><div>"At that point," says Goetze, "Cyril whips out a letter from Mayor Bradley supporting San Francisco."</div><div><br /></div><div>Magnin had earlier taken the precaution of having Alioto get supporting letters from the mayors of ten Western cities to assure Huang that the exhibit would get the widest possible exposure if it was shown here.</div><div><br /></div><div>Magnin says that he believes the final decision to bring the exhibit to San Francisco was made in Peking on the recommendation of Ambassador Huang.</div><div><br /></div><div>Eager to give the Mayor credit for his role in the coup, Magnin says: "The Mayor was in on it from the start. He was the first one to ask me to work on it. When things looked feasible he was on the phone every day. He was really the spark plug."</div><div><br /></div><div>But Goetze puts it another way: "When you boil it down, it was Cyril."</div><div><br /></div><div>And d'Argence says: "It was a fantastic coup. This man (Magnin) has been so instrumental ... dealing with the Chinese ambassador and the State Department..."</div><div><br /></div><div>In the following month, February, the State Department, somewhat astonished at what had happened, notified the Asian Art Museum that final negotiations were underway, in Peking with the Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office there, Ambassador George Bush.</div><div><br /></div><div>There was some delay before the sining of the formal protocol documents, during which time Goetze was frantically trying to get a phone connection to Bush in Peking to hurry it along.</div><div><br /></div><div>Before the call got through, it was announced in Washington that the papers had been signed and the exhibit would come to San Francisco - officially.</div><div><br /></div><div>Among the many people Magnin worked with to bring the exhibit here was Mrs. Howard Ahmanson of Los Angeles. She heads a committee of the National Endowment of the Humanities through which the NEH agreed to sponsor the exhibition with a $275,000 grant to the Asian Art Museum.</div><div><br /></div><div>The funds were matched by local contributions from among others, the Bank of America Foundation, the Chinese-American Committee, IBM Corporation, the San Francisco Foundation, Standard Oil Company of Califonria, the Bank of California, the Banque Nationale de Paris, Crocker National Bank, Fireman's Fund American Insurance Companies, Foremost-McKesson, Inc., Levi Strauss Foundation, Security Pacific National Bank, United Airlines, United Bank of Califonria and the Wilbur Ellis-Connell Bros. Co., Ltd.</div><div><br /></div><div>The show is free to the public and will remain at the Asian Art Museum through August 28. It is for the people, and that's the way the Chinese wanted it. That's the way San Francisco wanted it. And that's the way a handful of dedicated people made it happen when everyone said it couldn't be done.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner June 1975</i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-14196628184431556812009-11-15T14:36:00.000-08:002009-11-15T22:29:12.955-08:00The Chinatown Murders<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC2hL2dpRABuWXTRi1oOaEsZF-Glr0dLlTo3mgIKpCwvYX9eIwNRYhzwBvCpn5HtyPPp6YlrYfDazQEu6cDjuLKdXpSbKa-uMqF_HY9vJzufcKObvyj1WIPscxExlgZ0YuVIXD0bFWt9M/s1600-h/chinatown+pic.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 170px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC2hL2dpRABuWXTRi1oOaEsZF-Glr0dLlTo3mgIKpCwvYX9eIwNRYhzwBvCpn5HtyPPp6YlrYfDazQEu6cDjuLKdXpSbKa-uMqF_HY9vJzufcKObvyj1WIPscxExlgZ0YuVIXD0bFWt9M/s200/chinatown+pic.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5404463517305560642" /></a><br /><b>by Tom Emch</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Is San Francisco's Chinatown the spawning ground for criminal gang activities springing up in large cities elsewhere in the United States? Is it organized, possibly from Hong Kong?</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Police are not specific. But there are these facts:</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">- Various San Francisco homicide inspectors have been traveling to New York City where police are setting up a special unit to deal with Chinatown crime there.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">- Royal Hong Kong police have been in close contact with the San Francisco police intelligence unit and homicide detectives. Hong Kong police have helped identify certain suspects here by supplying mug shots, fingerprints and names translated from the "Three-way Chinese Commercial Code."</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">- Hong Kong police have been corresponding with San Francisco police offering their knowledge of the workings of the active Triad Societies, and their elaborate code numbers.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">- It is known that Los Angeles, Vancouver, B.C. and New York police have been cooperating in the search for Paul Seet Chin, wanted for the murder of Richard Leung in October of 1971.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">- Since 1969, there have been seventeen murders associated with Chinatown youth gangs. Here is the chronology of violence:</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Armado Legardo, 29, stabbed April 19, 1969.</span></b></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Glen Fong, 19, shot March 1, 1970.</span></b></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Teddy Tam, 21, stabbed June 13, 1970.</span></b></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Larry Miyata, 16, shot September 12, 1970.</span></b></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Richard Leung (also known as Raymond Leong), 18, shot October 2, 1970.</span></b></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">George Yun, 21, strangled November 5, 1971.</span></b></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Kenneth Chan, 15, shot November 7, 1971.</span></b></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Allan ("The Monster") Hom, 22, strangled November 19, 1971.</span></b></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">James Lee, 20, strangled November 20, 1971.</span></b></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Harry Quan (or Kwan), 14, shot March 9, 1972.</span></b></div><div>Harry (The Professor") Ng, 60, shot March 13, 1972.</div><div>Poole Leong, 22, shot June 14, 1972.</div><div>Barry Fong-Torres, 29, shot June 26, 1972.</div><div>William Hackney, 41, shot March 23, 1973.</div><div>Anton Wong, 24, shot May 24, 1973.</div><div>Yip Yee Tak, 32, shot June 3, 1973.</div><div>Wayne Fung, 19, shot August 12, 1973.</div><div><br /></div><div>Besides the murders, there have been numerous armed robberies and plenty of acid throwing and window smashing, the tactics reserved for shopkeepers and restaurant owners who dislike paying for protection. However, police believe the actual criminal element in Chinatown is small.</div><div><br /></div><div>They say no more than 150 persons, mostly teenagers, are responsible for all the crime, and these are the gang members.</div><div><br /></div><div>What is behind the crime wave, Chinatown residents ask.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ghetto crime has not changed much over the years and the patterns are similar wherever you crowd people into tenements and lock them with poverty.</div><div><br /></div><div>San Francisco's Chinatown is probably the worst ghetto in the country. More than 60,000 people are packed into forty-two square blocks. One-third of the families earn less than the federal poverty level.</div><div><br /></div><div>Chinatown's unemployment rate is nearly thirteen percent, while it is six percent for San Francisco as a whole and under five percent for the country.</div><div><br /></div><div>Crowded? The density rate in Chinatown is 885 persons per acre, ten times The City's average.</div><div><br /></div><div>Few Chinatown tourists are aware that Chinese children attend classes in hallways and in storage areas and hold recess on rooftops. Many of the working people live in dormitory-like buildings and keep their possessions in suitcases because there is no closet space.</div><div><br /></div><div>They work in sewing-factory sweatshops along Pacific Avenue, Powell, Jackson and Kearny Streets where, it is said, some 3,000 seamstresses produce garments on a piece-work basis for American firms.</div><div><br /></div><div>Add to this the fact that many residents can't speak English. And they refuse to complain about conditions because they or some of their relatives are here illegally - a perfect framework for exploitation.</div><div><br /></div><div>The present turmoil in Chinatown is, some observers believe, an open revolt against intolerable social conditions. And the youth gangs are the knife point of the revolt.</div><div><br /></div><div>Police are concerned with keeping the lid on Chinatown. They don't see an armed youth who robs a "Mom and Pop" grocery store as a social crusader.</div><div><br /></div><div>Homicide inspectors don't regard a teenage strangler as a social problem and the product of his environment. He is a violent and dangerous killer and should be brought to justice before he kills again.</div><div><br /></div><div>An international underworld hierarchy, directed from Hong Kong, may be responsible for some of the seventeen execution-type gang warfare murders in Chinatown.</div><div><br /></div><div>Directly involved are two Chinatown youth gangs linked with the protection racket: the Wah Ching (Chinese Youth) and the Chung Ching Yee (Loyalty and Righteousness), also known as the Joe Fong Gang, after its former leader Joe Fong, now serving ten to life for attempted murder. Fong was born in Macao, a Portuguese enclave near Hong Kong. </div><div><br /></div><div>The leadership of the Wah Ching, specifically, is known to have strong Hong Kong ties, now under investigation by the Royal Hong Kong Police, as well as ties to the underworld gangs in Los Angeles and to an organization in New York's Chinatown known as the White Eagles.</div><div><br /></div><div>Former leader of the Wah Chings, Anton Wong, murdered in broad daylight May 23 at Powell and Jackson Streets, was born in Hong Kong and traveled extensively to both Hong Kong and New York, where, police believe, he was consulted on the formation of the White Eagles.</div><div><br /></div><div>Harry Ng, murdered in his Kung Fu studio March 13, 1972, is believed to have been a courier between the Wah Chings and a mysterious person in Hong Kong known only by a code name. Ng gunned down on a Monday, had airline reservations for Hong Kong the following Saturday.</div><div><br /></div><div>The 60 year old Ng ("The Professor"), police say, was mentor of the Wah Ching thugs, teaching them extortion tactics.</div><div><br /></div><div>The criminal activities of the Chinatown gangs - the extortion racket, assault and armed robbery for the most part - are well known to police, particularly to the homicide and intelligence details.</div><div><br /></div><div>What is less well known is the extent of the profits from crime - estimated at a minimum of $250,000 a year but possibly five times that amount - and how much is funneled back to Hong Kong.</div><div><br /></div><div>Control of the rackets and the profits, police believe, is the motive for the chain of seventeen gangland murders that began in April of 1969.</div><div><br /></div><div>Another unknown factor is the extent to which any or possibly all of Chinatown's five tongs are involved with the gangs.</div><div><br /></div><div>A tong today is a respectable benevolent or fraternal association, some Chinese claim. They admit, however, that tong gambling games are more sophisticated than, say, church bingo. And all the tongs operate gambling games.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Hop Sing Tong, one of the largest nationally, has ten chapters in the United States with headquarters in San Francisco and has assets of more than $7 million. </div><div><br /></div><div>The Hop Sing, police say formally initiated into the tong some young Wah Ching hoodlums in the late 1960s. They were brought in as look-see boys for tong gambling games, but were later expelled when they got out of control and demanded more than $100 a night as guards and lookouts. It seems they wanted part of the action.</div><div><br /></div><div>Chinatown's largest tong, the Bing Kong, has a reputation for civic and business leadership as well as a history of using muscle to enforce its rules.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Hip Sing, third most important in San Francisco, is big in Los Angeles and perhaps the strongest tong in New York's Chinatown.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Ying Ong (or Ying On) is the smallest numerically in San Francisco. But it, too, has chapters in major cities. Politically, it is said to be tied to the Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintgang) government on Taiwan. In New York, the Ying Ong and the Kuomintang have offices in the same building.</div><div><br /></div><div>The fifth tong in Chinatown is the Suey Sing. One source says that Suey Sing members harbored some Red Guard youths from Mainland China who came to San Francisco during the 1969 Cultural Revolution and were responsible for the Chinese New Year's Jackson Street confrontation with police.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Suey Sing, one of the more impenetrable of the Tongs, includes in its membership one youth gang leader known as Tom Tom, sources say. Tom Tom, one of the original members of the Wah Chings, broke away from the organization in late 1969 and formed his own gang. The new gang, identified by police as the "young Suey Sings" or the "Tom Tom Gang," is made up of foreign born teenagers known as "F.O.B.s," or "fresh off the boats." </div><div><br /></div><div>The Tom Tom Gang was hired by the Suey Sing as look-see guards at gambling games, just as the Wah Chings were hired by the Hop Sing. Rivalries between the gangs developed, leading to the first violence.</div><div><br /></div><div>On March 19, 1969, a 29 year old Filipino, Armado Legardo, was stabbed to death at Washington and Grant Streets. His murder is unsolved, but police believe he was executed by one of the gangs.</div><div><br /></div><div>Then, on March 1, 1970, Wah Ching president Glen Fong was executed - riddled with ten shots from a .30 caliber carbine as he entered his home at 927 Jackson Street.</div><div><br /></div><div>The assailant is still unknown, but police say that shortly after Fong's death, Tom Tom was mobbed and beaten nearly to death in a Chinatown alley.</div><div><br /></div><div>After a hospital recovery, Tom Tom moved his gang to Oakland, where he established headquarters and staked out his sphere of influence. Police say he may be "waiting in the wings" for the day he can return to Chinatown and take over the rackets.</div><div><br /></div><div>Fong's killing kicked off the gang war in earnest. There were two more killings in 1970; five murders in 1971, four of them in November; four more murders in 1972, and there have been four so far in 1973.</div><div><br /></div><div>Police have two convictions for the seventeen murders; there are "wanted" bulletins out on two separate suspects for two more of the murders; a suspect is in custody for one recent killing; nine are officially listed by police as "unsolved," and the most recent is being investigated.</div><div><br /></div><div>Homicide investigators believe they know who committed all but five of the murders. But evidence is a hard thing to come by in Chinatown, where a wall of silence has been traditionally maintained by Orientals when talking to police officers, particularly Caucasians.</div><div><br /></div><div>And in the entire San Francisco Police Department there are only a few men who are fluent in both Mandarin and Cantonese, the prevalent language of Chinatown. The tongs are experienced at using the language barrier to their advantage.</div><div><br /></div><div>Tongs got their start more than one hundred years ago when Chinese "coolie" labor was imported into California to work on the railheads and in the gold fields. Originally, they were associations to protect members from the oppressions and injustices of the racist white bosses.</div><div><br /></div><div>Only much later did they allegedly get into the rackets, gambling, prostitution and narcotics. But from the beginning they used muscle and strong-arm tactics to settle grievances.</div><div><br /></div><div>The tongs are descendants of the ancient and secret Triad Societies of China which were organized on a military basis with well-defined ranks and duties. Even today, Triads control Hong Kong crime.</div><div><br /></div><div>For mutual recognition and to avoid detection, Triad officers were (and are) known by numbers. The number "481" is the chief officer, and "438" is the deputy chief. "415" is the officer in charge of administration and finance. "426" is the liaison or messenger. This individual, known as the Straw Sandal, is also responsible for delivering demand notes and collection of protection fees. When force is necessary, "432" arranges for it, supplies the "enforcer."</div><div><br /></div><div>Ordinary rank and file members of a Triad are designated by the number "49" - standing for four times nine or thirty-six, which is the number of oaths a recruit has to take during the initiation ceremony. In Hong Kong, the ceremony is known as "Hanging the Blue Lantern."</div><div><br /></div><div>Similar initiation ceremonies into associations still take place in Chinatown, reportedly in the attics or on the rooftops of some buildings where no Caucasian has ever been allowed. Initiations into both tongs and, on another level into gangs are secret; so are sessions at which "justice" is dispensed. Punishment for infractions of rules is known as "roof discipline."</div><div><br /></div><div>In the case of a youth gang, membership offers prestige and status to aspiring recruits, as well as protection from bullies and strong-arm men. For a teenager, a recent immigrant from Hong Kong for instance, non-affiliation can be unhealthy. Resisting initiation can even be fatal, according to police.</div><div><br /></div><div>Police say the real link between San Francisco and Hong Kong crime is not between the tongs and the Triads, but between the Triads and the Chinese youth gangs in major U.S. cities which use fragments of Triad rituals, although unaware of their origin.</div><div><br /></div><div>The average teenage Chinese initiated into a criminal gang here or in Hong Kong usually knows little or nothing about the orthodox Triad Society structure, but he is aware that he is joining a secret group and must take orders from its leader to whom he must swear allegiance.</div><div><br /></div><div>Royal Hong Kong Police say the young Triad gangs - they have identified more than fifty of them - engage in extortion from shopkeepers, restaurants, dance halls, mahjong schools, gambling games in addition to purse snatching, armed robbery and assault. In 1971, Hong Kong police arrested 874 Triad members, of which 72 percent were under 21 years of age.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hong Kong police have noted a sharp increase in juvenile crime since 1968, and in San Francisco there has been a corresponding rise in robberies, extortion and violence in Chinatown.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is not viewed as coincidence by San Francisco police homicide inspectors who see similar patterns of crime here and in Hong Kong. This has led to increased cooperation between San Francisco and Hong Kong police, including an exchange of files, rap sheets and fingerprints on persons believed to be operating on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.</div><div><br /></div><div>San Francisco police won't divulge information they feel will be important in future prosecutions, but they are full of speculation and they are willing to theorize on certain events and motives. So are some attorneys acquainted with the Chinatown gang warfare through either prosecution or defense efforts.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here is the way the police reconstruct the chain of violence and retaliation for violence that has plagued Chinatown for four years and has been a shock for the normally law-abiding Chinese citizen of San Francisco.</div><div><br /></div><div>Lt. Charles Ellis, head of the Homicide Detail and a former uniformed patrolman in Chinatown, says the beat was once considered "quiet". There either wasn't much crime or the residents didn't report crimes to the police.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ellis says: "There's been a change in Chinatown. The immigration laws (The McCarran Act) were liberalized in 1964 to allow more Chinese into the country, and we started seeing the Hong Kong kids in about 1968.</div><div><br /></div><div>He refers to the kids from Hong Kong's Wanchai District, a high crime area similar to the Tenderloin in San Francisco.</div><div><br /></div><div>These "street urchins" got into the United States by means of a "paper father" - a person in San Francisco who would, for a fee, claim to be the father of a youth in Hong Kong, and sign papers to that effect.</div><div><br /></div><div>The papers signed in San Francisco were sent back to Hong Kong where they were processed by Chinese clerks working in the U.S. Consulate in the Crown Colony.</div><div><br /></div><div>On the surface it was a legal relative of a U.S. citizen of Chinese descent entering the United States under the sponsorship of his father.</div><div><br /></div><div> But in fact, the immigrants were unknown to their "fathers" and never saw them once they arrived "fresh off the boat" in San Francisco.</div><div><br /></div><div>Immigration officials are reluctant to talk about it, but some Chinatown sources say hundreds of young Hong Kong Chinese entered the U.S. in this fashion. Additional thousands entered with perfectly legal papers under the sponsorship of legal parents.</div><div><br /></div><div>Police now believe that some of the "illegal entrants," the Wanchai street urchins, were recruited and brought to San Francisco by members of Chinatown gangs in cooperation with Triad Society members in Hong Kong to engage in crime and return part of the profits to Hong Kong.</div><div><br /></div><div>Lt. Ellis says these teenage criminals, some of whom have police records in Hong Kong, began appearing on police blotters here in 1968.</div><div><br /></div><div>But even before that, possibly in 1965, a Chinatown source says, some of the Hong Kong kids were in San Francisco and working for the Hop Sing Tong as guards at gambling operations.</div><div><br /></div><div>As more of them arrived fresh off the boat, they formed the Wah Ching, which is a designation indicating "foreign-born."</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>In the period between early 1968 and the murder of Wah Ching leader Glen Fong in March of 1970, it was "The Professor," Harry Ng, police believe, who organized the Hong Kong kids into extortion gangs, acting as a teacher, much like the character Fagin in the London of Charles Dickens.</div><div><br /></div><div>Glen Fong led one group, Tom Tom led another group and by the time the gang warfare erupted in earnest, there was another extortion group, called the Yau Lai (Friendship for Profit), led by Steven Chan and Joe Fong, who has been described by police as an 18 year old with all the intelligence and cunning of a 40 year old Chinese warlord.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Yau Lai, by late 1971, had become the dominant Chinatown extortion gang, infringing on the territory and "customers" of the other gangs and, indeed, incurring the wrath of certain of the tongs.</div><div><br /></div><div>Police speculate that the end of the Yau Lai occurred in October and November of 1971 with the murders of four of its members, including Steven Chan's chief lieutenant, Richard Leung (also known as Raymong Leong) on October 2. Leung was killed by a .38 caliber revolver in the 600 block of Jackson Street in broad daylight in front of hundreds of horrified spectators.</div><div><br /></div><div>Three Chinese youths had an argument with Leung in which two of them pulled guns and shot Leung, who ran to Grant avenue and collapsed. There, one of his pursuers fired two more shots at point blank range into the back of Leung's head.</div><div><br /></div><div>Within the next six weeks, three more known Yau Lai members were executed:</div><div><br /></div><div>George Yun was found November 5, strangled and dumped in the Presidio shrubbery near West Pacific road. He had been hogtied and beaten.</div><div><br /></div><div>Allan Hom's body, dumped in the Bay, surfaced near Hayward November 19. He had been strangled and hogtied with a length from the same piece of rope used on Yun.</div><div><br /></div><div>The next day, November 20, the body of James Lee, appeared in the Bay at Redwood City. He, too, had been strangled and hogtied.</div><div><br /></div><div>Only the first of the four murders produced a suspect. Police believe a Paul Seet Chin of New York, a member of the White Eagles, was imported as the "hit" man in the Richard Leung slaying. The suspect is still at large and the subject of a "wanted" bulletin.</div><div><br /></div><div>There are several police theories on the bodies that were found hogtied and dumped:</div><div>(1) They were executed by members of the Tom Tom gang in Oakland; (2) Tom Tom's gang was hired by one of the tongs to perform the executions; (3) It was strictly an execution by tong members fed up with the rising cost of protection.</div><div><br /></div><div>At any rate, Joe Fong, by December of 1971, found life in Chinatown unhealthy and went into hiding in the Ingleside District. But before he left he was cornered in Ross Alley, beaten and left for dead by unknown assailants - unknown to the police, that is.</div><div><br /></div><div>Joe knew who had beaten him and, underworld sources say, he went to the leader of the Yau Lai, Steven Chan, to get permission to kill a character known as Henry ("Big Head") Louie. Permission was refused and Joe Fong left Chinatown to form his own gang.</div><div><br /></div><div>It must be understood that there were shifting alliances and many Yau Lai members were also members of the Wah Ching. It was the latter organization, led by the mysterious Anton Wong, which became the arch enemy of the new Joe Fong gang, named the Chung Ching Yee. Their clubhouse was at 161 Farallones Street.</div><div><br /></div><div>The polarization of these two gangs set off the current chain of Chinatown murders which began March 9, 1972 when Harry Quan (or Kwan) was shot from a car with a .32 caliber automatic as he stood with a group of youths in front of 815 Stockton Street, location of the Police Athletic League.</div><div><br /></div><div>Quan, only 14, was a Wah Ching member. After his murder, police immediately issued a warrant for the arrest of Joe Fong and one of his lieutenants, David Wong. There were six witnesses for the prosecution and one for the defense when the case came up in Juvenile Court. On the strength of the one defense witness, a girl who established Joe Fong's alibi, he was acquitted, as was David Wong. The car used in the Quan murder was registered to Richard Leung, the friend of Joe Fong who had been murdered five months earlier.</div><div><br /></div><div>By June 1972, with the help of a list of members obtained in a raid on the Joe Fong headquarters in the Ingleside District, police were aware of the names of the leaders of both the Chung Ching Yee and the Wah Ching - names that had popped up in homicide investigations and as the last half dozen victims of the gang warfare.</div><div><br /></div><div>Also by this time, the tongs had become alarmed at the wave of violence. One of them broke the traditional rule of silence and printed an announcement in the Chinese Times, the leading Chinese-language newspaper of Chinatown:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>"Bulletin of the Bing Kong Tong."</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>"Due to the current lawlessness in the Chinese Community, we issue this bulletin to all of our brothers and sisters to obey the law, to observe the customs and desist from all unruly behavior harmful to the commercial and social life of our community."</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>"If you persist in this anti-social conduct, our Tong will never interfere on your behalf. If you dare to damage any of the business enterprises owned by members of our Tong, we will go after you all the way."</div><div><br /></div><div>The Bing Kong is influential in Chinatown and their warning was not to be taken lightly. It was interpreted by some Chinatown observers as putting the Wah Ching and Chung Ching Yee on notice that protection fees were getting too high and that the tong was prepared to do something unusual in Chinatown - go to the police, name names, sign complaints and press for prosecution.</div><div><br /></div><div>And indeed, the Chinese wall of silence began to crumble shortly after the next act of violence. On the night of June 13, 1972, Poole Leong, a Wah Ching member, was shot to death on the balcony of his apartment in the Ping Yuen housing project in the 800 block of Pacific Avenue, just off Grant Avenue.</div><div><br /></div><div>While talking on the telephone, Leong was approached by two Chinese youths. One produced a .25 caliber automatic and fired. Leong slumped to thefirst floor balcony deck, bleeding profusely. Police were called and the Dispatcher at the Hall of Justice sent an ambulance to the housing project. The gang warfare victim - the twelfth in three years - was dead on arrival at San Francisco General Hospital.</div><div><br /></div><div>Twelve murders. All unsolved. But this one was different. There were witnesses who were willing to talk to the police. The Chinese wall of non-cooperation was broken.</div><div><br /></div><div>Homicide inspectors Frank McCoy and Edward Erdelatz Jr. knew that their witnesses might bow to pressures in Chinatown and refuse to talk by the time the case came to trial; so they immediately transfered the sketchy description of the assailants to a tape recorder.</div><div><br /></div><div>At Central Police Station, on the morning of June 14, 9172, the witnesses identified a picture of Weyman Tso from the files. He was one of the two intruders, they said. Later the same day, after studying more photo files, they came across a picture of Richard Lee, five feet seven, 120 pounds and 21 years old. This was the man who produced the gun and fired the fatal shots, the witnesses told police.</div><div><br /></div><div>The next day, the District Attorney's office decided there was enough evidence to justify warrants on a charge of murder. Superior judge Eugene F. Lynch agreed and promptly issued warrants of Weyman Tso and Richard Lee.</div><div><br /></div><div>In another break with tradition, the <i>Chinese Times</i> appeared on the streets with a story on the murder in the Ping Yuen housing complex. The story even speculated on Poole Leong's gangland connections. Community reaction was definitely on the side of the police.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anonymous tips began coming in to Inspectors McCoy and Erdelatz. These tips linked Richard Lee with the Joe Fong gang, naming him as Fong's number one deputy.</div><div><br /></div><div>Fourteen days went by after issuance of the all points bulletin for the arrest of the suspects, but without result. Lee and Tso were still at large when another murder occurred.</div><div>This time it was not in Chinatown and the victim was not a known gang member but a respected youth worker, Barry Fong-Torres, 29, director of the Youth Services Coordinating Center on Columbus Avenue.</div><div><br /></div><div>Fong-Torres had been in his Sunset District home at 1434 16th Avenue when someone rang his bell, police said.</div><div><br /></div><div>It was about 11:30 p.m. Fong-Torres opened the door and five shots were fired, striking the youth worker in the head, eye, mouth and chest.</div><div><br /></div><div>A scrawled note was found under the victim's body in an envelope. The misspelled message read: "Pig Informer Die Yong."</div><div><br /></div><div>(Police later discovered that Fong-Torres had complained to a friend shortly before being killed that he was "getting too close to the Chinatown gangs whose members thought he knew too much.")</div><div><br /></div><div>Four hours after the Fong-Torres murder, police stopped a speeding car on 16th Avenue and arrested two Chinese youths.</div><div><br /></div><div>One of the youths was Richard Lee, wanted for the murder of Poole Leong. The other was gang leader Joe Fong. Both were taken to the homicide bureau and questioned. Lee was held over for indictment in the Leong murder, and Joe Fong was released for lack of evidence.</div><div><br /></div><div>There have been no warrants issued in the Barry Fong-Torres killing, but Richard Lee was brought to trial and found guilty of the murder of Poole Leong. He was sentenced November 22, 1972, in front of Superior Court Judge Walter Calcagno. The term: life in prison. It was the first conviction in the chain of Chinatown gangland killings.</div><div><br /></div><div>And it marked the first time in the history of the San Francisco Police Department that a conviction had been brought about through the cooperation of Chinatown residents.</div><div><br /></div><div>The apparently motiveless murder of youth worker Barry Fong-Torres brought a wave of reaction from the entire city and demands were made that police crack down on Chinatown violence.</div><div><br /></div><div>By September of 1972, the crackdown was a fact.</div><div><br /></div><div>On the night of September 12, police raided the Chung Ching Yee headquarters at 161 Farallones Street and took ten Chinese youths into custody, including Joe Fong.</div><div><br /></div><div>Less than a month later, Joe Fong - out on bail on the kidnap charge - was picked up again. This time for attempted murder.</div><div><br /></div><div>He was accused, along with David Wong and Paul Lew, of firing at a car containing five Chinese youths parked at the corder of Hyde and Sacramento Streets. The shots wounded Jerry Leng and Gordon Wong, both Wah Ching members. The wounds were minor and both were treated in Mission Emergency Hospital and released.</div><div><br /></div><div>The crackdown continued and on the night of October 18, police arrested twenty-two Chinese youths at a disturbance in the 600 block of Jackson street. All were questioned and released. No charges were filed. But police said all twenty-two were members of either the Wah Ching or the Joe Fong Gang.</div><div><br /></div><div>Police interrogations of gang members usually are fruitless. But the aftermath of an event in September of 1972 was different.</div><div><br /></div><div>At the annual outing of a Chinese flower growers' association held in Mountain View there was a gambling game in progress. Police say members of the Wah Ching knew in advance of the game, and showed up in two cars. Seven youths - all armed - scooped up the gambling pot, shook down several of the flower growers and fled with an estimated $10,000.</div><div><br /></div><div>San Francisco police were tipped off that the raid had taken place and questioned several Wah Ching suspects separately. Several of them described the raid in detail, police say.</div><div><br /></div><div>The statements were turned over to detectives of the Mountain View police, but the flower growers refused to sign complaints and the case never produced an indictment.</div><div><br /></div><div>The year 1973 began with a serious blow to the Chinese gangs. Joe Fong, leader of the Chung Ching Yee, was convicted January 12 of the ambush shooting of Jerry Leng. Convicted iwth Fong were David Wong and Paul Lew. A fourth suspect, Clifton ("Bongy") Wong, later surrendered to police.</div><div><br /></div><div>In February, Joe Fong, 18, considered by police to be the most dangerous man in Chinatown, was sentenced to ten to life for an attempted murder that only slightly wounded his intended victim. However, police believe that Joe Fong's conviction and sentencing removed from society the person who either ordered or participated in four other murder cases: Harry Quan, Harry Ng, Poole Leong and Barry Fong-Torres.</div><div><br /></div><div>The imprisonment of Joe Fong left his gang in confusion and without an apparent leader, but it didn't stop the killings.</div><div><br /></div><div>There was a senseless murder March 23,1973, which had nothing to do with the gang warfare, but it sheds light on the mentality of some Chinese youth gang members and their low regard for human life.</div><div><br /></div><div>After a racial confrontation March 23 in a parking lot near Roosevelt Junior High School between four Chinese and a group of Blacks, the Chinese apparently decided to avenge some sort of insult.</div><div><br /></div><div>In a case of mistaken identity the four Chinese later hassled William Hackney, 41, in the parking lot of the Doggie Diner at the intersection of Arguello and Geary Boulevards.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hackney was mobbed and given several Karate chops, police said. Then witnesses said, shots rang out and Hackney crumpled to the pavement. He was dead on arrival at Park Emergency Hospital. Police later arrested and released three Chinese juveniles, including Robert Louie, 19, who was held as a possible parole violator and later released.</div><div><br /></div><div>Louie is the suspected leader of a robbery gang known as the "ski mask" bandits, linked with eight armed robberies between mid-March and mid-May of 1973. Louie, later convicted in connection with the robberies, is believed to have been deep in the extortion racket in Chinatown, but not directly affiliated with either the Wah Ching or Joe Fong's Chung Ching Yee. The Hackney murder is still unsolved, but there is a wanted bulletin out for Ernest Wong, 16.</div><div><br /></div><div>After the January conviction of Joe Fong, police intelligence officers knew it was jut a matter of time until his imprisonment would be avenged.</div><div><br /></div><div>One officer said:</div><div>"As the killings went on, some of the gangs that had been ill-defined became clearer to us. They were staking out the rackets and their territories and we could almost tell who was going to get it next. "</div><div><br /></div><div>The leader of the Wah Ching got it next - Anton Wong. He was killed for the apparent motive that he had been a prosecution witness at the trial of Joe Fong.</div><div><br /></div><div>In am amazingly bold high noon attack at Powell and Jackson Streets Wong, who had ben told by his parole officer to stay out of Chinatown, was gunned down execution-style.</div><div><br /></div><div>The victim was the number one police suspect in the slaying of a Japanese seaman, Larry Miyata, in September of 1970. Wong was the liaison to the White Eagles in New York, the pallbearer for Harry Ng, and a frequent visitor to Hong Kong. Police believe he may have been the "bag man" who carried the money back and forth.</div><div><br /></div><div>Police say Anton Wong was born in Hong Kong in 1948, and came to San Francisco in 1963. His rap sheet has twelve entries beginning in July of 1967 - mostly burglary and assault with a deadly weapon. One charge was pending at the time of his murder, which left the Wah Ching leaderless. </div><div><br /></div><div>According to police, a youth approached Anton Wong at 12:15 p.m. at the corner of Powell and Jackson Streets, where the cable cars make their abrupt turn.</div><div><br /></div><div>The killer approached to within a few feet and began firing. The first bullet apparently wounded Wong and he fell to the pavement. His assailant then stood over his victim and pumped five or six bullets from a .25 caliber automatic into Wong's head.</div><div><br /></div><div>Witnesses said the young killer then ran south on Powell and escaped into the crowd.</div><div><br /></div><div>Police immediately named Joe Fong's younger brother Chung Wai Fong, 15, as aprime suspect. Eight days later, Chung Wai Fong surrendered topolice to face a murder charge. He was later convicted in Juvenile Court. A brother, Kit Fong, a youth worker and the older brother of the imprisoned Joe Fong,aided police in the surrender of Chung Wai Fong.</div><div><br /></div><div>Police immediately made arrangements for the safety of Kit Fong, who they believed to be marked for assassination. He has left his job at the Youth for Service Organization at 14th and Harrison Streets and has dropped out of sight.</div><div><br /></div><div>Then, on June 3, came the sixteenth Chinatown gangland murder since April 1969.</div><div><br /></div><div>Yip Yee Tak, 32, also known as Dr. Ysung Yang, a counsellor to Chinatown youth, was gunned down at the busy intersection of Pacific and Grant Avenues. Three shots from a .38 caliber revolver hit him in the head and shoulder.</div><div><br /></div><div>Witnesses said the killer ran down Pacific to Columbus Avenue, turned right and disappeared, walking casually. On the way he tossed the revolver into Beckett Alley, where it was recovered by police. A suspect, Chol Soo Lee, is in custody.</div><div><br /></div><div>Officers so far have been unable to fit this slaying into the pattern of violence and retaliation. They will say only that Yip Yee Tak, like Barry Fong-Torres, knew too much.</div><div><br /></div><div>Fong-Torres knew too much; Tak knew too much and that fatal knowledge is the prime motive for the seventeenth murder.</div><div><br /></div><div>On the night of August 12, at a service station at 19th Avenue and Irving Street where he was employed, Wayne Fung was killed by seven bullets from a .38 caliber automatic.</div><div><br /></div><div>The gunman, an Oriental youth, fired the shots and ran to a waiting car parked on 18th Avenue, witnesses said. Fung, 19, was a member of the Wah Ching.</div><div><br /></div><div>Homicide inspectors are investigating this gangland slaying and are waiting for the next.</div><div><br /></div><div>They wait helplessly. Because they are almost certain they know who the next victim will be.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle 1973</i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><br /></b></div></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-89911112906796891532009-11-10T12:17:00.000-08:002009-11-10T13:46:03.833-08:00Life on the Bomb Squad<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3VjblcJfS5ugVaNq6rhpnUsqlTTMpNTdtGEH8bET-e7-x6qBvoXWCbE1ZrNMw7jy9dtJ-BSy43cdvIlYQqUXnvk9m23kh1zOTjyapoMIZbpJYbQ3g8hH46_XHH4kX_2RmuFatcUTat8U/s1600-h/cartoon+bomb.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3VjblcJfS5ugVaNq6rhpnUsqlTTMpNTdtGEH8bET-e7-x6qBvoXWCbE1ZrNMw7jy9dtJ-BSy43cdvIlYQqUXnvk9m23kh1zOTjyapoMIZbpJYbQ3g8hH46_XHH4kX_2RmuFatcUTat8U/s200/cartoon+bomb.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5402572848434813074" /></a><br /><b>by Tom Emch</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div>There are nine San Francisco policemen, five sergeants and four patrolmen, who are uninsurable - because there are no available statistics on their life expectancy.</div><div><br /></div><div>The nine are volunteers, highly trained in the extremely gentle art of disarming explosive devices. Like the kind that blew up Park Station and the Iranian Consulate.</div><div><br /></div><div>Each knows the techniques developed by British bomb disposal officers during the London Blitz. And each knows that these World War II bomb disposal pioneers had a life expectancy of six months.</div><div><br /></div><div>One day you may read about one of the men on the San Francisco bomb squad. Remember their names: Sergeant Burton J. Bishop, the leader, Sergeant Don Goad, Sergeant Tom O'Donnell, Sergeant William Pacheco, Sergeant Dave Winn, Patrolman Dale Boyd, Patrolman Robert Hulsey, Patrolman Fred Neville, Patrolman Ray Portue. All have other regular duties except Bishop who is bomb squad full-time.</div><div><br /></div><div>Tonight, while you're safe in bed, or tomorrow while you're in your place of work, one of these men might lose an arm, an eye, or his life.</div><div><br /></div><div>The phone rings , Judy Boyd answers it, and the ring is like a shriek in her ears. Her husband, Dale, is already out of bed and on his feet. </div><div><br /></div><div>She says "It's for you, Dale, Operations".</div><div><br /></div><div>Police operations gives Boyd the location of the "package," and a few details. He mumbles acknowledgement, hangs up.</div><div><br /></div><div>Usually, a patrolman on the park and beach detail, this time he has a different sort of assignment: a suspected bomb. Boyd dresses quickly, grabs his "tool kit" and kisses his wife goodbye.</div><div><br /></div><div>"I'll call you," he says.</div><div><br /></div><div>Later, he does call, tells his wife the "package" was a false alarm, a shoe box on the door step at one of the consulates. It contained rocks.</div><div><br /></div><div>Boyd is used to the false alarms, the lunch bucket at Candlestick Park that turns out to be just a mislaid lunch bucket, the paper bag at the Federal Building that contains garbage, the attache case at the Bank of America that contains harmless business papers.</div><div><br /></div><div>But Judy Boyd has never gotten used to the phone ringing in the middle of the night "When he told me he had volunteered for the bomb squad, we discussed it."</div><div><br /></div><div>"He told me about the training and all the precautions, and finally I told him it was his decision."</div><div><br /></div><div>"But the phone is still bad, I find myself waiting for it to ring. And then it does. I wait up for him until he gets back. Couldn't sleep anyway."</div><div><br /></div><div>Judy recalls one night in October 1971 when the phone rang for her husband and it wasn't a dud. The Iranian Consulate had just ben bombed rocking the Pacific Heights mansion off its foundation and damaging fifty homes in the area. Miraculously, the wife of the Consul General and her three children escaped injury.</div><div><br /></div><div>Another night, shortly after that blast, she recalls the phone ringing again: "I guess we were jittery and when it rang we both reached for it and collided, bumped our heads. That broke the jitters and we started to laugh."</div><div><br /></div><div>Patrolman Boyd doesn't laugh easily when he talks about his work. </div><div><br /></div><div>"We were trained at the Presidio by the 87th EOD (Explosive Ordnance Detachment). Seven weeks, and we worked mostly on homemade stuff and pip bombs, dynamite, C-4 plastic, blasting caps, grenades..."</div><div><br /></div><div>"We were taught disarming procedures, techniques I can't tell you about, except to say that the British developed most of them."</div><div><br /></div><div>He says that before you get around to disarming a device, there are a few things that have to be done. You "isolate" the device: get the civilians out of the area, and perform some routine crime laboratory work, like searching for evidence, dusting for fingerprints, taking pictures."</div><div><br /></div><div>"You do this even if the device looks like a brown paper lunch bag says Boyd. "Everything, every package is treated as if it is real, a live explosive. That's the only way to stay alive."</div><div><br /></div><div>It's the way experts operate, although Boyd and his fellow bomb squad officers are fond of saying "There are no experts in this business."</div><div><br /></div><div>They say this and recall, perhaps, the Army captain who trained them, Captain Gary Guest, deceased. </div><div><br /></div><div>Captain Guest was alone in the 87th EOD workshop April 17, 1971 when an explosion occurred. He apparently had been working on a disarming technique when the explosive material detonated. Guest was dead on arrival at Letterman General Hospital.</div><div><br /></div><div>"There are no live experts," says Sergeant Burton (Jim Bishop), head of the San Francisco bomb squad, "Only dead ones."</div><div><br /></div><div>Bishop, in his office on the first floor of the Hall of Justice, lights up a cigarette and waves at a steel cabinet full of defused dynamite sticks, blasting caps, grenades, Viet Cong mortor shells and pipe bombs.</div><div><br /></div><div>"That's just a few of them."</div><div><br /></div><div>Bishop, owner of nine meritorious citations for heroism, explains the bomb squad has been in operation since July 1970 (a few months after the bombing of Park Station at which Sergeant Brian McDonnell was killed and several other officers were seriously injured.</div><div><br /></div><div>His records show more than 1,350 bomb threats since formation of the squad and 24.5 "actuals". 'Actuals' are explosive devices either duds or disarmed by his squad.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Business has picked up" he says. Now we're getting eight to one-hundred-twenty threats a month.</div><div><br /></div><div>A chart of bomb squad activity on the wall of his office graphically describes the frequency of the threats. Thursday and Friday are prime days. Two o'clock in the afternoon is a prime time.</div><div><br /></div><div>Bishop says the explosive device at Park Station was a pipe bomb containing black powder, hooked up to an alarm clock and a six volt battery. The bomb, containing small caliber bullets, was placed in a cardboard box filled with staples. It exploded at 10:45 pm February 16, 1970.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is still a $38,000 uncollected reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of suspects involved in the crime.</div><div><br /></div><div>The blast at Park Station shook the Police Department into action which resulted in the formation of the bomb squad and the bomb-proofing of district stations and new security procedures at the Hall of Justice.</div><div><br /></div><div>The blast also made Jim Bishop the top bomb disposal officer in The City, a job that no one envies. </div><div><br /></div><div>Bishop has had one brush with death and expects more. Several months after he was trained at the Presidio, on January 19, 1971, he responded to a call at the Old Federal Building, 50 Fulton Street. A package had been found containing two and a half pounds of live dynamite, a battery and a plain wrist watch.</div><div><br /></div><div>"The device was set to explode at fifty-five minutes after the hour," Bishop recalls. </div><div><br /></div><div>"I know I had a minimum of fifty-five minutes to disarm it, and possibly an hour and fifty-five minutes."</div><div><br /></div><div>"I took it to the basement in a bucket and dismantled it. The battery connections were good, the watch was working. I found it had fifteen minutes to go."</div><div><br /></div><div>There's another way to express the situation: Sergeant Bishop had fifteen minutes to live.</div><div><br /></div><div>The sergeant is aware of the odds, and says of his job: "Someone has to do it."</div><div><br /></div><div>He says this is in his apartment where he is waiting for the return of his wife of five months, a pretty blonde named Sheila.</div><div><br /></div><div>The apartment has a kind of careless look, comfortable, but contemporary. Like the occupants may not be there forever. And Bishop himself strides through it restlessly, as if he is anxious for something to happen.</div><div><br /></div><div>The phone rings, and it is his wife who says she'll be home shortly.</div><div>Sheila Bishop arrives and says quietly that she doesn't like to talk about her husband's job.</div><div><br /></div><div>"During the day, he never calls me, so I don't know if he's out on a job or not. It does make me nervous at night when he goes out on a call. I wonder if he's going to come home. Stay awake. Wait for a phone call."</div><div><br /></div><div>"No, I don't object," says Sheila "I don't think I should interfere with his job."</div><div><br /></div><div>She seems to have a reservoir of quiet strength that enables her to accept a precarious married life... ("I wonder if he's going to come home")... to a demolitions man, a man she sometimes flares up to defend at cocktail parties.</div><div><br /></div><div>Judy Boyd has the same problem. "When we're out socially," she says, "people will find out Dale works on the bomb squad, and they'll say 'You mean he <i>volunteered'</i>?</div><div><br /></div><div>"Or they ask 'What possesses a man to <i>want </i>to disarm bombs.'"</div><div><br /></div><div>She says that her two children, Laura, eleven and Kenny, Ten, both have been hassled in school. Poked fun at because their father is a cop.</div><div><br /></div><div>"In some circles", she says, "people become uncomfortable when they learn Dale is a policeman, so we end up socializing mostly with other police families."</div><div><br /></div><div>Boyd shrugs his shoulders and says, 'It's just easier talking to someone who knows something about your work."</div><div><br /></div><div>When you work on a bomb squad, you have to keep up with your subject. In Sergeant Bishop's office there are bombing reports from other jurisdictions, reports from the National Bomb Data Center in Washington, D.C. There are FBI reports, training films to study.</div><div><br /></div><div>Both Bishop and Boyd teach classes at the Police Academy, two hours a week. They give lectures to businessmen, bankers and tell them "Don't touch. Call the bomb squad."</div><div><br /></div><div>Many large companies now have, as a result of these lectures, a floor warden, someone responsible for checking the premises at the beginning and end of the work day. The wardens are taught to look for characteristic packages, things out of place, like an attache case that normally isn't there.</div><div><br /></div><div>This has increased the number of "false alarms," the suspicious packages reported to police, but in some cases it has saved lives.</div><div><br /></div><div>When the bomb squad was detailed to the Soledad Trial, Bishop was called four times to inspect the women's lavatory. Each time there was a brown paper bag taped to the underside of a commode, and each time it was found to contain cottage cheese.</div><div><br /></div><div>Boyd has gingerly opened packages that contained nothing but cracked crab shells. And once he dismantled an entire desk at the British Consulate to satisfy an official who had panicked because it was locked and it wasn't supposed to be.</div><div><br /></div><div>Bishop once deftly cut into an attache case at a Bank of America and the owner came up to him and yelled: "Hey, what are you doing to my case?"</div><div><br /></div><div>Says Bishop, "Here I was working on this thing for ten minutes and all the time thinking I was going to blow sky high. And all I could say to this guy was 'Sorry about that.'"</div><div><br /></div><div>There's a certain amount of comedy in taking elaborate precautions to open a sack full of garbage, but the bomb squad men will tell you over and over: "That's the only way to stay alive."</div><div><br /></div><div>Because some lunch buckets actually do contain explosives: some shoe boxes do contain pipe bombs, some brown paper bags do contain C-4 plastic. And that was seven sticks of dynamite on the roof of Mission Police Station last March.</div><div><br /></div><div>The sticks were twenty-four inches long, three inches around and might have killed fifty to one-hundred men if they had gone off as set.</div><div><br /></div><div>You can't joke away a package of live dynamite, or a pipe bomb filled with one inch staples, or some Underground newspaper that prints details on how to make homemade explosives.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Treat every device as if it's alive," Bishop tells his men. Because someday they'll unwrap something they've never seen before.</div><div><br /></div><div>That's way the sergeant wants the squad to have an annual refresher training at the Army's demolition school at Indianhead, Maryland, or at the bomb school at Redstone, Alabama.</div><div><br /></div><div>"I feel I'm well trained," says Dale Boyd, "but, I'd like to go to Redstone."</div><div><br /></div><div>There's a nagging worry in the mind of each of the bomb sqadders. And to each other they make a joke of it.</div><div><br /></div><div>"We all talk about getting zapped," say Bishop. "We talk like we could get it tomorrow."</div><div><br /></div><div>"I talk to Dale (Boyd) like that ... like it might be the last time I'll ever talk to him."</div><div><br /></div><div><i>San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle 1972</i></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-81662022011500060242009-10-16T02:12:00.001-07:002009-10-16T02:49:56.698-07:00Andre the Friendly Giant<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimZGDDWu_MAnmiHKfbFeATL25Jy9Wy7KUiFPARV4aMrKere1t95lEEBsv_u-5-lMIC6Q3LdJPYI6XzewmJHIHR0w_4oXEJKA2iA-glFBN5DjFJDy_L3NCO5H_tTXsXQaQA5SCRyYn_g1k/s1600-h/andre1.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 183px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimZGDDWu_MAnmiHKfbFeATL25Jy9Wy7KUiFPARV4aMrKere1t95lEEBsv_u-5-lMIC6Q3LdJPYI6XzewmJHIHR0w_4oXEJKA2iA-glFBN5DjFJDy_L3NCO5H_tTXsXQaQA5SCRyYn_g1k/s200/andre1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5393123286725022354" /></a><br /><b>by Ambrose Blake (Tom Emch) </b><div><br /></div><div>Beloved by small people, particularly children; feared by his enemies, an object of interest to <i>les girls</i>, Andre is a twenty-nine year old Frenchman with a Gallic sense of humor and a handshake you won't forget.</div><div><br /></div><div>You don't really shake Andre's hand; he shakes yours. You put your hand in his and it gets lost somewhere in a fold of flesh that is positively Brobdignagian.</div><div><br /></div><div>He's difficult to believe unless you see him, but Andre, who reached seven feet when he was sixteen, is now seven feet five inches and still growing. His Paris doctor says he will grow two more years, until he is thirty-one, and probably top out at seven feet seven inches. He weighs 465 pounds and says he could easily lose eighty or ninety pounds if he quit drinking three cases of beer a day.</div><div><br /></div><div>"I like biere," says Andre. "I like Eenglish biere; I learned to dreenk it when I would in Loundoun. And I like Oustralian biere, but I never dreenk biere in France; I dreenk the wine."</div><div><br /></div><div>They call him Andre the Giant and he had just finished winning a tag team wrestling match at the Richmond Memorial Auditorium: Andre and U.S. champ Pat Patterson vs. Mr. Saito, the Masked Invader and Bobby Jaggers. It was no contest.</div><div><br /></div><div>Andre merely kicked Mr. Saito in the derriere with his size 22 EEEE leather boot and picked up the Masked Invader and threw him out of the ring. The match went on for a little over twenty-five minutes while Pat Patterson took a drubbing, but the moment he tagged his teammate, Andre, the outcome was not in doubt. The highlight - and a real crowd-pleaser - was when in mock rage Andre picked up the referee and threw him out of the ring, but gently because the referee has a wife and kids and had to work again the following night.</div><div><br /></div><div>The wrestling match was predictable, except for the ringside spectators, who didn't know from one moment to the next who was going to land in their laps, and for that reason it was somewhat boring. But talking to Andre later, after he had showered and dressed and was drinking beer, was interesting.</div><div><br /></div><div>Andre said he was born in Grenoble, an industrial city in southeastern France, and his parents were pretty much normal size. But his grandfather was seven feet eight inches, and he knew he was going to be a giant by the time he was twelve.</div><div><br /></div><div>At fourteen, Andre dropped out of school and wen to Paris to seek his fortune. First job? A mover; pianos, and two tone safes were his specialty. One day a sports promoter saw him lift a safe and asked Andre to come to the gymnasium and work out. He was sixteen and in a few months he was wrestling professionally.</div><div><br /></div><div>"I used to do road work and lift weights," Andre says. "When I started wrestling, I weighed under three hundred pounds. That was before I went to Eengland and started dreenking biere."</div><div><br /></div><div>In addition to England and Australia, Andre has appeared in the ring in almost every non-Communist country in the world. He is also a movie actor; he appeared as Bigfoot in a two-part segment of television's <i>Six Million Dollar Man</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>When he travels, it is by air and first class. "I don't fit in the seats in tourist class," he explains. He's somewhat of a feeding problem, too. The giant usually eats about six meals a day and says he prefers six small meals to three big ones.</div><div><br /></div><div>A small meal is a dozen scrambled eggs for breakfast plus fruit and French bread and jam. Lunch (or brunch) is often fillet of sole, which is his favorite fish. "I eat everything; I like everything," he says, grinning.</div><div><br /></div><div>When Andre smiles, everybody smiles. One wouldn't want to offend him. People also laugh at his jokes, even through they are in a combination of English, French and Quebecois and you only understand about half the lines.</div><div><br /></div><div>Andre is asked about wine and he says he likes champagne. "One time on a plane from Montreal to Paris, I dreenk eighteen bottles of champagne; I like champagne," he added redundantly.</div><div><br /></div><div>Drinking and eating are very big with Andre and he says he'd like to open a restaurant when his wrestling career is over. "I enjoy meeting people and people like me."</div><div><br /></div><div>It's true, Andre is likable. Pat Patterson calls him the "gentle giant" and says Andre wouldn't harm a flea.</div><div><br /></div><div>Patterson recalls: "I only saw him mad once. It was in Montreal and we were in a bar together. There were some big Canadians who wanted to take him on; they provoked him."</div><div><br /></div><div>What happened?</div><div><br /></div><div>"It took Andre about sixty seconds to flatten four men," said Patterson, with a gesture that indicated the smashing of heads and bone structure." But he avoids trouble; just smiles and offers to buy a drink."</div><div><br /></div><div>Andre can afford it. His promoters in the Bay Area, Davy Rosenberg and Pete Marino, estimate that Andre makes close to $250,000 a year wrestling four or five nights a week. He picked up about $8000 for his work at the Richmond Auditorium, and it would have been more but the crowd was small. Out of his annual take come travel expenses and lodging and food, a big item.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Some brewery ought to buy a piece of him to promote their beer," says Rosenberg. "He drinks enough of it."</div><div><br /></div><div>While in San Francisco, on sort of a promotional tour of the city, Andre visited some North Beach night spots and the financial district, where he ws impressed by the huge polished boulder on the Bank of America plaza.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Theeze ees my pet rock," he announced to the press.</div><div><br /></div><div>The day after his encounter with Mr. Saito (who wrestled in the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964), the Masked Invader and Bobby Jaggers in the Richmond Auditorium, Andre flew east. To Detroit, to Montreal, where he has a home, and to Europe.</div><div><br /></div><div>And as you read this he is probably wrestling somewhere in the world, or drinking beer, and the audience is cheering him on.</div><div><br /></div><div>He said, when I left him, that he doesn't consider himself unusual. He said he is normal and all the rest of the people in the world are freaks. </div><div><br /></div><div>This is very funny if you hear it in French. Andre has a Gallic sense of humor. Everybody laughed.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle 1976</i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-34972786362739182562009-10-14T01:11:00.000-07:002009-10-14T02:20:49.525-07:00The Hardcore Unemployed<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCW1HzZic76-3TWz6Gp4XsemK-bGQDbqZI3aT1SjqwQO099vlpDe61S6r4NSouO5ruyJRDXu18doWgbH9PjuGBxwuP9L6fdp-0JC15q1soKO1B90OFAxpUIFB76bA__FzCR4RwVjQGH8M/s1600-h/unemployment_office.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 193px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCW1HzZic76-3TWz6Gp4XsemK-bGQDbqZI3aT1SjqwQO099vlpDe61S6r4NSouO5ruyJRDXu18doWgbH9PjuGBxwuP9L6fdp-0JC15q1soKO1B90OFAxpUIFB76bA__FzCR4RwVjQGH8M/s200/unemployment_office.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5392366612732699954" /></a><br /><b>by Tom Emch </b><div><br /></div><div>Hardcore unemployable Leroy Smith, 20, born in the Mission and still living there near 18th Street and South Van Ness, would be startled to learn that there are hundreds of bureaucrats making a living out of trying to get him a job.</div><div><br /></div><div>He would be astounded to know that there are some forty-four agencies with annual public monies exceeding $5 million eager to train him to "fill the manpower needs of this community," as the Mayor puts it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Leroy would be further shocked to discover that of all these people in all these agencies, no one knows where he lives or that he's out of work. And that he officially doesn't exist.</div><div><br /></div><div>Leroy Smith has lived in San Francisco twenty years; he's worked at a regular job only three weeks of that time, and he's not even an "unemployment statistic."</div><div><br /></div><div>When the Manpower Planning Council reports that there is a ten percent unemployment rate in the Mission, they're not including Leroy, who is probably out somewhere shooting pool for quarters.</div><div><br /></div><div>"There are a lot of people <i>not counted</i> as being in the labor force," says Steve Sussman, who runs the U.S. Manpower Administration's Concentrated Employment Program for The City with $3.3 million a year. "Like the guy who hasn't worked in five years and hasn't applied to DHRD (Department of Human Resources Development). There's no record of him."</div><div><br /></div><div>There's no record of Leroy, who worked three weeks as a stockman at the Emporium, has done some carpentry and painting odd jobs when he really needs some bread, and picks up most of the change he needs at the pool table.</div><div><br /></div><div>A job?</div><div><br /></div><div>There's no way anyone is going to get Leroy a job. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade; he functionally illiterate; has no driver's license; has an arrest record (assault); he's not bondable and he doesn't like to work with his hands. Some people suspect he doesn't like to work, period.</div><div><br /></div><div>Says Leroy of the only skill he has - carpentry: "I don't know why I got into it. I don't like to work with wood.</div><div><br /></div><div>"I went to Mission night school to get trained for a job and they put me in a poultry class. I told them I didn't want poultry and they said I had to take poultry, so I quit."</div><div><br /></div><div>They should have known better than to offer an accomplished pool player like Leroy a career in poultry.</div><div><br /></div><div>Among Leroy's colleagues who are not counted as being in the labor force are estimated 5,000 San Franciscans: bookies, pimps, prostitutes, pushers, burglars, fences, winos, street people, petty thieves and other assorted types who live the "fast" life as opposed to the "straight" life.</div><div><br /></div><div>A man who knows both lives, Kenny Marcelous, assistant director of the Mission Rebels, says: "Some of these cats bounce from one odd job to another, boosting (shoplifting) on the side, but it doesn't last. You can't do both. You gotta be straight or you gotta be on the street."</div><div><br /></div><div>"You gotta take your pick because you can't mix the two", says Marcelous. Of the people on the street, he says; "Either a cat can (get a job) and won't, or he just can't."</div><div><br /></div><div>Applying a little street philosophy to the case of Leroy, the Mission Rebels administrator says:</div><div><br /></div><div>"Maybe he's afraid of succeeding; afraid that if he got a good job and started to like the work he'd fail or get fired. If you don't want to succeed, don't take a job."</div><div><br /></div><div>In speculating on Leroy's attitudes toward gainful employment, Marcelous is describing what many professional manpower analysts call the "failure syndrome."</div><div><br /></div><div>Eunice Elton, the Mayor's Director of Manpower Planning and Research (at $22,140 a year), says a person with a failure syndrome is "one who has had a succession of secondary jobs -seasonal or part-time - and has found little reward from working. He decides: " 'They won't keep me on anyway,' and then he quits and drops out of the labor market. he decides he's not needed."</div><div><br /></div><div>Refining her definition of unemployables, she says persons with disabilities such as epilepsy are traditionally unemployable, but there are other groups employers don't want to take a chance on: reformed alcoholics, persons who have been on drugs and persons with multiple felony records. "These are the hardest of the hardcore."</div><div><br /></div><div>Her fellow manpower expert, Steve Susssman, agrees, with some minor variations.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here is his profile of an unemployable: "A person who is not a citizen, is past age 60 and has a Spanish surname. He's functionally illiterate in Spanish and speaks little English. He has two felony arrests: he's not bondable and can't get a driver's license, and he's presently on a methadone maintenance program. Oh yes, he doesn't like to work with his hands."</div><div><br /></div><div>Few such people exist, of course, and the description is fictional, but Sussman says he has had people with similar records come to him looking for work.</div><div><br /></div><div>"What can I do for this person?" he asks rhetorically. "Nothing."</div><div><br /></div><div>He says the hardcore, the person who really needs a service, can't get any service. "There are other people laid on top of him ... the returning Vietnam veteran who has a priority; the resident alien who may have worked as an attorney in South America and who is well equipped to work here."</div><div><br /></div><div>Sussman explains that the Department of Labor money received by his program is via a performance contract based on the number of people served and the number of persons placed in jobs. So there's pressure to move people through quickly and cheaply.</div><div><br /></div><div>"You take on a person you can find a job for and pass over the person who really needs help. So when you're talking about the hardcore unemployable, you're talking about the person who doesn't get touched by any of the services."</div><div><br /></div><div>He gives this example, "The people from the methadone program call up and say 'We have a person we have been working with who is ready to go to work. What can you do?"</div><div><br /></div><div>"Well, we can't do anything, because we can't preselect a person to train. We have to get our people from DHRD (people who have signed up with State unemployment), people who are on file there.</div><div><br /></div><div>"So we are actually excluding certain hardcore unemployables," he says.</div><div><br /></div><div>Many other publicly funded manpower agencies do the same thing because they are sub-contractors of Sussman's CEP, and subject to the same performance standards. Some of these include Youth for Service, Health Professions Council, Arriba Juntos, Chinatown-Northbeach English Language Center, Fil-Am Language Center, Mission Language and Vocational School and the San Francisco Civil Service Commission.</div><div><br /></div><div>These publicly funded action groups, plus perhaps two dozens others that are either publicly or privately funded, all peddle their own trainees to employers.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ray Holland who heads the data reporting and information systems unit of CEP, says that in the recent past sub-contractors would meet each other coming and going from the executive offices of large corporations.</div><div><br /></div><div>He says that action groups from the Misison, Chinatown and Filipinos have been banging on the doors of company executives demanding jobs for their particular people.</div><div><br /></div><div>"After about a year of this, the employers caught on. They discovered there's a lot of competition between manpower contractors for the available jobs. Now, all the employer has to do is sit back and wait. He'll say: 'Sure, I'll consider your person.' Then he'll hire the best qualified applicant who will work the cheapest."</div><div><br /></div><div>Sussman adds that all of the manpower contractors are under the same gun: Too little time, too little money to train the person who really needs help - like the hardcore unemployable. So the contractors end up placing the person who already has some skills.</div><div><br /></div><div>"They work with people who are easily employable to make their records look good," says Sussman.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is another deterrent to training someone who needs help. Take the case of a bank that has a job for a clerk, says Sussman. 'The bank says: "What do I want to train someone for? I've got eight qualified applicants."</div><div><br /></div><div>This is the catch. "We're locked into this system," he says. And it works against the person without any marketable skills.</div><div><br /></div><div>Without marketable skills describes Leroy Smith, our Mission District pool hustler. (This isn't his real name, but many like him exist, manpower experts agree.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Leroy's problem is one of attitude. He doesn't like to work and he doesn't like to be told what to do, so you ask him about his experience and attitude.</div><div><br /></div><div>What did you get paid as a stockman at the Emporium?</div><div><br /></div><div>Leroy: "I don't know what I got paid... they docked us by minutes... two minutes, three minutes: the check was always different."</div><div><br /></div><div>Would you like to get a driver's license and be a truck driver?</div><div><br /></div><div>Leroy: "Not interested in driving."</div><div><br /></div><div>Would you like to be a carpenter? You have some experience.</div><div><br /></div><div>Leroy: "No. Don't like that job."</div><div><br /></div><div>Would you like to go back to school and learn a trade?</div><div><br /></div><div>Leroy: "The Mission Rebels got me back in school and the second day I had a hassle with the teacher... I was standing by the window and she told me to sit down. So I quit."</div><div><br /></div><div>What would you like to do?</div><div><br /></div><div>Leroy: "I'd like counseling. Counseling kids here for the Rebels. I do some counseling, but I don't get paid for it."</div><div><br /></div><div>It's not certain what Leroy would counsel Mission kids about, except maybe how to hustle pool - he would probably be good at that. But it is certain he couldn't counsel them how to get a job and keep it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Leroy, when we left him, was at the pool table in Rebel headquarters on South Van Ness smoothly dropping balls in rotation. so you couldn't accurately describe him as being totally without skills.</div><div><br /></div><div>As Eunice Elton says: "I insist that someone who can dismantle two 10-speed bicycles in five minutes and put them back together so they can't be identified has a skill." She adds that it isn't a socially acceptable skill, however.</div><div><br /></div><div>There are apparently two things all hardcore unemployables have in common: They lack marketable skills and they have an attitude toward the "work ethic" that would shock Benjamin Franklin. They don't see work as a shiny ideal that will surely get them ahead in the world.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sussman says: "You can't talk about these people in terms of statistics because you're talking about attitudinal problems. The classic case is the black male youth who drops out of high school and learns the reality. He can only make about $1.50 an hour. He tries a series of marginal jobs for awhile and finally says: 'screw it'. He goes on welfare and that's where he stays. He's almost a statistical non-entity." </div><div><br /></div><div>Ray Holland adds: "For this person the work ethic is a lie. His income is about $10 a week less on welfare than it is if he's working." He says that the controversial guaranteed wage might be the answer.</div><div><br /></div><div>Others in the manpower field agree. Eunice Elton says: "Maybe it would be cheaper to pay for a guaranteed annual wage than to pay for the welfare system. The country is not ready for the concept. It would be unpopular as a drain on individual income, and it is viewed as redistribution of wealth.</div><div><br /></div><div>The problem must be studied, she insists, "because the work ethic is in trouble."</div><div><br /></div><div>Shiny ideals and volumes of statistical reports - these things mean little to the estimated 21,000 persons who live in San Francisco and are out of work.</div><div><br /></div><div>"More than six percent of The City's labor force is unemployed," according to Eunice Elton. And her office estimates the rate in certain census tracts South of Market is fifteen percent, thirteen percent in Hunter's Point, ten percent in certain tracts of the Mission and Western Addition.</div><div><br /></div><div>And you can add to these figures one Leroy Smith, hard core unemployable,who is not even a statistic.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle 1973</i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-29764612045764611052009-09-24T19:13:00.000-07:002009-09-24T20:17:50.079-07:00Six Days that Shrank the World<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHe-aPC9sMvLulZzOmkCn2eUI9sByM5t2LfUGMgjSV0icwdr4MP7TbX2s8V4tyqHWEWsZ4ngYW6S7Nup7VMFA6BYfJVVpvUQVQsZdjihEWN-yZHCaNg0jAy_rLoo0V-h9geQ5KMpVKqVs/s1600-h/china+clipper.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 179px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHe-aPC9sMvLulZzOmkCn2eUI9sByM5t2LfUGMgjSV0icwdr4MP7TbX2s8V4tyqHWEWsZ4ngYW6S7Nup7VMFA6BYfJVVpvUQVQsZdjihEWN-yZHCaNg0jAy_rLoo0V-h9geQ5KMpVKqVs/s200/china+clipper.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5385224571474288962" /></a><br /><b>by Tom Emch</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i>Forty years ago yesterday, the first flight of the China Clipper from San Francisco Bay to Manila held the attention of the world. It was front page news - a fledgling world radio hookup carried live programs on the departure and arrival in the Philippines, more than 8,000 miles away.</i></span></b></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i>Here is the story of the day of departure, Nov. 22, 1935, as it might have appeared in a newspaper dispatch, and the story of the flight as one of the Pan American crew members might have told it.</i></span></b></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">ALAMEDA - Nov. 22, 1935 - The China Clipper, beginning a new chapter in American aviation history, lifted off the waters of San Francisco Bay today on the world's first scheduled flight across the Pacific. Her destination: Manila, 8,000 miles away.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">More than 10,000 people here cheered as the Clipper rose to the top of the waves and flew under the Bay Bridge, still under construction, over the Marina, where another 20,000 people had gathered, and set a course for Hawaii on the first leg of a world-shrinking journey into history.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">At the controls was Captain Edwin Musick, who, moments before had received his sailing orders from Pan American president Juan Trippe.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">"Cast off and depart for Manila," Trippe told the veteran pilot, setting in motion a six-day flight that will take the Clipper to Pearl Harbor, Midway, Wake Island, Guam and the Philippines.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">During ceremonies preceding the take-off, California Gov. Frank Merriam hailed the event as an aviation milestone. He was followed to the podium by Postmaster General James Farley and the governor of the Territory of Hawaii, Joseph Poindexter.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Then, through special trans-Pacific radio facilities, the voice of Manuel Quezon, president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines was heard. He forecast the "dawn of a new era for the Orient" with the coming of the Clipper ships.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Aboard the China Clipper, now flying directly into the retreating sun at a steady 130 miles per hour, the crew is busy monitoring the rows of flight instruments that describe the performance of the four Pratt & Whitney 850-horsepower engines.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Capt. Musick has told the crew they can change from uniforms worn for the departure ceremonies and get comfortable for the 21-hour flight to Hawaii.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Engineering officer Victor Wright breaks out a pair of red pajamas and slippers. Navigators Fred Noonan and George King shed their jackets and ties and roll up their sleeves.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">There are no passengers aboard; seats have been removed to make room for cargo and mail - some 110,000 letters specially canceled as the first transoceanic airmail.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Now the Clipper is swallowed by darkness. A cloud layer has closed out the sea, 8,000 feet below. Radio operator Wilson Jarboe Jr. has just informed Capt. Musick he has raised the Coast Guard cutter </span>Ithaca<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> and confirmed the Clipper's compass bearing.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The wind drift is checked by crewmen dropping flares from the aft hatch. Navigator Noonan takes a sighting on the flares as they fall away into the sea, and notes the speed of the drift.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">After midnight he is able to get a celestial navigation fix through a hole in the clouds. In a few hours, the Clipper will pick up the Hawaii direction-finding radio beam and "ride" it home.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">At 10,000 feet the big Martin flying boat is drilling through the darkness. Suddenly dawn catches us by the tail. A flood of color spreads across the quiet sea.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Noonan makes another navigation fix and then joins the off-watch crew in the lounge for breakfast. First officer R.O.D. Sullivan has set up a table and arranged hot coffee, sandwiches and fruit.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The Clipper is 20 hours out of Alameda when Capt. Musick announces it is time to shave and get back into uniform.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">After the watch change, it is Sullivan who is the first to sight the landfall. Beyond the clouds is the summit of Mt. Molaki, still more than 100 miles away.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Capt. Musick begins the long descent, sliding down the Hawaii direction-finding beacon toward Honolulu. Then, Jarboe raises the radio operator at Pearl Harbor.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Diamond Head looms up in front of us and all hands man their posts for the landing in the patrolled channel. We touch the water at 10:19 a.m. The China Clipper has traversed 2,400 miles in 21 hours, 33 minutes.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The welcoming committee at Pearl is small but enthusiastic. Clipper crewmen are presented with leis, and the naval officers - thanks to Capt. Muscik - are duly impressed with our fresh uniforms and clean-shaven faces.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">That evening, under glaring lights, the ground crew inspects every nut and bolt on the Clipper and loads supplies for Pan American's ocean bases on Midway, Wake and Guam.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">There are 21 crates of fresh vegetables, 9 crates of oranges and lemons, and 12 crates of turkeys for the first real Thanksgiving in the history of the colonists on Wake and Guam. There are also the spare sewing-machine parts, refrigeration machinery, baseballs, tennis rackets and light bulbs - all the items requested by radio from the ocean bases.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Before the dawn takeoff, 14 passengers come aboard - replacement for the ground staffs on the islands. We are able to take on the extra weight because the hop to Midway is only 1,380 miles, requiring less gas.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The last cargo hatch is closed and, at 6:30 a.m., the second leg of the flight to the Orient begins. The Clipper rises over Honolulu as daylight spills across the mountain peaks.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The Clipper will follow its flight plan over a string of tiny islands and coral reefs - Necker Island, French Frigate Shoals, Gardner Pinnacles and Marco Reef. The volcanic islands rise sharply out of the sea like a road map across the Pacific.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But beyond Marco Reef a weather front moves down on us, and we come in on direction bearings from the Midway radio compass. Then the clouds clear and we sight the atoll, white waves foaming on the beaches.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">We circle the base at 500 feet and settle in for a landing. It is 2 p.m., local time, just 8 1/2 hours from Pearl Harbor.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Our reception is noisy - all Pan American base employees crowding around the little seaplane float. Airport manager Karl Lueder posts a guard over the stacks of mail and supervises the refueling of the Clipper. Departure for Wake Island is scheduled for daybreak.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The jump to Wake is the shortest leg - 1,252 miles - but the most difficult to navigate. There are no island signposts, and finding Wake will be like finding a pinhead on a vast map of the Pacific.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Noonan has to rely on dead reckoning. But about 350 miles out of Midway, Sullivan sights a Matson liner. It's the </span><span class="Apple-style-span">President Lincoln</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">, 11 days out of San Francisco and bound for Yokohama. Jarboe confirms his position and the liner salutes us with three blasts from her whistle. A few hours later he hears the radio operator on Wake and we can ride the beam into the tiny ocean base.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Eight hours, 28 minutes out of Midway, the Clipper glides into a landing on the lagoon inside the atoll. We have put more than 5,000 miles behind us since leaving San Francisco Bay.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Ahead is Guam, then Manila.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Wake's governor and airport manager, George Bicknell, is on hand to greet us. He has planned a dinner party, but we are all so exhausted that the party has to be cut short so we can get some sleep before still another dawn departure, this time at 6.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">There is a final predawn weather briefing and then we are airborne again, this time into dense clouds. Ceiling is 2,000 feet.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">After we are aloft an hour Jarboe makes contact with the</span><span class="Apple-style-span"> USS Chester</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">, eastbound out of Manila. Position is confirmed.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Noonan comes up with a little trick to get additional radio bearings as we approach Guam. There is a Japanese radio station on Rota, an island just north of Guam. He sends out a "CQ" signal, meaning "do you hear me?" on the Japanese frequency.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">As they answer, he gets a bearing on Apra Harbor, and then combines the two bearings for a positive fix. The Japanese, of course, aren't too interested in anyone establishing an airline across the Pacific.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">We drop into Apra Harbor and touch down at 3:05 p.m., local time. The entire Pan American contingent is there to welcome us, and the news is that we won't be taking off again at dawn.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Someone in Manila has become confused by the day gained in crossing the International Dateline. The official reception ceremony is not until the day after tomorrow. They will not be ready until then.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The error provides us with a needed day of rest before the final 1,600-mile leg to the Philippines.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Departure from Guam on November 29, is at 6:12 a.m. Below us is the roughest sea we have encountered, giant whitecaps and a wind-tossed spray leaping high into the air.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Captain Musick takes the Clipper quickly to 6,000 feet, where we find a tailwind that enables us to make almost 200 miles an hour.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The Guam-Manila leg of the flight has a pioneering note. This is the first time anyone has flown over this deserted stretch of the Pacific.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Noonan is using the sun to get a fix on our position. The weather is beautiful and we are now at 11,000 feet, drilling along at 150 miles per hour.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Once again it is time to shave and put on fresh uniforms for the welcoming ceremonies. Sullivan is first to spot the high volcanic cone of Mt. Pandan. The rugged hills of Luzon appear off the port bow and beyond is Manila Bay, our final destination.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">This is the Orient. In a few minutes, the China Clipper will have conquered the Pacific. Incredibly, the flight has been almost without incident and, except for the layover on Guam, right on schedule.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">From the cockpit Capt. Musick can see the escort of military planes, dipping their wings in salute. Musick responds and gently lets the Clipper down into the channel. We are on the water at 3:31 p.m., local time. Air time from Alameda is exactly 59 hours, 48 minutes.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Taxiing up to the float, we can see thousands of well-wishers lining the Manila rooftops. There is some wild cheering as the mooring lines are secured and Capt. Musick steps down the ladder and onto the float.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">President Manuel Quezon of the Philippines is there to greet him. Musick hands him a letter from President Roosevelt and it is immediately canceled by the Philippine postmaster general, marking the first airmail across the Pacific.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">At the official reception and banquet at the Malacanang Palace, we are told more than 100,000 people watched the landing of the China Clipper. It's truly a big day for the Filipinos.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Everyone is happy except members of the press, most of whom can't believe the 8,210 mile flight was without serious incident.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">"Didn't you get lost?" one of the reporters asks. "How about the thousands of miles of fog?"</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Capt. Musick explains patiently that there were four master mariners aboard and two radio operators and that ground stations monitored most of the flight. "It would have been difficult to get lost," he tells them.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Newspapers hailed the flight as the elimination of the barriers of time and space and told the world that the vast Pacific Ocean had suddenly become smaller because of the courage of a handful of aviation pioneers.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But the real significance was that the China Clipper had cut 15 days off the best surface time from San Francisco to Manila and opened up the Orient to air cargo and scheduled passenger flights.</span></i></span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Within a year, Pan American inaugurated passenger service to Manila, and, in the spring of 1937, there was direct service to China.</span></i></span></b></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i>San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle November 23, 1975</i><br /></span></i></span></b><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-69719641923354263952009-09-18T15:49:00.000-07:002009-09-18T16:31:03.858-07:00Around the World in Record Time<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuuMCYQszkYbxzI0aussxW9Neg2WbE9lW2nJV25etD5d8MIm_2XNc-bk1D8VFB2vwL35c8x32s-iq6BNZeszZ3Cit6AIFSPqxqFK_Oa0sxhuNpStjIg-T2V35fC1kgbHJOeRQdFviV8-w/s1600-h/rc_world.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 131px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuuMCYQszkYbxzI0aussxW9Neg2WbE9lW2nJV25etD5d8MIm_2XNc-bk1D8VFB2vwL35c8x32s-iq6BNZeszZ3Cit6AIFSPqxqFK_Oa0sxhuNpStjIg-T2V35fC1kgbHJOeRQdFviV8-w/s200/rc_world.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382952363216181170" /></a><br /><b>by Tom Emch</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div>On May 11, at San Francisco International, shortly before the scheduled departure time of 6 p.m., a man will board British Airways Flight 286, non-stop to London. He will be wearing a wrinkle-proof suit, shirt and tie, and he will be carrying a small flight bag containing some toilet articles and three books. Unlike the rest of the passengers, he will be known to the captain and the cabin crew. They will know why he is going to London. In the tower another man will record the exact time the wheels of the aircraft, a 747, leave the ground.</div><div><br /></div><div>On May 13, at approximately 11:05 a.m., Pan American's Flight 12, non-stop from Tokyo, will touch down at San Francisco International. The man with the small flight bag and the three books will be aboard, again known to the captain and the cabin crew. Another man in the tower will record the exact time the aircraft's wheels hit the runway.</div><div><br /></div><div>If all goes well, it will be forty-one hours and five minutes from the time Warren Rairden left San Francisco until he returned. And he will have set a new world's record for an around-the-world journey on scheduled airlines.</div><div><br /></div><div>The man in the tower will file the total elaspsed time with the proper authorities in Dublin, Ireland and Rairden's name will appear in the next edition of the <i>Guiness Book of Records</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>"You're right. It's crazy," says Rairden, who held the record in 1969 (forty-two hours, fifty-nine minutes) and lost it in 1971 to Millbrae busines Maurice Rosen (forty-one hours, thirty minutes).</div><div><br /></div><div>"It's not a sight-seeing trip," he says. "Except for the takeoffs and landings, all you see is a lot of clouds. But I might get a view of the South China Sea out of Singapore."</div><div><br /></div><div>Rairden's itenerary calls for British Airways to London with three and a half hours on the ground and then the British Airways Concorde to Singapore with a refueling stop in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. After one hour, five minutes on the ground in Singapore, he will take Japan Airlines non-stop to Tokyo (forty minutes on the ground) and board Pan American's Flight 12 for San Francisco. The round-the-world trip will cost approximately $4,000 and cover 20,962 air miles in four different aircraft. Total time on the ground will be about five hours and fifteen minutes.</div><div><br /></div><div>One of the first questions Rairden is asked is: "Why?"</div><div><br /></div><div>"First of all I want to get the record back," he says. "I promised myself a long time ago I would try it again when it became feasible; whenever there was a new schedule with the Concorde that would allow me to break the record."</div><div><br /></div><div>He made his first attempt in 1964 (fifty-nine horus, thirty-five minutes) and failed the break the record. "I made some bad connections." Then in 1969, he did the London-Moscow-Tokyo leg on the Russian airline, Aeroflot, changing plans in Moscow in an incredible seven minutes, and broke the existing record.</div><div><br /></div><div>"When I landed in Moscow in 1969 I could see my connecting flight on the ground, already boarding. I got off and saw this little Russian official standing there. I pointed to my wristwatch, held up my passport and said: "Tokyo.' He took me to a Russian girl in the building; we went through a couple of rooms and I had to sign my name twice, without knowing what I was signing. She took me back to the connecting flight and the little man was there with my passport, and I got aboard. The whole think took about seven minutes," says Rairden.</div><div><br /></div><div>His other recollection of that journey was clearing customs back in San Francisco. There was an incident that will probably be repeated on May 13 when he returns from his record attempt.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Well, they know you've just arrived non-stop from Tokyo and everybody's got bags to be opened. You stand there with only a flight bag with toilet articles and some books and they say: "Where have you been?"</div><div><br /></div><div>"Then you tell the oficer that you've been to London and Singapore and he asks: 'Where is the rest of your baggage?"</div><div><br /></div><div>"When you tell them it's all you have, you get this funny look. It's like they're thinking: 'This guy is an odd one, we'd better watch him.' It just looks totally ridiculous because it's not an everyday occurrence."</div><div><br /></div><div>Rairden travels light because baggage would slow him down. He travels without visas; none are necessary when your're an in-transit passenger in a foreign country not intending to clear immigration.</div><div><br /></div><div>He says he's going to buy a wrinkle-proof suit "to see if it is really wrinkle-proof. I wear a shirt and tie because that's just the way I am, but I loosen the tie and the first think to come off are my shoes. I try to get as comfortableas possible."</div><div><br /></div><div>Rairden also travels first class all the way around. "It would destroy me to try it in coach. This way I get the best meals and wine on the Tokyo-San Francisco leg on Pan Am I'll have a sleeperette and I hope to get six or seven hours of sleep. I'll need it by then." He will go through twenty-four time zones and three nights while earthbound people in San Francisco will go through only two. "Eastbound they're short nights," he says, "Only three and a half to four hours apiece."</div><div><br /></div><div>How about exhaustion and jet lag after flying around the world? Rairden says there is no jet lag because you return to the same place you left from before your ssytem has a chance to adjust to another time zone. "I fully expect to be in the office at 9 a.m. the day after I get back." His office is that of Portal/Albertson, a travel corporation in the Wells Fargo Bank building on Montgomery Street. Rairden is the vice-chairman of the firm, and says, "All the airlines involved will know I'm trying for the record. The various public relations departments will know of the attempt and probably the captains and cabin crews will know who I am. None of them will be eager to drop the ball."</div><div><br /></div><div>There could be mechanical problems or bad weather, of course, and that's a chance he has to take. "May should be a good month ofr the attempt, but if I get socked in, I just have an airplane ride out, and no record."</div><div><br /></div><div>When Rairden made his first attempt at the record in 1964, there was no trans-Siberian flight; he went all the way around on Pan American. In 1969, when he broke the record, there was a trans-Siberian flight, but no Concorde with a cruising speed of 1,250 miles per hour (twice that of the 747). Now there is a Concorde flight from London to Singapore.</div><div><br /></div><div>His itenerary might change and eliminate the Japan Airlines flight from Singapore to Tokyo, if he can convince Pan American to hold their Singapore-Hong Kong-San Francisco flight for fifteen minutes. If he can bypass Tokyo, Rairden would make it around the world in thrity-seven hours, forty-five minutes, far ahead of the present record of forty-one hours, thirty minutes or more, becuase as a Pan Am spokesman says, "Flight 12 from Tokyo is usually fifteen to thirty minutes early arriving here."</div><div><br /></div><div>Rairden's 1964 attempt was a promotion for the opening of Stevens Creek Boulevard from Highway 17 to Saratoga Avenue. He went from one end of the extension to the other the long way around. His 1969 record-breaking flight was another promotion. This time for the opening of the El Camino Highway in Santa Clara, where he was president of the Chamber of Commerce.</div><div><br /></div><div>What does he plan to do in the air between San Francisco and San Francisco while traveling around the world?</div><div><br /></div><div>"Well, there isn't much you can do besides eat, sleep and read. I'm takng along thre books on pro football. Paul Brown's autobiography and a couple of others.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Fortunately, I sleep like a baby on airplanes."</div><div><br /></div><div>Taken as a whole, the trip may be the most boring way in the world to get into the <i>Guiness Book of Records</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle 1975</i></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-28556749588609061122009-09-12T21:07:00.000-07:002009-09-12T23:40:12.743-07:00Anatomy of a Hijack<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnRz8b8_CsDIHYU_ZAi1n6a7EnV8wZqUu4iA4JAn2EmqW6wVIQMqsrA_pi_HSnHndyknxscrwVqI1QsfVClLKEkLnpjbb5o4jowSgL9XzlAW-WK1DBeCL94Lp67TuodRFsqDCTm11pu74/s1600-h/psa_airlines_2.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 125px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnRz8b8_CsDIHYU_ZAi1n6a7EnV8wZqUu4iA4JAn2EmqW6wVIQMqsrA_pi_HSnHndyknxscrwVqI1QsfVClLKEkLnpjbb5o4jowSgL9XzlAW-WK1DBeCL94Lp67TuodRFsqDCTm11pu74/s200/psa_airlines_2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5380800251651891186" /></a><br /><b>by Tom Emch</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Last passenger to board, a middle-aged Chinese, hurries across the ramp and into the plane. Stewardess Jacque Stallman closes the door, buzzes the cockpit and tells Captain Dennis Waller they are clear. The Boeing 737 jet begins backing away from the gate at Sacramento Municipal Airport.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 710 for San Francisco. Scheduled departure, 9:50 a.m. One minute late.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Eighty-one passengers and a crew of five for a half hour commuter trip. Weather good; no problems. There never have been any problems on this run. But six hours and ten minutes later, Flight 710 will still be on the ground in San Francisco, parked at the end of Runway Nineteen Left with the passengers aboard.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Three people will be dead; two injured.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Six hours and ten minutes after takeoff from Sacramento, Captain Waller will be covered with the blood of a hijacker, Dimitr Alexiev. Hijacker Michael Azmanoff will be covered with his own blood, from four FBI bullets. E. H. Stanley Carter, from a suburb of Montreal, will be slumped over the lap of his wife, dead. Leo R. Gormley of Van Nuys, a heart disease victim on borrowed time, will be wounded, a bullet in his neck. And Victor Sen Yung, Chinese-American television actor, will be bleeding from a bullet hole in the small of his back, a player, for the first time, in a real life-and-death drama.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Hijackers take their chances; some are killed. But passengers, these are the first to be wounded by gunfire in a U.S. skyjacking. Carter, a sixty-six year old railroad conductor, is the first passenger to be killed.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Character actor Victor Sen Yung, who plays Hop Sing, the Chinese cook in the Bonanza Series, walks up to the PSA desk at the airport and buys a ticket for Burbank.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">He was Parade Marshal at Pollock Pines the day before - the Fourth of July. Today he is going home to Universal City. He checks his bags through and with a friend, Jeff Wong, a Sacramento radio personality, goes into the coffee shop to kill half an hour.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">The two are deep in conversation when Wong looks at his watch and says, "You'd better run." Two minutes to plane time.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Sen Yung flashes his ticket at the sole gate attendant and goes aboard. Immediately the door closes behind him. The tower clears Flight 710 for takeoff.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">No one recognizes the actor in the sport shirt. He walks to the rear of the crowded plane and finds a seat back near the galley aisle seat on the left. Next to him is Daniel Kahawai who is traveling home to Honolulu with his wife and five children. Two rows ahead are Stanley Carter and his wife, Lillian. Behind are stewardesses Linda Heath and Lorraine Adamski, the latter a bride of two weeks who is still stealing glances at her wedding ring.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Passengers, including two Bulgarian immigrants wearing suits and dark glasses, are belted for takeoff. Captain Waller positions the jet at the head of the runway, releases the brake and the plane begins to roll. In a moment, Flight 710 is airborne.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">The flight appears to be routine. Stanley Carter, happy, looking forward to settling down to retirement in Los Angeles talks to his wife. He tells the man across the aisle, Dr. Manuel Alvarez of Sacramento, of his plans. The 'No Smokng' sign goes off.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Stewardesses Heath and Adamski are forward: stewardess Stallman is in the rear preparing refreshments at the galley. It is a minute or two after 10 a.m. The seat belt sign goes off. </span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">A man in a dark suit stands up, turns his back to the passengers and shows an automatic pistol to Miss Stallman. He forces her back behind the partition.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">The gunman tells her he is taking over the plane, orders her to pick up the phone to the cockpit and tell the captain they are going to Russia. He wants the captain informed he will need two parachutes and $800,000.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Then, he tells Miss Stallman to summon the other two stewardesses to come to the rear and sit down. They walk to the back of the plane, unable to believe what is happening.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">As the stewardesses go past, Sen Yung, the actor, lets his eyes follow the mini skirts, and he turns his head around until, from the corner of his right eye, he sees a man with his hands crossed and an automatic pistol in each hand.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">One is pointed at the stewardess standing near the galley, the other is aimed at the seated stewardesses. </span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">The realization begins to sink in - hijack - and Sen Yung slowly turns his head back and looks straight forward. The other passengers are unaware of the threat to their lives.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Dr. Alvarez, across the aisle and two seats forward of Sen Yung motions to a stewardess who has walked forward. He orders a glass of punch. It is some time before the punch arrives and he looks quizzically at the stewardess.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Is there something wrong? Alvarez wants to know. Linda Heath ignores him. Alvarez winks at her, half laughs because the question is foolish "Are we being hijacked?"</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">His expression chanes when the stewardess without saying a word nods yes.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Disbelieving at first, Alvarez is shaken by the grim nod from the stewardess. He thinks, but why hasn't there been any announcement from the captain? Why isn't someone acting alarmed? Perhaps they don't know.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">He decides to take a chance. On the paper napkin that came with his glass of punch he writes a note and passes it to the woman acros the aisle.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">It reads "I think we're being hijacked."</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">The woman, Sheila LaPoint of Mobile, traveling with her thirteen year-old daughter, Valerie, reads the note and turns to stare at Alvarez. She's speechless.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Behind them the hijacker, Dimitr Alexiev, says quietly to Sen Yung who has seen the automatics:</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">"Hey you, move across the aisle."</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">The actor doesn't move, pretending he doesn't hear or understand. The order is repeated and Sun Yung still doesn't move.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Stewardes Stallman comes up to the actor's row and leans over him "I've been told to tell you to move across the aisle - very slowly."</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Now Sen Yung moves. Over to the right side of the aisle to the empty seat one row forward. He is now four rows from the rear, and another row removed from the hijacker and the stewardesses being held at gunpoint.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">In the tower at San Francisco International, airport personnel, Federal Aviation Administration officials have received the message from Captain Waller: There is a hijacker aboard. Flight 710 is cleared for landing.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">From the tower, the message goes to the FBI, the San Mateo County Sheriff's office, the Coast Guard. According to plan, the Coast Guard will stand by with a launch ready to take aboard agents.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">The agent from the San Mateo substation is already on his way to the airport. San Francisco FBI agent in charge Robert Gebhardt has been notified and is moving toward the scene.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">A command post is set up on the fourth floor of the Central Terminal with communications men, PSA representatives and the FBI. One agent will be stationed in the tower with the flight controllers.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Flight 710 touches down and the hijacker immediately tells Captain Waller he wants the aircraft parked at the end of Runway Nineteen Left. They park and wait... five minutes. Ten minutes.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Stewardess Stallman is employed by the two hijackers, still in the rear, to take verbal messages to the captain who is to relay demands to the tower. Captain Waller now knows there are two hijackers: they have three automatics between them.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">In the command post, the demands are discussed: $800,000 in small bills, two parachutes, aerial navigation charts for Canada, Alaska and Siberia.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">There is an offer of a larger aircraft, since the 1500 mile-range 737 could not make the trip to Russia without refueling. This is rejected by the hijackers.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Another offer is to provide an international pilot familiar with the route. With stewardess Stallman carrying the message, this offer is accepted.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">The hijackers are told it will take time to raise the money, find a qualified international pilot. There is a tense moment while the anxious hijackers confer in the rear of the plane. They decide they will wait in the air. Captain Waller is ordered to take off immediately.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">And twenty minutes after the first landing, Flight 710 is back in the air, in a holding pattern over San Francisco Bay.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Now the passengers know. They had not approached the terminal upon landing in San Francisco. And now they are back in the air - circling. But still there is no announcement from the captain.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">The last vestige of doubt is removed a moment later. A voice comes over the public address system. It is Lorraine Adamski:</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">"Ladies and gentlemen." Her voice is calm and reasuring. "You have all been asked to sit still, face the front and not look back... because this may mean your life."</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Several of the passengers sob; there is a murmur of voices that Sen Yung can hear. Stanley Carter starts to rise in his seat; his wife Lillian tells him to get back down.</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">The aricraft continues to circle, and then there is another announcement by the stewardess Adamski:</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div>"Will all passengers place their hands on top of their heads. And do not look back or fear of your life."</div><div><br /></div><div>In complete control of the aircraft, crew and passengers, the hijackers felt confident enough now to order the plane to land again. They had made their point; proved they were in command.</div><div><br /></div><div>Flight 710 again lands, and taxis to the end of Runway Nineteen Left to wait for the ransom, parachutes and new pilot. But there is a difference this time.</div><div><br /></div><div>The FBI's Gebhardt on the scene in the tower's fourth floor command post is ready to make a decision - to stop the hijacking.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is now a few minutes before noon. On the plane, the hijackers get the word that it will be two, maybe three hours before the huge amount of ransom can be rounded up. The new pilot, a volunteer, will be available shortly. It's a stall, and Gebhardt will stretch the three hours to more than four.</div><div><br /></div><div>Resigned to a waiting game, the hijackers, Alexiev and Azmanoff, still in the rear of the aircraft, tell stewardess Adamski to announce to the passengers they can take their hands from on top of their heads. They do, and it is a relief.</div><div><br /></div><div>Some of them ask if they can smoke and are told they may. A few minutes later, there is a strange procession up the aisle of the plane. </div><div><br /></div><div>Alexiev, holding a gun on stewardess Adamski in front of him, and one on Stallman behind him, walks up the aisle. Stallman, has her hands on his shoulders. If he feels her hands leave his shoulders, the hijacker has only to turn and fire.</div><div><br /></div><div>The tandem trio reaches the cockpit and enters. This is the first time Captain Waller and First Officer Dick Peterson get a look at their captor.</div><div><br /></div><div>It seems like only a few moments later to Sen Yung that he hears Waller's voice:</div><div><br /></div><div>"This is the captain. Momentarily, we are expecting a truck to come and refuel the plane."</div><div><br /></div><div>The fuel truck comes; the plane is refueled but few of the passengers are aware of it. One o'clock becomes two o'clock. The stewardesses serve coffee, punch. Drinks that were declined earlier are now accepted gratefully.</div><div><br /></div><div>Passengers read, talk quietly. There is no hysteria. Only waiting. And some of them are beginning to get hungry. Flight 710 carries no food.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sometime after three o'clock, Dr. Alvarez beckons a stewardess, asks if he can use the restroom. After a conference with the hijacker in the rear, he is told he can. If he gets up and walks slowly with his hands on his head.</div><div><br /></div><div>Behind Alvarez and across the aisle, Sen Yung also asks the stewardess for permission to use the restroom, the one in the rear. Because he knows of only one hijacker, the one now up front.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sen Yung gets up, puts his hands on his head and turns toward the back of the plane. Between the galley and the rear exit is the second hijacker with an automatic pointed directly at him.</div><div><br /></div><div>The automatic follows Sen Yung into the restroom compartment until the door isclosed. When he opens the door to return to his seat the pistol is again pointed at his nose. He uses his elbow to open the door all the way and walks back up the aisle.</div><div><br /></div><div>The actor sits down, talks to his seatmate, Daniel Kahawai. Small talk. Cigarettes. More waiting. </div><div><br /></div><div>Then they hear the voice of the captain for the second time: He says the passengers will be allowed to leave the plane in fifteen or twenty minutes. And the words break the dam of tension.</div><div><br /></div><div>Most of the eighty-one passengers, including many of the children aboard, break into applause. There are cheers and laughter. The stewardesses smile, answer questions and smile some more. Stewardess Adamski is happy for the passengers, but knows the crew will not be released. She slips off her wedding ring and gives it to one of the women who has befriended her.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Keep this for me, just in case. I've only had it for two weeks."</div><div><br /></div><div>The emotional relief is short-lived. Tension returns as the cockpit door swings open and those in the aisle seats can see the hijacker with the two guns, one of the captain and the other trained on the first officer.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sen Yung sees this and thinks. There's still an armed hijacker in the cockpit and another in the rear. Something can happen before we're released...</div><div><br /></div><div>He loosens his seatbelt so he can move quickly if he has to, he puts his seat in an upright position, and waits. And at that moment, there is more happenening than the actor can imagine. It's happening out on the runway and behind the parked aircraft.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is a few minutes before 4 p.m.</div><div><br /></div><div>A station wagon drives up to within one hundred feet of the plane and stops. In it are two FBi agents. One of them is posing as the international pilot, a volunteer from Pan American. That is what the hijackers have been told. His name is "Jim Williams."</div><div><br /></div><div>Williams gets out of the automobile which immediately drives off on instructions of the hijackers. He stands and waits. he has a small suitcase, two parachutes and a cloth bag.</div><div><br /></div><div>Stewardess Stallman, in the cockpit has been told to walk out to the "pilot" and tell him to strip so the hijackers can look him over for concealed weapons.</div><div><br /></div><div>Suddenly, the passengers see a shaft of sunlight as the forward door is opened and the stairs are lowered. Stewardes Jacque Stallman is ordered to walk down the stairs and out toward the "pilot".</div><div><br /></div><div>Before he can say anything to her she says evenly, "You don't look like a flight captain. You are to take your clothes off, right here, so they can see if you're armed." His .38 caliber automatic is in his pocket.</div><div><br /></div><div>Williams says: "I am disappointed I don't look like a pilot. I'm an agent. Keep calm."</div><div><br /></div><div>When Williams begins to take off his slacks, Miss Stallman turns around and for the first time sees three men in white coveralls under the belly of the aircraft. They are armed with shotguns. And they have arrived by water in a Coast Guard launch tied up directly behind the tail of the plane.</div><div><br /></div><div>Four more agents, also armed with shotguns, are inching closer to the runway through the grass and dirt. The driver of the station wagon who brought Williams to the runway is also ready to make his move.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the window of the cockpit, Alexiev can see only the stewardess and the new pilot. He is apparently unarmed and putting his clothes back on.</div><div><br /></div><div>Williams takes his time dressing, fumbles with his cufflinks, stalls and keeps asking Stallman for details about the hijackers. She tells him one is in the cockpit, one is back near the galley. She describes in detail what they are wearing. She says she has been ordered to stand at the bottom of the stairs when they get back to the plane.</div><div><br /></div><div>Williams says this is fine: "Stand there until you see the three agents under the belly charge. Then break and run under the plane."</div><div><br /></div><div>They start back toward the aircraft, hurried along by Captain Waller who is motioning to them from the cockpit. Williams is carrying one of the parachutes and a cloth bag containing navigation charts. Miss Stallman is carrying the other parachute and the suitcase containing the money.</div><div><br /></div><div>At the foot of the stairs, they both stop. Alexiev tells them to leave the parcels there.</div><div><br /></div><div>He wants the new "pilot" to put his hands over his head and come up slowly. Williams starts up. Stewardess Stallman stands still, one eye on the three agents under the aircraft.</div><div><br /></div><div>Williams enters the cabin. Alexiev, with both automatics trained on him, motions the "international pilot" toward the rear where Azmanoff behind a partition has him covered.</div><div><br /></div><div>At that moment, the three agents under the aircraft make their move. Stewardess Stallman dshes for safety. Concentrating on Williams, Alexiev is caught by surprise as the first of the agents jumps into the cabin and fires a blast from his shotgun.</div><div><br /></div><div>The single shot catches Alexiev full in the chest and he goes down without ever getting off a shot from either of his automatics. Williams, with his back to the action, dives for an empty seat and comes up firing at Azamoff in the rear.</div><div><br /></div><div>The remaining hijacker is firing wildly at the agent with the shotgun and Williams. A second agent with a shotgun is firing at the ceiling to keep Azmanoff down.</div><div><br /></div><div>Lillian Carter yells at her husband to keep down, but it is too late. Stanley Carter has been hit in the chest and is dying.</div><div><br /></div><div>Two rows behind him, Sen Yung rolls to the right to get out of the way of the shooting. He feels the impact of a bullet near his spine. </div><div><br /></div><div>Leo Gormley puts a hand to his neck and feels blood.</div><div><br /></div><div>Dr. Alvarez, his seat in the reclining position, slumps down as far as he can. He is safe. Sheila LaPoint, across the aisle screams and throws her body over her daughter. Alvarez looks over at Carter and his wife. He hears Carter say:</div><div><br /></div><div>"I'm going...this is it. Kiss me, Lil."</div><div><br /></div><div>Williams finds the range and gets a few shots from the pistol into Azmanoff, who is frantically tring to reload.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the luckless Bulgarian is already mortally wounded. He drops his empty pistol and grabs a knife. A final shot from Williams ends the hijack attempt, and the life of Michael Azmanoff.</div><div><br /></div><div>Just as abruptly as it had begun, the shooting stops. Two hijackers are dead. So is Stanley Carter, whose retirement from the Canadian National Railroad ended a few weeks after it started.</div><div><br /></div><div>Stewardess Adamaski, standing behind Alexiev when he was shot dead, is crying softly. </div><div><br /></div><div>Passenger Sen Yung is helped up by Kahawai. The actor is bleeding bladly from a bullet that had entered the small of his back at the belt and lodged in his left side near the skin. He had saved his life by rolling right when the shooting started.</div><div><br /></div><div>Leo Gormley is slumped in his seat, semi-conscious. A bullet has passed through his neck, missing the vital arteries. Dr. Alvarez is helping him. The doctor, a Sacramento chiropractor, looks up at an agent and hears him say to no one in particular.</div><div><br /></div><div>"We got the sonofabitch."</div><div><br /></div><div>Another FBI agent tells Sen Yung. "It's all over now. A stretcher is coming."</div><div><br /></div><div>In the cockpit, Captain Waller, splattered with Alexiev's blood, is on the microphone talking to the tower:</div><div><br /></div><div>"Ambulance. Need an ambulance... we have a passneger hurt..."</div><div><br /></div><div>(The official Federal Aviaiton Administration recording of this conversation lists the time as 4:03 p.m.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Tower to PSA 710: "Is any of the crew injured?"</div><div><br /></div><div>"Negative," says Waller.</div><div><br /></div><div>The tower asks Waller to confirm passenger injuries and wants to know about hijackers.</div><div><br /></div><div>Waller says: "There are two of the passengers injured ... the one up front, (the hijacker), is disabled. I think he's ..." The tape goes blank at this point.</div><div><br /></div><div>Linda Heath tells the passengers, "You can go now."</div><div><br /></div><div>Flight 710 is over.</div><div><br /></div><div>Passengers are already leaving by the front exit, down the stairs. In the rear a stewardess activated the emergency chute and kicks it free of the door as it inflates. The wind whips the chute off the runway until one of the agents anchors it with his body.</div><div><br /></div><div>On the runway, stewardess Stallman rushes up to an FBI agent and hugs him: "Thank God you came." She kisses him, and one of the passengers. Some are laughing; some sobbing.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sen Yung is helped out of the forward door and down the stairs on a stretcher. He is told a helicopter will take him to the hospital. but he is placed in an ambulance, after a few minutes, and taken to Penninsula Hospital. Gormley also is taken to Penninsula Hospital. So is Carter, although, he is quite dead.</div><div><br /></div><div>The bodies of Michael Azmanoff and Dimitr Alexiev are placed on gurneys, moved to ambulances and taken to Chope Community Hospitals where autopsies will be performed. </div><div><br /></div><div>It is 4:20 p.m. Six hours and thirty minutes after Flight 710 dearted Sacramento Municipal Airport.</div><div><br /></div><div>The passengers are taken by bus and car to a room in the terminal and briefly interrogated by FBI agents. Then, they are moved to the Hilton Airport Inn to talk to newspaper and television reporters. </div><div><br /></div><div>Mrs. Arthur Stone of Detroit recalls that she began to cry when the first shots were fired.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Some said 'hit the deck,' " says Larry Jenkins of Sacramento. "I was down on the floor, fast."</div><div><br /></div><div>"I was scared to death," remembers twelve year old Aaron Marcus of Tiburon. "I started crying and shaking."</div><div><br /></div><div>"I just fell on the floor between the seats, " says Bill Corcoran of Sacramento.</div><div><br /></div><div>One of the passengers, Franz Lingnau of El Dorado Hills, had little to say to the reporters. The next day he was to board another PSA jet for the return trip to Sacramento. This one would be hijacked by an AWOL Army private first class, Francis M. Goodell, who later gave himself up to authorities. Lingnau thus became the first man to be hijacked twice on consecutive days.</div><div><br /></div><div>By nightfall, passengers with destinations other than San Francisco found connections. Mrs. Stone went back to Detroit: Dr. Alvarez proceeded to Dallas. For most of them the episode was over, a vivid memory; but now safe from harm, it was also something to joke about, relate to friends at home.</div><div><br /></div><div>Mrs. Stanley Carter, whose husband was slain by hijackers' bullets, awaiting the arrival of a son from Vancouver. Together they would make funeral arrangements, and later the widow would return to Montreal.</div><div><br /></div><div>For the crew, Captain Waller, First Officer Peterson, stewardesses Stallman, Heath and Adamski, there was a break in their flying schedules, a week's rest, adn then back to work.</div><div><br /></div><div>That is as much as is known about Flight 710. FBI reports on the incident are closed pending the outcome of lawsuits.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of the hijackers there is even less known. But there is a skeleton of information pieced together from neighbors, and from what the FBI has made public.</div><div><br /></div><div>EPILOGUE</div><div><br /></div><div>The FBI, after the hijacking, routinely checked Sacramento Municipal Airport for an automobile belonging to either Azmanoff or Alexiev.</div><div><br /></div><div>They found none and suspected immediately there was an accomplice. Suspicion was backed up by evidence when William Scott, San Mateo County coroner's investigator, found a slip of paper on the body of Alexiev.</div><div><br /></div><div>It read: "Fifty-two degrees, seven minutes north; one hundred twenty-four degrees, ten minutes west. Altitude 3100 feet, runway 6210 feet lng." The location was an abandoned airstrip in the wilds of British Columbia. Puntzi Lake.</div><div><br /></div><div>With the cooperation of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, it was discovered that a charter pilot from Campbell River, on the east shore of Vancouver Island, had flown three men to Puntzi Lake on June 25, and on the day of the hijacking he had again been chartered to fly to Puntzi Lake. With a man who said he was a real estate speculator.</div><div><br /></div><div>The man ordered the pilot to take him back to Campbell River "in a hurry" on the morning of July 6.</div><div><br /></div><div>On July 13, eight days after the shootout at San Francisco International Airport, Lubomir Peichev, identified from a picture, was arrested as he left work at an Oakland machine shop. Peichev was established as a friend of the slain hijackers and a former pilot for a Bulgarian airline. He was traced from Bulgaria in 1967 to Massachusetts, where he married Sheila Tierney. They moved to San Francisco in 1970. At the time of his arrest, Peichev was estranged from his wife and living in a small Oakland hotel.</div><div><br /></div><div>Earlier, a search of the luggage aboard Flight 710 revealed a suitcase containing two inflatable plastic dummies, apparently to be dropped as a decoy.</div><div><br /></div><div>With the capture of Peichev and the evidence of the scribbled note and the plastic dummies, the FBI was able to build a theory:</div><div><br /></div><div>The hijackers had apparently planned to take over the PSA plane enroute to San Francisco, and bargaining with an offer to release the passengers, obtain the $800,000 ransom.</div><div><br /></div><div>From San Francisco, the aircraft would head for Puntzi Lake, and somewhere along the way, the dummies would be parachuted out to draw off pursuers.</div><div><br /></div><div>The 737 and crew would be abandoned at Puntzi Lake were Peichev was waiting. Then, the three conspirators would commendeer the light plane and leave the pilot behind.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is believed they planned to fly to Hope, a small Canadian town near the Washington State border, abandon the charter plane and disappear. With the $800,000 ransom.</div><div><br /></div><div>Azmanoff, officials said, fled Bulgaria to Ankara and would up in a refugee cmp in Naples before coming to the United States in 1968 under the sponsorship of the National Council of Churches. </div><div>He had served in the U.S. Army as a truck driver, and settled in the Bay Area in 1970. He once had an address on Clement Street, and had been seen by friends with Alexiev.</div><div><br /></div><div>Dimitr Alexiev had come to the Bay Area in 1970 from Bulgaria, via Beirut and New jesey. He became a "permanent resident" on March 2, 1971, and later married a divorcee with three children, Mrs. Joan Day.</div><div><br /></div><div>The family lived at 2588 Atwell Place, Hayward. Before moving to Hayward, Alexiev had lived in San Francisco and worked for the Yellow Cab Company in Pacifica. He had been arrested once, for soliciting passengers at San Francisco International Airport. The firm he worked for did not have an airport franchise.</div><div><br /></div><div>Whether or not the three Bulgarians had known each other in their homeland is not known. What they planned to do with the ransom is not known.</div><div><br /></div><div>Alexiev and Azmanoff were both twenty-eight years old when they died. Peichev was twenty-nine when he was arrested. His crime carries a minimum sentence of twenty years impresonment, maximum penalty - death.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle September 1972</i></div><div><div><b><br /></b></div></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-50036551342941200662009-09-12T20:34:00.000-07:002009-09-12T21:07:08.894-07:00Tasting Wine With The Experts<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDS7Df-3kwimC-XaKsZlpwbCf6OqC66trEE52rALzat9axf9u9fbXHgkgTI5wUmXMCrf85MUCugbWwN8PJjN0vPbrOgoJ1eUmKzqgtrUXvkjNJRiYsdKWMPCIPY0en5ieUotg16JWKwo8/s1600-h/Snapshot+2009-09-12+20-32-43.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 155px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDS7Df-3kwimC-XaKsZlpwbCf6OqC66trEE52rALzat9axf9u9fbXHgkgTI5wUmXMCrf85MUCugbWwN8PJjN0vPbrOgoJ1eUmKzqgtrUXvkjNJRiYsdKWMPCIPY0en5ieUotg16JWKwo8/s200/Snapshot+2009-09-12+20-32-43.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5380790407163705874" /></a><br /><b>by Ambrose Blake (Tom Emch) </b><div><b><br /></b></div><div>The Grand Ballroom of the St. Francis Hotel is a large room. It's so large that you could set up tasting tables for some eighty wineries around the perimeter, a massive cheese table in the center and still have space for a few Olympic equestrian events in between.</div><div><br /></div><div>But you don't gallop around at a formal wine tasting, glass in hand, from the Chardonnay to the Johannesberg Riesling to the Gewurztraminer just because it's free. You have to do it with style and not appear thirsty.</div><div><br /></div><div>Keep calm, I told myself. Just because there are more than eighty wines here, you shouldn't panic. Treat it like a cafeteria line and don't load up at the beginning. Make some careful decisions.</div><div><br /></div><div>Best to look over the Wine Institute's listings, read the descriptions and note the adjectives: "full-bodied, crisp, tart, smooth, lingering finish, fruity, spicy, intense, balanced" and, of course, "elegant."</div><div><br /></div><div>Immediately, I decided to forget the fruity and intense and concentrate on the smooth and elegant. Why fool around?</div><div><br /></div><div>Decisions can be a problem at a big wine tasting, particularly when faced with about eighty-five of them. So you have to make some heart-wrenching ones - like don't ry to sample everything: twenty or so should do the job.</div><div><br /></div><div>Although I've been to a few wine tastings, I'm still not up to speed on the proper etiquette. I never say the right thing, like "fine nose," or "lovely bouquet," or "marvelous balance." Becaue I don't know what these things mean.</div><div><br /></div><div>I used to say things like: "wow", or "yummy," or "ugh." But people frowned at me. So now I just smile - no matter how bad it tastes - and say, "Mmmmmm." They can take it anyway they want to.</div><div><br /></div><div>My first time out in this league I was astonished that the tasters were taking a sip and tossing the rest into buckets. Why throw away good booze?</div><div><br /></div><div>Another source of wonderment at tastings: Why all the cheese and bread? Most everybody has already had lunch. I was told you should take something between the Cabernet and the Chenin Blanc so you don't get your palate confused.</div><div><br /></div><div>You can learn a lot by just observing the professional tasters and wine experts. Best thing is to pick out someone who looks like he knows what he's doing and follow him around; do what he does and say what he says.</div><div><br /></div><div>Some observations.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>* The pros hold the glass by the stem, instead of holding the glass like it's a steering wheel. Have no idea why.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>* Experts swish the liquid around in the glass before tasting it. Some of them hold it up to the light.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>* Some people even close their eyes while tasting. Seems like you could spill a lot of booze if you miss your mouth.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>* The cognoscenti say things like "big," or "young" or "good potential." But if you don't know what you're talking about, it's best to keep your mouth shut and just drink; and gobble some cheese occasionally.</div><div><br /></div><div>There are a lot of other fine points of wine tasting etiquette, but I've forgotten most of them. I know you're not supposed to belch, or spit or drink the whole glass, which seems sort of silly, if you find the one you like.</div><div><br /></div><div>I usually sneak away from the crowd when I find a good one and toss it off in one gulp; but this is not considered proper.</div><div><br /></div><div>Tasting the really bad ones is even more difficult. You never make a face, even when the acidity is so strong your mouth puckers up. Smile.</div><div><br /></div><div>But to get back to the Grand Ballroom at the St. Francis and the Wine Institute's "Tasting of California Wines."</div><div><br /></div><div>A knowledgeable friend told me to look for the offerings of the small wineries: Simi, Geyser Peak, Grgich Hills, and Dry Creek. But I got confused after the first three or four glasses and a bit too much time at the Korbel Champagne table.</div><div><br /></div><div>I do remember the priest at the Novitiate Winery table saying something about "first crushings" and a "new relase". I think it was a Riesling.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Concannon people told me their Rkatsiteli is from a Bulgarian and Russian grape. The stuff was so good I lost my poise and drank the whole glass.</div><div><br /></div><div>At the Carey Cellars table (it's a new winery in Solvang) the girl behind the table offered a Sauvignon Blac and said it was "nice for picnics."</div><div><br /></div><div>I said "Mmmmmm," and smiled.</div><div><br /></div><div>I was behind an expert at the Geyser Peak table. He tasted the Pinot Noir Blanc and said, "A little young."</div><div><br /></div><div>So I tasted and said: "Youngish."</div><div><br /></div><div>(See how easy this wine tasting routine is? It gets easier as you go on to the fifteenth or sixteenth variety.)</div><div><br /></div><div>The man at the E. J. Gallo table looked strangely at me when I said, "Surprising complexity," after tasting the Sauvignon Blanc. So I decided to stick with my standard noncommittal comment.</div><div><br /></div><div>Someone told me that the Robert Mondavi Napa Fume was selling for sixteen dollars a bottle in Tokyo and I decided to move up in the world. I tried it and said, "Mmmmm." But with a Japanese accent.</div><div><br /></div><div>From there it was a short jump to the class of the show: the Domaine Chandon Brut, a blend of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pino Blanc.</div><div><br /></div><div>I sipped. Great bubbly, I thought to myself. But I said only: "Mmmmm. Something here I can't identify. Would you fill it up again?"</div><div><br /></div><div>The Chandon man started talking about the champenoie method and the cuvees and rotating bottles and the second fermentation.</div><div><br /></div><div>Didn't understand a word of it, but the champagne was beautiful. Not Dom Perignon, mind you, but excellent.</div><div><br /></div><div>The tasting was all down hill from there. The Chardonnays tasted flat and the Sauvignon Blancs were too blanc. Even the cheese tasted different.</div><div><br /></div><div>It was much later that I learned I had been at a special press tasting and among the tasters were experts from a dozen or so magazines and newspapers - Copley News Service, the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, the Los Angeles <i>Times</i>, the Rocky Mountain <i>News</i> and <i>Harper's</i>, to name a few. These are the people who write about wine for a living and have all the etiquette down pat.</div><div><br /></div><div>I hope they enjoyed themselves as much as I did.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle 1979</i></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-32973433401954889332009-09-11T20:58:00.000-07:002009-09-11T21:47:19.892-07:00One More Hour to Play<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0jy9xjxu1ahmLz_8vQkBT0FFl-hB0WMuL8yCeVc7_1C6yYMwFxsmCUK36kwq1CcHIzXBFZI9tjAe3DgHDZN-7Uvv7hN3S1EsbFDz7xRwI33hrCDYPlE5PGROI-1cM-xJzUD9BCRliZYM/s1600-h/Snapshot+2009-09-11+20-54-13.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 111px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0jy9xjxu1ahmLz_8vQkBT0FFl-hB0WMuL8yCeVc7_1C6yYMwFxsmCUK36kwq1CcHIzXBFZI9tjAe3DgHDZN-7Uvv7hN3S1EsbFDz7xRwI33hrCDYPlE5PGROI-1cM-xJzUD9BCRliZYM/s200/Snapshot+2009-09-11+20-54-13.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5380428053539044002"></a><br /><b>by Ambrose Blake (Tom Emch) </b><div><br /></div><div>Now that we're back on Daylight Savings Time and the sun is coming up later and you're going to work earlier, we can sit back and contemplate, logically, what has been done to our lives - by an act of Congress.</div><div><br /></div><div>Last Sunday you turned your clock ahead an hour so you lost an hour's sleep. One full hour was stolen from you. If you were in a Las Vegas casino, where they have no clocks, you probably didn't notice the theft. But most of us noticed right away. We were told by our stomachs.</div><div><br /></div><div>Instead of getting hungry (or thirsty, as the case may be) at noon, we found we were really not ready for the filet of sole until one o'clock, at which time we had to be back in the office.</div><div><br /></div><div>I know people who have developed a clockwork-like thirst. They get a tremendous dryness on the roof of the mouth at precisely five in the afternoon, and they've found they're not enjoying their cocktails at four o'clock by the sun's time. Then later, the real thirst strikes them on the freeway, in the middle of the commute. It's a terrible inconvenience.</div><div><br /></div><div>We all know that Mother Nature doesn't like being tampered with. And it's easy to see the enormity of the tampering if you can imagine yourself one of the nation's millions of cows. Just ask yourself how you would like it if some farmer tried to milk you an hour ahead of your regular time. It's a well-known fact that Daylight Savings Time makes for some very uncontented cows, and a measureable drop in the milk supply.</div><div><br /></div><div>A lot of European countries go along with this madness. There's British "summer time" which started April 6. A total of seventeen countries switched at that time, but Portugal, Poland and Czechoslovakia held out for two weeks.</div><div><br /></div><div>Switzerland, a country that knows something about clocks, and Yugoslavia have both voted against Daylight Savings Time, making them an island of sanity on a continent out of synch with the solar system.</div><div><br /></div><div>This causes confusion in border towns like Geneva or Trieste. French businesmen miss dates with their Swiss mistresses and Italian smugglers are late for their rendevous with Yugoslav sailors. It can also get complicated if you want to call your banker in Zurich. If youre' not careful, he will be gone for the day.</div><div><br /></div><div>It all started with Ben Franklin way back in 1784. Ben was at a dinner party in Paris and admired a particular oil lamp and the light it gave off.</div><div><br /></div><div>He got to thinking whether the oil consumed was in proportion to the light it afforded. The thought kept him awake until well after midnight and at six in the morning a sudden noise awakened him. He was surprised to find the room filled with light. He soon realized that it was the sun beginning its early rise that time of year, and he immediately began calculating the sum the city of Paris would save by adopting an "early to bed, early to rise" policy, using sunshine instead of oil lamps and candles.</div><div><br /></div><div>Franklin figured Paris would save sixty-four million pounds of wax and tallow in six months by getting up an hour earlier. An idea was born, but it was ahead of its time. Frenchmen have never been fond of getting up early.</div><div><br /></div><div>William Willett of Chelsea, England, gets the credit for the campaign and adoption of the daylight saving system. The plan was described in his book, <i>Waste of Daylight</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>The British Parliament rejected his idea several times before finally adopting it in May, 1916. They were a year behind the Germans, who had adopted the system in 1915 to save fuel during World War I. In 1918, the U.S. Congress passed a bill authorizing advancing clocks one hour from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October. It was repealed in 1919 because farmers (and probably their cows) objected strongly to readjusted work schedules.</div><div><br /></div><div>In 1942, during World War II, the U.S. again adopted Daylight Savings Time and after the war it became a state option. California had the system off and on and finally passed a proposition adopting it in 1949. In 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Tim Act and ended the confusion between states and even portions of states.</div><div><br /></div><div>The normal six-month cycle is from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October. But this was changed in 1974 when Congress put the U.S. on year-around saving time for two years to save on energy. In 1976 the normal cycle resumed.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is still scattered opposition to the system, particularly in the rural South and Southwest and in the Midwest. And there are a lot of urban people who object on the grounds that their metabolism gets upset twice a year. They don't always know when they're supposed to be hungry or thirsty, and they like to sleep late anyway.</div><div><br /></div><div>It was Ben Franklin who started tinkering around with solar time; it was William Willett who sold the idea to Parliament, and the U.S. Congress made it a law here.</div><div><br /></div><div>But in San Francisco, only a fool will wait until one o'clock for a drink when the dryness on the roof of his mouth tells him he's thirsty at noon.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle</i></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-49952328278060550842009-09-08T21:24:00.000-07:002009-09-08T22:56:43.434-07:00Ten Seconds of Terror<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIax3UZ9EUO5Um6pbD_aQn6duMAShNJAYUhiB8w2a03fneFy9Qv8FBbzoUIIuRWRSrjBoqexjuTqRdiWK_jjNumbZvf83II-2guQXEPDNlQBwvkddViMNFGkdrlqslxTogi8ch3qVwn_s/s1600-h/avalanche-726092.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 186px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIax3UZ9EUO5Um6pbD_aQn6duMAShNJAYUhiB8w2a03fneFy9Qv8FBbzoUIIuRWRSrjBoqexjuTqRdiWK_jjNumbZvf83II-2guQXEPDNlQBwvkddViMNFGkdrlqslxTogi8ch3qVwn_s/s200/avalanche-726092.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5379320545627586530" /></a><br /><b>by Tom Emch</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div>Dry snow, the kind the powder-hounds love, began falling early Monday at Alpine Meadows, the flakes landing noiselessly on a crusted, unstable Sierra snow pack. It snowed again Tuesday morning while avalanche control teams worked the upper slopes with doubles, two dynamite hand charges taped together. The blasts left tell-tale craters near the top of Beaver Bowl, below the wind-curled cornice on the ridge.</div><div><br /></div><div>Mike Pisani and Bub Luttman of San Mateo saw the craters as they entered the bowl from Wolverine traverse. In the diminishing visibility they thought the mountain and the powder were theirs alone, and they started down. But minutes earlier Steve Woodbury and Todd Osborne had traversed across Beaver to a knob on the north side where they stood resting on their skis. They saw a party of seven skiers below them entering Lower Beaver. That's when it happened.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sheriff's deputies and investigators from the U.S. Forest Service put the time at 11:55 a.m. The survivors - Pisani, Luttman, Woodbury, Osborne, Bob Happle, Tom and Jim Donnelly, Ron Stanford and four others skiing Lower Beaver - won't forget the day: Tuesday, March 2, 1976.</div><div><br /></div><div>Woodbury thought it sounded like an airplane at first. "We turned around and saw this cloud of snow coming down. It got louder, rumbling and crackling, and we saw the seven skiers below us where the bowl wraps around ... and they weren't able to see it and it was coming fast. I yelled 'Avalanche' and by the time I yelled it again the slide was by them."</div><div><br /></div><div>On the other side of the bowl, Pisani and Luttman never heard the warning shout. But they suddenly discovered they weren't alone on the mountain. From above them they heard yell: "Go for it." At the same moment, Luttman recalls, "I looked over my shoulder and saw a big poof of snow and heard a thundering sound. I had less than a second to think 'It's going to get us; steer for the trees.'" His partner Pisani, remembers yelling: "Grab a tree."</div><div><br /></div><div>The words "Go for it" were the last uttered by one of the three men who died in the avalanche at Beaver Bowl, a massive slide that tore loose a 200-yard wide wall of snow more than five feet high and sent it crashing down the slope, over the lip and on down half a mile to the top of Kangaroo chairlift at a speed estimated in excess of fifty miles per hour.</div><div><br /></div><div>John Robert Freitas, David Paul Machholz and Dennis Joseph Graber were swallowed up by the white monster and buried without ceremony just above the lip of Beaver. Freitas and Machholz died of asphyxiation. Graber died of a broken neck, according to the Placer County coroner's report.</div><div><br /></div><div>Pisani and Luttman were immediately caught by the slide and "swam" on top of it toward the trees to their right until it completely took them, slamming Pisani into a tree and covering him with three feet of snow and debris and burying Lutman beside him.</div><div><br /></div><div>Bob Happle, a Reno fireman and a trained paramedic, the leader of the party of seven skiers on Lower Beaver, heard the warning shout from Woodbury and turned sharply to his right, out of the path of the avalanche.</div><div><br /></div><div>Happle and his party made it to safety, coming to rest on the edge of the slide path. Pisani and Luttman were not so lucky.</div><div><br /></div><div>"There was no chance to out-ski it. No way. If you were anywhere in the bowl you were committed," says Luttman. "We started swimming to keep on top of it and then it just started to take us, rolling us over and over. The slide carried us eighty, maybe one hundred yards. We tried to steer, but lost control."</div><div><br /></div><div>Pisani, excited, begins to talk: "My hat and goggles were ripped right off my face. I landed right on a tree, really hit it hard. I just held on to the tree and the snow was still coming over me. It was building up on top of me. Then it was over and I heard Bob yelling his head off."</div><div><br /></div><div>It had been less than ten seconds from the time the avalanche caught them until they started digging out.</div><div><br /></div><div>Luttman recalls: "I was down about three feet, sprawled out, and I stuck my hands up over my heard. I couldn't see my hands, but could see faint light. And I broke out and began yelling for Mike. I thought: My God. Where's my friend?"</div><div><br /></div><div>"About fifteen seconds later I saw him burrow out like some kind of mole."</div><div><br /></div><div>Luttman's safety straps had held; he had both his skis and his pole straps had moved up his arms to his elbows. Pisani had lost one ski. They found it later, about twenty-five feet away, sitting right on top of the slide.</div><div><br /></div><div>It was snowing harder now. But from their vantage point high on the north side of the bowl, Woodbury and Osborne tried to assess what had happened.</div><div><br /></div><div>It appeared likely that the seven skiers below them had made it to safety. At least they could count six. They had seen two skiers get caught in the slide on the south side of the bowl and saw them dig out. But were their more?</div><div><br /></div><div>They agreed they had seen a flash of yellow in the middle of the slide by the lip.</div><div><br /></div><div>"After the slide we were hesitant about skiing right down on top of it because something else could break loose," says Woodbury. "We waited a few moments and then traversed back into the bowl, skied over to the two guys who dug themselves out.</div><div><br /></div><div>"On the way over, Todd found a pole sticking out of the snow, just one pole."</div><div><br /></div><div>Osborne and Woodbury came up to the two dazed men who were checking themselves for injuries.</div><div><br /></div><div>Luttman recalls the conversation:</div><div><br /></div><div>"Do you have all your equipment?" they asked me. "Yes." "Is everyone in your party accounted for?" "Yes." "Did you see anybody in the slide?" "No. But we heard someone above us yell: 'Go for it.'"</div><div><br /></div><div>Luttman says, "They kept asking if we had our poles because one of them had found a pole in the slide. And we agreed that somebody could be in the slide, buried."</div><div><br /></div><div>Minutes later a ski patrolman and a girl came up to the four survivors and Osborne told him about finding the single pole in the middle of the slide path. The ski patrolman told Pisani and Luttman to go down to the first aid hut and then report to Summit House.</div><div><br /></div><div>Pisani, in the first aid room, discovered he was spitting blood and had probably inhaled some snow. The bleeding was stopped and he was told to go to the clinic at Squaw Valley and have his ribs x-rayed. Luttman and Pisani wen to Squaw; the ribs checked out okay and they returned to Alpine Meadows to make a report.</div><div><br /></div><div>Before Luttman and Pisani left the slope and immediately after the avalanche, Bob Happle and his party, five of them Reno fireman, counted noses. Everyone was accounted for and unhurt. Jim Donnelly had been knocked down and his brother, Tom, had jumped right out of his bindings when the slide burst by them. But no one was hurt.</div><div><br /></div><div>Happle says they checked everyone's recollection and agreed they had seem somebody in the slide, at least one and perhaps two skiers.</div><div><br /></div><div>He says, "We looked down the hill to make sure no one was caught below us and then Ron Stanford and I - we're the two best powder skiers of the group - raced down to the bottom of Summit.</div><div><br /></div><div>"I grabbed the ski patrolman's phone and said: 'I want to report an avalanche in Beaver Bowl. There's one down and maybe two. An observed burial in the slide. We're not sure of the location.'"</div><div><br /></div><div>Stanford, meanwhile, told the lift operator what had happened and Summit chair was immediately closed to the public.</div><div><br /></div><div>Up on the slope of Beaver Bowl ski patrolmen were already organizing a hasty search. From their training they know that the chances for survival for an avalanche victim are only 50 per cent after thirty minutes under the snow.</div><div><br /></div><div>Below them, at the foot of Summit chair, another party of ski patrolmen, plus Happle, the fireman, got aboard the lift to ride to the top and traverse across Wolverine and into Beaver near the fracture line where the avalanche had started.</div><div><br /></div><div>Within twenty minutes, Placer County sherif's deputy Sgt. Dave Rickert had been notified at the Tahoe City substation; so had Don Huber, U.S. Forest Service officer at Truckee, and probe lines being organized with ski patrolmen and volunteers. Soon there were nearly 200 people engaged in the search.</div><div><br /></div><div>Collapsible metal probes and ten-foot aluminum conduits were issued to the searchers and it was explained that the probes would be done in unison on command of the probe line leader.</div><div><br /></div><div>The work, agonizingly slow and painstaking, began near the bottom of the slide and worked up the slope toward the lip of Beaver where the pole had been found. Avalanche rescue-trained dogs were brought in from South Lake Tahoe and Truckee to aid in the search.</div><div><br /></div><div>Happle recalls: "The first body was found about an hour after we started the search. Someone in the top probe line found the body about ten feet from the edge of the gap we had skied through before it all broke loose."</div><div><br /></div><div>The snow, says Happle, was packed solid by the slide and searchers had to use shovels to get down to the victim buried about four feet from the surface.</div><div><br /></div><div>The skier was carefully removed from the snow and immediately giving mouth to mouth resuscitation and heart massage, but he failed to revive. A doctor in the search party pronounced him dead at 2:15 p.m.</div><div><br /></div><div>The body was identified as John R. Freitas, twenty-two, of 663 Denslow Lane, Hayward. He had suffocated.</div><div><br /></div><div>A second victim was discovered fifteen minutes later and resuscitation appeared to be bringing him around. "We were able to get some color back into his face," says Happle, who alternated with a ski patrolman and a doctor on the mouth to mouth resuscitation. After more than an hour, the desperate attempt to revive the skier was abandoned, and the doctor declared him dead of asphyxiation. Both victims had been found facing downhill in the prone position.</div><div><br /></div><div>The second victim was identified at first as Robert Maccholz of 3025 Tosca Way, Concord. That was the identification in his billfold. It was later discovered that the body was that of David Paul Machholz, twenty, who was carrying his older brother's papers.</div><div><br /></div><div>The search continued throughout the afternoon in the belief that there might be one more victim. An extra hat and a pole had been found, but it was not certain who they belonged to, Happle says.</div><div><br /></div><div>Roberta Huber, one of the searchers with an avalanche-trained dog, recalls working the slope with her German Shepherd, Bridget, until nearly 9 p.m., and then returning the next morning to resume searching.</div><div><br /></div><div>She says that on the day after the avalanche probe lines were again organized and there were about 150 searchers, including ski patrolmen who worked at other ski resorts and many volunteers from the public. Also among the searcher were members of the sheriff's Nordic Ski Rescue Team and trained avalanche control men from the Forest Service's Truckee Station.</div><div><br /></div><div>The all-day search Wednesday proved unsuccessful. It was no longer a question of saving the life of a buried skier, they were looking for additional bodies. On Thursday and Friday they searched again, and late Friday, after combing most of the side area with probes, sheriff's deputies officially called the search off.</div><div><br /></div><div>Also on Friday, Forest Service investigators, with the aid of half a dozen eyewitnesses including Pisani, Luttman, Osborne, Woodbury and Happle, reenacted the roles each had played. The eyewitnesses were quizzed on exactly where they had been when the avalanche began and what they had seen.</div><div><br /></div><div>Two other eyewitnesses, Dave Braker and Jeffrey Childs, both of Chico, were not available for reenactment, nor were most of the Reno firemen in Happle's party. But all had turned in written reports.</div><div><br /></div><div>From this and from written reports taken the day of the tragedy, investigators were able to reconstruct the separate events. But they were unable to determine if there were more bodies in the slide.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sgt. Rickert says that all cars in the Alpine Meadows parking lot were accounted for and there were no missing persons reports. </div><div><br /></div><div>But the following day, with a handful of ski patrolmen and volunteers, the search went on. And this time it was successful.</div><div><br /></div><div>Alpine Meadows ski patrol director John Waite recalls that the third body, that of, Dennis Joseph Graber, twenty-three, was found Saturday morning by ski patrolman Gary Halkens.</div><div><br /></div><div>Graber had evidently rolled an undetermined number of times after he was caught in the avalanche. He was found in about six feet of hard-packed snow with his legs under him, his body bent backward and his neck broken. Placer County sheriff's deputy, Sgt. Steve Mikol, was notified and in his report listed the cause of death as accidental. The body was removed to the county's Central Morgue in Augurn. Graber's address was listed as Kingswood, a condominium at King's Beach, Tahoe City. It was established that he was skiing with Frietas. Machholz was evidently skiing alone, according to investigators.</div><div><br /></div><div>All three bodies were found within thirty feet of each other, all of them just above the lip of Beaver Bowl, near the ski pole found immediately after the slide by Osborne. Roberta Huber was there when Graber's body was found. She says there were about fifty ski patrolmen in the search party, many of them from other ski areas. She says the body was found ten feet from the still-visible hole that had been Freitas' grave four days earlier.</div><div><br /></div><div>The site was abou t450 feet from the fracture line on Upper Beaver where the avalanche started. Waite says the Beaver Bowl slide was a Class IV avalanche, a big one. Avalanches are classified on a scale of one to five, and Waite says he has never seen a Class V, not in ten years as a ski patrolman.</div><div><br /></div><div>The recapitulation is still going on. Bernie Kingery, the mountain manager at Alpine Meados, who has seen many avalanches and been caught in a few in "ridge pullbacks' while dynamiting, can't figure it out.</div><div><br /></div><div>Waite says they fired a few founds from the recoiless rifle mounted on Gunner's Knob into Upper Beaver the day before the avalanche and hand charges were exploded the morning of the slide. "We didn't think Beaver was unstable," he says.</div><div><br /></div><div>Woodbury says that two or three skiers on a high traverse - the three victims - had broken it loose.</div><div><br /></div><div>Happle says no. When he went back up Summit chair to help in the search there was only one set of traverse tracks into the bowl. He thinks his party of seven, Osborne and Woodbury, Luttman, and Pisani had all entered the bowl at the same spot.</div><div><br /></div><div>One experienced ski patrolman said it was an "act of God."</div><div><br /></div><div>Neither Pisani nor Luttman think the slide was started by a skier, although there was someone above them. They estimate they were forty feet from the fracture line when it burst. </div><div><br /></div><div>Was it snow conditions?</div><div><br /></div><div>Avalanche expert Monty Atwater of Sausalito, author of a book on avalanches, told reporters it was due to the freak weather conditions throughout the winter. </div><div><br /></div><div>"What has happened is that with the fair weather and light intermittent snowfalls, the snow metamorphosing process has been reversed.</div><div><br /></div><div>"The grains of snow have become larger instead of smaller, causing a highly unstable snowpack. We call this reverse metamorphosis process "depth hoar". And when it exists there's no telling what the hell the snow will do," he says.</div><div><br /></div><div>Carl Westrate, regional director of the U.S. Forest Service recreation division, says there were layers of depth hoar and dry snow and underneath that was a layer of ice formed in January or earlier. The early snow was very non-cohesive.</div><div><br /></div><div>Because part of Alpine Meadows is within Tahoe National forest and the U.S. Forest Service has the responsibility to see that avalanche control procedures are up to federal standards, Westrate's report will wind up at the Forest Service's Alpine Snow and Avalanche Research Project headquarters, Ft. Collins, Colorado.</div><div><br /></div><div>Snow conditions were unusual enough to cause Atwater to announce that there was grave avalanche danger in the entire Sierra for the balance of the ski season. And the Forest Service responded by posting avalanche warning signs on popular cross-country ski trails and snowmobile routes.</div><div><br /></div><div>Alpine Meadows ski patrolmen, busy with avalanche control work before the tragedy, redoubled their efforts afterward, blasting snow from packets and cornices on sixteen different routes in the ski complex. "There are more closure signs on Beaver Ridge than ever before," says mountain manager Kingery.</div><div><br /></div><div>One week after the avalanche, Beaver Bowl was still closed to public skiing. The slide had blown out all the deep powder and left a hard surface. But you could step off the slide path and sink into dry snow up to your waist. And new snow had not yet covered up the holes dug to retrieve the bodies of the three victims.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the aftermath, the survivors still wonder how they were saved.</div><div><br /></div><div>Says Woodbury: "It dawned on me a few hours later that I could have died. Todd and I were the first ones to traverse across the bowl. It would have made a pancake out of me.."</div><div><br /></div><div>Happle: "We had just skied through the gap and heard the sound wave that preceded the slide. We were going pretty fast and to the right, or it would have caught us."</div><div><br /></div><div>Luttman: "I still dream about it... being caught in it and swimming or the trees and then I'm buried in the snow, and I wake myself up."</div><div><br /></div><div>Pisani: "We were in it only ten or fifteen seconds but the force of it was unreal. I wouldn't have believed it."</div><div><br /></div><div>Ski patrol director Waite, interviewed a few days after the slide, still appeared stunned: "It was a freak. Usually the slides don't go over the lip of Beaver, they stop. This was just too much snow."</div><div><br /></div><div>He said the vertical drop of the avalanche was more than 1000 feet and the total distance it ran was 2600 feet. No one can say exactly what the speed of the slide was. But he says no skier could have outrun it. (Avalanches in Alaska have been clocked at more than 400 miles per hour.)</div><div><br /></div><div>A Forest Service snow safety pamphlet says: "Avalanches are complex, natural phenomena. Experts do not fully understand all the causes. No one can predict avalanche conditions with certainty... Play it safe."</div><div><br /></div><div><i>San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle April 1976</i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-6527056598099313102009-09-05T21:00:00.000-07:002009-09-05T22:04:49.252-07:00Reminiscenses of a Chili Freak<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYCZjxdyfqnTf6hNBt2DaVJIStpl6BrHPA_TbUwW2UHxZST-HhYRJi1orD0trXJ77JJ3Kd1r5NJ3UTGkMRJHMkqXw2eogwZ7deL5rber-TZaW80pP1G5GPGyMYu7Kfgji5NAWZo6e5X0Q/s1600-h/Working_2.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 164px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYCZjxdyfqnTf6hNBt2DaVJIStpl6BrHPA_TbUwW2UHxZST-HhYRJi1orD0trXJ77JJ3Kd1r5NJ3UTGkMRJHMkqXw2eogwZ7deL5rber-TZaW80pP1G5GPGyMYu7Kfgji5NAWZo6e5X0Q/s200/Working_2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5378200154676390338" /></a><br /><b>by Ambrose Blake (Tom Emch)</b><div><b><br /></b></div><div>Chili, also spelled chilli and chile, is a term used to describe, usually, the international dish chili con carne. South of the Border it is used to describe <i>salsa</i>, a peppery sauce found on restaurant tables, with which intrepid Mexicans smoke up any number of national dishes.</div><div><br /></div><div>In a purer sense, chili refers to the chili peppers, the bright red chile colorado, the potent light green chile jalapeno and others of varying degrees of tongue-scorching strength.</div><div><br /></div><div>In most American restaurants, the word "chili" on the menu refers either to chili con carne or chili with beans, which is nothing but chili con carne with less meat.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is power in the word chili. You can test it for yourself on friends. Few people are neutral on the subject.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Good chili?" says a colleague. "Only my aunt Sophie knows how to make chili."</div><div><br /></div><div>Another says: "I had a bowl of chili once in El Paso..." He can still remember what it tasted like, describe the restaurant and the brand of Mexican beer he used to put out the fire.</div><div><br /></div><div>Chili arouses emotions. It is controversial, beautiful or damned, and nearly always memorable, if made right.</div><div><br /></div><div>This chili freak, brought up on peanut butter sandwiches, weak vegetable soup, potato pancakes and other bland Midwestern fare, recalls with mind-searing accuracy his introduction to chili.</div><div><br /></div><div>We had stopped for lunch at a small roadhouse on the highway from Torreon to Monterrey. My companion, a Mexican who knew about such things, ordered machaca, tortillas, beans and chili. I did likewise. The chili came in a separate bowl.</div><div><br /></div><div>What was impaled on the fork was transferred to my mouth and - surprise - I had to stifle a scream. Perspiration burst forth on my brow and my Mexican friend burst out laughing.</div><div><br /></div><div>From that moment on, I have been very respectful of anything called chili, whether it comes as bright colored peppers, dark red with beans, or with meat and onions and garlic.</div><div><br /></div><div>Chili, almost everyone knows, produces an effect when it hits the palate that is the opposite of cottage cheese. It is much more wonderful, intriguing, changeable.</div><div><br /></div><div>Chili can be subtle, but it is more often seductive. As with women, one should never come too close without caution. If care is exercised, the rewards can be fantastic.</div><div><br /></div><div>Most of my adult life I've been eating chili. It has been a holy quest that has taken me into the barrios of many countries, into the little greasy spoon restaurants found near railroad and bus stations, into the Latin Quarters of all the major cities of the United States.</div><div><br /></div><div>It has been a search for the PERFECT BOWL OF CHILI. And the search must go on, because somewhere there is a bowl better than the last, seasoned precisely for my palate, with the right amount of meat, the most tender beans and exactly the right balance between garlic, onions and chili powder.</div><div><br /></div><div>Although the perfect bowl of chili is perhaps unattainable, there are some that have come close.</div><div><br /></div><div>John's Chili Parlor in Houston, deservedly famous throughout Texas, dispenses a potent but not overpowering bowl of chili that has a following among oil tycoons and visiting Arab shieks. King Hussein of Jordan had some brought to his suite in the Rice Hotel a few years back.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Rice Hotel itself serves a bowl of chili that has some renown as a hangover cure, particularly if ordered in the coffee shop at two in the morning along with scrambled eggs.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Texas Cafe in Brownsville serves chili with authority, so do a number of small restaurants in Austin, Texas. Austin, of course, is the stamping grounds of Wick Fowler, known as the "Chili King" for his internationally famous homemade chili. Fowler once beat out H. Allen Smith in a chili cook-off in Terlingua, a Brewster County ghost town. (Smith later claimed that Fowler had cheated, broken the rules at the last minute and influenced a judge.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Fowler has given his basic recipe - but not some of the secrets - to the Naitonal Press Club in Washington, D.C., one of the few places in the East where you can get good chili.</div><div><br /></div><div>Fowler once cooked his chili in the White House for LBJ, and his chili was served to President Ordaz of Mexico at Johnson's ranch on the Perdernales River.</div><div><br /></div><div>Chili, far from being just a peasant dish of no particular merit, has had an effect on the cuisine of some important cities.</div><div><br /></div><div>Dave Chasen's Restaurant in Los Angeles got its start serving a notable bowl of chili late at night to pub crawlers and theatrical folk a little short in the pocket. It's still on the menu, although Chasen's is now a gourmet restaurant.</div><div><br /></div><div>And that little-known fact is what got this piece started. I happened to mention one day that I was a chili freak, and my editor says: "You know Chasen's used to be a chili joint. Why not find out if there's a good bowl of chili in San Francisco."</div><div><br /></div><div>That did it.</div><div><br /></div><div>I have now gone through about eighteen bowls of chili in The City, and I haven't found one yet that ranks much higher than the lunch counter chili at Union Staiton in Chicago.</div><div><br /></div><div>But there is at least one good bowl of chili in San Francisco, in an unexpected place. More about that later.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the Mission District small authentic Mexican and Central American restaurants abound, yet you won't find an outstanding bowl of chili.</div><div><br /></div><div>Why? Frederico Hernandez explains: "Chili? You mean<i> salsa</i>. That's what we call chili. If you are talking about a Mexican dish. Chili con carne is an anglo dish. You will not find much chili con carne in the Mission."</div><div><br /></div><div>Verdad. He speaks the truth.</div><div><br /></div><div>At one of the most respected Mexican restaurans in the Mission, Guadalajara de Noche, 2981 24th Street, chili beans is not on the menu. A waitress looked confused when I asked for some.</div><div><br /></div><div>At Mario's, a fine little Mexican restaurant on the corner of Bush and Taylor Streets, there is likewise no chili. Chili rellenos, yes. But chili con carne, no.</div><div><br /></div><div>Some of the popular Americanized Mexican restaurants in the Avenues - El Sombrero and Tia Margarita on Nineteenth Avenue - serve what San Franciscans have come to think of as good Mexican food. But they have no chili of the Wick Fowler or H. Allen Smith variety.</div><div><br /></div><div>You can get an occasional bowl of chili beans on Mission Street, however at El Zocalo, 3230 Mission, at The Chili Bowl, Mission and 22nd Street. And on 24th Street at 2817, the Roosevelt Tamale Parlor. Except for the latter, one suspects the chili beans came out of a can, like Hormel's. There are of course many other places in the Mission and many small places on Howard Street and all over town that serve chili beans. They're from a can and an honest cook will tell you so.</div><div><br /></div><div>One proprietor of a small Howard Street establishment admitted: "Ours is from a can - Monarch. Sometimes we make it here, but it's a lot of work. Good chili you have to cook a long itme." He adds that most customers can't tell the difference anyway.</div><div><br /></div><div>He's wrong. Any discriminating chili eater can tell the difference immediately. And there are some experts who can even tell you the brand name of the chili powder used in the recipe.</div><div><br /></div><div>No decent bowl of chili in San Francisco? There may be others, but I have found only one. In a restaurant that has the honesty to use real diced beef, instead of taking the ground meat shortcut. And pinto instead of red beans. </div><div><br /></div><div>The place is Talmale Joe's. It's hidden away at 203 Stevenson Alley, off Third Street. Open for lunch only. Afficionados call it simply "Joe's". Some fans claim Joe has the best chili rellenos in town; others show up weekly for the chili colorado, served only Tuesdays and Thursdays.</div><div><br /></div><div>Strictly speaking, the chili colorado is not a bowl of chili. It comes on a plate with rice and beans on the side. But the meat and sauce is almost identical to that in Joe's dish called chili beans.</div><div><br /></div><div>This masterpiece arrives steaming hot in a standard size chili bowl full to the brim with tender beans and diced beef, seasoned just enough so that you know you're eating the real thing. </div><div><br /></div><div>There is still another chili dish at Joe's: straight chili. This is simply and beautifully the sauce, the beef. No beans. There are customers who work at Pacific Telephone and other offices in the neighborhood who swear by Joe's straight chili and chili beans, giving them the highest accolade of all: </div><div><br /></div><div>"Better than I make at home."</div><div><br /></div><div>This is one thing all chili freaks have in common. They've all tried making it at home, controlling the ingredients and cooking time and seasoning themselves to suit an exacting taste.</div><div><br /></div><div>One of the best homemade chili recipes is this one based on the Wick Fowler recipe, but toned down from the original four-alarm firehouse concoction to maybe three alarms. Even at that you are advised to have some cold beer standing by if the roof of your mouth is tender.</div><div><br /></div><div>TEXAS CHILI</div><div>(serves eight)</div><div><br /></div><div>1 1/2 C pinto beans * 3 slices bacon * 1 1/2 lbs. chuck, diced into 1/2 inch cubes * 1 clove garlic, split * 1 T flower * 1 C tomatoes, peeled and sliced * 1 1/2 T. chili powder * 1 T. salt.</div><div><br /></div><div>Wash beans, cover with cold water and let stand overnight. Next day, drain beans and place in large saucepan with two quarts of water. Bring to a boil, then simmer about one-and -a-half hours. Drain and reserve one cup lidquid.</div><div><br /></div><div>Cut up bacon slices, saute in Dutch oven two minutes. Add meat which has been browned and drained of all but one tablespoon of grease. In separate pan saute onion and garlic until tender, about five minutes. Mix in flour and add bean liquid, tomatoes, chili powder and salt. Add meat and bacon and simmer covered for one hour. Then, add beans and simmer one hour more, or until meat is tender.</div><div><br /></div><div>The above recipe is peculiar in that it must be followed exactly to obtain top results. Even minor deviations destroy the delicate balance. Also it is wise to remember that while it is easy to add chili powder to make the dish hotter, it is impossible to take it out. Be careful.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is a variation that some chili freaks claim is acceptable, even necessary. They add one teaspoon of mashed cumin seed to the onion and garlic before simmering. This produces a distinctly South of the Border flavor that you may find desirable.</div><div><br /></div><div>Fanny Farmer, the Boston lady and cookbook writer, has a recipe for chili con carne that calls for red kidney beans instead of the authentic pinto beans. She also allows the use of tomato juice instead of fresh whole tomatoes. This is pure blasphemy, and a transgression serious enough to get her cookbook banned in Brewster County, Texas.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of course there are differences of opinion amoung chili experts. H. Allen Smith insisted the final product be of a soupy consistency. Fowler leans toward the meat stew school of thought.</div><div><br /></div><div>Both are very careful with the potent chili powder. Too careful for a true chili freak.</div><div><br /></div><div>My own feeling is that I want to know I'm eating highly seasoned chili. I want to feel the perspiration jump out on my forehead, and then reach for the cold bottle of Carta Blanca or Dos Equis beer.</div><div><br /></div><div>A bowl of proper chili is not a dish for the timid. It is for the brave. And you worry about the bicarbonate of soda later.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle April 1973</i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-19798709554135403182009-09-05T20:31:00.000-07:002009-09-05T20:52:22.299-07:00Letter from Manila<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh41W9ss-L3ySl0U3ro6JHKGTVL2fQR65nJBfhxg25wMmnoUgC7DIGOr0kOk2f5aH-Tljr-lH4PpG1uJ9NQvwMWgNoDpiHvi5xztxg-gpeXezvweNTHpE_8sXZRMZ7bHcEHcgAGfoLufY/s1600-h/clark+air+force+base_2.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 177px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh41W9ss-L3ySl0U3ro6JHKGTVL2fQR65nJBfhxg25wMmnoUgC7DIGOr0kOk2f5aH-Tljr-lH4PpG1uJ9NQvwMWgNoDpiHvi5xztxg-gpeXezvweNTHpE_8sXZRMZ7bHcEHcgAGfoLufY/s200/clark+air+force+base_2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5378196216751941458" /></a><br /><i>Staff writer <b>Tom Emch</b> likes to get away from the magazine to act out his favorite Walter Mitty foreign correspondent's fantasy. And this time he managed to get to Manila and Clark Air Base to cover the return of the POWs. The following letter reached us just about the time Emch showed up with a bad case of jet lag.</i><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Following established custom, I looked in at the Manila Overseas Press Club on Roxas Boulevard immediately after dumping bags at the Intercontinental. </div><div><br /></div><div>In attendance were Manuel Collantes, Philippine deputy foreign secretary, who was holding three queens at the poker table; Ben David, the <i>Copley</i> stringer, with two jacks; Joe Shea, the <i>Village Voice </i>correspondent, who asked about magazine jobs in San Francisco; and Joe Umali, who covered the Philippine congress until President Marcos shut down the <i>Herald</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>Manila is down to three dailies from six before martial law, and Umali is just one of the more than 100 unemployed newsmen floating around the city, looking for odd jobs like helping cover the return of the prisoners of war at Clark Air Base, 50 miles to the north.</div><div><br /></div><div>Windows in the lounge of the Press Club look west over Manila Bay - Corregidor is off to the left - and are supposed to provide a good spot to view the famed Manila sunset, which is largeley a product of the Department of Tourism.</div><div><br /></div><div>It was so overcast you could barely tell when the sun went "plunk" into the Bay. But the sky was red from the exhaust pollution of Manila's 10,000 "Jeepneys," the working man's rapid transit.</div><div><br /></div><div>At the M.O.P.C., as the club is called, San Miguel beer is 80 centavos or about twelve cents a bottle. At the big hotels like the Intercontinental, the Hilton and the Hyatt, they soak you about 40 cents for San Miguel, a dollar for Scotch and it makes you feel right at home.</div><div><br /></div><div>By the first of February, there were 300 media people strung out from the Hyatt, where CBS had converted two rooms into a color lab, to the Oasis Hotel in Angeles City, across the fence from Clark Air Base.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of course everyone expected to be covering the big story - the return of the first prisoners - at any moment. "Any moment" dragged out to twelve days. Then, finally, there was a story.</div><div><br /></div><div>Soon as the prisoners arrived and the words were cabled home, the exodus began. Peter Jennings and the rest of the ABC crew made a fast exit, followed by the newspaper types not normally assigned to the Philippines. </div><div><br /></div><div>Back at the M.O.P.C., the card game was still going. It cleared a little and finally I saw the sun go "plunk" into Manila Bay.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle 1973</i></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-17486551489875736422009-09-01T20:48:00.000-07:002009-09-01T21:19:14.803-07:00Ambrose and Rudi at a Party<b>by Ambrose Blake (Tom Emch)</b><div><br /></div><div>On the second floor of Bali's Restaurant at Pacific and Battery, where the buffet was set up as if for the Czar or perhaps Rudi Nureyev, I found myself staring at the roast suckling pig. It rested head and all on a bed of mashed potatoes, cantaloupe and pineapple slices, with an apple in its mouth and cherries where its eyes once were, giving it a decidedly unhappy expression.</div><div><br /></div><div>It was about to be demolished along with half a dozen pheasants, twenty pounds of Iranian caviar, a salmon in aspic, a crown of pork roast, a steamboat roast of beef, some cheese paskha, pirog, piroshki, kulich or Russian Easter bread, kuliblak, dolmandes in grape leaves and some black bread for the peasants. On another table was the dessert: a huge layer cake with the words "Spasiba Rudik" frosted onto the top and a bathtub full of ambrosia. Centerpiece on the buffet table was a swan carved from a three-hundred pound block of ice, the creation of sculptor Guerrino Cassano.</div><div><br /></div><div>The small service bar was doing a b risk business in Polish vodka and, naturally, I was posted an arm's length from the bar in accordance with Blake's Third Law.</div><div><br /></div><div>The law states that you should station yourself close to the bar and not too far from the hors d'oeuvres at cocktail parties. It increases your options. But of course laws are made to be broken, and so it was, rather suddenly.</div><div><br /></div><div>I was armed against the milling throng with a scotch over and ready with a riposte in case some oaf spilled caviar on my jacket when it happened.</div><div><br /></div><div>Madame Armen Bali enters with Nureyev in tow. Everyone is greeting everyone: "Hi, love" and "Hello, my darling." I should have been alerted when the barman, Tochobanian, poured two oversize shot glasses full of the good vodka, Stolichnaya, and passed them up to Mme. Bali and Nureyev. She said something to her guest of honor in Russian and knocked back the vodka. Then she whirled and threw the glass against the back bar where it shattered. "Pow."</div><div><br /></div><div>Before I had a chance to brush the shards of glass from my sleeve, Nureyev tosses down his vodka and rifles his glass into the back bar where it explodes like a fragmentation grenade.</div><div><br /></div><div>Wow, I thought, this could turn into a great party if the glassware holds out.</div><div><br /></div><div>No one seemed surprised at the glassware bombing exercise, and the barman explained: "It's a Russian custom. They break the glass to seal the toast and no one can use the glass for another toast."</div><div><br /></div><div>I said: "That's okay with me but I called for a slider and Nureyev threw me a curve ball."</div><div><br /></div><div>Shortly after the assemblage began queuing up for the goodies, the line was somewhat longer than for a peek show at a county fair. One of the first casualties was the cherry eyes of the suckling pig; the icy swan started melting, too. So I ordered another scotch over, ground a little glass into the rug and left for the first floor bar where the dancing girls were.</div><div><br /></div><div>It was probably time to leave. They were passing glasses of Stolichnaya to the Countess Irina Tolstoy, the grandniece and last living relative of the famed novelist. And it didn't look like her aim was too good.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ballet dancers, Russian nobility, free-loaders are all friends of Mme. Bali, who shortened her name from Baliantz when she arrived here in 1950 after fleeing Siberia, Manchuria, Tsingtao and winding up in a displaced persons camp in the Philippines.</div><div><br /></div><div>Her restaurant; first on Sansome Street and now on Pacific, has been headquarters for exiled Russians for years. It was through Russian friends that she met Nureyev five years ago. With a common interest in ballet and vodka, they became fast friends and mutual admirers.</div><div><br /></div><div>For this particular party Nureyev had flown from Washington after a rehearsal and was scheduled to fly back the next day.</div><div><br /></div><div>While the caviar, champagne and ambrosia people were having at it upstairs, the first floor rocked to the wild gypsy music of a group called the Ararat. It was a foot-stomping, vodka-drinking music of the sort that makes you want to grab the girl next to you, flare your nostrils and shout something in Russian.</div><div><br /></div><div>However, some of us found it more prudent to merely wander about with scotch in hand checking the array of decolletage and trying to keep the people with Cossack boots from stepping on our toes.</div><div><br /></div><div>Russian gypsy music can make some people very agitated and of course one never knew where the next shot glass, empty of vodka, was going to land.</div><div><br /></div><div>As the evening wore on, and various grand entrances were made by assorted columnists and state senators, it got so crowded that I edged toward the door to take the air. Outside, on Battery Street, was the white Cadillac convertible that had whisked Rudi from the airport. It was covered with flowers; there were flowers and flower petals everywhere, even on the street. And carnation petals can be slippery, as more than one reveler found out.</div><div><br /></div><div>San Francisco police had Pacific blocked off from Battery to Sansome, and not a few partygoers were dancing in the street, if not lurching.</div><div><br /></div><div>The buffet room ended up a mess. But, no one seemed to care. Particularly Mme. Bali who owns the place. She was having a marvelous time, greeting friends with a kiss and circulating throughout the crowd that was about double the number invited.</div><div><br /></div><div>The hand-clapping gypsy music continued into the morning by which time, as one observer noted, there were people dancing on top of a police radio car on Battery Street. Not bad for a finale.</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle April 1975</i></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-1206669187501447192009-08-30T22:26:00.000-07:002009-08-30T22:41:25.214-07:00The Most Beautiful Commute<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">by Tom Emch</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div>Commuting to the City by ferry boat. Getting to know the fog and the water. The sound of the gulls and the sea changes, the feeling of intimacy between passengers drawn together on a voyage, no matter how brief.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's more than just a way to get there, as any escapee from the exhaust fume funnel will tell you. It's leisure. Time enough for a conversation, or for long thoughts at the rail, lulled by the gentle slap of waves against a moving hull. It's a style.</div><div><br /></div><div>Gone are the Bay's great fleets of ferries,, but there's a survivor, a spicy dame.</div><div><br /></div><div>She's a little broad of beam, three decks high and 100 feet long; she's smooth and powerful, but you couldn't call her beautiful. Not early in the morning as she squats alongside the Tiburon Ferry Landing in the dawn.</div><div><br /></div><div>She's the M.V. Harbor Emperor. And from the main deck floats the promise of strong coffee and fresh rolls and donuts. Off the water the air is sharp. A bit of spray and a changing seascape. A landlubber's bargain at $1.00 the round trip adventure.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's a feast for the senses even before the blast from the bridge signals the beginning of the 5 1/2 mile cruise to The City, 35 minutes away. "Let go the bow line." You hear the salty phrase and the captain sets a course for Alcatraz and San Francisco, silhouetted in the distance on an orange canvas.</div><div><br /></div><div>"This is the way to go," says Hilda Gibson, a ferry boat fan since the Tiburon run began in 1962. "You can stand up here on the top deck and sip coffee and feel the freshness of the morning. And the trip is different every day."</div><div><br /></div><div>The Emperor cruises past Alcatraz, cutting an 11-knot wake, and nudges up to the Ferry Building Landing to disgorge some 300 voyagers, braced and ready for the day. Then with the sun rising, she turns back to Tiburon.</div><div><br /></div><div>Four round trips in the morning and four in the afternoon. Shoppers during the day, and the crowd of commuters on the "5:30" back to Marin.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is the heaviest and thirstiest run. Card games and newspapers occupy some, but there is cocktail action at the bar. "We do better than $100 in 35 minutes," say Manuel Melas, who is manager for the food and drink caterer.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Most of them order doubles so they don't have to get back into line," he explains. "But one guy got up to the bar four times, ordered a double martini each time. It's a record."</div><div><br /></div><div>Up on the bridge, guiding the tight little ship and the homeward bound, is the captain, James Hill. "It's a good run and the passengers like the ride: they like us (the skipper and four deck hands)." The crew plays a game when they spot a "runner" at the dock. Says Hill: "He knows we'll wait, but he runs anyway and when he comes aboard, the passengers cheer."</div><div><br /></div><div>The Emperor? "She's a good ship, handles like a doll, even in choppy weather. But you're right about her looks," he admits.</div><div><br /></div><div>You couldn't call her beautiful."</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle</span></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-15357381340719342332009-08-30T21:21:00.000-07:002009-08-30T22:03:04.738-07:00Carol and Blaze Talk Shop<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnrdaTSNy3PP02VrKYdM9AjNumBnXxCdiDcgT27b93EwAt3dMjTFoE80oATcdpyG6uxXRvRzV6nWEOwldjItfhDDzFRyLHQPHhz1C199ahaGNJRO-WuBgwWXei5eYOV4viR1dVsNxkf-E/s1600-h/Carol+and+Doda+pic+jpeg.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 154px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnrdaTSNy3PP02VrKYdM9AjNumBnXxCdiDcgT27b93EwAt3dMjTFoE80oATcdpyG6uxXRvRzV6nWEOwldjItfhDDzFRyLHQPHhz1C199ahaGNJRO-WuBgwWXei5eYOV4viR1dVsNxkf-E/s200/Carol+and+Doda+pic+jpeg.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5375988889776358338" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">by Ambrose Blake (Tom Emch) </span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div>Another workday. Go to the office. Go to the Hilton to interview Blaze Starr (38-25-37) and Carol Doda (44-24-35), both tightly sweatered and sitting in Henri's Room at the Top talking shop. Shop, in this case, being the fine points of taking off clothes in public and some of the problems of being heavily endowed. Or, some say, upholstered.</div><div><br /></div><div>"You have to be careful about leaning forward," says Carol. "One time I went bowling, threw the ball and followed it right down the alley."</div><div><br /></div><div>Blaze, some of whose gowns are covered with mirrors and weight as much as twenty pounds, says: "Sometimes if you tilt the wrong way, you go right over."</div><div><br /></div><div>The meeting of the two strippers, one a municipal landmark on Baltimore's famed "Block" and the other an attraction no less spectacular than one of the Bay's bridges, could have become the Battle of the Mammaries. But as it turned out it was just two sweet girls gabbing about show biz.</div><div><br /></div><div>How about the measurements, Carol?</div><div><br /></div><div>"About 42 up here," she says, "depending on the weather."</div><div><br /></div><div>And what does the weather have to do with it?</div><div><br /></div><div>"The silicone expands when it gets hot," she reveals, "and it shrinks when it gets cold. If it is real cold I don't even work. That's why I can never play Alaska."</div><div><br /></div><div>Some years back, Carol got a little bust alteration treatment that transformed her from a perfectly normal "B" cup brassiere size to a fantastic configuration. Silicone, known for its physiochemical inertness, is usually used in adhesives, lubricants, electrical insulation and synthetic rubber.</div><div><br /></div><div>Blaze, on the other hand, gets by with her original equipment, which is in fine repair.</div><div><br /></div><div>Blaze is asked how she handles drunks who want to get up on the stage and touch the merchandise.</div><div><br /></div><div>"I say to him. 'Okay, come up here and stretch out on the couch and I'll rape you.' That stops 'em every time."</div><div><br /></div><div>Carol has had the same problem, but handles it differently. She says: "I tell him if he doesn't behave I'll hit him with one of these and knock him out."</div><div><br /></div><div>Blaze then launched into a personal story that was harrowing to hear and gained her immediate sympathy:</div><div><br /></div><div>"It was in Baltimore," she began. "I was doing my act for a private bachelor party and I have this routine where I place a rose between my bust and then point to someone in the audience and invite him to come up on stage and I ask him:</div><div><br /></div><div>'How would you like to go flower pickin' in the hills?"</div><div><br /></div><div>"Well," she continued, "this guy comes up and instead of getting the rose, he sunk his teeth right into my boobie and wouldn't let go.</div><div><br /></div><div>"It hurt and I started pulling his hair and beating him on the head, but he held on, like a bulldog, until one of my assistants unlocked him and got him off."</div><div><br /></div><div>She added that her boobie (strippers have various names for their breasts) became black and blue and swelled up and hurt like hell. But, thank goodness, it healed up.</div><div><br /></div><div>Carol said her worst experience was a few years ago when a San Francisco police sergeant climbed up on the stage at the Condor and insisted he was going to take her to the station as is.</div><div><br /></div><div>"But I don't have any clothes on," Carol recalls saying, "It's indecent." Whereupon, she ran from the stage to her dressing room and slipped on a few things for the ride downtown.</div><div><br /></div><div>Curiously, the two strippers have different attitudes about streaking. After being assured there would be plenty of photographers on the scene, Carol once streaked the Marina Green in the altogether.</div><div><br /></div><div>Blaze, however, says she was once urged to streak Pimlico Race Track on a horse, but refused. "He was a long shot," she recalls, "and he had his blinkers off."</div><div><br /></div><div>Both Blaze and Carol have been around the circuit for awhile. Blaze, born in Mingo County, West Virginia during the Depression, began stripping in Washington, D.C. in 1950.</div><div><br /></div><div>She was working a night club with a guitar act and followed on stage another guitar act, a cowboy. One night the promoter discovered that Blaze was getting laughs each time she tried to get the guitar strap over her head and chest.</div><div><br /></div><div>The promoter said: "You ought to be a stripper."</div><div><br /></div><div>That started it. Once she learned the basic bumps and grinds, she no longer needed the guitar. She found she loved stripping on the old burlesque circuit and developed her act into an art form that is beautiful to behold - even today.</div><div><br /></div><div>By the late fifties she was famous on the East Coast. In 1963, she became a fixture of Baltimore's "Block" and eventually bought the Two O'Clock Club, where she held forth for six years.</div><div><br /></div><div>The rewards of this toil?</div><div><br /></div><div>Today she owns two four-story buildings on East Baltimore Street, a $150,000 home with a pool in suburban Pikesville and has investments.</div><div><br /></div><div>Her recent one-week stand at the Palace Theater on Turk Street earned her $4,000 and she says she doesn't work much anymore. Maybe one week a month or every two months "to pick up pocket change."</div><div><br /></div><div>How about the rise of pornography?</div><div><br /></div><div>"About seven years ago the porno flicks won their court case and suddenly they were everywhere. But when you've seen one of them, you've seen them all.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Now, people are tired of them and they want to see the flesh again," says Blaze defiantly.</div><div><br /></div><div>Carol agrees. "That's what they come for. It's couples and even families. The audiences have changed since the go-go dancers of ten years ago."</div><div><br /></div><div>Carol, a veteran of the North Beach scene and a television personality in San Jose, has plans for a "Nevada-type" show that she would like to take to Reno and Vegas. She has in mind a full night club routine with a number of performers and top flight comedians and musicians.</div><div><br /></div><div>"But I would always come back to work San Francisco," she says. "I feel a responsibility toward the community. We get tourists who come out here from the Midwest and want to see two things: the Golden Gate Bridge and Carol Doda."</div><div><br /></div><div>Their acts differ, but are basically comedy by highly professional performers. Carol says, "I've had to get into production numbers. You can't maintain audience interest unless you give them the jokes and one-liners. After I take off my clothes I can't just stand their and say: 'Hello, there'."</div><div><br /></div><div>Blaze concentrates more on the old fashioned strip routine. She uses her own original music to strip by and has written two sons - Thirty-eight Double-D (her bust size) and West Virginia Sink Hole.</div><div><br /></div><div>She remains a West Virginia country girl at heart, and people around Baltimore will tell you it's a big heart. She's active in a number of charities and does non-profit performances when asked. She (unreadable) and like many true stars, she's a plain, honest person underneath a professional patina.</div><div><br /></div><div>Her book, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Blaze Star; My Life</span>, has been sold to Hollywood and casting for the film will begin soon and though she is not really wealthy, she doesn't have to worry about money.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Burlesque has been good to me," she says.</div><div><br /></div><div>Carol Doda says the skin trade agrees with her, too. Both claim that all they do when they strip "is what every other girl in the world would like to do - if they had the nerve."</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle August 1975</span></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-48931441060799501012009-08-25T21:32:00.000-07:002009-08-25T22:46:49.979-07:00A Pollution Revolution<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYoU4-llBYPyZXbv_xLsJ3f4oSrGZHdFosMIlJLtCN7wG5KRZxh429bkWf_OggWXlnKS0LwpR0pZwgbEKiCIZduLjMMD7nER2l1lMf1_HP5ufmmeOPpB4EGsulxCNYKS-ZeWMJJWtBEBw/s1600-h/jpeg+pollution.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 154px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYoU4-llBYPyZXbv_xLsJ3f4oSrGZHdFosMIlJLtCN7wG5KRZxh429bkWf_OggWXlnKS0LwpR0pZwgbEKiCIZduLjMMD7nER2l1lMf1_HP5ufmmeOPpB4EGsulxCNYKS-ZeWMJJWtBEBw/s200/jpeg+pollution.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5374127030649354594" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">by Tom Emch</span><div><br /></div><div>In the Diamond Valley of Alpine County is a sparkling new 165-acre lake. It looks ideal for swimming, boating, camping and fishing - and it is. Majestic mountains form the backdrop for this pristine jewel, alive with rainbow trout.</div><div><br /></div><div>But those trout aren't swimming in an ordinary Sierra lake. There isn't another like it in the world. Every drop of that beautiful blue water comes from sewage.</div><div><br /></div><div>The lake, known as Indian Creek Reservoir; is filled entirely with reclaimed water from the South Tahoe Public Utilities District. One billion gallons of it. </div><div><br /></div><div>If you can stomach the idea, what goes into the utilities district treatment plant as a six-letter word comes out as a five-letter word - water. Good water. It meets U.S. Public Health Service drinking water standards, tastes slightly flat but mixes well with scotch.</div><div><br /></div><div>This effluent of the affluent, from some 8000 buildings along Lake Tahoe's south shore, from Emerald Bay to Stateline, is purified and pumped 27 miles by pipeline over Luther Pass and to the reservoir where it serves three purposes.</div><div><br /></div><div>* It supplies irrigation for farmers with pasture land or bay and alfalfa. </div><div>* It is a receptacle for unwanted effluent from nearly one-third of the Tahoe Basin.</div><div>* It provides a new Sierra recreation facility, approved by the State for water contact sports.</div><div><br /></div><div>Boating and swimming in what was once sewage? Just how pure is the water?</div><div><br /></div><div>It's comparable in quality to the drinking water from your tap in The City, according to the Purification Division of the San Francisco Water Department. Accepted water quality tests indicate San Francisco drinking water is slightly higher in turbidity than that at the reservoir, but slightly lower in detergents, phosphorous and alkalinity. The coliform bacterial count is almost identical.</div><div><br /></div><div>If that doesn't tell you much, listen to Bob Tharatt of the State Fish and Game Department, who stocked the reservoir last August with 8000 rainbow trout. "The water's fine - or the trout wouldn't be thriving."</div><div><br /></div><div>Two and a half months after the stocking, the fingerlings had doubled in size. "We expect they'll be a foot long by opening day of the season, May 2. It's a good test of the water quality.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Rainbows require a pollution-free environment, unlike carp or catfish. We stocked the lake as an experiment, but the results are so good that we plan more stocking to replenish what the fisherman take out."</div><div><br /></div><div>The lake, man-made from reclaimed wastewater, was made possible by one of the world's most advanced sewage treatment plants.</div><div><br /></div><div>The $28 million plant is the engineering answer to water pollution. Because it was a prototype, nearly half of the funding came from government agencies, including the U.S. Public Health Service, the Economic Development Administration, the U.S. Forest Service and the State of California. Residents of South Lake Tahoe provided the rest through revenue bonds, and they provide operating money through sewer assessments.</div><div><br /></div><div>The reclamation plant, which has been visited by engineers from all 50 states and from 31 foreign countries, was completed in March of 1968. Eight months later, an ammonia stripping tower was added to removed nitrogen from the effluent. And in April, 1969, exportation began.</div><div><br /></div><div>Pumps lift the water 1700 feet to the summit of Luther Pass from where it flows by gravity into Alpine County and to the reservoir hidden in the mountains, five miles from Woodfords. </div><div><br /></div><div>Lakeside development plans, according to Hubert Bruns, chairman of the Alpine County Board of Supervisors, include an access road from Hwy. 89. And the State Bureau of Land Management will spend $100,000 to erect 35 campsites, 20 picnic sites, restrooms and a boat launching ramp.</div><div><br /></div><div>Alpine County supervisors, reluctant at first to take the effluent, now know the quality and the value of the water they are getting free. (The Federal government and the South Tahoe Public Utilities District maintain the pipeline.) They almost didn't.</div><div><br /></div><div>Export routes considered but prohibited by various agencies included one over Echo Summit to the South Fork of the American River, a route over Dagget Pass to Douglas County, Nevada, another into the Hope Valley. </div><div><br /></div><div>Location of the reservoir in Diamond Valley was finally approved in late 1965 by the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board. The reservoir with its two dams and spillway was completed in December, 1967.</div><div><br /></div><div>Solving the export problem was simple compared to the task of producing potable water from raw sewage. And the District had guaranteed water of drinkable quality at the point of discharge. </div><div><br /></div><div>Jerry Wilson, quality watchdog for the District's consulting engineers, Claire A. Hill & Associates of Redding, explains how it's done.</div><div><br /></div><div>"First you must realize that there is only one wastewater reclamation plant in the world anything like this. It's in Pretoria, South Africa. And when they get through treating the water there, they feed it back into the city water system for drinking.</div><div><br /></div><div>"The effluent comes in over there, almost 99 per cent liquid and about body temperature. Solids are ground up, and removed by sedimentation in these tanks." You don't have to look where he's pointing because you can smell it.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Then it goes into these sludge aeration tanks where diffused oxygen is pumped in for the bacteria, or bugs, that eat the sewage. The waste, solid sludge, is settled out and pumped in the incinerator where it is cooked and reduced to sterile, insoluble ash and burned off. Please note there is no steam or smoke or air pollution from the incinerator.</div><div><br /></div><div>"This is a primary and secondary sewage treatment. And this is where conventional treatment stops. All major cities have this and pump the secondary effluent directly into rivers. Seattle pumps it into Puget Sound. The Ohio, Illinois and Mississippi rivers all get this sort of effluent."</div><div><br /></div><div>At this point you notice it still smells plenty. And it's muddy colored. You don't believe even with the wildest imagination, that it will ever be fit to drink.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Over here," says our tour guide, "we add lime to remove phosphorous. And in the next tank we take out the lime floc by sedimentation. From these secondary clarifiers , the overflow is pumped to the ammonia stripper or nitrogen tower where the effluent becomes droplets and the ammonia is dissolved as a gas. Here, carbon dioxide is added to reduce the pH factor, or alkalinity.</div><div><br /></div><div>"The re-carbonated water flows to ballast ponds. These are control tanks for the timing of the whole three-day process. Then, the effluent flows to the tertiary treatment plant where it is filtered in sand, anthracite and garnet. This removes the last of the solids. </div><div><br /></div><div>"The, it is pumped through eight carbon columns containing 25 tons of charcoal each. Here, the color is removed; also remaining chemicals, detergents and dissolved organics. "Now the effluent is clear," says the guide, "clear as Tahoe water."</div><div><br /></div><div>And by this time you are almost convinced the water is good enough to drink. For somebody else to drink. But there is one more step.</div><div><br /></div><div>The final touch is simple chlorination. "To kill any coliform bacteria." he explains.</div><div><br /></div><div>The magician of wastewater reclamation then leads you to an artificial mountain spring outside the plant. Clear, inviting, bubbly, cool water cascades from the rocks. "Here, try some," he says and smiles.</div><div><br /></div><div>"You mean drink it?" says the guest, knowing that to refuse would be a gross error of etiquette. So you take a sip of the reclaimed wastewater and say "Hmmm, marvelous."</div><div><br /></div><div>Later noting few bad effects, you even begin to fee good. Daring. After all, what's good enough for rainbow trout is good enough for you.</div><div><br /></div><div>And later still, after two martinis, you suddenly remember with a shock that in the lobby of the South Tahoe Public Utilities District building, there was a bottled water tap. The label read "Diamond Springs Water Co., Reno, Nevada."</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle Jan. 1970</span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-57535864049693667542009-08-20T05:36:00.000-07:002009-08-20T06:25:07.869-07:00Last Man on the Rock<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">by Tom Emch</span></div><div><br /></div>Plaster peels off the solid walls of Alcatraz; steel gun galleries that rang to the booted step of the guards are rusting. Grass sprouts from cracks in the concrete of the exercise yard and the guard towers are unmanned.<div><br /></div><div>In the main cellblock, three tiers high, the only sound is inside your mind where you can imagine the screaming and rifle fire of the big 1946 riot that left two guards and three prisoners dead. The cellblock today is a a place of bad dreams and clouding memories.</div><div><br /></div><div>But John Hart remembers well. He's the last man on Alcatraz, the last link with the 29-year history of the prison that began in 1934 when the Federal Bureau of Prisons took over the island from the military.</div><div><br /></div><div>A square fort of a man, he has lived on Alcatraz for nearly 22 years. For 15 of those years, he was an armed guard, close enough to the prisoners to know them by name. They are gone now; the last of the inmates was herded off the island in 1963. And most of the grimness is gone, replaced by the ghostly atmosphere of a decaying institution.</div><div><br /></div><div>John Hart and his wife, Marie, remember happier times: their four children growing up on the island, playing on the rocky shore; their two daughters who were married on Alcatraz; their friends among the 65 resident families. It was a good life - outside the prison compound - for the 250 "civilian" employees, many of whom commuted daily to the mainland.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hart stays on as a security contractor for the General Services Administration, reluctant owner of the property which will unload the island as soon as The City decides, finally, on a developer.</div><div><br /></div><div>Meanwhile, the Harts live in spacious comfort on the 12-acre island. They occupy two ground floor apartments in the building that formerly housed married guards and their families. On the west side of Alcatraz, their quarters command a sweeping view of The City from the Golden Gate to the lower Embarcadero.</div><div><br /></div><div>"At night, San Francisco is a fairlyland," says Marie, "but I miss the lights on the prison and along the shore. And mostly I miss the children. This was their home."</div><div><br /></div><div>It's still home for the last couple on the island, and for two semi-retired men who help keep the curious away. Bill Doherty, 62, and Orval (Barney) Barnes, 83, help with the guard chores, and answer the phone on the dock.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here, where Hart's boat, Rocky II, is moored and where all visitors come ashore, is a watchdog. He's required by Hart's contract with the GSA.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Duke is a little unpredictable," says the former prison guard. "We have a loud speaker here, and at night we can hear Duke's bark at the apartment. If he snarls, I get into the pickup and drive over to the dock. No one gets by him." Another dog, Duffy, has lesser duties. He stays near the apartment located on the old parade grounds. Four people and two dogs. It's a lonely little community on the Rock that once held more than 250 prisoners in maximum security. "It was tight security, but not escape-proof," says Hart.</div><div><br /></div><div>He takes you out in his 20-foot twin outboard cruiser and points out the spot where, it is believed, three men entered the water in June, 1962.</div><div><br /></div><div>The three - Frank Morris, John and Clarence Anglin - disappeared. They have never been heard from since. Nor have Ted Cole and Ralph Roe who took a similar route to death in the tides or possible freedom in December, 1937. Only these five are listed as "escapees," according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in the history of the prison.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hart and his wife "escape" occasionally to Santa Rosa where they have a second home. And there are the weekly trips to the Marina for supplies.</div><div><br /></div><div>"One of the problems of living on the island," explains Marie, "is groceries. It's hard to buy for a week at a time. We have three refrigerators and try to keep them full."</div><div><br /></div><div>"If we run out of something, we can't just dash in to the store," says the lady of the island, who has written a book about her years on Alcatraz. Lou Hurley, a radio traffic reporter who daily delivers the Harts' newspaper by helicopter, has offered to fly in emergency rations, land on the old parade ground where he drops the paper. But it hasn't been necessary.</div><div><br /></div><div>Communications with the mainland are another problem, or were. Six months ago, a freighter cut the underwater telephone cable. It has only recently been repaired. Radiotelephone contact is available, but unreliable.</div><div><br /></div><div>And water (certain to be a headache for any future developer) is brought in by barge once a month - 10,000 gallons at a time. "There's enough water for us," says Marie, "but not enough for the lawns, barely enough for the flowers."</div><div><br /></div><div>Water has been a problem for visiting movie companies and television camera crews that have used Alcatraz for location filming since the prison was abandoned. </div><div><br /></div><div>The Harts have been host to all the news networks, including Britain's BBC. A Hollywood studio filmed "Point Blank" on the island; MGM rented it for $2000 a day for one scene.</div><div><br /></div><div>But, seeing the bleak five by nine foot cells and the bare tile boxes for the mentally disturbed wonder if the smoldering world of the inmates could have been captured on celluloid. The yelling and bar-banging of the isolation unit where prisoners were fed from trays pushed through a slot in the bars. The"Central Bath" where Mickey Cohen once handled the linen. The caged fury of Al Capone, Alvin Karpis, Billy Cook, Machine Gun Kelly and the Barker brothers. The special cell for Roubert Stroud. The office of Warden Olin D. Blackwell, now an unfurnished shambles.</div><div><br /></div><div>And what of the life outside the walls where the children of the guards played hide-and-seek among the old military fortifications? This story has not been told. "The children who grew up on the island have all had happy marriages," says Marie. "We don't know of any of them that have gone bad. They had a good life here."</div><div><br /></div><div>Their years on Alcatraz have meant much to the Harts. "I hope we will be able to stay on after the island is developed." Both of them want this. And both want to be there when the development is complete. Marie says: "We would like to see them put the lights back on again."</div><div><br /></div><div>"It's really such a beautiful place."</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle 1969 </span> <br /></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-64032072104901388102009-08-11T21:53:00.000-07:002009-08-11T22:45:12.174-07:00A Heavy Look at Diets<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">by Ambrose Blake (Tom Emch)</span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; font-style: italic;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">When you're overweight, like I am, you like to read about diets. It's much easier than actually going on them. A friend of mine likes to read about diets in his local pub while drinking draft Budweiser. This amuses him; so does needling people who take the veil and announce they're on a diet (with a capital D).</span></div><div><br /></div><div>It was this joker who suggested my first diet, some ten years ago. "Look," he said with a leer, "just give up all potatoes and beer."</div><div><br /></div><div>"Okay, I said. "I'll give it ten days, and if I loose ten pounds, you have to go on it for ten days."</div><div><br /></div><div>He feigned horror, but agreed.</div><div><br /></div><div>After seven days of substituting wine for beer and doing without French fries and baked potatoes with sour cream, I said "To hell with it" and started drinking beer again. Before the tenth day I started draming about little red-skinned new potatoes, boiled, and garnished with parsley and butter. End of first diet. Weight loss: zero.</div><div><br /></div><div>The second effort was the fourteen-day Nibbler's Diet. Your're allow to snack, but are forbidden full meals. I liked this idea because it didn't interfere with the drinking, and at cocktail parties there's usually plenty to nibble on, such as shrimps, chicken livers wrapped in bacon and occasionally caviar with grated egg yolk. Unfortunately, I gained weight on the Nibbler's Diet. But at least I lasted the entire fourteen days.</div><div><br /></div><div>In between diets, I kept up with my homework, read everything I could lay my hands on about dieting. I discovered there are Zen Macrobiotic diets, diet hypnosis and one-Dimensional diets.</div><div><br /></div><div>A lady I know tried the latter one and lost about twelve pounds in two weeks. The game plan is that you eat a hard-boiled egg (just one) at mealtimes, and for supper, you're allowed a boiled chicken leg. That's all. Period.</div><div><br /></div><div>After two weeks of this she opened the fridge one day, saw the rows of hard-boiled eggs, and began to cry. She tried to get me on that one but I balked, claiming I'm allergic to hard-boiled eggs.</div><div><br /></div><div>I really don't know why I don't like to diet and never have from the earliest days. I was born with a large hungry frame and an inense interest in the gustatory pleasures of life.</div><div><br /></div><div>Mother's milk, I thought, was great stuff. And I still drink a fifth of milk occasionally. Dieting was not a big thing during my formative years, the Great Depression era. No one was concerned about dieting and theere weren't a lot of fat people in the bread lines and at the soup kitchens anyway.</div><div><br /></div><div>I liked the Depression because I liked peanut butter. The owner of a Chicago peanut butter factory owed my father some money. And he paid off by the case. I ate peanut butter with a spoon then and I still do every now and then.</div><div><br /></div><div>In adolescence it never occurred to me that I might someday slip into obesity. But the handwriting was on the wall the day, at age sixteen, I discovered I truly liked beer.</div><div><br /></div><div>One thing led to another and some years later I found that I liked drinks of all kinds. I was what H. L. Mencken called "omnibibulous." And everyone knows it's difficult to remain slender when your're an omnibibliac.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, without ever trying it myself, I became obsessed with the subject of dieting. I liked particularly to read articles warning of the dangers of dieting.</div><div><br /></div><div>One doctor claimed, in the public prints, that quickie diets caused your hair to fall out by the handful, because if the roots are deprived of calories and nutrients, the hair dies.</div><div><br /></div><div>I told a lot of dieters about that one. Another doctor had written that fad diets could cause holes in the bones, or osteoporosis. Bones need minerals and if they don't get them - presto, instant holes. It was fun describing osteoporosis to people who'd announce proudly that they'd lost fifteen pounds.</div><div><br /></div><div>And when the Cigarette Diet broke into the news, I was overjoyed. All that it required was that you smoke a lot. The theory was that smoking dulls the taste buds and food tastes lousy and so you don't eat as much. And the nicotine was supposed to limit the extent that foods add to existing fat. I was on this one for six months and developed a smoker's cough so bad I had to cut down to two packs a day. I must relate, honestly, that the diet didn't work anyway. My weight loss was again zero.</div><div><br /></div><div>The next diet I tried was one invented by the writer, Jonathan Dolger. He called it the ExpenseAccount Diet. On this one you give up all junk foods, such as hot dogs, hamburgers; and all sauces and salad dressings. But in return you get to eat caviar, escargot, prime roast beef, asparagus spears and drink champagne. Dolger maintained that caviar and champagne have hell of a lot fewer calories than hot dogs and salads with thousand island dressing. He was right, of course, but I found that I couldn't afford Beluga caviar and I gave it up without any discernable effect on my waistline.</div><div><br /></div><div>Other diets tried were the High Protein Diet (all the beef and fish you can eat, but nothing else); the Low Cholesteral Diet (all the fish and vegetables you can eat, but nothing else), and the Low Sodium Diet.</div><div><br /></div><div>This last one you get from a doctor. He hands you a list of things you can eat that is half a page long, and a list of things you can't eat that is four pages long. I lasted less than a week on the Low Sodium Diet because I discovered with horror that even club soda contains salt. And how can you drink Bourbon and Soda without the soda?</div><div><br /></div><div>The whole dieting concept, I finally decided, was masochistic. People always say: "I've lost eight pounds and I feel great!" This is not only designed to make non-dieters feel lousy, it's downright fallacious.</div><div><br /></div><div>You actually don't feel better when on a diet, I believe. Most people I know invariably feel worse; they get irritable, some get headaches. (Some may even get osteoporosis.)</div><div><br /></div><div>The moment I decide to go off a diet, I want to splurge. Once I ate an enire eighteen-day diet for breakfast and got up from the table feeling wonderful.</div><div><br /></div><div>A brother-in-law believed, for a time, he could live on vitamin pills, coffee and cigarettes. He tried it and after two months with very little solid food he had a minor heart attack and passed out in a car on the San Diego Freeway. He doesn't diet anymore.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't diet much anymore either. I eat whatever my wife provides and skimp a little at lunch and drink whatever I want. My weight hasn't varied five pounds in as many years. The writer, Jimmy Breslin, who is about five feet eight and half inches tall and weighs more that 250, says he knows that drinking puts the pounds on. But he adds that he likes to drink and in the long run it doens't make much difference if you're fat or skinny in this world. The food columnist, James Beard, says much the same thing: "Who cares?" He weighs in at about 270 pounds.</div><div><br /></div><div>The only diet that has riveted my attention lately appeared in the pages of the New York Times. A Dr. Abraham Friedman wrote that "you should reach for your mate instead of your plate." He claimed that each act of sexual intercourse burns off 250 calories. </div><div><br /></div><div>Marvelous news! That means you can have two and a half martinis (at 100 calories apiece), make love and break even.</div><div><br /></div><div>It may not take any weight off, but it won't put any one. That's some kind of diet.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle</span></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-2328358728020405112009-08-04T21:09:00.000-07:002009-08-04T21:54:26.706-07:00The Case of the Missing Finger<div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiitREUuEoYtJ7vEy6AZ8UZ501urs00qMJi0J_QsFmF7RP3ID4VojuVYngZARTjd8nc-m6Ia03qfAezOqy4TxfV9LlqjAlp3fBOcDqD7fAoWIKds-HdPd6jPsviPLzFYP0LKgHCAuJkcM0/s1600-h/Snapshot+2009-08-04+20-56-33.jpg" style="text-decoration: none;"><img style="text-decoration: underline;display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 156px; height: 200px; " src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiitREUuEoYtJ7vEy6AZ8UZ501urs00qMJi0J_QsFmF7RP3ID4VojuVYngZARTjd8nc-m6Ia03qfAezOqy4TxfV9LlqjAlp3fBOcDqD7fAoWIKds-HdPd6jPsviPLzFYP0LKgHCAuJkcM0/s200/Snapshot+2009-08-04+20-56-33.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5366328034506984242" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">by Ambrose Blake (Tom Emch)</span></span><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Almost everybody has ten fingers (including thumbs). I don't know anyone with eleven, although I do know a number of people with less than ten. A former colleague had eight; two had been amputated on his left hand in a peculiar alignment. Without trying, he was constantly giving people the sign of the cuckold. Another friend has only nine, having lost one on a butcher's block struggling with a particularly tough chicken leg and a very sharp knife. And yours truly has just nine and a half fingers.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Nine and a half is really all you need if you're not a touch typist. It's even an advantage sometimes.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>First of all a missing finger is a conversation piece, and somewhat of a curiosity among the ten-fingered set. "How did you lose it?" I'm asked at parties. Immediately I have the floor and all eyes are turned on me, waiting for an unusual story. This is quite an advantage for someone who is usually ignored at gatherings.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>"Which story would you like?" is my standard rejoinder. I lost the half finger in 1935 and for years, when asked questions, I told it just the way it happened. Then one day I realized that people would believe any story I told them. So I started to improvise. The stories got better, more polished, and today I have a repertoire that is just short of astounding.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Fingers are very important to the species. H. Allen Smith, the humorist, pointed out that we would be living in quite a different world if we didn't have fingers. Toes would have to do all the tricky work, and the world would be minus a lot of outstanding violin music. Pianos would be non-existent, but there would probably still be art masterpieces. We would have developed a race of people with very talented toes.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But as it turned out we have pianos and Beethoven and Chopin and Jascha Heifetz, and when we go to the dentist, he doesn't have to use his toes to... Well, let's skip that.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Everybody knows about the value of the opposed thumb, the gripper. And the index finger. This is the one the Anglo Saxons called the "toucher". The middle finger, of course, is the longest and most useful on the freeways. If someone honks his horn and tries to get you over into the slow lane, you simply raise the middle finger of your right hand and jab it in the air. There is an Italian expression that goes along with this gesture, but I've forgotten it.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The next finger is the ring finger. Once it was believed that there was a nerve that went from the tip of this finger directly to the heard. And thus it was appropriate to signify a bond between two hearts with a ring on this finger. In some quarters, it is also known as the "stirring finger." I can't imagine why because if you try it in your scotch and water it doesn't work nearly as well as the index finger, particularly if you use ice cubes.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The last finger is called the "little finger," logically enough. Here again I'm indebted to Smith for pointing out that the little finger is the only one that fits well into a nostril or an ear. Try it.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Fingers are useful to nervous people who drum them, and to executives who tap them to get the attention of subordinates. And if you've got a mouthful of spaghetti and meat sauce and someone asks you the way to the men's room, an index finger makes a handy pointer.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Children find more uses for fingers than adults; finger painting, making mud pies, writing in the sand, scratching enemies and getting into the cookie jar, to name some.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>When they grow older they use fingers to play musical instruments (the five-hole flute, for instance) and to write home for money and to learn about the opposite sex. Entwined fingers are big with teenagers. Fingers are also good for typing (you need at least two), and for throwing an inside curve ball.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>But to get back to how I came to have only nine and a half fingers, it happened this way. Possibly.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>My parents had imposed on me the cruel and usual punishment of piano lessons. Unless you're eight years old and male and it's a beautiful spring day, you can't understand just how cruel piano lessons can be.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I had stuck with it grimly, through all the exercises and some of the beginner pieces until one day I was handed a simple Chopin etude. "Simple" is what the piano teacher called it; she had been playing Chopin for forty years.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Three lessons later I still hadn't come close to what the composer intended and I knew I never would. That's when I hit on the "final solution" to the dreaded piano lessons.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>When I tell this story, there's invariably a gasp from the audience and I usually let the story hang unfinished. It's very effective.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>"You don't mean you cut it off yourself?" they ask.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Or it's: "Oh, you couldn't!"<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I just smile because I know the story isn't true. Depending on the audience, I have another story, also untrue:<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In make company, particularly right after World War II, I would hint broadly that it was a combat wound. Men who had been really wounded didn't pay any attention to me, but the stateside GIs would listen respectfully.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I told how I was in a forward observation post in the Pacific, in a shallow foxhole when, suddenly, a large snake slithered in beside me. I made such a commotion trying to get the snake out of the hole that I attracted enemy fire. And when I finally got hold of the snake and held it up to throw it aside, I caught a bullet on the end of my index finger on my left hand.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Looking back, few believed this story, but it did get me an occasional free drink.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Actually I had lost the finger years before and the military wasn't interested that I was minus half a finger. After all, it wasn't my trigger finger, they said.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Another story about how I lost my left index finger at the second joint I can only allude to because this is a family newspaper.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>It begins on a beach near Havana in 1947 and involves a Cuban girl named Maria, who was not as virginal as her name. The next scene is in a room at the old Florida Hotel, near the waterfront. Maria and I have words, then we fight and in the ensuing altercation I end up with half a finger gone, and Maria is in tears, bandaging me up. "Don't know if she still has the finger," is the way I conclude this tale.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Almost nobody believes the story, including me, but it fires the imagination of the listener and it usually makes a hit.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Okay. Okay. Enough of the baloney. You want to hear the real story:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>It's dull but true. On my eighth birthday, I received as a present a good jackknife. Showing off this marvelous weapon to my pals, I jammed it into a tree and the clasp closed over my finger and severed it. I recall that all my good pals were scared and ran home. I was left to pick up the severed finger-end and hold it in place until I was taken to a doctor.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The doc said he couldn't save it, sewed it up and sent me home with a piece of candy. I never had a chance to thank him.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>That missing finger has gotten me hundreds of free drinks over the years; it has made me the center of attention at scores of cocktail parties; I've learned how to do tricks with the stub that amuse some people.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>And I don't miss the end of the finger one bit. I was even able to tap this story with two fingers and one thumb on the space bar.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><br /></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3680504675518435195.post-17154420961996026722009-07-25T21:58:00.000-07:002009-07-25T22:34:11.121-07:00The Works of Tom Emch<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 51, 51);">This is a blog created for my father, Tom Emch. My father was the ultimate blue collar, roll-up your sleeves, chain smoking, beer drinking, newspaperman who could punch out a story with two fingers on old manual typewriter in a hazy smoke-filled city room at the last minute. He wrote stories about life in San Francisco and California in the 1970's for the California Living Magazine in the Sunday San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle from 1969 to 1981. He had several different by-lines, each with a different personality. Ambrose Blake, Wallace Toon, Keith Randall, Randall Thomas and Tom Emch paint a unique picture of a changing time in San Francisco in the aftermath flower power. These are a collection of some of his stories that I have enjoyed. I hope he likes his own blog. He has always been my favorite writer.</span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 51, 51);"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 51, 51);">-Becky Emch Tamura</span></span></div>Becky Emch Tamurahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15582807018544963673noreply@blogger.com