David's Web Log

Don't Settle?

2011-10-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

The unfortunate passing of Steve Jobs has highlighted his accomplishments and his vision. But one bit of of his wisdom might require some qualification or at least discussion. Steve emphasized following what people love and not compromising that. Indeed, he pressed his engineers to solve insoluble problems, and they did. He didn't settle for their expert advice. There is much to be said for persistence. Since he was writing the checks he could be as persistent with his engineers as he wanted.

But then we see that applied to governance and it's not nearly so inspiring. In our nation's capitals politicians have become fixated on their visions and refuse to settle, e.g., the need to raise taxes or to cut entitlements to reduce the deficit. No one wants to settle lest they be deemed a loser or having compromised his or her beliefs. Speaker of the House John Boehner rejects the idea of "compromise" out of hand.

I hope that Steve's followers will have his wisdom to distinguish between technological innovation and getting things done.

Another Voice

2011-05-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

I recently published, via Amazon.com's print-on-demand program Create Space, my historical novel Down The River. The story grew out of my family history research when I came across the murders of two of my ancestors in 1813 in an argument over slaves. I was taking writing classes through the University of California Extension in San Francisco and started playing with scene and setting and all the other techniques one needs to grasp. I landed upon the idea of telling the story from the only eyewitness, the slave Phyllis whose title, and that of her two small children, was in question. Records of the time show their total value as $150.

The novel was pushed aside by others, a mystery that never sold, and some history projects that did. But the approach remained the same, to tell the story of David Morgan, most powerful man in the county, through the eyes of one of his African slaves. I was fortunate in that there was little recorded about the incident so that I had a largely blank canvas with which to work. Authors of historical fiction are entitled to move things around to simplify the narrative as long as they keep to the essence of the story and load up on detail. And in my case I had to convincingly sound like a freed female slave writing some fifty years after the event. It was a huge stretch for a white guy from Seattle in 2011 to sound like a black woman from Kentucky in 1867. About all we had in common was the English language and (spoiler alert) decendency from the central characters.

I benefitted from the critiques from my writers group, a real paid editor, and the detailed work of a book development class at Portland State University which picked up a draft after their publishing arm passed on it. The best part of that process was to sit in a room and listen to educated readers talk about my characters and my story as if it had real import. I arrived at the final, final draft and when I started using a Kindle opted for the ebook and publish on demand avenue.

So far I have sent out more complimentary review copies than in sales, but I am very encouraged by the feedback. Of particular value is this comment from an old colleague also pursuing the writing life in this chapter of life who is an African American living in Philadelphia: "you have the language, cadence, and reactions down well -- which could be difficult to do for someone of a different race."

Justice?

2011-05-04T10:11:00.000-07:00

The recent demise of Osama Bin Laden has caused many to declare that justice has been done. Even the president says this. Calling the killing of the terrorist justice is unfortunate because it equates this action with some sort of judicial process. I don't agree. There was no judicial process so this is not really justice. Back as far as President Bush there were cries to do justice and bring terrorists to justice.

A more sensible approach to the killing of terrorists is as an act of self defense. The United States and it's residents were attacked in a foreign military operation. The natural response should be another military operation to eliminate the threat of future attacks. Had an enemy fleet shelled Manhattan the response would be to try to send the ships and their sailors to the bottom of the sea, not as punishment, but to prevent further attacks. The same with terrorists. Terrorists threaten the safety of the nation and it's residents (lots of non-citizens died on 9/11) and should be destroyed. Self defense is the inherent right of any person or community or nation.

Calling the killing of Bin Laden or other terrorists justice is something of a perversion. Justice is due process and the exercise of law to exact punishment. The killing of Bin Laden was an act of self defense.

As Michael Corleone told his brother, "It's not personal Sonny. It's business."

Published

2011-03-26T06:53:00.000-07:00

My novel Down The River is now available through Amazon.com.

A Kindle version will also be available soon.

Buy it.

Read it.

Review it.

Tell your friends.

Here is a complete list of my other titles from Amazon.

What are you reading?

2011-02-11T11:09:00.000-08:00

About everything I can get my WiFi around. The Kindle Santa brought me has transformed my lierary life. I have purchased and downloaded a dozen or more books and have many more waiting in my wish list as soon as I get through this "stack." I have adopted the practice of having one work of fiction and one of non-fiction underway at a time. Since they are all in one device I don't need to keep track of two physical books and once done, I don't have books to store and dispose of. A collection of books is nice, but they just sit there and take up important real estate in my new downsized lifestyle. If a book doesn't please me I can archive it and it doesn't sit on a shelf nagging me.

Currently I am reading Ken Follett's A Dangerous Fortune and Ron Chernow's Washington: A Life (900 pages in hard copy). Below is my list of eBooks completed:

Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell
Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester
Dark Star: A Novel by Alan Furst
Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and the American Volunteer Group by Dan Ford
Three Stations by Martin Cruz Smith

I also have the complete works of Jack London and have treated myself to some of his short stories. London gets some credit for the origins of the short story appearing in magazines. We don't see many of this genre anymore with the demise of weeklies like The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. Kindle is offering short works that I have yet to check out. The London collection is free.

I think this eBook thing is here to stay. I don't see it replacing paper books and it very well could increase general readership. I know the Kindle has helped reintroduce me to some old favorites.

Silliness Within the Sadness

2011-01-12T09:19:00.000-08:00

The recent tragedy in Tucson didn't bring an end to the silliness that has inspired my posts recently. First the Sheriff of Pima County blamed the shootings on the degradation of political discourse. Apparently he is more politician than law enforcement officer and couldn't see the event as another deranged person bent on destruction. Predictably the media picked up the scent and went bonkers on the sheriff's idea. Never mind that there is no evidence to support that. It's all a waste of bandwith.

The tragedy is that the real problem is being ignored: the lamentable state of the law and mental health services in this country. In several of my careers I have to deal with people who are bi-polar, schizophrenic, and disordered, and the aftermath of their untreated illnesses from wasted governmental resources to children whose lives are forever scarred. Now we have murders to add to the bill. Virginia Tech all over except now we have a live defendant to sketch in a courtroom.

I hear from advocates about the rights of mental health patients and even their right to refuse treatment. Crazy people have a right to their craziness even if they end up homeless and potentially violent.

But they don't have that right.

Government and society have a responsibility to protect themselves from those who would do harm and people with demonstrable mental health issues fall in that category. Police and courts need more tools to prevent the mentally ill from harming others, harming themselves, and becoming a burden to society. The definition of a dangerous mental illness needs to be revisited along with the resources available to treat people. Alas in this era of shrinking public budgets we can only look forward to more tragedies like Tucson and then endless litigation about whether a defendant is fit to stand trial or is not-guilty by reason of insanity.

Captain - Not

2011-01-06T13:59:00.000-08:00

More silliness. Although I will grant the U.S. Navy absolute discretion in who they appoint as captains of their warships I wonder if the recent relief of Captain Owen Honors as captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise is either wise as a principle of military leadership or a proper use of taxpayer dollars.

Four years ago Honors was the Executive Officer (XO) of the Enterprise and while on deployment made a series of videos to bolster crew morale. Deployments on carriers last six months or more and become very tedious. Crew members describe the experience of a long cruise as like the movie Groundhog Day, the same thing day after day. In an environment where all members of the team have to be on their toes at all times morale is very important. So the XO, himself a Top Gun fighter pilot, undertook to poke fun at himself and the Navy. The videos were broadcast throughout the ship and, from a crew of 5,000 men and women, some were offended. That he had time to do the videos is an indication of just how much time people have on their hands aboard ship. I've seen the clips and found them within the boundaries of college and GI humor.

This all happened between three and four years ago. Honors progressed through the pretty-stiff process of qualifying as captain of one of the Navy's most important assets and was about to ship out to support the war in Afghanistan. Then clips from the videos were released and the admirals and cable channels went totally nuts. He was relieved of command, effectively the end of his Navy career. Not only that, the Enterprise has to get a new captain just as they are shipping out.

But the Navy has spent millions, maybe tens of millions, to bring this man to this point only to fire him for off-color satire he did four years ago! Since he made it to captain I assume that he is otherwise qualified for the job and not just a clown. To increase the silliness the Navy is on the hunt for any of his superiors who were aware of the videos (shades of Tailhook). To what end, prosecution of bad comedy? Wasting Navy time? Undoubtedly prejudicial to good order and discipline, a crime in the military. What if they find out this sort of thing happens on all the ships?

During the Civil War people complained to President Lincoln that General Ulysses Grant drank too much (not really true and never on the job). Lincoln replied, "I can't spare this man. He fights!" For the men and women who fight unseen and far away this American will grant them their bad jokes. Alas, the waste of good people is no joke.

PC Huckleberry Finn

2011-01-06T08:20:00.000-08:00

The news item about a publisher cleaning up Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn to eliminate references to "the N-word" is both laughable and lamentable. The work is in the public domain so there are no copyright issues or control to be exerted by the author's heirs so I suppose that the publisher is well within their rights to change the text in any way they like. They argue that this change will bring new readers to the work, as if Twain has been falling out of fashion. This is a silly nod to political correctness.

I think this move is an abomination, worse than colorizing black and white movies or putting a fig leaf on Michelangelo's David. Without launching into an analysis of the work Twain used the vernacular of the day to emphasize the discrimination against African Americans, which Twain abhorred, and Jim's humanity.

President Harry Truman (whose grandfather held slaves) used the same term in private correspondence and went on to desegregate the armed forces. Yet historians would use the former as evidence that Truman was fundamentally racist. No, Truman was just a man of his time who changed with the times.

I have written an historical novel, 104,000 words from the point of view of a slave. Omitting the N-word would make the work incomplete and dishonest. Omitting the word from Twain's work makes it incomplete and dishonest. Don't buy it.

The Lost Cause

2011-01-01T07:37:00.000-08:00

From news accounts (to be accepted with some caution) the controversy over The War Between the States - The Civil War - The War of the Rebellion - The War of Northern Aggression - is increasing in volume with the observance ("celebration" is an inappropriate term) of the sesquicentennial of the secession of states and the ensuing bloodbath. Although not a card-carrying Civil War geek, I am knowledgeable about the period 1850-1870 and am prepared to engage in a civil, rational, evidence-based discussion. Anything that you hear or read in the next four years on this topic should be viewed with the same skepticism as any contemporary news accounts so draw no conclusions until you know the facts. In the interest of full disclosure my second grandfather David Morgan had a son on each side (they survived).

A common piece you will see published is titled something like "Myths of the Civil War." These are bulleted, dumbed-down lists intended to be consumed between bites of cereal or page views. I find some of the myths laughable, but considering the (reported) level of knowledge of Americans many might believe them. So I guess that dispelling some of these assumptions is appropriate. But please don't base your study of history on bulleted lists. Who is writing and who is being quoted and why?

Once a journalist asked me the cause of The Great Depression. I replied that there are several depending on the historian. The journalist had a deadline and said, "choose two." So much for history in the newspapers.

I can hold forth on some of my own opinions about conditions and events in 1861, but will save them for online discussion groups and email exchanges. Anyone interested in The Civil War has tens of thousands of references to consult (probably more than any other subject) whether they are interested in politics, battles, or the lives of civilians and soldiers. Just the study of the study of the war - who is writing and why - is a lively sub-genre of the topic. Then there is the sub-sub-genre of which this post is part, the study of the study of the study of the Civil War.

What are you reading?

2010-12-30T05:58:00.000-08:00

I have been deficient in keeping this category of blog posts current, but something has changed that. Santa brought me a Kindle.

Now I have a list of books - no, the books themselves - to read that are as convenient to carry as, well, a Kindle. I am now reading much more than before and have even eschewed Roku, DVDs, and cable for a quiet evening on other journeys. The next page is a click. The next chapter is a click. Another book is a couple of clicks. And the experience of reading is still every bit as enjoyable, maybe more. I often need just one hand, maybe none at all, to read the Kindle. The book doesn't fall shut and - a big and - I can increase or decrease the font to compensate for low light and my willingness to use glasses.

eBooks are somewhat cheaper than their analog versions, but a current book is still going to cost ten or twelve dollars (I hope author royalties are comensurately better). The gift certificates that Santa's helpers left me help with that and I found myself on my back in bed at 2 a.m. buying books via a wireless connection. Pretty slick. I'm still investigating cheap and free books, but at the moment I have plenty to read.

I have a couple of titles open: Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester, and Tree Soldier, by Janet Oakley. (Janet is a writing colleague and has published her novel of the Civilian Conservation Corps herself via Amazon.)

I just finished Russian Detective - excuse me, Investigator - Arkady Renko's most recent adventure Three Stations by Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park, Polar Star). I'm the kind of reader who locks onto an author and tracks down everything he or she writes. Another series of books in the Kindle queue are the spy novels of Alan Furst (Spies of the Balkans, The Spies of Warsaw, The Foreign Correspondent).

I finished Three Stations and it's great, not just for the sense of place (contemporary Moscow), but the enduring protagonist who, if he isn't nearly killed, is almost always fired by venal Prosecutor Zurin. Now I have no more Arkady Renko novels to read until Smith does another. Fortunately I'm just getting started with Furst. And I have thousands and thousands more titles to check out.

Another video lynching

2010-12-23T13:06:00.000-08:00

In the aftermath of the tragic death of Oscar Grant at the hands of a Bay Area Rapid Transit policeman on New Year's 2009, Officer MarySol Domenici was suspended, then fired for her role during a chaotic situation on a train platform. She was accused of lying to investigators about her actions that night. She appealed her termination and an arbitrator held that the law firm hired by the BART Police to investigate the entire incident presented conclusions that were flawed. Only because the officer had the resources of her union and the Legal Defense Fund of the Police Officers Research Association of California was she able to retain the services of Force Sciences Institute to examine the evidence. Force Sciences experts carefully examined all the available video evidence and demonstrated over a fourteen-day hearing that she did not lie about what did not happen. (The full text of an article is below)

This is another example of a rush to judgement based on incomplete examination of video evidence by a high-priced law firm which was supposed to objectively gather evidence. Community activists demanded the firing of all present when Grant was killed when the evidence showed at least one of them had done nothing wrong (another case is still on appeal).

There are lessons here for those interested. First, just as one should not believe everything they read in the newspaper (or on cable or on the web), they should not believe everything they think they believe on video. Second, if you want something done right, use someone who knows what they are doing. It took fifteen months for the lawyers to investigate and for the BART police chief (who has since left) to decide the officer should be fired. The officer's appeal and the decision took six months. Third, wait until you have all the facts before you make a decision.

(Courtesy of Force Science News http://www.forcescience.org/)

"Scapegoat" cop wins back job with Force Science help

A northern California transit officer who was fired on charges of lying
about circumstances that preceded a nationally controversial OIS has been
ordered reinstated after an arbitration hearing in which Force Science
played a pivotal role.

Twenty-nine-year-old MarySol Domenici was among half a dozen Bay Area Rapid
Transit (BART) officers whose actions were challenged amidst a racially
fueled "media frenzy" after they responded to a brawl on a public train near
San Francisco early on New Year's Day, 2009.

One of the group, Ofcr. Johannes Mehserle, shot and killed one of the unruly
male suspects when he mistakenly drew and fired his pistol instead of his
Taser. Initially charged with murder, Mehserle was sentenced to 2 years in
state prison for involuntary manslaughter [see Force Science News
Transmission #154 for details of the role Force Science played in his case].

Domenici was accused of conspiring to "cover up" alleged excessive force by
another officer just before the shooting occurred.

After hearing a Force Science analysis of her actions and viewing enhanced
video of the chaotic scene, Arbitrator William Riker characterized the
official investigation that led to her job termination as "flawed,"
incomplete, and lacking in "critical information necessary" for proper
evaluation of what took place that fateful morning.

His order that Domenici be restored to her job "would not have been
possible" without testimony from Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of
the Force Science Institute, says the officer's attorney, Alison Berry
Wilkinson. "He provided a key component of evidence that led to the
arbitrator's decision."

Act I: Conflict on the Platform

The fight broke out about 0200 in the first car of an 8-car BART train as it
came to a stop in Oakland on the east side of San Francisco Bay. The train
was "jam-packed" with boisterous New Year's celebrants, many of whom
appeared to be under the influence of alcohol or drugs. The operator was
instructed by a dispatcher to hold the train at the Fruitvale station so
that BART officers could remove the combatants.

Ofcr. Tony Pirone was the first responder to hurry upstairs from street
level to the reverberant din of the elevated platform where the train was
waiting. Domenici, a 5-year veteran of the transit agency and a black belt
in karate, followed about 15 seconds later.

On the noisy platform, Pirone quickly detained a cluster of young males and
asked Domenici to cover them while he pursued 2 other suspected fighters who
had ducked back into the train in an apparent effort to avoid police
contact. Domenici directed the group to sit on the platform with their backs
against a wall, legs outstretched, and hands on their thighs.

Almost immediately, the platform erupted in chaos. As Pirone struggled to
remove subjects later identified as Michael Greer and Oscar Grant III from
the train, some of Domenici's detainees leapt to their feet "highly
agitated" and started toward her, yelling that the situation was "all fucked
up." She pushed them back toward the wall and ordered them to sit down and
"stay out of it."

While trying to physically control and monitor them, she stole fast glances
over her shoulder to confirm that her partner was ok. He managed to take
Greer down and cuff him and then turned his attention to Grant.

Simultaneously, one of Domenici's detainees started yelling, "Hey, blood!"
to several individuals milling nearby. Three other males then began quickly
approaching on her right flank. One held something ambiguous in his hand (a
cell phone, it turned out); another had his hands in his pockets. "These men
had angry looks on their faces, were yelling, and were calling her a
'fucking bitch,' " says Atty. Wilkinson.

Domenici turned fully in their direction, pulled her Taser, and ordered them
to step back. She focused particularly on one subject "who would step back
for a short while, then step toward her again in a threatening manner while
shouting curses," Wilkinson says.

Other BART officers were swarming onto the platform by now, including
Mehserle who headed toward Pirone and a struggling Oscar Grant, about 15
feet away and on the other side of a pillar from Domenici. As Domenici
started to raise her Taser to deploy it toward the male who was threatening
her, another officer came up behind that subject and tackled him.

Moments later, the fatal and fateful shot was fired by Johannes Mehserle,
and 22-year-old Oscar Grant III--ex-convict, current felony probationer, and
reputed gangbanger--was dead. Grant was black and unarmed, Mehserle white. A
familiar tinderbox was lit.

Roughly 5 minutes had passed since MarySol Domenici bounded up the escalator
onto the platform.

Act II: Accusations and Termination

Although Domenici had no direct involvement in Grant's shooting, she and
every other officer on the platform that morning came under intense scrutiny
in the firestorm of activist outcry ignited by Mehserle's bullet.

BART management, in what one observer characterizes as a move to "appease
people who were more interested in something other than justice," hired
Meyers Nave, a California legal firm that specializes in public agency law,
to investigate the incident for possible violations of departmental policies
and procedures.

Apart from Mehserle, who resigned quickly after the shooting and soon faced
criminal charges, the firm in its report exonerated 4 officers involved in
the fracas of any misconduct. But it leveled serious accusations against
Pirone and Domenici, based on statements of witnesses and on video from a
platform camera and recording devices collected from various civilians who
were on the train.

Among other things, Pirone was judged to have used excessive force in his
handling of Greer and Grant, thereby helping to escalate the situation to
the point that Grant was shot. Domenici, it was claimed, lied in her
original statements and in later testimony about Pirone's behavior in a
conspiratorial effort to cover up his supposed misdeeds.

The conclusions against her ranged from absurdly trivial to significant. She
was found to have been untruthful, for example, when she described the noise
level on the platform as "very loud."

More important, it was said that she was being disingenuous when she failed
to report and later denied seeing Pirone use excessive force on Greer and
Grant, including smashing a fist into Grant's face with a right hook without
reason.

Based on the Meyers Nave findings, both officers were fired. Both appealed
their terminations to arbitration. Through their union, the BART Police
Officers Assn., they were entitled to representation from the Legal Defense
Fund of PORAC, the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California.

Domenici's case was assigned to veteran police attorney Alison Berry
Wilkinson and associate counsel Jeff Martin, who are graduates of the Force
Science Institute's certification course in Force Science Analysis.
Wilkinson claimed that Domenici had been fired as "a political scapegoat"
amid a "media frenzy." Her case was arbitrated first.

Act III: Force Science Speaks

"Our training at the Force Science class was a huge part of developing the
defense case," Wilkinson told Force Science News. "It gave us tools and a
language that were vital." Two key components shaped their strategy:

1. The painstaking work of Michael Schott, a former sheriff's sergeant
who specializes as an attorneys' expert in developing forensic evidence from
video footage. He was able to uniquely synchronize images from 6 different
cameras with different shooting speeds and image quality so that what
transpired on the platform could be analyzed frame by frame from different
angles in precisely timed sequence. (Meyers Nave investigators had not done
this, Wilkinson says.)
2. Testimony and behind-the-scenes consultation with FSI's Bill
Lewinski. Drawing on scientific studies of human performance, he was able to
explain in simple but compelling terms how evidence from the synchronized
videos confirmed that Domenici was being truthful and not deceitful in her
accounts of what she saw and didn't see during the platform confrontation.

Last October, Lewinski spent a full day on the stand before Arbitrator
Riker, addressing the most critical accusations against Domenici.

For one thing, it was claimed in the Meyers Nave report that she at one
point had seen Pirone start to bring his hand up to punch Grant in the face.
But then, her accusers said, she deliberately turned away to avoid
witnessing the actual blow so that she would not have to report seeing her
partner deliver inappropriate force.

Analyzing video of that moment frame-by-frame, Lewinski was able to
determine that Domenici had already started to turn away when Pirone's hand
began to move up. At that point, his hand was open, with fingers spread, not
a closed fist. At most, Lewinski testified, Domenici would have had less
than one-third of a second to catch a glimpse of Pirone's hand in her
peripheral vision.

In that flicker of time, she could not possibly have seen the movement,
interpreted it as an impending assault, decided to conspire not to see it so
as not to have to report it, and moved to further divert her view, he
concluded. He supported his assertion with data from Force Science studies
and other research about stimulus/response times and decision-making.

What's more, Lewinski determined based on enhanced video of Pirone's action,
Pirone never did ball his hand into a fist to strike Grant anyway. His hand
remained open to grasp the suspect on the back of the neck for a takedown.
By the time of that action, Domenici's attention was focused fully in
another direction. "In effect," Lewinski says, "she was fired for not
reporting something that didn't happen and for lying when she said she
didn't see it."

Domenici also was alleged to be untruthful when she said she didn't witness
any excessive force used by Pirone in removing Michael Greer from the train.
In this regard, Lewinski explained concepts such as "selective attention"
and "inattentional blindness," which are explored in Force Science training
and have to do with how intense concentration affects perception and memory.

With only quick glances over her shoulder to confirm Pirone's well-being
during the removal process, Domenici likely was not really seeing and
registering much of anything other than a gross impression that her partner
was alright, Lewinski explained, because her compelling concentration was on
watching and controlling the rambunctious detainees she had against the
platform wall.

For most of the time Pirone was handling Greer, Domenici's back was to the
train and to the action. "She was intently focused on her own business and
the danger these defiant suspects presented to her," Lewinski insisted.

Using slides, film footage, and research results, Lewinski in effect
presented the arbitrator with a mini-seminar on human behavior principles
that related to Domenici's "rapidly unfolding, dynamic" situation. "To cut
through all the misconceptions from the racial turmoil and media outrage, it
was important to explain in simple terms what had really happened that
night," Lewinski says.

And so it went, with the defense team piece by piece countering the doubts
about her integrity that led to Domenici's firing. Lewinski described
Wilkinson as "one of the best attorneys I have ever worked with--sensitive
and insightful, with a great depth of understanding of the psychological and
physical components of human behavior. She and Jeff Martin did an awesome
job."

Act IV: The Decision

The arbitration hearing stretched across 14 days and included 2 site visits
to the Fruitvale platform. Both sides presented what Arbitrator Riker termed
"volumes of documentary evidence, a significant amount of video combined
with extensive analysis, and live testimony from numerous witnesses."

On Dec. 17, he made public his decision: "Just cause for the termination of
Officer MarySol Domenici did not exist.... The Arbitrator finds no basis for
the conclusion that Officer Domenici was untruthful in her statements and
testimony.... The proper remedy is reinstatement with full back pay and
benefits, as well as the removal of all findings inconsistent with this
Decision from her personnel record."

BART's reliance on the Meyers Nave report was "misplaced," Riker wrote,
because the report "did not contain a full vetting of the evidence...did not
ask witnesses certain key and critical questions about [Domenici's]
actions"...presented an analysis of the videos that "appears flawed" and
failed to include "critical information necessary to the evaluation of
whether Officer Domenici acted appropriately."

He itemized each of 7 specific accusations of lying against Domenici and
explained why none could stand. He declined to rule on whether Pirone had
used inappropriate force at any point because Pirone's appeal is being heard
separately.

The day Riker's decision was released was the same day MarySol Domenici
graduated from a fire academy in the Bay Area. On the chance that a decision
against her might scuttle her preferred career in policing, she had decided
to qualify as a firefighter in order to continue her service in public
safety.

She said she was "thrilled" to be vindicated by Riker's decision. She will
need to undergo a mental and physical fitness-for-duty evaluation that may
take a month or more before resuming a patrol assignment, but Wilkinson says
there is "no doubt she will happily return to duty in the BART system. She's
a tough cookie and is not going to let them defeat her."

In a prepared statement, BART officials said they still believe "we did the
right thing...to terminate [Domenici's] employment." But the agency said it
would abide by Riker's ruling because the arbitrator's decision is binding
under the union contract.

Act V: The Future

The ultimate conclusion of The Drama at Fruitvale Station is yet to play
out.

The arbitration hearing for Tony Pirone is being delayed until spring
because he is currently serving with the U.S. military in Afghanistan. The
PORAC attorney defending him is William Rapoport, another certified Force
Science Analyst.

Pirone, Domenici, and others are also defendants in a civil suit, filed by
various parties claiming injury as a result of the Fruitvale detentions and
shooting. That suit is scheduled for trial in May. Among those seeking
recompense is Oscar Grant's father, who is serving a life term for murder.
BART has already paid out $1.5 million to Grant's 5-year-old daughter.

And now for something political

2010-12-20T15:24:00.000-08:00

Today I read of a measure file in the House to enact a Constitutional amendment called the Repeal Amendment (New York Times, Kate Zernike). It would allow two thirds of the states to vote to repeal any federal law or regulation. What a dumb idea. And cowardly too.

Apparently conservatives think that this is the only way to limit the authority of the federal government which they find overly intrusive into private lives and business. Their case in point is the new health care bill and the requirement for all Americans to purchase health insurance. As if there is no other way to change the policies of the U.S. Government.

It's a dumb idea because potentially two thirds of the states, representing a minority of U.S. population, could dictate to the majority policy and legislation. That's not what the Founders intended. If the Founders had felt that the powers of the central government needed to be limited - and they did - they would have included a repeal mechanism in the first draft of the Constitution.

It's cowardly because if conservatives want to pass or repeal legislation they should elect enough members of Congress to do just that. If they have a friendly president, they can get him to sign the bill. If not, they can get a two-thirds majority like the Founders had intended.

We will see if this idea gets any traction, which I doubt.

Power For The People: A History of Seattle City Light

2010-11-21T07:58:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Mind Over Matter host Diane Horn interviewed me on KEXP Radio FM 90.3 about my history of Seattle City Light. Click here to go to the station archives and select November 20, 2010 and 7 am. Then you choose your media player.

Deficit cutting

2010-11-13T17:09:00.000-08:00

What a boring topic amid a week of news about presidential trips abroad, the GOP taking over the House, and, as always, the pundits proving that if you give people enough money they don't mind making fools of themselves. One item caught my eye and some other notice was the list of suggestions by two members of the deficit commission (not its official name) on how to trim federal spending.

The first reaction of readers and viewers is probably "how will this effect me?" and "will I get hurt?." Any time spending gets cut or taxes get raised people scramble to take positions that hurt them less. Individual citizens look at how much it will cost them in more taxes or some lost benefit. For the politicians it's all about "will this hurt me in the next election?" To be sure, the list of proposals includes things that impact nearly every American whether a government employee, a defense contractor, a Social Security recipient (current or prospective), or anyone who depends on those checks from dry cleaners to car dealers. And anyone who depends on dry cleaners to car dealers.

Watch the scramble of interest groups (nasty name for anyone taking an interest in government) as they try to avoid their share of the cuts that are really necessary if my grandson hopes to retire to someplace besides a blue tarp in a vacant lot. And when the government cuts get down to agencies watch - and marvel at - the artful arguments why they should not be cut. Everyone will have a case.

The good thing about these proposals is that they seem to hurt everyone which is what is needed.

Political Coverage

2010-10-18T11:00:00.000-07:00

I may be in a tiny minority, but I just don't accept what is being reported and analyzed about the outcome of the midterm elections. I read and hear about polls predicting a Democratic party route, but the Pew Research Center has suggested that the polls are only capturing people with hard-line telephones. The pollsters are not calling cell phone customers who have no phones at home. Doesn't that throw into question the "representative sample" upon which polls are based? Not that the predictions might not be true, but I just haven't seen any convincing evidence.

And how much of what is reported is coming from other news reports and "analysts" and not from primary investigation? The state of journalism being what it is most newswriters do all their work at the keyboard and not in the field or even on the telephone. I would hate to have my career determined by a second hand report of a telephone poll or some pretty face whose credentials are in entertainment and not journalism.

I've already voted by mail and will wait for the returns.

Publishing Update

2010-10-18T10:27:00.000-07:00

The two books I did with the late Walt Crowley several years ago are now available through University of Washington Press. Power For The People tells the story of Seattle City Light and Hope On The Hill is about Seattle Children's Hospital, the old Children's Orthopedic Hospital and Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center.

The publishing game being what it is I had not seen either work for some time and it was with great joy and some wonderment that I reread what I had done. Not bad, if I say so myself. Naturally Walt had worked his magic on the stories and others added updates, but both are still my work.

Hope On The Hill launches on October 26, 2010 at 7:00 p.m. at University Book Store. Marie McCaffrey, Executive Director of HistoryLink.org, Dr. John Neff, former Medical Director at Children's, and I will offer comments and sign books.

On the air

2010-10-02T09:24:00.000-07:00

Hot on the heels of the radio interview I appeared on KCTS Channel 9, our local PBS station. They are having a pledge drive and aired the documentary I did about Snoqualmie Falls. During the pledge breaks, as green-tee-shirted staff from Parks and Rec manned the phones, the host asked me quick questions about the story. Turn me on about history and I just keep on going. I didn't cause the show to go over too much.

KUOW Presents

2010-09-18T16:41:00.000-07:00

Today I was interviewed on KUOW FM 94.9. The segment is twelve minutes condensed from an hour conversation with producer Dave Beck. The piece is archived here.

Reflecting on 9-11

2010-09-12T13:28:00.000-07:00

A local journalist wrote recently comparing the disaster of 9-11 in 2001 to that of Custer in 1876. As a "Custer buff" I was immediately drawn to the article if only to look for holes in his historical account (not bad for a non-buff). But his point is to compare Custer's hubris and failure to see things beyond his own myopia. I think the writer complimented the Custer Battlefield as an effort to see an issue from both sides.

But the article got me to thinking about the way that Americans celebrate their defeats more than the victories. Everyone can recognize things like September 11, December 7, Custer, November 22, and the Fall of Saigon. But what about September 1, May 8, or November 11 (Armistic Day not Veterans Day)? What is it that draws us to remember the pain of the Arizona blowing up or the collapse of the Twin Towers and not the triumph of GIs and Doughboys?

I like to think that a military defeat, like any disaster, personal or national, is what teaches us the most. What do we learn when we graduate from school or land that job? Not as much as when the report card comes back with Fs or the interview goes sour. I've heard that Japanese business people call failures opportunities and I think they have something there. We don't recognize what went wrong unless it results in failure. When we fail we ask, why? We look to others to blame, then to ourselves. Should I have worked harder in that class? Should I have prepared better for the interview?

Pearl Harbor has shaped U.S. military and political policy for almost seventy years: Never be unprepared again. Custer left us with a whole list of lessons: "recon the objective" (taught in Infantry school) and beware of over confidence.

What do the 9-11 attacks teach us? Don't allow sharp objects on airplanes? I don't think so (but don't tell that to the tens of thousands now employed to collect nail clippers at airports). We learned that no one is ever totally safe from a terrorist attack, but how does that instruct the future? Be afraid? No. Spend billions on cosmetic security measures like the machine-gun inflatable boat that shadows our ferry? I don't think so.

How about, "stuff happens"? That is to say that the world is full of hazards, hurricanes, serial killers, oil wells, and fundamentalists bent on murder and suicide. None of us has ever been completely safe since our ancestors left the trees to strike out across the savannah and none of us can ever be completely safe again. Leopards and fundamentalists will always be out there, but we have to eat.

We can keep our eyes open and pay attention to the systems designed to protect us. As I have posted before we need to question whether the system is defective or just needs to work correctly. We can do our jobs, but that doesn't protect us from those who don't do their jobs. Custer didn't do his job, the Army and Navy didn't do their job in Hawaii, BP didn't do its job in the Gulf of Mexico, and the airlines didn't do their job on 9-11. But what is the lesson?

We were attacked because we were successful as a nation and a society. We have peace and prosperity where so many others have neither. The resentment was translated into some abomination of religious thought. Being successful at something will always make you someone's target whether it's a burlar after your new HD wide screen or some lunatic resentful at our shopping malls. We can never make those crazies happy and we can never kill them all. We can try to see things from their point of view, but they will still keep coming. We can keep working to make things better for everyone.

Like a small group of Homo Erectus which has just lost a member to some prowling cat, we keep heading toward the horizon. Stuff happens.

Flogging My Wares

2010-08-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had a book signing, probably one of the fantasies of those seeking to be published. The wannabe author imagines being seated at a table in an upscale bookstore surrounded by fresh copies of The Great Work. It is just before 10 a.m. and faces of anxious customers peer through the windows hoping for a glimpse of their hero. At 10 the doors open and they flood in to grab the precious copies. The book seller is prepared with burly salespeople, ID cards around their necks, earpieces connected to radios. The salespeople shepherd the faithful into orderly lines and they queue up to the table. The author greets each reader with a smile.

The readers offer compliments like, "I couldn't put it down," and ask questions like, "where did you get that character?" The author replies with a standard set of platitudes, "Thank you very much," "It just came to me," and "I'm glad you liked it. How would you like it signed?"

The books fly off the table and the displays. Clerks hurriedly unpack more boxes to fill the demand before the crowd gets rowdy. Fortunately the retailer has seen the brilliance of the book and has opted for most of the run just to be on the safe side.

As in the rest of life, reality is different. I stood next to the table and greeted visitors, about one every two minutes, "Hi, we're featuring my history book today," or "Hello, are you interested in history?" Most smiled and continued on. Some simply ignored me. No one stopped. Almost no one. I managed to sell three books, both copies of the first one and one of the new one. The last copy sold a minute after I was supposed to go off duty. My share of the sales paid for half my parking.

I did get to say, "How do you want it signed?"

Historic Photos of Seattle in the 50s, 60s, and 70s

2010-08-02T10:25:00.000-07:00

My latest book with Turner Publishing is now out, Historic Photos of Seattle in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I had posted the availability on this blog a few days ago then discovered that the copy I took for the weekend had blank pages. Gak! I took down the posts on Facebook, etc. When I got home I discovered it was just an anomaly and all the rest of the books are fine. You can order from Turner or contact me.

Video Lynchings

2010-07-22T11:56:00.000-07:00

The recent kerfuffle over the dismissal of a civil servant who was framed by a doctored video underscores something I've believed for a long time: you can't always trust the camera lens for the whole picture. In this last case someone boogered with the tape intending to embarrass the NAACP and ended up embarrassing the Obama White House. Here in Seattle we are in the middle of a couple of controversies over video taped police actions.

Ever since the Rodney King thing salacious video has been the caffeine of the 24/7 news cycle. It's even better than the aftermath of a car bombing. Get something on the air, don't worry about accuracy. The stylish transcribers who call themselves journalists today do little in the way of vetting of their stories and sources so what the viewer gets is often raw data, incomprehensible and misleading. In the 19th Century, journalists punched up their stories with information they thought made reading more interesting. Sometimes they made things up. This settled down to a more rational approach later in the 20th Century where good reporters checked sources, dug further, and committed their reputations to the story. In the 21st Century all that matters is speed of delivery.

Back to video. Consider first of all that any camera captures, at best, what you see can see with one eye closed. There is little in the way of scope to the scene and no sense of depth perception. Remember that famous shot of the raid that removed Elian Gonzalez from the home in Miami? What we saw at first was a SWAT team member pointing his rifle at a terrified Elian. A closer look shows that the rifle was aimed wide to the side. Elian was justifiably frightened (I blame his caretakers and the anti-Castro lobby for that) but the officer wasn't threatening to kill them. He had just entered a premises where people pledged to resist with force and then a room where persons unknown were hiding in a closet. He was doing as trained, enter a strange room as if it was hostile. Elian was carried from the home by a female officer and whisked away while activists happily waved the photo. (Some credit this photo with Al Gore's loss of Florida in 2000.)

The camera, still or video, often misrepresents the true relationship between the subjects. People many feet apart can appear next to each other. Artful cropping can alter context. Journalism and history are full of these false perceptions.Time magazine even has a top ten list. Given retail editing programs on desktop computers and any patient user can manufacture an image or a video clip at will. Upload the new product to the Web and you have an instant hit. But you don't have the facts. Magazine publishers routinely graft heads to pretty bodies for the covers. Does Oprah really look that good?

Second, consider the technical quality of the average home video camera degraded by low light conditions and wielded at a moment's notice. We often just don't get a good picture let alone something to support a rational decision. I have been careful not to watch the recorded episodes of the Seattle police incidents (I saw one just once, quite unintentionally). I prefer to wait for the complete investigations with all the facts and all the circumstances.

The next time damning evidence is presented on television or the web stop and question it. Question everything.

Guns

2010-06-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

Monday, the Supreme Court reinforced its position that gun ownership is an individual right as set out in the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Guns, gun ownership, gun violence, and firearms legislation is one of the great hot-button topics of our society along with abortion and any other partisan issue. I think this decision, which mirrored a decision from two years ago, will not have a serious impact on public safety except for a likely increase in accidental discharges in the hands of the careless as they embrace their newly confirmed rights.

I’ve been around guns all my life. Dad was a hunter and a strict gun-safety nut. Before he was nineteen he was involved in two or three hunting accidents and never cared to see any more. The guns at our house were locked up with the key hung on a hook up out of the way of little hands. I was taught at an early age how to safely handle firearms and to respect their power. I took this ethic to my brief military experience, then into a thirty-year career in law enforcement. I was trained as a firearms instructor, a range master, and as an armorer and trainer for the Glock pistol. As a retired law enforcement officer I am entitled to carry a concealed weapon in any jurisdiction in the nation. But I endured the weight of the weapon, its obligations, and the risk of having it turned against me long enough to have lost any desire to exercise my rights through gun ownership. No guns, no gun accidents.

What is to be made of this new decision? Not much. Gun sales might increase, but the issues of what regulation is allowed on gun ownership will still rage on here in the blogosphere, on the tube, in the Congress, and in courts. Can an illegal alien own a gun in his home? Can a regular citizen carry a gun in his camper to a state park? Can someone carry a gun openly in a holster in a grocery store? The Supreme Court left open these questions. The citizen remains confused. The gun lobby and the anti-gun lobby are assured of years of revenue-rich litigation to sort it all out. And legislators are not off the hook when it comes to gun policies.

I will relate a humorous episode as a Cub Scout leader. Starting in the mid 80s, we took eight, nine, and ten year old boys to summer camp. It was an experiment. They didn’t used to go to summer camp until they were Boy Scouts. The Scouts invited moms up too so they could keep track of their precious babes. One single mom was quite vocal in her disapproval of the trappings of Scouting, uniforms, badges, saluting the flag, mustering before dinner, and telling stories around a campfire.

One of the activities was the rifle range where the Boy Scouts shot .22 rifles as they have done since about 1909. The Cubs shot BB guns. Every shooter wore goggles to protect against ricochets. This mom just couldn’t understand why the boys needed to know how to shoot. She didn’t own any guns and her son would never own a gun. I tried to explain to her the importance of the boys knowing gun safety. Her son might never own a gun, but her neighbor might and her son might want to know how to behave if that gun came out. I left her to mutter her unhappiness. Three days later I chanced by the range. She was wearing safety glasses and just getting out of the prone position and readying her BB gun for her next course of fire. I doubt that she ever shot a BB gun again, but I know her son, now probably with a son of his own, will know how to be safe around a firearm.

Drill Ban

2010-06-10T07:02:00.000-07:00

I get irritated with the clamor to ban offshore oil drilling because of the current disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. I wish people would take a breath. The Deepwater Horizon accident is like a horrible traffic pileup on the freeway caused by someone driving drunk and over the speed limit. And then we discover that the highway patrol was off eating donuts. Do we close the freeways? No.

Oil platforms have blowout preventers, immense, complicated safety valves that, well, prevent blowouts. The operators are supposed to conduct regular tests of the BOPs, but this involves suspending drilling or production which costs money. Anyone inclined to take a shortcut will falsify the tests and get back on schedule. I was peripherally involved in a BOP falsification case in the 1980s. The oil company and its contractor cooked the books to maintain the drilling schedule. Already we are hearing accounts that on the Deepwater Horizon they knew the BOP was about to fail, but the crews were under great pressure to get the well in. Only a professional and rational investigation will reveal the facts.

There are systems in place that would have prevented the Gulf tragedy, but they weren't used. Indeed, they may have been willfully ignored. Just like the drunk driver going too fast. Will more regulations for offshore drilling solve this problem? Not if the operators ignore them too. Let the operators obey the rules and have a solid regulatory structure in place.

New Books

2010-05-28T09:21:00.000-07:00

I received good news this week. University of Washington Press is listing two books of mine in their online catalogue. The first is Power for the People, the centennial history of Seattle City Light. I worked on this for Walt Crowley and History Ink more than five years ago, but publication was delayed by Walt's illness and death.

It's a fascinating story, if I say so myself.The utility started in an era of go-go capitalism where corporations and trusts had their way with U.S. consumers. There was little, except Teddy Roosevelt, to block their sharp and even rapacious business practices. The cost for electricity from the one company selling power in Seattle at the turn of the 20th Century was something like 20 cents a kilowatt hour. That compares to more than $4 in today's values. As soon as competition in the form of City Light and the Snoqualmie Falls Power Company came on the scene the prices began to drop. And they continued to drop until 1970.

A Seattle newspaper columnist called City Light the closest thing the city has to a "secular religion." The utility survived political manipulation, fierce propaganda campaigns, the gold rush for hydroelectric sites, and engineering difficulties. Central to the success of the idea of public power was James Delmage "JD" Ross, a self-trained electrical engineer who envisioned Seattle growing and prospering with the benefit of cheap, plentiful electricity. You have to read the book to see how things turn out.

The other book is Hope on the Hill:The First Century of Seattle Children's Hospital (formerly Children's Orthopedic Hospital, Children's Medical Center, etc.) which I researched and co-authored with Walt. The book was due out in 2007 in time for their centennial, but was delayed due to finalization of the hospital's expansion plans.

This is another story of visionaries, in this case women who wanted to care for children disabled by disease and birth defects. Anna Clise and Harriet Stimson gathered like-minded wives of prominent businessmen to provide the long-term care needed to correct club feet, tuberculosis of the bone, and osteomyelitis, but at little or no cost to families. They recruited physicians to donate their services and raised money. They organized neighborhood guilds as networks to provide everything from sewn bandages to fresh and home-canned foods. The annual Penny Drive became a Seattle and Pacific Northwest institution.

What was amazing to me was that the women retained control of this remarkable enterprise when other successful hospitals were taken over by the physicians. The Board of Trustees remained entirely female until about 2003. Dorothy Stimson Bullitt, founder of King Broadcasting and daughter of founder Harriet Stimson, served on the board for many years. In the 1960s, when Seattle corporations scrambled to add women to their boards of directors, they found a great pool of talent with corporate experience at Children's. Bill Gates's mother, Mary, was a long-time and highly-respected trustee who helped spin off the foundation that now supports uncompensated care and research.

While I was working on the book, I kept encountering people who had history with Children's. The washing machine repairman spent nine months there. The clerk at the County Courthouse had his tonsils out there. It seemed like most of the city had some connection with "the Orthopedic."

Again, buy the book to see how it turns out.

What are you going to wear?

2010-05-25T06:26:00.000-07:00

Steve Sadis, the producer and my co-writer for The Power of Snoqualmie Falls informs me that the video has been nominated for an Emmy. The awards are June 5, 2010 at the Snoqualmie Casino.

6/7/2010
Alas, the Academy found Morocco to be more compelling than Snoqualmie Falls. But being nominated isn't so bad. Like they say on the north side of Chicago, wait til next year.

Spill

2010-05-24T07:57:00.000-07:00

It's time to join the cacophony over the Gulf oil spill. I worked for the EPA as a criminal investigator for sixteen years, thirteen of them covering the West. One five-year investigation involved a oil platform off the California coast so I became familiar with the culture of oil companies, the culture of regulators, the regulations, and the law. Don't forget the politics.

One thing that seems to be missing in the frenzy around the Gulf spill is an investigation into possible criminal violations by individuals (that is human beings, people) whose decisions contributed first to the deaths of eleven people then to the biggest environmental catastrophe since the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. After that event, criminal investigators from every agency imaginable descended upon the tiny port of Valdez. The Coast Guard investigated. The Alaska State Troopers investigated. The FBI investigated. The EPA investigated. Investigators learned that if you wanted to be a player in the case, you had to come up with your own evidence; a statement, a study, some forensic facts, something to give you a seat at the table.

If you will recall, the only criminal violations developed was negligence on the part of Exxon the company (for which they paid a fine, chump change for them) and misdemeanor negligence against the master (for which he paid a fine and served community service). The third mate in charge of the ship had been granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his cooperation. In a criminal investigation a person is not required to give a statement that might incriminate himself. The civil case is still going on after twenty-one years and scores of lawyers have retired on the fees they have earned.

Flash forward to 2010 and the Louisiana coast. With a new law in place the company faces a $1,000 penalty per barrel of oil discharged. With that much money at stake the company can afford a dream team of lawyers to keep things from moving forward.

Prosecuting companies is relatively easy since corporations have no right against self incrimination. The government can demand production of documents and emails and interview all the employees to see what they knew. All the evidence can be used against the corporation. But prosecuting the individuals responsible for the disaster is another matter. The negligent discharge of the oil is a crime, but that is a misdemeanor. Willful avoidance of conditions that lead to a discharge can be a felony with real prison time a possibility.

Just like the mob, the corporation instructs employees to clam up until they can get lawyered up (at company expense). Nobody talks, everybody walks. The lawyers can tell the government the worker won't talk without immunity. To get the information the government must often give the guilty parties a pass to get to the truth.

This process takes months and often years. Given the political magnitude of the disaster watch to see how the case - if any - gets fast tracked, maybe only a couple of years. The corporation has time on its hands and legislators and the electorate have a short memory. If five years passes without charges, the statute of limitations runs and prosecution become impossible.

Another tactic is hyper-cooperation. BP had a pipeline fail in Alaska. The company produced all the requested documents, millions of pages scanned to a server someplace. EPA had one or two people to read them all online. BP then offered the government cash to settle that case and one involving fifteen fatalities in Texas and the government took the money and went home. No individuals were prosecuted.

From all that BP proved again that it's all about the money.

5/29/10
Here is a LA Times article about this topic.

For Memorial Day

2010-05-23T06:00:00.000-07:00

[this is republished from a year ago]

Bob Snyder was my best friend in high school. We met as members of the McClellan Cadet Squadron, Civil Air Patrol in Sacramento. We both dreamed of military careers and spoke almost every evening on the phone about CAP and military history. We both became cadet lieutenants. (that's Bob in his CAP uniform).

Bob was raised by his grandparents in West Sacramento because his parents were out of the picture for some reason I will never understand. He attended James Marshal High School and played football. Summers, he got up before dawn to show up at the hiring lot in Sacramento to board a bus and pick local crops for rotten wages. H could not afford to attend the annual CAP encampments that I enjoyed so much.

During the school year, when he wasn't at football practice, he volunteered afternoons at the local Air Force recruiting station stuffing envelopes. Bob's grandparents lived on Social Security so on the money he saved picking produce, Bob went to Delta Community College there in Sacramento in 1966. He studied a new field, computers.He planned to go to San Jose State College and late in our freshman year he went down there for registration. He stumbled into a antiwar protest. This annoyed him so much he went right to a recruiting office and signed up for the Army Airborne. Bob attended basic training and advanced infantry training at Fort Lewis in 1967 and I visited with him there (I was attending college in Seattle safe from the draft). He went on to Noncommissioned Officers Candidate School. Upon graduation he was promoted to Sergeant E-5 - a "Shake and Bake".

Bob arrived in Viet Nam in November 1968. The Army promised him that as a volunteer he would be in the airborne unit of his choice. The Army instead sent him to the 2nd Battalion, 60th Infantry, 9th Infantry Division, a "straight leg" unit, in the Mekong Delta. Before Bob left he sent me a gift, a sweatshirt with an Ed Roth characture of an infantryman shooting and running through the mud. I still have it.

Bob arrived in country in November and was assigned to 2nd Platoon, A Company, 2/60th. His platoon sergeant was Richard W. Carter. The battalion allowed men to become acclimated before going on operations, but Bob volunteered early. His last letter to me is dated November 26, 1968.

Greetings from the front. Well old buddy I am what you call a combat veteran now. I learned what it's like to be a deer during hunting season. Our AO is the Delta, all rice paddies and mud. You cross the patty and move into the wood line, that woodline is murder. We had six KIA yesterday. The point man was 15 feet from the bunker when the guks opened up. Doc was put in for the CMH for his actions. He was one of the six. The guys feel real bad about it.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. We're going out on Bushmaster. War isn't very pretty besides it messes up my sleep. Charlie gets you up all hours of the night with his mortars. Hey Dave, gotta clean my shootin' iron. Say hi to everyone for me.

Bob

P.S.VIETNAM IS HOT SMELLY

THE WATERS BAD

AND THE PEOPLE AREN'T FRIENDLY.

BUT THE GIRLS ARE GOOD LOOKING. WOW.

REMEMBER INFANTRY MOTTO

LUTE - RAPE - PLUNDER

NOT NECESSARILY IN THAT ORDER.

AIRBORNE

On December 10, 1968, about two weeks after this letter, Bob and his platoon took on a patrol in the delta. The regular point man, who was very experienced, didn't want to enter a particular area known to have booby traps. Bob and PFC Gary Stephen Hodges took the point. Hodges tripped a 155mm artillery round rigged as a booby trap. The explosion killed them both. Bob was twenty years old.

Bob is buried at the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, Califonia. His grandparents, the Careys died in the 1970s and were buried in the same plot since Emmett Carey was a veteran of World War I. While I lived in San Francisco I decorated Bob's grave on Memorial Day.

I never went into the service. About ten years ago I discovered his battalion's web site and I posted a query about Bob. After a year or so I got a response and ended up telephoning a vet living in Missouri. He gave me the story about when Bob was killed. I posted a little bio on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund website.

The fortieth anniversary of Bob's death passed last month unnoticed by me until a few weeks ago. The oversight inspired me to make this entry which just might endure in cyberspace as the story of one soldier.

2/24/09
HBO has a film out about heros coming home and the trailer was enough to move me to include the link here.

May 4

2010-05-03T17:34:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe that it’s been forty years since the killings at Kent State. In Kent, Ohio they call the event May 4th like December 7th or 9/11. Everyone knows right where they were when they heard and I remember too.

I’m amazed that I lived through such a time. In March, hundreds of city and county cops occupied the campus when the acting University president hit the panic button over demonstrations about playing sports with the wrong school. In April, the Nixon Administration indicted radicals – called the Seattle Seven – for leading protests. The musical Hair opened at the Moore Theater. On May 1, a young man set a series of fires in one of the buildings. I helped put out some of the little fires, too excited to even speak clearly to my fellow officers.

I heard about Kent State on May 4, 1970 after a morning of writing parking tickets. Despite the increased tensions and scheduled rallies, the process of parking enforcement had to continue. I kind of liked that duty. I was outside walking around, sometimes talking to people, and I enjoyed seeing how many tickets for no permit and for parking outside a designated area I could write. That’s when I learned how to block print. We were already on high alert and putting in overtime because of the expansion of the war into Cambodia. (for Baby Boomers “the war” is Vietnam).

At break time, I got a ride to the station and the patrolman gave me the news. My first reaction was that it had to happen sometime. Seattle had been hit particularly hard by anti-war protests during those years. We were 19th in population and 2nd in bombings. The UW had more than its share. Two people were arrested setting a firebomb at an ROTC building. Another firebomb practically destroyed another ROTC building. A big bomb trashed the Administration Building and the library. Someone placed two pipe bombs under campus police vehicles set to go off five minutes apart. The first would pull the officers in; the second would take them out. The lieutenant on duty was wise enough to wait to respond. Then there was all the petty vandalism. Every night someone tagged a building or glued locks shut in some demented rationale that it would somehow bring peace. What a time it was.

So we knew what was coming when the reports of the killings in Ohio came out. The students would crank up the volume of the protests disrupting classes, damaging property, and even causing injuries. The campus police department had only recently expanded to meet this new challenge and we were seriously short of training and decent leadership. Everyone knew that another Kent State could easily happen (and it did in Mississippi). The response was to put everyone on twelve-hour shifts. We crowded into patrol cars three at a time to be able to deposit enough officers at the scene of a disturbance to calm things down. Such was the thinking of the time.

But the disturbing protesters were either too many or too fast for us and all we did was create our own traffic congestion as we circled the campus slouched down and exhausted. That was during the time between organized rallies. When people gathered to give speeches or to take action, that was called an Unusual Occurrence or UO. It was a month of UOs. I compiled a partial list here.

The University and City strategy was to let the people march until they became intolerable somehow. Intolerable was things like blocking the freeway, trashing businesses, and trying to shut down the University. When that happened the authorities and the police pushed back, not nearly hard enough for some, too hard for others. In the field of public safety you never make everyone happy.

For me the fallout from the killings peaked the night of May 7. General rioting drifted off campus into the University District where people no one recognized broke windows and threw rocks. Hundreds of city and county cops responded in buses. A few dozen Seattle PD plainclothesmen, on official orders, started roaming the neighborhood clubbing anyone.

I can still see the body of a man on the grass. A young woman comforted him and shrieked that those were the guys who did it. I ran, armed with a long riot baton, at the man with the night stick. Only because he dropped the club and showed me a badge did I not cold cock him right there. I saw it. My fellow campus cops and I stopped it. The response from the Seattle chief was that individuals “at least overreacted.” My ass.

But no one was killed. Probably the most serious injury during those years was a plainclothesman clubbed by a campus cop. And he turned out not even to be one of the goons.

There are men my age with much more dramatic memories, but we have the memories we have. Those are my memories that come up when Kent State – May Fourth – is mentioned.

The Chief

2010-04-01T11:28:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, Mike Shanahan died. He was my chief of police and assistant chief for two years in the early 70s. I moved on to be a federal agent and Mike stayed on to head the University Police Department for twenty-five years. Because I still had many friends in the department I stayed in touch with the gossip and cops love to gossip, particularly about the chief.

Mike came to the campus cops in May 1970 straight from the U.S. Army. Our old chief noticed him when he covered the University of Washington as a major from Military Intelligence. The first pick for assistant chief, a retired Seattle Police lieutenant, bailed on the job when he saw all the unrest we were facing. Mike stepped into law enforcement at a great time. He was not quite thirty with blond hair and a boyish smile not to mention a Stanford education. He was a positive addition to the talent pool even if we didn't recognize it. His first day on the job was when Nixon ordered troops into Cambodia. Three days later, National Guardsmen in Ohio gunned down four students. Things really came apart with demonstrations, strikes, and attempts to close the University.

Back up a little bit. In 1968, when the first sit-in on campus shook up the University fathers there was a political division between local and state elected officials. The city and county pols said it was a state problem and the campus police will just have to deal with it. The campus police were called the Safety Division which embraced parking lots, occupational safety, fire safety, and public safety. Law enforcement and police were words to be avoided. The department consisted of about eighteen men, some retired military, and not a few grandfathers. Hardly the highly-trained professionals the University needed. So the old chief started hiring people, students like me who sold parking passes or shook doors, and names offered by the personnel office - men looking for jobs like truck driver and janitor. By the time Mike showed up as the old chief's ramrod we had grown from eighteen to more than fifty or sixty. Half of us had no formal training. No mount of training would make some of them peace officers. Some of the original eighteen said no thanks and quit. Not a lot to work with.

This is important for two reasons. The first is that the level of professional practice in the department was not high. Second, the level of maturity to deal with Mike's take-charge approach was not high either. He pissed a lot of people off including me, mostly because he was the old chief's hatchet man. His radio call sign was Charlie Five. The oafs among us liked to hold up five fingers then turn it into a thumbs down.But Mike knew he had to lead from the front and he did.

Cut back to May 1970. The calls for a student strike resulted in some half-ass attempts by demonstrators to block the entrances to campus (as if this would somehow bring the troops home). It got serious enough that the University President Charles Odegaard ordered the old chief to clear the gates. This resulted in rock throwing and general rioting on and off campus similar to baloney the summer before. This sucked in hundreds of Seattle PD officers and King County deputies in riot gear to the U District.

Seattle PD responded with a practice they had employed in the Central Area since 1968. They fielded plain-clothes officers to wander around and just beat the crap out of anyone. The idea was to spread fear of vigilantes and random violence and send everyone home. This apparently had met with some success in African American neighborhoods, but it turned bad on campus. To make a long story short (read more here and here) campus cops confronted plain clothes officers. One of the SPD guys ended up on the ground with a shattered face and jaw.

The old chief put Mike on the task of an internal investigation. He called every one of us into his office individually where he assured each of us of eternal regret should we ever discuss the matter. He then extracted statements from all of us to document "The Incident on Hippie Hill". Oh, in the midst of all that, the University moved the whole department, lock, stock, and locker room off campus to an old saw mill on Portage Bay. And we went on twelve-hour shifts, no days off. It didn't take long for nerves to wear thin. I doubled my paycheck that month with the overtime.

A year later, the old chief died of a heart attack caused by the accumulation of stress. His name is on the law enforcement memorial in Olympia. Mike took over as acting chief until the University fathers felt comfortable enough to confirm him as chief. He did things that pissed off more people, but made me like him more.

For example, each officer was surprised with a written test on the traffic code, no chance to study. Those failing were prohibited from writing tickets until they studied up and passed. I was the only one to pass the first time around. (Maybe there was one other, but he was fired soon after.) The other cops bellyached, but they studied up and passed the test.

There was the long-standing issue of guns. The old chief had some odd ideas and insisted that officers carry lightweight, snub-nosed revolvers so as not to offend. "We're not out there to fight the people," he often said. What with officers being assassinated and bombs going off, this policy annoyed us all. Almost as soon as Mike was confirmed as chief, he signed off on a purchase order for new, proper police revolvers, but he didn't tell anyone.The first I knew was when the box arrived and I was handed a shiny, proper police weapon. There were other reforms.

The old chief's response to discovering the entire graveyard shift, save one, playing Hearts in the coffee room was to have them write essays. Mike continued to insist on more from the officers and he handed out letters of reprimand and days off where they were needed.

The day of the old chief's memorial service there was a rock concert at the pavilion on Montlake Boulevard. The University had allowed a series of these events and was immediately sorry. Thousands of young people, not entirely sober, showed up to trash the Pavilion. Hundreds more showed up without tickets and to force their way into the place. Mike's response for the next concert was a full-court press by every man jack of us, some seventy-two.

At the Pavilion we ran the ticketless long-hairs away from the front doors. They took up a position on the old railroad line that would someday become the Burke Gilman Trail. At that time it was still paved in ballast, rocks perfect for throwing. Add to that the elevation of the roadbed and even the most amateur rock thrower could lob missles onto the front porch of the "Pav". That left us pinned down behind pillars as rocks skipped in breaking windows like sniper fire. We crouched there clutching our riot batons like rifles or spears waiting for someone to take charge.

At that point Mike did something I think we all dream of. He stepped back from one of the pillars which provided us cover and said, "We're going to take that hill. Is everyone ready? Let's go."

We rushed out across Montlake Boulevard and into the traffic, legionnaires against the barbarians. One cop waved a motorist to a stop. Rocks rained down on the car shattering the windows. The officer then signalled the driver to proceed. Up the embankment we ran and, naturally, the rock throwers disappeared. So we fell back to the Pavilion. The rock throwers returned and we had to retake the hill, but that time we stayed.
The night deteriorated into groups of roving youths setting trash cans on fire and trying to sneak into the concert. It was quite a night.

After I became a fed, I had infrequent contact with The Chief. Years later, after we had both retired, I met him at a reception. He commented how, way back when, we had held things together on campus. It could have gone very bad like in Ohio or Mississippi, but we kept the lid on. No history is good history I suppose.

New Contract

2010-03-25T12:18:00.000-07:00

The folks at Turner Publishing Co. in Nashville have a new project for me, Historic Photos of Seattle in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. It's the same format at the book I did a year ago, Historic Photos of Puget Sound which "did quite well" according to Turner. As with the first book, Turner started with readily available digitized images of the era and asked for captions, chapter introductions, etc. Having been through the process before it was easy to get my arms around what was needed. Then the next day the people publishing my history of Seattle City Light notified me that they are going forward with the book and please review the manuscript within a week.

All this came down when I was in the process of selling the house, finding another place, and caring for my grandson one day a week (three days next week). I had a one-month turnaround to do it all. Preparing this four-bedroom, full basement home was far more work than in any other deal, but more on that later. I had to hump it to meet the deadline.

The decades selected for the coffee-table book are interesting ones and they bridge important eras in Seattle. I have already written about many of the events depicted so it was a small task to retrieve my research and pluck out the relevant facts. Also, I was here for half that time and had personal knowledge of what was going on. They selected many shots of the University of Washington and the U-District and I was able to offer some personal perspective.

These books are not intended as a comprehensive narrative rather as a collection of images with explanatory text each of which has a story. Some of the stories are big, such as the 1962 World's Fair. But many are small like air raid drills, traffic, and a series of businesses. That's the way history is. How many times do we say, "I'll never forget seeing..."

Based on the last book this one will be out in August or September, in time to compete with my other titles.

Smart Move

2010-02-02T12:07:00.000-08:00

Today there appeared a news item about Seattle Police and a man who was the subject of a felony arrest warrant. The police followed the man as he ran into a house occupied by his "elderly father" and a "five-year-old niece."

Once upon a time, the standard response was to get out the shotguns, strap on the flak vests, assault the house, kick in the door - announcing authority and purpose, of course - roar in and catch the bad guy. With luck, no one gets shot. With bad luck someone gets shot. If the luck is very bad the shooting victim is a cop or an innocent bystander, the price of discharging an order of the court. Bystanders receive a memorable experience (psychologists call this trauma). I used to be the guy with the flak vest and the shotgun.

These days, police procedure is to surround the house to prevent escape requiring a pretty significant response on the part of the police; lots of people who aren't policing the rest of the city. Then someone telephones into the house to get the man to come out. Most of the time this is sufficient to bring the person into custody. Most of the time.

In this case the officers telephoned into the house, but the man did not reply. When this peaceful approach fails the police are justified in going back to the old days with the flak vests and shotguns (but without me). An authority of no less importance than a judge has ordered the police to bring the man to court. There is no "if convenient" or "only if he answers the phone" in the warrant. Do it. Failure to obey a court order would be contempt. Cops hate being charged with contempt. It's bad for morale.

What to do? Warrant in hand, suspect inside, but unwilling to cooperate, officers in place, shotguns and flak vests ready: Let the balloon go up (Pentagon term).

Last night, Seattle Police, certainly a sergeant and probably a lieutenant, elected to find the guy another day. The warrant is described in the news article as for a narcotics offense, a felony to be sure, but hardly a situation where waiting puts the community at risk. He probably neglected to show up for court. Drug traffickers are notoriously bad about appointments.The cops returned to the streets and a five-year-old girl will never know the scars of trauma. I think the cops did the right thing.

Alas, other members of our community do not agree. Anonymous visitors to the news web site left these comments:

Sounds like the inmates are running the asylum!

and

Is this the new [Mayor] McGinn law enforcement procedure?
Don't arrest felons with outstanding warrants if they run into a house and refuse to answer the door?
Amazing.

Fools.

History on Television

2010-01-31T12:13:00.000-08:00

I will rant a bit on history as it appears on cable. I say cable since the broadcast stations don't feature much in the way of documentary material except PBS. Now that I have been writing history somewhat professionally for about ten years I think I'm in a position to comment on this genre. There is some good, lots of mediocre and some poor content. The viewer has to remember that programs are generated by producers who seek to generate a profit from selling something, anything, to the cable companies. I have never heard of a program that did not get sold.

The lead in cable history, as you can guess, is held by The History Channel which has branched off into all kinds of documentaries like The Axe Men and Modern Marvels. When THC first aired it was the World War II channel. The History Channel is now part of the same company that does A&E, Biography, and other History Channels. As viewership grew more content became available.

The first thing to remember about anything presented on television is that film and video are visual media. If you don't have a picture, you have to come up with one. That's one reason World War II was a natural starting point for televised history even back as far as The Twentieth Century and Victory At Sea in the 1950s. Ken Burns took the business to a new level with The Civil War in the 1990s. He developed a way to make still images move and brought to life that sad and critical moment in American life.

There are endless miles of film footage in official archives all over the world. Most of it was generated by government-paid soldiers and sailors and lie in the public domain. No royaly fees need be paid, an important feature of any commercial project. World War II is a great story: evil empires rise up to murder and enslave millions to be beaten back by young, brave, freedom-loving GIs (of course, the Sovs, the Brits, and others bled too, but the American producers decide what gets presented). Probably the two most used pieces are Stukas diving onto Poland in 1939 and the U.S.S. Arizona blowing up at Pearl Harbor. Too bad the survivors don't get residuals.

As THC grew more popular, the documentarians reached further and further into the vaults for footage to illustrate something, anything. Barring the usual difference of opinion between historians and predictable error the scripts appear to be sound academically. Alas, while the viewers watch footage they probably aren't listening to the narration. I think the producers know this so they feel free to show images totally unrelated to the script.There seems to be some union rule that writers and historians were not permitted to work with editors to point out that the airplanes in question are American and not Japanese or that the shots represent something five years from the event being described. That's the first giveaway to a bad documentary, but only geeks like me who can distinguish a B-17 from a B-24 or a Zero from a Dauntless really cares. This has gotten better in recent years I think.

The simplest documentary is public-domain archival film and narration. Then the producers added talking heads, historians, eyewitnesses, and anyone with something to say. This added an important dimension to the genre since the information was usually correct and the viewer tended to pay attention to what was said. The historians typically know their stuff. The eyewitnesses, mostly aging veterans, know what they know strained through the filters of time and perception. The last category is some descendant or any old person who knows what is written in the history books, but did not see it themselves. The crawl under their clip credits them with being a son or niece or simply being alive at the time. Talking heads need to be delivered in short breaths to keep the story line moving and to keep the viewer away from the remote.

Next the producers added footage of meticulously attired reenactors marching into battle. Reenactors are hobbyists who dress up like historical military units and even specific personages. They gather on weekends and camp out and march and have a wonderful time. The most numerous hobbyists are Civil War reenactors. Ted Turner used thousands of them to make the movie Gettysburg a visually stunning experience that credibly gave us an important historic event (but the soldiers were all too old and too fat). The guys who dress up as Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee deserve special mention. It works for television and there are excellent, if drawn out, histories of the Civil War. This approach works well in any period and as long as actors don't speak, you don't have to pay them as much.

The spinoff of this is The History of Sex where there are plenty of reenactors available and they aren't too old or too fat. Scenes of writhing bodies, appropriately blurred, are spliced in with more talking heads and full-color depictions of love in Egypt, Greece, and Rome. I would love to have been around the studio as that one was pulled together.

Probably the last, best iteration, in my view, is the two-part series on Paris 1919. Using lookalike actors in period dress who speak the correct languages, the producers give us an accurate and somewhat compelling account of a critical and often downplayed period in history. At the end of The Great War (World War I) the European allies carved up the world and hammered Germany economically. This planted the seeds for the rise of Facism ten years later and then World War II twenty years and four months later. Just about everying wrong about the 20th Century can be traced to the Treaty of Versailles and the divisions of colonial spoils. People die today because of these decisions. Kudos from me to Paris 1919.

Computer animation has added a great deal to understanding history. Moving arrows on maps have evolved into three-dimensional representations of battles that might remain misunderstood but for technology. This is not cheap to do accurately.

You can tell when the producers are focused on viewership and not history when they leave you hanging just before the commercials and retell the story at the end of the commercials. That's because the producer's biggest enemy is the remote control. The commercials come on and you look for something else. Have you noticed that the other channels have commercials at that same point in the hour? By crafting history around the remote a thirty-minute story can be stretched to an hour. The hour blocks are easier to fill. The editors recycle footage and narration and you don't get the whole story until the very end. It seemed to take forever to document that fact that a minesweeper was sunk by a then-secret German mine.

I have one documentary to my credit, but it wasn't crafted around commercial breaks. It was designed as history and the story unfolds coherently. The editors did an excellent job matching appropriate still shots and narrators and contemporary footage to the narrative so I know it can be done.

One of my favorite history programs is The American Experience and the historians appear to have taken control. They seem to have hit on the right blend of archival footage and talking heads to tell a story that remains both accurate and compelling. And anything by Ken Burns is worth a watch, but his work requires some dedication to follow each series.

End of rant

Opening for the centennial history of Seattle Children's Hospital

2010-01-08T09:39:00.000-08:00

Six-year-old Alice lies half reclined on the stretcher struggling against asthma to breathe. Her alveolar sacs are paralyzed and her lungs feel stuffed with cotton. She is slowly suffocating. A plastic mask supplies her with oxygen and medication. When she opens her eyes, she can look straight out the front windows of an Agusta A 109/Mark II helicopter as it speeds east through the night across Puget Sound. Assistant Chief Flight Nurse Sherri Kruzner-Rowe – Sherri K-Rowe to her colleagues – sits at Alice's left shoulder monitoring her labored respiration, her heart rate, her blood pressure, and her blood oxygenation. Flight Nurse Cincy Katz's flight station is on Alice's right, facing aft. To help Alice breathe, Katz injects additional aerosol into her mask, twenty times the dose of her home inhaler. Katz leans over to Alice and asks, "Can you breathe?" Alice's wheezes OK.

The conversation has two practical purposes; it helps console her and it tells the nurses something about Alice's condition. Even though both nurses each wear protective helmets and Alice herself sports large, soft hearing protectors, the close confines of the air ambulance and the soft words help relax her as she fights for air. Alice's parents rushed her to Olympic Medical Center in Port Angeles with a severe asthma attack and when her she failed to improve, her physicians ordered that she be transported as quickly as possible to Seattle Children's Hospital. "As quickly as possible" meant a helicopter from Airlift Northwest.

"Can you see the lights out front?" Katz asks. "That's Seattle. We'll be at the hospital soon." This time, Alice does not answer. The nurse repeats the question. No response. Alice is still breathing, but now that she cannot talk, her case has attained a new urgency. The nurses quickly replace the light mask with an air bag and mask that seals around Alice's mouth and breathes for her. Nurse Kruzner-Rowe keys her microphone and instructs the pilot to fly directly to the hospital.

Pilot Steve Lodwig radios Airlift Northwest dispatch with the change in destination. Lodwig sits next to Alice's feet in a cabin smaller than most compact automobiles. The twenty-four-minute run from Port Angeles at 150 knots is familiar enough that Lodwig almost does not need the Global Positioning Satellite System moving-map display that guides him along the Straits of Juan de Fuca and across Puget Sound directly to the helipad designator at Seattle Children's. He flies at a comfortable 3,000 feet, high enough to see landmarks and navigate, but beneath the flight path of busy Sea-Tac Airport. Even if Lodwig had not grown up in Seattle, the black void of Green Lake and the twinkling lights of the street grid offer a map that any tourist can follow. Passing Green Lake, Lodwig counts one thousand one, one thousand two, and banks right over the bright ribbon of Interstate 5. With the wind from the south, Lodwig will effect an approach to Children's from the north. He banks again left at Northeast 50th Street on a strictly prescribed path to minimize disruption by the helicopter's noise. On the new course, he spots the brightly-lit Children's complex in Laurelhurst.

Most flights, Lodwig lands at Graves Field in the midst of the University of Washington athletic complex on top of an old garbage dump on the shore of Union Bay. The patient then transfers out of the helicopter and into a regular ambulance to be driven the last mile and a half to Children's. But Alice's condition is too delicate to expose her to a second ambulance ride through Seattle traffic, seven stop lights, and ten more minutes away from the emergency room. Kruzner-Rowe will be required to justify to a committee her decision to land at the hospital, but tonight, Alice's life comes first.

On receiving the message from Lodwig, the dispatcher at Airlift Northwest hits the auto dialer on his phone to alert Children's. Pagers on the belts of security personnel at the hospital sound off and men and women hurry into the rain along Penny Drive with flashlights and prepare to stop traffic.

Pilot Lodwig pushes the collective in his left hand down slightly and begins his descent. The Agusta's on-board computer automatically reduces the fuel flow to the twin Rolls Royce turbines and the altimeter winds down through 2,000 then 1,000 feet. As the helicopter drops through 120 knots, the landing gear automatically extend, further slowing forward progress. Ground personnel turn on the landing lights and secure the pad's fences. Lodwig now can clearly see the two illuminated wind socks and the rotating amber beacon at the Laurelhurst helipad. The Vietnam veteran eases the collective down and at 18 knots, the helicopter shudders through an aeronautical phenomenon called effective translation lift. The wheels settle onto the helipad and take the weight of the aircraft. Lodwig moves the throttle from "Flight" to "Idle." Because Alice is fighting for air, Lodwig applies the rotor brake so as not to have to wait the two minutes for the blades to stop swinging.

A team from the emergency room rushes through the rain to the left side of the red-and-white helicopter as the flight nurses hoist Alice up and out onto the gurney. Royal blue flight suits glow brilliantly under the intense landing lights. Alice still clutches the stuffed toy the flight nurses had given her just before takeoff. In seconds, Alice’s gurney surrounded by blue scrubs and blue flight suits is through the triple pneumatic doors to the Children's emergency department. In the resuscitation room, the flight nurses continue working the air bag until the attending physician takes over. In the space of half an hour, Alice has completed a journey that will take her parents four hours by car and once took days.

The resuscitation room in the ER is designed for efficiency and not aesthetics. The walls are crowded with steel shelves and red enameled drawers packed with tools for saving young lives; more like a super-clean garage than a facility to offer solace and care. Large glass-front cabinets that look like vending machines with a key pad hold critical supplies. By pressing in a code, a nurse can access drugs and other life giving miracles. The cabinet's computer automatically notifies central supply to replenish the used items.

Bandages, syringes, drugs, splints, respirators, intravenous needles, tubes and solutions, probes, forceps, rubber gloves, and all manner of devices to measure temperature, blood pressure and breathing, and computer screens and electronic readouts compete for space and overwhelm the casual observer. The business of emergency medicine may be all business with little concern and less room for entertainment, but Beenie Babies and Care Bears perch on top of computer monitors and at the edges of shelves, a reminder that these are children's lives being saved here. The little furry friends peek around corners to comfort the new arrivals.

And there is light, lots and lots of light. Overhead fluorescents, lights on flexible arms, lights to be held, and lights for forehead-mounted magnifiers. The only compromises for comfort are privacy curtains and a simple chair and foot stool to allow a parent to hold and rock a desperately-ill infant. There is still enough space for a DVD player and television set to help ease the anxieties of patients and families.

Passing down the hallway through the ER, the visitor enters the rest of the hospital. More pneumatic doors allow a gurney or wheelchair to pass without delay. Down the hall to the right are the two Intensive Care Units. In the Neonatal ICU, the bright hospital lights give way to a more subdued atmosphere, dimmer, calmer. In the ECMO area, nurses, two at a time, all the time, hover over premature babies whose undeveloped lungs need the help of the Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation machines. The ECMO breathes for the baby until she can take in air on her own. Once distinguished by their immaculate white uniforms, distinctive starched caps, and sensible white shoes, modern nurses stand out with gaily patterned smocks and bright slacks or simple blue scrubs.

Almost as crowded with monitoring equipment, the Infant ICU makes a little more accommodation for parents with a sleeping chair so that the infant can enjoy the touch and soft words of Mom and Dad. For an infant, or any child, the trauma of hospital care can slow recovery and loving parents are included in the treatment plan. A simple rocking chair, worn from years of loving use, sits to the side.

In another room, A volunteer "Auntie" rocks a baby girl with more tubes in her tiny body than the sunrises since her birth. Human contact and soft words are as critical to her survival as the medicines. A hand-lettered card is taped to the crib and reads, "Amy, Trust in God."

Up one flight of stairs is an area specially designed with sleeping rooms, showers, sitting areas, laundry facilities, telephones, and even Internet access. Exhausted parents with blue-and-white stick-on name tags wait and try to rest, and try to share with each other the progress of their little ones downstairs.

Out through the big swinging doors into the public areas, elaborate murals and oversize plastic figures greet patients and visitors. Small children look up amazed at the images and some are hoisted on shoulders so that they can touch the animals and faces which smile from brightly colored locomotives and rocket ships. Great blue and green fish tanks catch little eyes and fascinate growing brains. The vast and confusing hospital is designated not with impersonally lettered wings, but into sectors marked by whales, giraffes, airplanes, rockets, and trains. Parents push hairless children in wheelchairs and teenagers pull intravenous stands that dangle life-giving solutions, but everywhere the visitor sees life and color and caring. Only so much assurance can be offered to a haggard family awaiting the results of a risky surgery or to a child facing months and years of painful rehabilitation, but the happy murals and bright figures help. Two clowns in white makeup, one with a guitar slung across his back, make their way into another unit to tell a joke, sing a song, and bring some cheer.

Visiting families with gifts and balloons make their way to patient rooms, and children, patients and guests, enjoy the toys and games in the public play areas. Blue-coated volunteers distribute gifts, cards and toys, offer companionship, and pitch in to give weary parents a break in supervision of young brothers and sisters. Social workers with their portfolios full of answers offer solutions to the greatest crises in these families lives.

Over in Rehab, patient rooms resemble the bedrooms of all kids with books, clothing, and posters in seeming disorder, but rationally placed in the mind of the adolescent occupants. Rehab patients tend to stay the longest at Children's while medical staff and therapists seek to repair and rebuild damaged spines and legs. The patients are encouraged to make themselves as much at home as possible, and home can look disorganized to a visitor. Special video game consoles allow a patient to play from bed both for entertainment and for therapy. A Teen Room provides space for older patients to gather and play arcade games, listen to music, and just hang. Some evenings, when things calm down, an old man with white hair stops in to see the patients. He is there as much to learn from their courage as to bring them friendship.

Earlier in the day, the outpatient clinics upstairs bustled with families and staff making their way to appointments. Strollers disguised as brightly colored kiddie cars help take young attentions away from what must be a mystifying and even frightening experience.

In any direction, the visitor sees the mission of Seattle Children's being delivered with love and with respect, but perhaps unaware that outside and across the community, the state, and the region a complex and comprehensive system of support makes it all possible. As Alice down in the ER gets the help she needs to breathe and to stay alive, she knows nothing of what makes it all possible. She and the other children are fortunate that their parents and neighbors can give them the care that they need, fortunate that their community can boast one of the finest pediatric medical centers in the nation, and fortunate that conditions like infantile paralysis, diphtheria, osteomyelitis,, and tuberculosis that crippled and killed children a generation or two before are now little more than historical trivia.

On another rainy night in 1898, in a fine home with a sweeping view of Seattle, six-year-old Willis Clise was not so lucky.

[Willis died. Nine years later, his mother helped found Children's Orthopedic Hospital]

Closure

2010-01-08T07:33:00.000-08:00

In my posts about my work speaking up for abused and neglected children I have mentioned those kids who are adopted once their parents' rights to them have been terminated. Not all children get adopted, some go to relatives' homes under third-party custody agreements and some actually go home to their parents.

When CPS removes kids from the home, there are reasons. Issues such as mental health or sobriety make it unsafe for the children. The court tells the parents to get their acts together by agreeing to engage in "services," evaluations to identify their problems, therapies needed to correct the problems, and even something as basic as parenting classes. The parents have time frames and concise performances to demonstrate to the court that they are ready to care for the children.

Sometimes the parents get it together and resolve the problems. They get sober and stay sober or they engage in therapies that overcome their emotional issues. I've seen it happen. When the parent has established a stable home and is doing services and cooperates with the social workers and we think the children will be safe, we will ask the court to return the kids home in an in-home dependency. The kids are still under state supervision, but they are home and the parents can demonstrate their parenting skills.

In a recent case that has gone on for almost four years, "Maria" has a mother who cannot parent because of her mental health issues and her abysmal choices of partners. Maria's stepfather molested her when she was nine and she witnessed nearly constant arguing and fighting in the home. At one point she called 911. The transcript of that call as she described her stepfather threatening her mother with a knife is heartbreaking. Then her little brother showed up at school with cuts and bruises. CPS had to get arrest warrants out for the parents.

The kids were placed with relatives, but this was never really satisfactory. Maria's mother was still involved in their lives and actively sabotaged the efforts of educators and therapists. Maria became something of a feral child, living where she wanted, learning to lie to the workers (if she spoke to them at all), falling farther and farther behind in school, and becoming a conduct problem for educators. She would barely speak to me because of the lies she was told about me.

But Maria had a father. He lived out of state and, at first, participated in the legal process. The mother and her relatives systematically walled him off from Maria and he quit returning calls from me and his lawyer. He surfaced again about a year ago, agreed to cooperate with the social workers, moved his wife and four children to the area, and offered to be in Maria's life.The department got her connected to therapy for being a victim (Maria's mother blamed her) and other help getting her used to a new home. Maria had a tough time adjusting to things like rules and supervision, but she settled in and bonded with her stepmother. A stable and loving home can do wonders for a child, even one on the crest of puberty.

I visited Maria who is now fourteen and a freshman in high school. She has adapted to a good home with structure and loving parents. She is catching up academically and there might even be an opportunity to develop an artistic talent I saw when I first met her. She was still pretty distant, but I could tell that she no long held the deep suspicion of earlier visits. As I explained the legal process and how we were all going to get out of her life I could detect a sense of loss on her part. The department, the social workers, the therapists, yours truly, and her lawyer (kids get lawyers when they turn twelve) had become part of her environment. Every week someone visited her or talked to her on the phone and asked her questions. Now she was going to be just a kid with a mom and a dad and brothers and sisters.

We had to go to court for the dismissal, even though all the parties were already in agreement. These dismissals are really kind of cool. They are meager celebrations of the tiny victories in the child welfare system. The parties are all smiles (rare in dependency court) and the judge congratulates us all for our good work on behalf of the children. There's no cake or punch like we have at adoptions, just good feelings.

Alas, when Maria's case came up, after four years of hard work and many tears, I missed it. I was down the hall in another courtroom explaining to another judge why a mother should not prevent the children from seeing their father. No smiles in that courtroom.

[A week after I wrote this, Maria's mother abducted her.]

Epiphany

2009-12-17T11:48:00.000-08:00

This is another theological term like reincarnation, resurrecton, and immaculate conception hijacked by literature and modern culture. Epiphany was originally the divine manifestation of Christ to the gentiles, but has come to represent any new understanding or "aha" moment. Misuse of the term in some eras might have been a capital offense, but today it's just another word. Each of us has epiphanies large and small when in a single moment, things become clear and life changes for the better. One epiphany for me was both a personal and a professional and I can mark.

When I was 21 and medicaled out of my military obligation (my paperwork certifying me as "unfit for enlistment or induction" lives in a fire-proof safe), I got a full-time job as a campus policeman. I had been a part time student dispatcher for over a year and the unsolicited offer was a pleasant surprise. Besides, I made $582 a month!.

As I am wont to do, I really got into the new profession. I memorized the police phonetic alphabet (Adam, Boy, Charles, David...) and bought my own copy of state criminal laws. I volunteered for overtime just to be there in case there was some opportunity to get real law enforcement experience. I was a hot dog. The University of Washington in 1969 was a lively place and the magnet for Seattle's hippie culture. The anti-war protests produced demonstrations (unusual occurrences or UOs), nickel-dime vandalism and even terrorism in for form of firebombings and explosions.

Until 1968, the campus cops -- called the Safety Division lest some professor or alum be offended -- were a grandfatherly collection of about fifteen men one would expect to police parking and lock buildings on an urban college campus. The year before they made one arrest. Then came a sit-in in the president's office. At the time there was a Democrat in the mayor's office, a conservative Republican in the prosecutor's office, and his enemy, a liberal Republican in the governor's office. When the University sought police assistance with the protest the mayor said, "Gee, this sounds like a state problem."

So, the campus cops began to grow. The chief of police, who had been in office about fifteen years, went to the personnel office for candidates. The personnel officer handled all the physical plant openings such as truck driver and carpenter. The first list of names came from the applicants for janitor. The numbers grew from fifteen to thirty almost overnight. Officers who ranked low on the sergeant list got their promotions. The University kept showering the chief with positions and money. Within three years there were seventy-five. Alas, the chief and most of his supervisors did not seem to know what they were doing, assuming they wanted to be there at all. Several supervisors found other jobs.

The chief originally came from eastern Washington where he was captain of the guard at a prison and later a chief of police. He was an intensely shy man and very soft spoken given to sucking on his pipe. Even when angry he could barely manage a squeak. When I was still a student and working there evenings one of my ROTC instructors commented that his wife's uncle worked for my chief. The instructor declined to relate what he had heard about my chief lest I be disappointed. I never did find out the story.

One of the chief's bugaboos was about firearms. We were police officers of the state and carried guns. The original fifteen carried the time-tested model dating from the turn of the century. As the chief hired more officer he needed more guns. Instead of buying more of the standard revolver with a four-inch barrel he opted for one with a two-inch barrel, much less offensive to University community. This was maddening for us new hires since the shorter barreled guns made us seem like less-than-police officers. Not the least of the issues was the difficulty in being accurate with the snub-noses. The chief hated light bars on top of the police cars, but eventually relented. He hated sergeant's strips on the sleeves of the supervisors, but relented. Sirens were slow in coming (I think I was the first one to use one on campus). He made us carry the shotguns in the trunks of the cars instead of in racks in the front seat (today Seattle PD carries their shotguns and rifles in the trunks). There were other things that told us he didn't trust us. We could do anything except make someone angry.

As a young, hot dog police officer hyper-sensitive about being regarded as a security guard, the chief made me nuts. I helped organize a union for the officers and we tried to affiliate with the Teamsters. There was a lot of rancor towards the chief who was unskilled at convincing his people of the wisdom of his actions. Only because I did a very good job at parking tickets and filling out forms did I avoid serious trouble with the chief.

After a year on the job I got to attend the police academy run by the Seattle PD. Our class of fifty consisted of men from six different police departments, something of an experiment. The training was excellent, even better than I received from the U.S. Government. I wanted to be a Seattle cop, but couldn't get past the physical. If I couldn't do that, I would be the best campus cop I could. I could also still be pissed off at the chief and made no secret of it.

I learned that the officers from Kent and Bellevue and King County all had enormous respect for the campus cops who had to deal with bombings, angry students, and arrogant professors. The cops all commented how hard police work was in other jurisdictions. The Bellevue guys could not countenance working alone and far from help in unincorporated King County. The King County guys expressed horror at dealing with the affluent citizens of Bellevue. The deputies on a certain island were said to carry silver bullets. The grass was always browner on the other side of the fence.

Then one morning during the break I stood around listening to my classmates from other departments complain about their chiefs. In fact, they all complained about their chiefs, all of them. What? You mean I'm not the only one who is unhappy about his chief of police? All cops are unhappy with their chief of police? Epiphany: Being unhappy with the boss was perfectly normal and nothing to be concerned about. [see graphic]

At that point life became much easier. A great burden lifted from my shoulders. I returned from the academy and cheerfully embraced my duties leaving the bosses with the impression that the training experience had been transformative. Even if I was writing parking tickets I took care to ensure there were no errors while hanging as many citations as I could. I knew that my classmates granted me respect for the job I did despite my aluminum gun. I grew comfortable with the idea that this could be a decent career. They chose me to fill in for a sergeant for six weeks. When I took the sergeants test, they arranged a special interview panel for me so that I could leave town to get married.

Sadly the old chief died within six months, his heart giving out under the stress of doing his job during a tumultuous time. His name is inscribed on the state memorial with the other fallen peace officers.

One of the first things the new chief did was buy proper guns.

Luck

2009-12-10T16:50:00.000-08:00

The loss of five police officers in a little more than a week here in the Puget Sound region made me remember how lucky I am to having completed almost thirty years of sworn service. It was close a couple of times. I observed over the years that my success relied upon two things, my own skill and luck. The more skill and preparation you bring to the table, the less that luck has to do with it.

So the loss of these five fine people was all about luck, bad luck. There was no defense for Seattle Officer Brenton as he sat in his car talking to his partner. Her own quick reaction to the attack and her skill saved her from a similar fate. One of the Lakewood officers fought with the assassin and the officer got a shot into him. There had to be considerable skill in that along with enough luck to have not been the first to die. but the bad luck won out.

I know about luck first hand. In 1974, I was pursuing a cocaine smuggler not far from the Canadian border. The car started fishtailing and I ended up hanging upside down from my seat and shoulder belts at the bottom of an embankment. In those days, the shoulder belt in the Plymouth Fury II was optional requiring a second step to hook it up. As I went out that night I thought it might be a good idea to take that second step. Skill on my part. In the car behind me as I entered that curve, did a 180, and rolled down the hill, was a constable of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (it was their crook). Mounties start their careers on the road and this was undoubted not his first serious traffic accident. He was first down the slope and he crawled in through the shattered window to unhook me. I dropped like a sack of potatoes to the crushed roof of the car and he pulled me out. Had I gone over with no one behind me it might be hours or days before someone missed me. Luck. I had six broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and a paracardial contusion.

There were other incidents, none as close as that, that I have apparently suppressed, a natural defense mechanism I suppose to what might have happened. It serves no purpose to recall them at this point in life. I don't propose throwing down on any miscreants anytime soon.

Civilans never hear about when skill and luck add up, when officers survive potentially fatal encounters. These incidents end up as a few lines in a report or even a charging document. An officer might speak of the situation to his peers or to a class of recruits, but there won't be a celebration of skill and luck. The matter will slide into police oral tradition which is a major teaching tool in the profession.

The FBI keeps the stats on officers killed feloniously and by accident, and those who are are assaulted. Each number is a story and probably a lesson of some kind. All involve skill losing out to bad luck. Arnold Palmer is said to have remarked, "Golf is all about luck. The more I practice, the luckier I get."

What is true about golf is true about police work, even life in general.

Christmas 2009

2009-12-10T14:12:00.000-08:00

It’s been a year of premiers, the big events that mark chapters in life. Where to start? We all strolled the red carpet to meet Kellen Richard Wilma on August 29 (don’t ask what we wore). He is our first grandchild and he continues to enrich all our lives. He even has his own Facebook page. One forgets how, with an infant around, the conversation changes to erp rags, oneseys, and the contents of diapers. Lorraine and I have signed up to watch him one day a week when his mom goes back to work in January.

I had my first book come out in print this year, Historic Photos of Puget Sound a visual romp in grayscale through our maritime and environmental heritage. Sales are good and the publisher needs to print more. I’m still shopping my historical novel (manuscript under review at one publisher) and the publishers of my local histories continue to promise soon, soon. There was also the movie, but not of Photos. I scripted a documentary about the hydroelectric plant under Snoqualmie Falls. The film debuted on a hot day in July in historic North Bend, Washington (don’t ask what we wore). I had a bit part in another documentary as an historical talking head. I didn’t say “ah” once.

An island entered our lives too. We became part-time residents of Whidbey Island when we bought a home in Freeland right on the water. For Lorraine and me the house hunting trip was really just an excuse to spend the day with Matt and Tiffany as well as to humor my sister Patti. We all walked into this place and everything changed. The Wilma kids formed a LLC and closed the deal in five weeks. When it came time to pick a name for the corporation we chose the first thing said when we walked in: Oh S[ally] What a View! It’s now the OSWAV Family LLC. The house has five bedrooms and a huge kitchen, and it sits across the street from a public park. The best part is a double garage with a smooth floor and a high ceiling where I moved my wood shop. We are now part of our region’s ferry culture and are learning to adjust to island time. Our neighbors include as many as four bald eagles, herons, Mr. Seal, and voracious bunny rabbits. We pledged to eschew telephones, computers, and televisions, and to devote ourselves to a slower pace of life. That didn’t last long. We now have a hard-line phone, DSL, and a fifty-inch plasma with a Blu-Ray player.

Lorraine received the Headliner Award from the Association of Women in Communications. The award is handed out only every two years and recognizes an AWC member who has recent national accomplishments, as well as consistent communications excellence. She now has a handsome crystal trophy to go with her other acknowledgements.

Life is good here. Keep saving these Christmas letters.

And naturally there is Lorraine’s quote of the year. This one reflects her tentative embrace of social networking: “There’s drivel in my Twitter.”

Turkey Day

2009-11-26T10:04:00.000-08:00

My ancestors were at the first one in 1621. Teenagers Elizabeth Tilley and John Howland survived that first winter when her parents died along with many of the other Mayflower passengers. The new settlers had much to be grateful for and not the least of the gratitude was toward their neighbors, the Indians. The Indians taught the English how to survive. Apparently the locals forgave the English for plundering their food stores upon stepping off the Mayflower. They were pretty hungry by then. Maybe the first turkey day was a bit of payback. Elizabeth and John did well. They married and had ten children, thank you very much.

As for the first official Thanksgiving in 1863 my ancestors also had much to be thankful for then as well. That was the Civil War and President Lincoln declared a national day of thanksgiving. Great-great grandparents David and Eleanor Morgan, natives of Kentucky who moved to Illinois, had two sons in military service, one on each side. There is no evidence that the family even heard about the presidential decree and celebrated, but I like to think that at some point they took time to think about their sons' survival of the war.

For Thanksgiving 1945 my mother's family was certainly thankful that her cousin had emerged from a Japanese prisoner of war camp, emaciated, but alive after nine months listed as missing.

In 1985 I was thankful for having a dining room table again. I still have it.

And this year there is much to be grateful for, love, family, health, prosperity, and the privilege to give some of it back.

A Bold History

2009-11-06T07:12:00.000-08:00

I received the first review of my Historic Photos of Puget Sound. The Queen Anne - Magnolia News covers our neighborhood here in Seattle.

The book launch at Queen Anne Books in Seattle went well. The book store staff (thank you Tegen) was very gracious and had a beautiful display of the books at a signing table. They even had to pull me away from a beer next door to come back and sign another book, a story that will undoubtedly feature in my unofficial biography.

Update: Rachel Hart of Seattle magazine has chosen the book as her Holiday Gift Pick.

As of December 15, most retailers are out of the book. Amazon.com has stopped discounting it. Turner will publish more in January.

Historic Photos of Puget Sound

2009-09-22T13:15:00.000-07:00

Turner Publishing Company has listed my Historic Photos of Puget Sound in their shopping cart and you can order it now by clicking on the link.

My own copies are in and they are beautiful. The publisher is arranging local media interviews and a launch party. Stay tooned.

Termination

2009-09-18T12:42:00.000-07:00

I just concluded almost three weeks of trial to terminate the parental rights of a father whose three children were removed from the home (a cheap motel room) three-and-a-half years ago. Well, two were removed. The third was born during the dependency and she is now two-and-a-half. This has been an amazingly complex case that has surprised everyone with its twists and turns ("Oh, THAT case") and has churned through seven or eight social workers, fifteen or more different public defenders and retained counsel, several dozen hearings, and two trials. At one time there were six children, nine assigned lawyers, two social workers, two mothers, four fathers, one Indian tribe... and one volunteer CASA, me. Imagine the public payroll for just one court appearance.

The number of parties dwindled as one child and his tribe were dismissed out of the case, one mother and two fathers had their parental rights terminated (the parents didn't show up in court), and another child found her biological father. That left two boys and one little girl with one father.

The dependency system is set up to return kids home if the parents work to alleviate the conditions that led to state intervention in the first place. In this case two of the children were abused and they all had been exposed to domestic violence. When the kids came into care they were all revealed to have special needs, particularly developmental delays. The State will pay for things like parenting classes, psychological evaluations, domestic violence intervention, therapeutic child care, special ed classes, drug and alcohol evaluations and rehab, and whatever it takes to return the kids home not take them away. But the parents have to cooperate. In my very first case the mother was a junkie, but she got sober and won her son back. In another it took the mom five years to get her psychological stuff together enough to be a parent again. Unfortunately some people just never get it because they relapse or their mental health issues prove overwhelming. I seem to always get the mental health issues. Bipolar disorder, anti-social personality disorder, even personality disorder not otherwise specified, just ask me.

So, for three and a half years the social workers in this case tried to steer the parents (those who showed up) to services. But the parents blew them off. Failure to complete the services within a certain period of time, usually eighteen months, is grounds for the worker to petition the court to have parental rights terminated. Kids cannot languish in foster care, even relative care, indefinitely. For a child in care, time is the enemy.

Part of the case involved the paternity of the little girl born ten months into the process. The mother named a mystery man as the father and denied that her partner and the the father of two of her children was the father. He denied it too. Until the little girl was almost two-and-a-half. Then he raised his hand and said I'm the guy and I want her back. The state said prove it, but we're not paying. He paid $510 and proved he was the dad. The state still wanted to terminate his parental rights as well as those of mystery man. I agreed.

Through all the the hearings (many of them continued, meaning oops no court today, come back another day), the different judges and commissioners, the substitute lawyers, the newly-assigned social workers, the flurry of letters to the parents reminding them of services, and the lies and evasions there was one constant, me, the volunteer CASA whose job it is to speak for the children. At one hearing the judge and the lawyers turned to me for answers on the status of the case and the most recent court orders. Me, a volunteer. I had the answers for which I am paid mileage.

The last barrier to permanency for the three youngest children was termination of the parental rights of the father, a convicted felon, registered sex offender, documented batterer ("dangerous to his family and the community") and walking advertisement for the need for anger management. Some parents agree to have their rights terminated in exchange for open adoptions. In those cases the biological parents get to keep in touch with the children while the adoptive parents do the heavy lifting of raising the children. But the parents usually have to admit that they have been poor parents and cannot overcome their deficiencies. No one in this case was about to admit that and certainly not this father.

I have an amateur theory about these parents. They are generally from the lowest income levels and suffer from an array of psychoses from substance abuse to mild disorders to serious mental health issues. When pulled into court they are entitled to public defenders at no cost (even those with jobs get free legal help) and these clients discover that they have rights. They interpret "rights" as "power" and play it for all that it is worth. Instead of cooperating for the benefit of their children they use their rights/power to fight every inch of the way.

Trial

To terminate the parental rights of this father we had to go to trial. I, as the Court Appointed Special Advocate (Guardian ad litem) am a party to such an action and I appear as a witness. As luck would have it the trial began as the long trial in which I was a juror was wrapping up. I missed the first day and a half of the termination trial.

Just a week before the trial was scheduled to begin, the father fired his public defender (who is quite good) and hired his own lawyer. Did I mention he had anger management issues?

Interestingly, in these cases, the first witness called by the state is the parent himself. You would think that would not come until the defense put on its case, but this was a civil case. The Assistant Attorney General questioned the father, but his time on the stand was broken up several times over many days to bring in other witnesses who were scheduled. Some witnesses testified in person and some appeared by phone (the judge tells the person to raise his or her right hand). When done each time, the father went back on the witness stand.

The court hears testimony four days a week leaving Fridays for sentencings and hearings. The lawyers expected the trial to last seven or eight days. Then the judge got sick two days and and things spilled over into week three. After two weeks of jury duty and more than two weeks of trial I was getting pretty familiar with the courthouse and lunch places nearby.

I testified about day five. I am comfortable on the witness stand, having been sworn dozens and dozens of times starting with traffic court in 1969. I have testified before the Queen's Bench in Canada and before a Congressional committee. And I still clean up pretty good. Not that the judge much cares. She is trained to look at the evidence, not the shine on my shoes. Still, it feels good to put on a professional face with a suit and tie. I testified how the father was always angry, to how he stomped out of a hearing calling everyone "kidnappers", and how he dismissed advice from experts who evaluated his sons as developmentally delayed.

In his defense the father pulled in the mother who had fled the state and had her rights terminated for not showing up. At first he didn't know where she was, but when the judge pushed he had her there in twenty-four hours. She lied on the witness stand, but she always does that. We got in all our evidence and adjourned to get the judge's verdict after lunch.

Usually, in handing down a ruling, a judge will start with comments to the opposite of where the ruling is going. I expected things like, "the father really loves his children," or "the father has been remarkable faithful in attending all court dates." Not so this time. She launched into what a sad case this is and how many times the father blew off his services. It took forty-five minutes for her to comment and then to read an eighteen-page order of findings of fact and conclusions of law.

What now?

So the kids are "legally free" and living in prospective adoptive homes where they have been thriving. The six-year-old says he wants to stay there. The ten-year-old half brother now in a group home wants to live with his younger brothers.

Happy ending? Not yet. The state is required to consider placing the children within the extended family. The kids could still be pulled from the only stable homes they have ever known and placed with "relative" they do not know. With the State of Washington headed in that direction the only voice for the children is a volunteer, me.

Stay tuned.

We Have a Verdict

2009-09-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking a lot about my jury experience. The testimony, etc. lasted the best part of ten days. At ten dollars day, I made one hundred dollars. The lawyers and the plaintiff made much, much more.

Ours was a medical malpractice case. A surgeon mistakenly cut a nerve which was in an unexpected place (no it wasn't the plaintiff argued). He attempted a repair (no he shouldn't have the plaintiff argued), but the outcome was poor to moderate and the patient ended up with impaired speech and swallowing, devastating to a woman in show business and with an active social life (not so bad the defendant argued).

We listened to surgeons describe their experience and education. and they described procedures and anatomy and something called the "standard of care." As many as five percent of patients experience some nerve damage and this patient, an operating room nurse, was aware of the risks. But the procedure promised to prevent a stroke and to save her life.

On top of all the medical evidence we had to sit through a parade of friends and colleagues testifying how the injury ruined her life and her career. An expert projected her medical costs. An economics professor project her past and future lost income. She testified and we heard her slurred speech. The surgeon testified and we heard his sincere regret. The lawyers introduced hundreds of pages of her tax records to show how much money she made and could have made. Her monthly planner showed how her life has not slowed down since the injury. Veins are blue and nerves are white. Not always. Back and forth the assertions and arguments flew.

Every day, I caught a bus at 8 a.m. to get to the courthouse by 9:00. I filled two steno pads of notes. Other jurors took even more notes.

The lawyers were all very good and it was clear they had invested a great deal of time and money in their cases. The computerized audio-video system allowed them to quickly punch up power point slides, pages from text books, photographs, documents, and video clips. It worked efficiently indicating extensive rehearsal. It's show business after all. We heard from twenty-nine witnesses. The documentary exhibits filled three large loose-leaf binders.

Deliberations

We got the case on day nine and I volunteered to be the "principal juror." I'm a recovering bureaucrat and can keep meetings on track pretty well. On the jury form we had to determine if 1) the standard of care was violated, 2) the violation was the proximate cause of the injury, and 3) any damages. If we answered no to the first question, the case was over. If we answered no to the second question, the case was over. If we answered yes to 1) and 2) we calculated damages.

It was a good, balanced group. Ten men and two women, a couple of retirees, several corporate employees whose companies allowed them time off for jury duty, and some civil servants. One man was a veteran of World War II. Another showed elaborate body art reflective of Generation Y. Two jurors were foreign-born.

We voted on the original injury and came down seven to five that the standard was NOT violated. I was one of the seven. We needed ten for a verdict. After discussion it was obvious that no one was willing to budge on that. So I moved the topic to the repair of the injury. This was seven to five that the standard WAS violated. I was one of the seven.

We hashed it around and slowly it came down to ten to two against the defendant because the surgeon had the opportunity to get expert help in repair of the nerve. We felt he should have asked for help and an expert was right next door. We never resolved the issue of the cutting of the nerve. Then we had to determine proximate cause and we quickly found that the cause was there. On to question 3).

Damages

This tied up the rest of the day and brought us back in the morning. We took the economist's word that she lost money. We took the expert's word about future medical expenses. We argued a lot about how much future income was at stake and even reduced the economist's projections. It was still a lot of money and left her more than comfortable for the rest of her life.

Non-economic damages. Pain and suffering. Loss of enjoyment. Difficulty swallowing. Loss of a career she loved. All of us were totally offended by the requested amount, but there was little hard evidence to guide us. Here we had to project ourselves into her situation and here we disagreed the most. I came down at the low end of the range.

As the principal juror I had to make sure people spoke one at a time, to draw out jurors who tended to remain silent, and not dominate the deliberations myself. One end of the table tended to be more vocal. "I want to hear from this end of the table," I said several times. Once or twice people became testy, but I kept things civil. I used to attend meetings where people carried guns (which I taught them to use).

We finally came up with a number. I won't disclose it because then the number becomes the story and that's not my point here. It was way below what the plaintiff asked and, I learned later, way below what the plaintiff asked for in settlement negotiations.

The plaintiff did not attend the verdict, but the surgeon did. I didn't even wait to see the reactions of the players. As soon as we delivered the verdict and were discharged, I took off because one of my CASA cases had started the morning before and I needed to be there. But the experience stayed with me. It was a sad story all around. The surgeon was experienced, talented, and dedicated. He apologized for the mistake. It was just one of those things. The patient had a compelling life story. She was attractive, popular, and very good at what she did. She made a good living until things went bad.

Did I do the best job I could have? Should I have insisted we resolve the issue of the cutting of the nerve? Should we have spent more time on proximate cause? Did I compromise too much on my opinions in the damages? A surgeon's distinguished career has been tarnished, but the plaintiff's life was transformed by his decision. Would another surgeon have done any better? The experts disagreed, but we had to make a decision.

Things are always better in the morning and this is no exception. I suppose that there was nothing else I could do for any of the parties and the result was probably the same if they had just settled. The other trial quickly took my attention as I worked to find permanent and safe homes for three young children. Them I could help. As I write this, that case has stretched over two weeks and goes into next week.

For the CASA case I don't even get the ten bucks a day.

Summons to Appear

2009-09-06T16:07:00.001-07:00

About five or six times since reaching my majority I have received the annoying notice in the mail to appear for jury service. Since my first career was in law enforcement, this was generally unproductive. Cops and their kin are routinely dismissed from juries because of some belief that they cannot be fair and objective, an insulting prejudice.

While living in San Francisco, the dates to appear invariably interfered with some personal business. One time, we left a wedding reception on a Sunday afternoon in Santa Monica to drive 300 miles back to San Francisco in time for Monday morning. After all the waiting around and telephoning recorded messages, I got as far as a jury box to be questioned by counsel. On an assault case (homeless person punching a blood bank employee) I was excused after explaining that I had "been in lots of fights." In an asbestos liability case I explained that was responsible for the largest asbestos prosecution in U.S. history, I was the only one in the courtroom who could pronounce mesothilioma, and I had past dealing with one of the defendants. Excused.

Lorraine has had a drivers license and voted every election for over forty years and has never received a single jury summons. Not one. Go figure.

When I moved to Seattle, the jury network must have somehow flagged my electronic dossier as one who appears and I received regular summonses from the county and the city. Last year, I was actually selected for a criminal case involving drugs (I was a narcotics agent for ten years). That was the first time I actually sat through a case. We returned a verdict of guilty (there was no real defense), but the process tied up two or three days.

One year later, another summons arrived for August. I cleared my calendar and arranged to be home from vacation in time to catch a bus Monday morning in time to be there by 8:00 a.m. The summonses come with a bus pass (one way) and a juror badge with a bar code. You walk into the jury assembly room and the worker scans you in and directs you to fill out a short bio form. The assembly room is like any waiting room, but with television monitors everywhere, a kitchenette, and a lunch area. A smaller waiting room to one side was built, I think, when they allowed smoking in public buildings, but serves now for people who need to make phone calls. We heard that most of those summonsed do not respond.

On Monday mornings the room fills up with those willing to do their civic duty reading, sipping coffee, snoozing, tapping away on laptops or PDA until the ubiquitous orientation tape runs. Then one of the judges stands up and gives us a pep talk. Next comes the list of names to draw numbers and be dispatched to courtrooms. Those not called continue to sip, read, snooze, tap, and chat. It's a pretty well-organized system and its designers are conscious of the contribution being made by citizens for ten bucks a day. Ten bucks. It just covers a good lunch in downtown Seattle and in no way compensates for any lost wages. The state legislature has had many opportunities to change this, but has found other priorities to fund.The County does pop for bus passes or mileage.

Those whose names are called assemble on the designated floor. In the elevator lobby the bailiff lines us up by number and files us into the courtroom where lawyers and parties look at us with a mixture of curiosity, anxiety, and anticipation. My group numbered thirty-nine. The first fourteen fill the jury box and the rest of us take seats on the spectator benches.

Our case was a civil case. No prosecutor and cops to justify being dismissed. The judge introduces himself and the lawyers and the plaintiff and the defendant. We learn this is a medical malpractice case and will last a couple weeks. This will prove to be a problem for me as I was set to begin a trial in my child advocacy job the following week.

Then each of the jurors is asked to stand and introduce himself or herself and answer a few simple questions about occupation, marital status, etc.The people at the tables include the now de rigueur jury consultant with a sheet of post-it notes, one for each potential juror. The consultant and the lawyer all note the answers to the judge's questions. He excuses jurors because they know the plaintiff and because of job conflicts and work history.

Alas, my prior law enforcement career, my child advocacy, my enrollment with the health plan being sued, and my pending trial are not enough to get me excused. I take a seat as juror number five and settle in for opening arguments.

Next: We Have a Verdict

The New Person

2009-08-30T09:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we welcomed Kellen Richard Wilma into our family. He is the first of the next generation of our family and is beautiful and healthy. He is the first grandchild for all the grandparents and we are all simply thrilled.

Island Vacation

2009-08-11T09:17:00.000-07:00

In order to keep up my blogging I am posting from Freeland on Holmes Harbor on Whidbey Island. We have a home here and are spending the week doing as little as possible. The kitchen here looks out onto the beach and the water and we got some rain last night, our first in a couple of months. It's the first time I've ever seen the area under some kind of weather. Usually we have had sunny skies and although the rain keeps us inside, it's a nice break.

I will spend my time working on my novel, reading history (Middle East this time), watching DVDs, and being a good island neighbor.

Premier

2009-07-18T08:30:00.000-07:00

Puget Sound Energy premiered The Power of Snoqualmie Falls on Thursday at the North Bend Theater in North Bend. I estimate that 100 people showed up including the staffs of PSE and Sadis Filmworks. I researched and wrote the script.

The North Bend Theater dates from 1941 when it opened to newsreels of the Second World War and the latest Hollywood features. A newspaper article at the time touted "Many Marvel at Beautiful Interior-Lavish Appointments-Excellent Sound." The theater has been lovingly restored and it was fitting that PSE chose this landmark for the first public showing of the documentary.

To recap, the Snoqualmie Falls power plant was built by engineer Charles Hinckley Baker beginning in 1898 and it's still in operation producing power for Pacific Northwest consumers. It was the world's first completely underground power generating station blasted out of solid rock 250 feet below the Snoqualmie River. Baker overcame amazing financial, engineering, technological, and political battles to build the plant only to be forced out of the business. You will have to see the movie to know the whole story.

I came into the project through Steve Sadis and Jeri Vaughn who PSE retained to produce the documentary. PSE needs to remove some of the 100-year-old buildings on top. The movie is one mitigation for the loss of the historic structures. Having written the centennial history of Seattle City Light I was already plugged into Northwest utilities history and knew my way around the various archives. I tracked down several local historians with detailed information. Greg Watson who has written and taught about Native American History and who speaks the Lushootseed language. Onscreen Greg recounts the legend of Moon the Transformer who created the falls. Dave Battey is a local historian with insight into Baker.

I had seen the video before, but this was the first time on the big screen. Wow. There are even a couple of movie posters with my name on them as the writer. Wow. I didn't wear my tux, but I wore my Panama hat. The cookies, popcorn, and drinks were complimentary.

Copies of the DVD are being distributed to schools and public libraries. Steve Sadis is working with our local PBS station for broadcast in the fall. (I looked for the title on The Seattle Public Library catalogue, but it's not in yet.)

Here is the trailer which appeared here earlier.

The Publishing Industry

2009-06-12T06:51:00.000-07:00

I just read an article (online) about the most recent BookExpo America convention in New York which points out some important points about bricks-and-mortar publishing.

Attendance at the book sellers convention was down fourteen percent from last year, and the convention space was one-fifth the size of last year.
Book sales are down.
2008 e-book sales were up sixty-eight percent over 2007.
2009's e-book sales for the first quarter were up 100 percent over 2008.
People are reading and writing more than ever.

Here is the complete article

Readers

2009-06-09T13:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I drove to Portland to meet with a class of twelve university students who read and critiqued my historical novel Down The River. I received the opportunity from Ooligan Press at Portland State University who read the manuscript and liked it, but not quite enough to publish it. Not yet. By having strangers read the book I could get a good sense of what is working and is not working. How could I pass up on the opportunity? I was too late for the winter term, but got into a spring term class.

Each student read the book (133,000 words, over 400 pages) and took notes. They broke into groups to discuss certain features. Then each wrote a detailed critique of from four to fourteen pages which I got via email last week. And boy were they detailed. The students wanted to meet with me and scheduled me for 5:30 p.m. yesterday.

We met in a library-like conference room seated on sofas and chairs in a circle. First I thanked them for their effort. Such commentary is incalcuable to a writer, or at least very expensive to purchase. I explained to them the origins of the book, a real family story, and how it evolved. I summarized for them the more common concerns that they had and how these were all good ideas. Some of their ideas I have already accepted and introduced into the text. Other ideas I will pass on and many I have to really chew on in order to work into the story.

One thing I had to clarify with them was the two central mysteries of the story, never explicitly answered, but for which there was ample evidence. (you have to read the book to find out what they are.) Some got the answers, some did not. When I explained the mysteries there was slappling of foreheads, etc. I enjoyed very much discussing my characters who the readers really engaged. In many cases the cry was more! more! they liked them so much. I will grant some of these requests, but not all. In writing, less is more.

In balance they all enjoyed the book and since the class was on story development, they offered ways to develop it. They were remarkably professional in their approach to a work they had to read and the extent to which they commented is a tribute to how much they enjoyed it. At the end we applauded each other.

So, I am really pumped to get into this thing and make it really sing. Once that is done, I will resubmit to Ooligan and see if they will nibble again.

The New House

2009-05-24T12:00:00.001-07:00

The first thought in walking in the door was, "Oh [Sally] what a view!" (this comment will become important later) The house sits a few yards from the beach and public park at the head of Holmes Harbor on Whidbey Island. The main floor and deck faces the north towards Saragoga Passage.

My wife Lorraine and I tagged along on this property hunting trip because it seemed like a harmless way to spend a Sunday. I hadn't been up to Whidbey in 30 or 35 years. My son, Matt, a realtor, had been showing houses and lots to my sisters Patti and Sally for some time. We all had a mild fantasy of some day owning a large family vacation property together, but for me, it was mild fantasy, very mild. Who has that kind of money these days? I have never owned vacation property and never really had a desire to. I don't enjoy taking care of one home let alone two. But never say never, right?

Matt lined up a number of properties from the Multiple Listing System for about the third time and he gave up another Sunday to indulge his aunts. One offering had two small houses and a boat house and even a marine railway leading into the water and Patti wanted us to see it. Despite the three buildings it would just not suit as any kind of a family compound. Who needs a marine railway? One place we didn't even go in.

Then we parked in the driveway of the house in Freeland. We walked in the front door and immediately took notice of it and its sweeping view. Without going into all the details, it's a 30-year-old house of solid construction and a sensible layout. It has tons of room not to mention an amazing location yards from a beach. All the land to the front is public park and immune from development. Did I mention the view?

Immediately plans changed. Things shifted from a remote fantasy to a definite possibility. Except for being one structure, versus several in the classic idea of a family compound, this met our needs. Our extended family often spent vacations together and had already booked a house at Sun River, Oregon for July. The house was bigger than anything we rented in Oregon.

Looking at the rest of the houses that day was a formality. We all met the next evening and began to make plans. We would visit the house again to make sure, but we agreed to explore forming a limited liability corporation, a LLC, and finding financing. On the second visit later that week, we made our decision. This is the house.

Lorraine and I had never considered how we would pay for such a thing, but a phone call to the credit union solved that. They would be pleased to extend our line of credit. And at a very low rate.Patti and Mike made the official offer with the buyers being "and assigns" permitting us to lock in the deal ($200K below the asking price two years ago) and have time to form the LLC.

Lorraine found the lawyer who set up the LLC for us and that went together in a week or so. Once the LLC was official I could set up a bank account and we wired our contributions. Once we could show the LLC had the money, Matt scheduled the closing. By next Wednesday night, we should be occasional residents of Freeland, Whidbey Island, site of the Freeland Land Association.

The colonists who founded Freeland spun off from another utopian colony in about 1900. They set aside the park in front of our house in perpetuity for the people of Freeland.

The colony dissolved in the 1910s. We plan to last longer than they did.

As for the quote above, we needed a name for the LLC. The question came up what was your first thought?
So we named it the OSWAV Family LLC.

A New Gig

2009-04-24T09:53:00.001-07:00

Surfing the ads on Craigs List does work. They have two categories for writers and I found an ad that caught my eye. I am now under contract with the Turner Publishing Co. of Nashville to compose the captions, chapter introductions, preface, and dust jacket for their Historic Photos of Puget Sound due out in November. Among other things Turner produces coffee-table books with archival images. Walt Crowley completed one for them covering Seattle in 2007 and Nick Peters did one for Tacoma. I also agreed to attend three book signings or promotional events. And I get some free books.

The publisher's representative said that he was impressed by my web site.

So by Christmas I should have three books on the shelves.

The Birth of the Tank

2009-04-14T06:16:00.000-07:00

The title and the photo are related, really. I grew up in Stockton, California which was home at the turn of the 20th Century to Benjamin Holt and his Holt Manufacturing Company. Holt invented a moveable track on agricultural tractors to cultivate the fertile but boggy peat soil of the San Joaquin Delta. He called this system the Caterpiller.

In 1914 the British Army needed to move artillery through the mud of France and dispatched officers to the U.S. for an alternative to horses. In Stockton they met Mr. Gilmore the general manager at Holt. To demonstrate the Caterpiller system he took them to his cattle ranch near Linden, east of Stockton, where the Sierra foothills begin.

Using a Holt tractor Gilmore built an earthen dam on a creek to create a lake. (the dam is at lower right in the photo)
The British were impressed enough to buy Holt tractors as prime movers for their guns. In France, Colonel Ernest Swinton saw the tractors in action and dreamed up the idea of putting armor plate on them to assault enemy lines. The tank was born.

My father managed Gilmore's cattle ranch in the 1940s and 1950s when Greenlaw Grupe (pronounced GROUP-ee) owned it. Dad told me the story then. Grupe trucked in sand, built a bathhouse and shelter, and added a boat dock. On Sundays in the summer we drove out to the lake for picnics and swimming and boating. It was the one day a week I could drink strawberry soda. We returned to town bloated with hot dogs, potato chips, and sugar. Mom hosed us down in the yard to clean off the sand.

The photo is of me (blowing up the balloon) and Bert Sandman standing on the dam built by the Holt tractor that inspired the tank. Hardly the stuff for a History Channel interview, but perfect for a blog.

For Opening Day

2009-04-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

(This is from last year.)

Somewhere it is written that boys must join Little League where they will learn about physical fitness and teamwork and self reliance and the other manly virtues. Introducing boys to baseball is an ideal way to develop them into young men. This benefit is now extended to little girls so that virtue no longer belongs to men alone, but the premise is the same: Baseball is good for America. Little League is viewed as wholesome and American and baseball as nothing less than preparation for the rest of life.

The seasonal nature of baseball and school compresses the Little League season into a few months in the spring. Everything, from organizing to training to competition, is jammed between about St. Patrick's Day and the last day of school. This is probably appropriate for nine-year olds whose concepts of time are, at best, no wider than a week or so. Entering into a Little League season with its calendar of practices and games is a long term commitment.

For the nine year old, Little League baseball is the only path to social standing and personal identity. That spring, I happily brought home the note announcing the tryout session for Saturday. Come the appointed morning, I rode my bike to the play field, looking for baseball heaven. I found nothing but two kids playing catch. I had missed the tryouts. Everyone else in my class was going to be in Little League except me. I had been left behind. Little League was gone.

I pedaled home in tears. Closer examination of the note by my mother showed that I was a week early. Enthusiasm had warped time and I had gotten the wrong Saturday.

On the correct Saturday, hundreds of nine year-olds crowded the field. At registration tables for each age group we submitted forms and fees in exchange for a large card bearing a number. Volunteer moms pinned the cards to our shirts and shuttled us into lines. Young players slammed fists or balls into gloves trying to get the pocket just right. Moms and dads hovered at the edge of the crowd while disinterested siblings scampered about. Men with clipboards commanded lines of placarded boys to move to the different stations. I was thrilled just being there.

The first tryout was fielding. An older boy hit fly balls to about ten of us at a time. Somebody else always caught the ball.

We reported to a backstop for the next station. Each boy had three chances to demonstrate his batting skill. Arrayed to one side sat a row of men with sunglasses on lawn chairs, holding pencils poised over clipboards. Suddenly, there I was, at the plate, all alone. Everyone, the boys in line, the pitcher, the catcher, the fielders and, worst of all, the seated men, all watched ME. A seventh grader smiled malevolently from the mound.

Pitch, swing. Pitch, swing. Pitch, swing. The men in the chairs wrote on their clipboards. Although I missed every pitch, I have no recollection of any feeling of failure though. My sense of baseball then was less about catching and hitting than it was about belonging to baseball.

A week later, boys at school announced that they had been assigned teams and I worried because I had not heard from anyone. One evening, I received a telephone call from a strange man. He who told me that I had been selected for his team. I was so excited that ran to tell my mother and I didn't think to remember his name or to ask when or where I was to report for practice. My mother had to make several phone calls to reconstruct things.

I was in! I was on a team! A sports writer once proclaimed that baseball is all about coming home, and when I reported my assignment to my classmates, I was home, a member of the Brown House (for the sponsoring department store) Miracles. After that first practice, team mates wore the same caps to school and hung around together. The world split between those who on a Little League team and those not, then subdivided by colored cap.

The euphoria of being on a team soon began to fade. Just as marriage can dissolve into bills and diapers and a new job can become just another Monday, my career crashed into one harsh reality: I had no talent for baseball. Not only did I not know the rules (which were never taught), but I couldn't catch, I couldn't hit, and I couldn't run. At first, I attributed these shortcomings to equipment. But new shoes and a new mitt and my own bat did not compensate for being afraid of the ball and for a serious lack of athletic aptitude. I was a klutz.

Little League policy entitled each kid to play a minimum number of innings. This guaranteed opportunities for me to strike out and stand around in right field. Even when a ball made it all the all the way out to me, I could only run after it (if I didn't trip) and throw it in the direction of home plate. All I can remember is people yelling at me. At bat I struck out. Once, just once, I was thrown out at first base. But I usually just struck out. Only in my very last game in my second season, did I actually score a hit.

This lack of baseball skill resulted in an immediate rift between me and the more accomplished athletes. They hit regularly and they competently pitched and caught and threw to the adulation of parents. They could play baseball and they saw that I could not. Not only did I not help win, I contributed to losing.

The coaches, dads just doing the best that they could, were all very patient, and I cannot recall a single critical remark from any adult. However, the sneers and insults and complaints from teammates all blend now into one bad memory.

That was it for sports and me. The jocks went their way and I went mine. Naturally, it did not help that I developed an asthma condition or that I was a little overweight. The next athletic competition I entered was at age 30 when I got sucked up by the running craze and did a fun run with some other cops. But this wasn't really a competition and running is not a team sport.

This early separation from the group formed my social development: I became a bit of a bookworm and joined other, non-athletic clubs like the school paper, if I joined a club at all. I did not date in high school and I married just once. Although I have always managed to be employed by institutions, my work remained solitary in nature. The awards in my personnel folder cite "independent action" and "initiative." Like the time I arrested that rapist when a dozen other officers searched for him blocks away. Or one night when two of us commandeered a Coast Guard cutter and rammed a drug smuggler. One thing that made me a good Scoutmaster was not being the least bit concerned how I looked to other adults while wearing a brown uniform and relating to twelve year-olds. I couldn't teach them to bat, but I showed them how to saddle a horse and how to right a canoe.

Today I do not read the sports pages and I do not watch games on TV. The only good part about baseball on TV is holding hands with my wife, but I can't even do that for nine innings. She explains the game to me and I wonder how a girl learned all that and I did not. I think I am still afraid of the ball.

In any event, I haven't missed the athletes and I suspect that they haven't missed me either. Being unable to catch or hit meant that I could not belong to baseball, so I had to belong to myself. Although I have valued being a member of a good team, I never needed a team to do what I wanted or to succeed.

I guess they were right; baseball is preparation for the rest of life.

Publishing Update

2009-04-03T15:25:00.000-07:00

I just heard from the folks at Historylink.org about two books I wrote with the late Walt Crowley. They are going ahead with centennial histories of Seattle City Light and Children's Hospital of Seattle.

I wrote the City Light history about five years ago and was originally timed for the utility centennial, 2002 or 2005, depending on when you start counting. I got to use historical documents, archival photos, and interviews of City Light employees.

The hospital story took more than two years of pouring through archives and interviewing patients, physicians, nurses, staff, and the countless volunteers whose dedication and devotion has made that remarkable institution what it is today. That project too, was timed for the 100th anniversary of the founding, but Walt got sick and things have taken a while to come to this point. Both books will have both our names on them.

With any luck I will have some books on the shelves by Christmas.

Pickups II

2009-04-02T10:08:00.001-07:00

I got to use the truck while I was a member of the Civil Air Patrol in Sacramento. The CAP is nominally the auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force and dates from 1942 when civilians used private planes to search for U-Boats. In the spring of 1966, CAP still flew searches for missing planes, but mostly it was a youth group. We teenagers drilled in Air Force uniforms and dreamed of flying jet planes. Our real flying was limited to orientation flights and instruction in small, even tiny, planes. Our home squadron had an Aeronca Champ, a two seater totally inappropriate for searches over the Sierras, but perfect for weekend trips around the Central Valley. The Champ is a lot like the J-3 Cub, but you can solo from the front seat.

My call to action came from some CAP senior members, as the adults were called. The squadron Champ had just received a new engine, but it conked out and had to make an emergency landing at a tiny strip in the Sierras. They needed me, or more precisely my truck, to haul the old engine up to the strip for a change. How far away from high school could that be?

I recruited my good friend Bob Snyder and we met at the squadron (in uniform of course) on Saturday. The senior members helped us load the replacement engine into the truck. Bob and I navigated from Sacramento up to the gold rush community of Georgetown.

We found our way up an unpaved road to the airport. In those days the Georgetown strip had no services and the Champ might have been the only airplane there. We had no trouble finding it. After a short wait while Bob and I giggled at this pleasant diversion from senioritis, the mechanics arrived by air with their tools.

The seniors had day jobs as machinists at the Air Force base and they knew their way around airplanes, not that there was much to know about the Champ. Changing engines proved amazingly simple. Off came the prop and the engine cover. Four bolts (if I remember correctly) and retaining wires held the engine to the firewall. The connections to the few engine instruments and the fuel line came off quickly. By backing the truck up to the airplane, the engine dropped right to the bed. I bet it took the four of us only an hour for the whole operation.

The Champ has no electric starter so I seized the honor of hand cranking the prop. You stand close to the propeller, so as not to lose your balance and fall forward, and you take the right blade with both hands. You call out “brakes!” to the pilot insure that when the engine comes to life it doesn’t run over you. Then you pull on the prop to see that the brakes are set. Next is “switch on” and the pilot sets the magneto switch. One pull on the prop is usually enough to get it going.

Off flew the Champ with its new/old engine and we drove back to Sacramento with the old/new engine. It was all soooo cool.

The Champ flew for CAP for nine more years. In 1976, our friend Mike “Andy” Andrykiewicz attempted a takeoff for a search mission. Andy apparently got disoriented in the fog and crashed. He did not survive.

Pickups I

2009-04-02T09:05:00.000-07:00

I drive a pickup these days, but it isn’t my first. My dad bought our first pickup in 1965 for $100 from a Japanese gardener named K. Sera. It was a ’53 Chevy, 110,000 miles, with corner windows and a three-on-the-tree stick shift. Someone had hit the truck on the passenger side stoving in the door and smashing the window. Dad and I hammered the door out and he scared up some new glass. After we painted the thing red, I had a serviceable set of wheels to get to school.

In those days Dad managed a chain of service stations and they had a setup in the warehouse to put striping in tires. He took the four old recaps from the truck and put two red stripes in each tire mimicking expensive, high-performance tires that had become the envy of the hot car set. I turned many heads in the parking lot at school. We added a holder for a GI jerry can for five gallons of gasoline, a radio (that took a full minute to warm up), and several cans of water sold in the service stations for survival after a nuclear attack. We even included some National Guard C rations for under the seat. You never knew where you might get stuck with that truck.

Attending parochial school required a commute and families formed car pools to get kids back and forth. The pools involved complicated arrangements orchestrated by the moms. In my setup I picked up two freshmen in our neighborhood, took them to within a block of their school, then on to another corner where I picked up a classmate, Denis, for the run to our school. The freshmen found their own way home somehow and I dropped Denis near his house. My passengers gave me cash for gas money, but since I used the family credit card, it was basically my running around money.

I mentioned the caved-in door. It proved to be warped and riders tried and tried to slam it shut. I was the only one who could close it. I learned to reach across and pull it firmly shut allowing an extra instant for the latch to engage. If my mother or sister borrowed it they experienced extreme frustration until they got it closed.

That wasn’t the only problem. Somewhere K. Sera had bottomed out and knocked the transmission out of alignment. Shifting worked fine if you double clutched. Then when you cruised along in 3rd for any distance it popped out of gear. I tried a string with a rubber band and a hook that I placed over the gearshift to keep it in place.

I could perform most repairs with three tools, a crescent wrench, a pair of pliers, and a slot screwdriver. The gearshift linkage occasionally slipped out of alignment and I had to get under the hood to disassemble the linkage box.

In the summer of 1965, I took the truck to Bakersfield for six weeks to work on a summer school for the children of farm workers. I thought I was going to be a teacher, but because I showed up with a truck I became the milkman and bus driver.
Every morning I picked up cases of donated milk at the Carnation plant, stopped for some crushed ice, and ran my nutritious load to the school sites. For field trips we loaded as many as twenty-five children in the back (totally illegal these days). The experience was formative in many ways, but its most enduring impact came in meeting Christine a prospective nun. Christine introduced me to Lorraine who has lasted longer than any truck. Lorraine actually visited our project that summer. She never met me, but she remembered my red truck.

That truck served our family for five years or more. I used it to haul the cats and tow the boat from Sacramento to Seattle when we moved. I helped friends move (for a case of beer) and hauled junk for neighbors (for $5 and the dump fee). It got me back and forth to college for a year or more although on cold mornings getting it started involved a complicated procedure of pumping the throttle just right and patiently cranking the engine. To avoid the commute and never knowing if the truck would start, I moved into a dorm you could see from our house.

When I got a real job in 1969, I bought a car, a new one that started every time you wanted it to. The truck then passed out of my employ and Dad sold it, I think, for $100.

What are you reading?

2009-03-23T11:11:00.000-07:00

My current book is one of the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser. For the really well read, Harry Flashman is the bully who tormented Thomas Hughes's protagonist in Tom Brown's Schooldays. Flashman is exposed for the drunkard and coward that he is and is expelled. Flashman dropps off the edge of the literary world until Fraser resurrects him in a series of historical novels based on the fictional Flashman Papers.

After Rugby, Flashman flowers as a total jerk, but one who admits his failings as "a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward — and oh yes, a toady"and even enjoys them. Flashman's father buys him a commission in the British Army and, just as in the real world, the young man rises in stature and rank through no fault of his own. He runs away from danger, allows others to die for him, and happily embraces torrid and meaningless affairs with women wherever he goes. Whether he is kidnapped or assigned, he lands in the great historic events of the mid 19th Century from the first war in Afghanistan to the Battle of the Little Big Horn. To date Fraser has produced twelve Flashman books.

My current read is Flashman And The Angel Of The Lord in which Flashy, a colonel in the Army and holder of the Victoria's Cross, finds himself in the United States in 1859 and conscripted to be military adviser to John Brown. Brown plans to invade the slave states and raise a rebellion of slaves. I won't tell you how it ends, but Flashy will survive. He always does.

Fraser's stories are both entertaining and informative, like good historical novels should be. I have seen our antihero through the invasion of Afghanistan, war with China, and now the perilous years before the U.S. Civil War. With twelve books to read I will have lots of fun following our man in his adventures, geographic, political, military and carnal.

Games

2009-03-17T12:51:00.000-07:00

A minor interest of mine (it doesn't yet rise to the level of hobby) is strategy and simulation games for the computer. I have always been fascinated by things like trains and airplanes and I had a model railroad and dreamed of learning to fly. As an historian, I have studied battles and contests between nations and naturally engage in a bit of "what if." Before desktop computers I played war games on table tops and even played by mail where we used stock indices to calculate the rolls of dice. Those games took months and years. I had the Battle of Gettysburg set up with dozens of counters (the little cardboard pieces that represent units) in precise locations depicting the first day. Then a little girl who visited us decided she would mix it all up. That was the last play-by-mail game I tried. (The little girl is in grad school now I think.)

Then personal computers came along. I watched how microprocessers compressed the time and effort needed to execute moves and the computer watched that you obeyed the rules. You could even play the computer. This last feature eliminated the need to deal with boys and grown men with more imagination than social maturity.

I got a copy of Flight Simulator when it was black and white and played from a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk (which was really floppy) using the number keys in lieu of a joystick. As the microprocessers grew in power so the games grew in beauty and sophistication. Flight Simulator became full color and offered a variety of aircraft over varied geographies. When Train Simulator came along I had to have a copy of that. I even got a little game that recreated toy Lionel trains in a train set.

The simulation games are another animal. With Civilization II and III I occupied wildernesses, planned and built cities and civilizations, and constructed empires. The same thing with the Age of Empire series. The Civilization games are particularly good way to consume an entire Saturday. I had to choose between games and several editions of Age of Empires went in a yard sale.

In Railroad Tycoon I didn't so much operate trains as built and ran entire railroads complete with finances and stock manipulations. I spanned the North American continent and exploited China. I acquired Roller Coaster Tycoon and Sim City. But I also have a life to pursue, so these will have to wait until my life is nothing but free time.

My friend Steve introduced me to Rome, a very realistic (without the smells) recreation of the rise of the Roman Empire that cannot be played in one day. So you save the game and come back to it until some other faction obliterates you.

My latest acquisition is a sequel to Rome. Empire: Total War takes me into the struggles of the 18th Century where England, France, and Spain battle over control of the world. It has both land scenarios - lines of soldiers hammering away with muskets and bayonets - and sea scenarios. I am a sucker for the sea battles since I was an early devotee to the writings of C.S. Forester (Horatio Hornblower) and Patrick O'Brian (Jack Aubrey). The ships really sail.

All these games have an online and network capability. Online is where you find someone on the Internet, usually a fourteen-year-old boy, to kick your butt. Network is computers in the same house or office. I haven't tried either since I would be sad to be beaten and insulted by some teenager in Finland.

Here's hoping that computer gaming doesn't prevent me from blogging.

Marketing the Manuscript

2009-03-11T14:57:00.000-07:00

I completed the major revision in my historical novel Down The River that the publisher was looking for. I had one of my writing colleagues, Bob, look at it and he had some very helpful comments plus dozens of typos. Using his advice and comments from the publisher trimmed the manuscript by about ten percent and really tuned up the language. I also tweaked the ending more to my liking (no one minded the way it was).

I contacted a literary agent who liked my sample chapters last summer and I offered her the manuscript. She said send the sample chapters again and I shipped those off this morning. I also sent sample chapters to a publisher in Chicago who seems to do my kind of stuff. So the process of shopping the story starts again.

What's funny about the revision process is that after I finished my major revisions and caught scads of typos, I went back and looked at what Bob marked. I missed almost every one of those!

From the Mouth of a Babe

2009-03-04T10:47:00.000-08:00

I have been collecting quotes from Lorraine that either offer an insightful comment on the world at large or just upon her world. I will post the good ones hereput the best one for the Christmas letter. I move this post forward on the blog as new quotes come to light.

On meeting with her CPA:
"It made me feel really good, that I'm not crazy and I'm not a bad business person."

On her office:
"You have to pretend you didn't see this. The corner over there on the floor looks really good." (best quote for 2007)

"My reading pile is on the floor. I got it out of my to do pile." (best quote for 2006)

On sending me to the store to pick up treats for the engagement party:
"Don't eat the lemon bars. You can have a cookie. Don't eat the chocolate chip bars."

Technology:
"As long as my Zune has energy, I'll be alright."

From her years as a producer on the morning news:
"I hate it when celebrities die."

"Just because I'm eating ice cream doesn't mean I'm feeling better." (best quote 2001)

On baseball:
"It's going to be an ugly damn season." (best quote 2003)

"No."

"Wait"

"Wait, I have something to say."

On computing:
"I just need to click around a little more without fear."

"I have a laptop connection in my office, but you can't get to it."

"Are those the only sandals you have?"

"I don't have time to listen to the message."

"The question is will I be alright."

"I have a system. I just forgot what it was."

"I was talking to my shoes."

"I’m a little tense, but I’m good, I’m good."

"My pants are a little better. That doesn’t mean my brain is any better."

"It's a G** D*** miracle!" (best quote for 2008)

First flower of the season

2009-02-24T09:26:00.001-08:00

Tolerance

2009-02-24T07:44:00.000-08:00

Recently the Seattle Police Department has implemented a training program to address allegations and perceptions of racial profiling. That's where police take action only because or partly because of a person's race. It's a hot political issue and there there isn't even agreement on the definition, "partly because" or "only because." As a narcotics agent in the 1970s I did racial profiling based on "partly because" definition handed down to me by my superiors. The profiles were written down. But that was then.

The training chosen by the department is called Perspectives on Profiling an interactive computer program funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and produced by Tools for Tolerance, part of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. All SPD employees will take the training which uses actors in scenarios designed by police officers. The action stops so that officers can discuss and critique the action and then make a decision using a remote control. That decision leads to another set of circumstances which then require another decision.

A great idea, right? Not so fast. The Muslim community in Seattle is outraged. Last night I attended a community meeting sponsored by SPD and I learned why.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is building a Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem on the site of an 800-year-old Muslim cemetery called Mamila. Fifty years ago the Israelis built a parking lot on part of the cemetery and this will become the site of the museum. Two points of view about this project are expressed at Haaretz. com and at Wiesenthal.com

The dilemma for Seattle is whether to offend (perhaps too mild a word) the Muslim community by going forward with a training program with ties to the desecration of a cemetery, or to abandon the expenditure of time and money invested in Perspectives. No one has questioned the quality or efficacy of the program which, from my brief viewing, is excellent. Muslim advocates state that there are equivalent products available not connected with the Wiesenthal Center.

What occurs to me is that should Seattle pull the program and go with another, the controversy will end. The Muslim community will have made its point, but the construction of the museum will go forward and the story of Mamila will then be lost along with other accounts of injustices against Palestinians. No one seeing the new program will have a clue about this issue.

What if the program went forward to include an explanation of what the Wiesenthal Center has done in Jerusalem; to show that Tools for Tolerance is connected with an act of intolerance? Why not include information for the trainees showing how they, in Seattle, are still connected with that most tragic of world conflicts?

The News

2009-02-21T08:03:00.000-08:00

In this case the news is of the family variety. My son Matt and his wife Tiffany announced to the family a couple weeks ago that she is expecting a baby next September. Yesterday they got her first sonogram.

The funny thing is that if it's a boy they might name him after his grandfathers David and Richard.

The little boy could be Dick Wilma.

Networking is Here

2009-02-19T16:40:00.000-08:00

The whole idea of online networking has gotten coverage lately. Sites like Facebook and Twitter have created networks of friends, colleagues, classmates, clients, and service providers that people are still trying to get their heads around. I am still comprehending these resources and I'm a pretty savvy user of email and the World Wide Web.

I was first introduced to LinkedIn by colleague Charlie Hamilton, but let the whole idea just sit there. I picked up a few friends and relatives to form a miniscule network. Just recently though I decided to really explore LinkedIn and see if its features might benefit me, a freelance writer and wannabe novelist between gigs. I went to the trouble of completing a profile with my employment history and education and I was able to add this blog and my web site. Then I started surfing around and inviting people. Some people I haven't seen or heard from in fifteen years. You can cross check old jobs and schools to see who else listed them. I found a high school classmate from Sacramento who has worked here in town for 35 years and an attorney I worked with in the 1980s.

Charlie recommended I check out Facebook. I figured this was for middle and high school students. Since I didn't like high school the first time I never even looked at it. I was surprised that it was really quite tame and perhaps another good way to get my name out there. After all, it's not who you know, it's who knows you.

The Solitary Writer - Not!

2009-02-09T10:21:00.000-08:00

Writing is an individual sport, but the writer is not always alone, certainly not this one. I started taking writing classes in 1995. After every quarter, the students usually spun off into critique groups to continue our momentum at the craft. A good part of the classes was critiquing other students' work, not just for the feedback received, but to put each writer to work analyzing other work.

Every group evaporated after about a year, if one started at all. In 1998, I enrolled in a mystery writing class through the UW Extension taught by Northwest mystery writers G.M. "Gerry" Ford and Jo Dereske. (I don't think the mystery classes are offered any longer). I signed up for the mystery series because I had a background in law enforcement. It was natural that I give that genre a try. Jerry and Jo are excellent teachers and I learned a great deal. One product of Wednesday evenings for three quarters was an early draft of my mystery novel Tiny Details. The other was a reliable and long-lasting group of colleagues.

We started with about ten, lost a few writers over the years and picked up one. We are now seven. Everyone has completed one mystery novel and Bob has finished three or four. I finished one mystery and one historical novel, then started a sequel to the first mystery, a new mystery, and a sequel to the historical piece.

Bob's protagonist is a private eye. Brad's is a cashiered research biologist roped into murder over a timber theft scheme. Janet has a freelance writer investigating murder and fraud in the diet industry. Kathy takes us to the world of international wildlife trafficking. Rick's main character is a young, obscenely wealthy retired software entrepreneur investigating a suspicious death and environmental terrorism in the Cascades. Maurice has finished a couple of police procedurals set in the fictional Seattle suburb of Lakeview. Ted's story started with a sumo wrestler stung to death by bees in a porta potty at a local golf course, but Ted is on hiatus with us.

We rotate meeting locations and take turns submitting. The host makes a pot of decaf and serves sweets (Janet's fudge brownies appear in her mystery). We circulate the submissions by email so that we show up with marked up copies and written critiques. Our December meetings are something of a holiday celebration at a local restaurant, combined with critiques.

The process has been immensely helpful in my work and they helped head me off from potentially disastrous turns of plot. And knowing you have to periodically perform keeps us all writing. The comments are all carefully drawn and we have come to trust one another's sense of style. I am still "pre-published", but I am a much better writer because of them.

The Publishing Front

2009-02-04T09:50:00.000-08:00

This blog started as a way to report progress in my efforts to publish my two novels, Down The River, an historical novel, and Tiny Details, a mystery. River has been at a publisher since last spring and the early reports were that the readers liked the book. The acquisitions manager reported back to me that in its present form, they will decline to publish the manuscript.

But, were I to make revisions, she writes, they would like to reconsider it. They enjoyed the characters and they think it is a good story, particularly the way it was set up. This is the only publisher that read the entire manuscript and the comments she made were not unlike those from a literary agent who also read it. The publisher is a university press and they offered to have a class of students read and critique the work. How could I pass up the opportunity to have real readers give real feedback to my story?

I got in touch with the professor and he agreed to show it to his class. But the term has already started and it will have to wait until next quarter. That means that their comments won't be in until June. That will give me a chance to revise it some more before the students get it.

I have mailed out over 100 query letters and sample chapters for Tiny Details and received back everything from nothing, to preprinted regrets cards, to my own letter with a note, to one or two carefully crafted letters. All passed on the work. I did undertake to enter Details in the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Contest. The winner gets a $25,000 publishing contract. I entered River last year and it was actually selected as a semi-finalist. Alas, the version I submitted was before I had an editor go over it and help me with typos, etc., so it was pretty raw. Let's see if Details gets as far.

The news from the publishing industry is not good. Some major houses in New York have laid off staff and stopped taking new submissions at all. And all the money that is spent on advances for celebrity books by Laura Bush, et al., comes out of the pot available for fiction writers like me. It just ain't fair.

So I keep plugging away. I started a sequel to River and a new mystery with another protagonist, but have put these aside to revise 455 pages of plot and scene and dialogue.

The Little Screen

2009-01-29T16:10:00.000-08:00

I have just seen the finished DVD of The Power of Snoqualmie Falls, an hour-long documentary for which I did the research and wrote the starting script. It's beautiful! Puget Sound Energy, the underwriter, will release it this spring. Stay tooned.

As I say, I wrote the starting script and I located many of the historical photos. From that, Director Stephen Sadis adapted it to his needs and wove into the story the narration of local historians, two of whom I recruited to the project. Here is a little movie I made out of clips I shot while doing research. The Sadis DVD is much, much better. Remember, this equipment is as it was installed 110 years ago.

Good Wood

2009-01-28T09:23:00.000-08:00

One of my distractions is the construction of furniture for me, my family, and friends. I have a small-but-respectable wood shop in what would be our garage/basement. My current project is two benches for my sister. These are designed to compliment a dining table I built for her several years ago. Sally moved to a new house with a smaller dining room. Benches make more sense than chairs and they stow out of the way.

I have always enjoyed working with wood and, over the years, I built a diaper changing table, a small stool (still in use), and a couple of train sets (for myself). This was all facilitated by a used radial-arm saw that I got on long-term loan from my dad. He bought it from a laid-off Boeing employee in 1970. When I moved from Seattle in 1983, the saw went back to his house. For more than fifteen years in two states my woodworking was limited to what I could accomplish with a hand-held power saw. My son Matt was better with the saw than I was and he crafted a rather decent set of speaker boxes for his car stereo system.

When I returned to Seattle and took up writing, I needed a table for my office. I reborrowed the radial arm saw and found a set of do-it-yourself plans. I had not a clue as to the relative merits of wood species so this table was a combination of fir, poplar, and pine. No matter, it just had to be functional and fit the space. I took the trouble of fitting it with corbels and slats to match the mission-style computer desk I bought retail. The new table didn’t turn out too badly and I am writing this from that first project.

Next my ambition turned to a stereo cabinet for the living room. From commercial plans I built a cabinet out of oak and oak plywood to match other pieces. Never mind that I didn’t have a proper router to finish the edges or to make rabbets. And never mind that I did the project in a tiny one-car garage.

Imagine my amazement when I had the saw blade sharpened. Cutting wood no longer threw off clouds of smoke and the cuts were nice and free of burns. A sharp blade – what a concept.

A pen pal on the web was in the process of upgrading his woodworking equipment. I scored many tools from him including the key to any good shop, a table saw. Add to that his joiner, his thickness planer, and a chop saw abandoned by our remodeling contractor. I was in business. All my birthday and Christmas wishes included either tools or gift certificates. The big breakthrough came after we remodeled and my tiny garage became a proper-if-low-ceilinged, shop with lights and plentiful electrical outlets.

I made tables and stools and bookcases and things I can’t remember. Outdoors is a garden shed and an arbor. My most consistent client is my sister-in-law who needs specific kinds of cabinetry for her pet boutique and grooming salon. She designs specific pieces that have to go into very tight places and I get to build them and she pays for the lumber. If you are going to have a distraction, find someone to buy you lumber. Naturally the earlier pieces for the store are not as good as later versions.

The shop itself is a showcase of my work. I have a router table, a workshop hutch, a unit on wheels for two tools, and, the centerpiece, a solid-maple workbench. My only limitation now is room in the homes of everyone who has commissioned pieces.

I still have all my fingers although one slip with a chisel did require several stitches.

I am largely self taught with credit to Norm Abrams and The New Yankee Workshop. I bet I have built twenty-five of Norm’s projects. The benches and dining table mentioned above are his. I taped dozens of his programs when they came on at 4 a.m. on cable and I have every one of his books, even the ones out of print.

There are two areas I hope yet to master. One is turning things like table legs on the lathe, and the other is building chairs, particularly Windsor chairs. Chairs are challenging in that all the angles are not 90 degrees (unless you are Frank Lloyd Wright) and they use lots of mortises and tenons that must be very precise. The Windsor chair requires lots of turnings and carvings plus steaming some pieces.

Here is an album of things I have done.

A series I missed the first time around

2009-01-15T08:28:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Netflix I found Over There, a 2005 series produced by Steven Bochco about the war in Iraq. I gave the pilot episode a try and I was hooked. As with all good war dramas we follow an infantry squad --technically a "fire team" I think -- five guys. De rigueur for war dramas we see the hard-bitten good sergeant, the cynical LA black man, the college dropout, the religious marksman, and the Arab American who translates. Add to that two women who drive them around or fix their Humvee, and three of the families back home including a husband. The 21st Century allows for female soldiers, an angry beauty from West Virginia (her ex is in prison) and an Hispanic mechanic pining for her a husband and child.

If you can stand the violence and the language, you will find good Bochco here. The sergeant could be Andy Sipowicz. The characters have room to develop and make their bad decisions, and you care about them. The kid from Compton bonds in an odd way with the one from Cornell. A wife falls into a bottle. A husband is distracted by another war widow. One regular is subtracted from the squad in the first episode when he loses his leg to an IED (in the 60s this was a booby trap). He and his wife take a journey through the Army system and into life after a war. The people are completely engaging and I'm reminded of The Wire or The Shield. I think the writing is exquisite.

I understand that Iraq veterans trashed the series for its accuracy ("you don't take your helmet off!" "You don't pull off to the side of the road!"), but they missed the point. Drama is a story about people in a situation, not a training film. The principle character is war -- insane and cruel, always -- and particularly this war. There is no discussion of policies. Every day is Ground Hog Day, always the same. But the people don't stay the same and I want to be there to see how they turn out. Alas we know how it turns out for them.

Over There lasted one season, 13 episodes, and I can see why. It's very graphic and very intense. American viewers in 2005 probably didn't care to be reminded of the mire they were stuck in. The mournful score contributes to the sense of hopelessness. But there is hope as the characters do the best that they can. Perhaps on the verge of a new administration and some prospect of an end, Over There might find a new following. It's available at Netflix.

Small Victory

2009-01-11T10:43:00.000-08:00

The year end produced some good news, but I didn't learn of it until just the other day. One of my foster kids was adopted by her grandmother after two and a half years in care. The case showed the complexities and glitches in even the most straightforward dependency cases.

N***'s 17-year-old mother was homeless when she gave birth and the biological father was one of two teenagers with gang affiliations. The mom picked one as the dad for the birth certificate. Mom (in dependency cases we always describe adults by their relationship to the child) had been adopted at the age of eight by a professional woman (the grandmother) along with other adopted children. The teen became a truant and runaway and at 16 became pregnant. N*** was born in March 2006.

Because the mom was homeless and the baby was not receiving proper medical care, social workers obtained a pickup order for the mother as a Youth In Need of Services. When they finally got the mom to court, she was ordered to live with a friend. On their way to the friend's house, the mom jumped from the car with the baby and ran off.

Social workers finally picked up baby N*** and placed her with the grandmother whose older adopted children were out of the home. N*** settled in. Mom, still homeless, was ordered by the court into certain services and refused to live with the grandmother. In official parlance Mom had "no fixed address."

In the meantime the social workers did a paternity test on N***. Paternity tests are easy nowadays requiring just a swab of cells from inside the mouth. The results demonstrated that the young man on the birth certificate was not the father. Workers went after the other candidate and when N*** was about a year old he was brought into court (still recovering from a gunshot wound) as a respondant to the dependency. The court ordered him into services that including a drug and alcohol evaluation.

N*** thrived (throve?) in her grandmother's care and even attended the same day care as Mom did.

When baby mama and baby daddy failed to show up for their services the social workers filed a petition to terminate parental rights. Then someone discovered that the wrong dad was on the paperwork. So they had to refile the petition, track down the right dad, bring him to court, and order him into services. That delayed the process some months. By last June, N*** had been in her grandmother's care for two years and grandmother was the only parent she knew. Then the state went to trial to terminate the parental rights of the father who said he wanted to take N*** with him.

That's when I came in. I had to investigate the case, look at the social worker's files, try to contact the dad and other witnesses, interview the grandmother, and write reports. The trial started in July and the dad showed up with his court appointed counsel.

The judge discovered (from my report) that the dad was the subject of an arrest warrant. The judge called the police and two uniforms took the guy out of court in handcuffs. The next day of trial (a week later) he didn't even show up. After testimony, including mine, the judge terminated rights. Of my testimony the assistant attorney general commented, "Awesome." I give good court.

That left N*** legally free and available for adoption. The grandmother applied and was accepted. Then someone noticed that the wrong dad's name was still on the birth certificate so the state had to file a motion to order the name to be changed. The adoption was finalized in December and N*** has a new mom.

For the CASA it was a pretty simple case. All I had to do was gather information on the one parent whose record of compliance was so dismal that the trial was a no brainer. But I had to dress up three different days, drive 25 miles to court, and sit through the formalities.

That frees up my plate for another case and I should get that in a week or two.

The Annual Letter

2008-12-25T10:22:00.000-08:00

I got such good comments about our letter for the holidays I thought I would post it here.

The year 2008 has been a wonderful one for all of us. Our biggest news is that Matt and Tiffany got married in a lovely sunset ceremony in September followed by an even lovelier party – three days of party all told. One nice thing about all the runup and followup events is that we had time to meet their wide and delightful circle of friends. It was like that Bollywood feature Monsoon Wedding without the drama or the henna tattoos. With this event we can pass the responsibility for Matt and Tiff’s news on to them and their annual letters. If I had started these letters when I got married you would have thirty-six of them instead of only a dozen. Given the recent economic news and the value of my older letters you could sell one or two for a mortgage payment. I told you to save them.

Lorraine’s business is better than ever and our plucky media skills trainer improved presentations in Sacramento, New York (again), Toppenish, Walla Walla, and Atlanta, as well as all over the Seattle area. Her book Give Your Elevator Speech A Lift has gone into its second printing and she remains in great demand. But the real news, the stupendous news, is that she cleaned up her office! One weekend she unloaded everything out into the living room and then, like the captain of an overloaded lifeboat, ruthlessly pushed unneeded nicknacks over the side. The tiny stuffed animals, corporate trinkets, and swag bag chachkas slipped under the waves and brave Lorraine saved her ship. [note on January 1, 2009: The cleaning was a cruel ruse. The office is back to its old condition.]

Along with the wedding in Oregon wine country there was Maui, Sun River in eastern Oregon, and New York. Lorraine worked her magic with the Forbes.com contestants before they pitched their business ideas to venture capitalists. While in New York I saw my first Broadway show – Mama Mia – and had to remark that the singers and dancers were all pretty good.

I have a new job. I’m on the Seattle Office of Professional Accountability Review Board. That’s the citizen group that oversees the police department’s internal investigations program and they needed someone with a law enforcement background. We do not sit in judgement of police officers (the chief does that), rather we look at the process, network with the community, and make recommendations. They offered a $400 stipend which I thought was reasonable. Imagine my surprise to learn that wasn’t for the year, but every month. They threw in free parking at City Hall and a week in Cincinnati for a national conference.

While waiting to be discovered as the next breakthrough author I started a couple of new stories, a website, and a blog. Everyone has to have a blog. Take a look at DavidWilma.Blogspot.com. The child advocate job keeps me hopping too. Two kids I represented for five and-a-half years finally got adopted in October. Another kid who was out of the home for five years finally went home, and his brother is soon to follow. I tutored African immigrant kids a bit last spring, mostly in their math. With all the woodworking I have done for more than ten years I have yet to multiply or divide fractions, but they still teach that to immigrants struggling with English. I don’t think the kids noticed the tutors passing around Math for Dummies.

It was a great year for quotes from Lorraine so I started posted the good ones and the other winners on the blog. This year’s winner is: “It’s a G** D*** miracle!”

Everyone have a great holiday season.

More Snow

2008-12-22T09:55:00.000-08:00

It snowed last weekend, Friday morning, Saturday night, and Sunday night. The total accumulation here on the north side of Queen Anne Hill is nine to twelve inches. Things are a mess. Yesterday I dug out my 4WD pickup truck and almost got stuck before I pulled back into my parking place which means we are pretty much snow bound. I will try again today. Other cars are making it up the hill and my truck has good snow tires. It's probably a matter of technique. Here is my neighbor sledding down the hill on Sunday.

From Snow December 2008

Thousands of airline travelers are stacking up at Sea-Tac and some have been stuck there for two or three days. The concessions are running out of food and the airlines have been cancelling flights. Alaska and Horizon cancelled all flights on Sunday.

It's not snowing now and things certainly are pretty. We are due for another storm on Wednesday, Christmas Eve.

12:41 PM.
I got my truck going up the hill, barely, and when I got to more heavily traveled streets it got easier, but would have been silly without snow tires. A tank of gas helped with the traction of my rear tires, but didn't prevent me from spinning out as I turned into my street. I spun wheels until the truck worked its way back into the parking space where it remains.

Snow Day

2008-12-20T09:57:00.000-08:00

It's hard to imagine that forty years ago Seattle endured two significant storms a season without too much difficulty. Indeed there were street closures and hellish commutes, but residents and officials worked through it all. There is so little snow these days that I don't even have a shovel (I left it in Illinois in 1985). My bag of salt, which I found in the basement when I moved in ten years ago is finally gone. The hardware store is sold out.

In last ten years, since I returned to Seattle there have been perhaps two measurable snows (see January 2007) with the ones this week being the biggest.

With the imact on the area you would think the Big One (earthquake) had hit. The major interstates are down to one or two lanes and frequently on- and off-ramps are closed. Schools closed in Seattle yesterday on the threat of snow only no snow fell. The flakes didn't start until about 5 a.m. Friday and continued into early afternoon. I measured at least three inches of white stuff. The hinterlands are much worse off with lower tempertures and deeper drifts. Sunday morning the accumulation was almost seven inches.

Our hill is basically only four-wheel drive only so it's pretty quiet and a great place for the kiddies to try out their sleds and plastic saucers. I discovered a great blog by a meteorologist who has published a book about the weather hearbouts.

If you don't like the weather here in Seattle, wait a while, it will change.

Here is some driving in our neighborhood

Profiles

2008-12-05T09:41:00.000-08:00

On a more serious note I am being drawn into the issue of biased policing as part of my civilian oversight job. (I thought it was a volunteer gig, but they keep paying me.) Last night I listened to a presentation by three members of the community concerned about how racial profiling impacts African Americans (particularly young men), immigrants, and Muslims. We listened to pretty compelling anecdotes about how individuals were being victimized, not for their conduct, but for their race, religion, or civil status.

Immigrants get hit when they enter the criminal justice system at any level. If they don't have legal status, they can be immediately deported since Immigration and Customs Enforcement - ICE - routine sweeps jails for illegals. If a legal immigrant is convicted of a crime he or she can be immediately deported despite their family ties, clean record, or time in this country.

Muslims have suffered since 911 because they are Muslims. Anyone with middle eastern looks taking pictures can be questioned and even arrested. Federal and state investigators who target suspicious Muslims are seen to be doing a good job. The panelist showed an advertisement from a security contractor retained by a local law enforcement agency offering counter terrorism courses. The training included the naming patterns for Arabic and Muslim children, religious practices, and the tenets of Islam. The panelist did not object to cultural awareness training, but not in the context of battling terrorism.

The panelist from the NAACP, who is also a defense attorney, provided several accounts of how his clients were targeted because of race. That racism exists in America and in all its institutions should come as no surprise.

Alas, these issues of immigrants and Muslims fall outside our board since they reflect federal initiatives and policies. We provide oversight to the Seattle PD and its policies and practices. One panelist complimented the Seattle police chief for "getting it" and notifying is officers that religion and physical appearance was not the basis for a criminal investigation. Another complimented the City Council for reconfiguring its professional accountability system of which my board is a part. So despite the concerning accounts of biased policing, Seattle either was not the problem, or was already taking firm steps to improve fairness and accountability.

What about racial profiling?

The Los Angeles PD's civilian oversight made some interesting findings. Out of hundreds of complaints of biased policing only four were sustained and those were because the employees made some sort of biased comments. Without some demonstration of animus there was no way to prove the stop or action was based on race, etc. In Seattle no complaints of biased policing have been sustained and no employee was the subject of a bias complaint more than once.

LAPD decided that to guarantee fair policing it made more sense to focus on the constitutional basis for the stop or the arrest instead of pursuing prejudice. The police just can't stop anyone, handcuff them, and seat them on the curb without some reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or hard evidence of a crime. So if a motorist suffers from issues of "rear license plate illumination" the traffic stop should be limited to investigating that infraction. Naturally if the officer sees something else amiss he or she should pursue it, but a bad bulb should not, by itself, take forty-five minutes to resolve.

So one of the issues our board will address is the perception that biased policing – racial profiling – is a problem. As for the feds, change is coming. Isn't it?

What are you reading?

2008-11-30T11:12:00.000-08:00

I'm the kind of reader who fixes on an author and then tracks down everything written by him. Usually it's a him. I snap up everything by Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park, Red Star) and Bernard Cornwell (Sharpe's Eagle) and even discovered Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose) after he died. When I go to a bookstore I will often go to the fiction section and scan the author's alphabetically for familiar and favorite names.

Currently I'm in the Ivan Doig (Ride With Me Mariah Montana, Dancing at the Rascal Fair) fan club and I'm almost out of books to read. Doig lives in Seattle, but grew up in Montana in the 1940s and 1950s where his father was a ranch hand and sheep rancher. One afternoon as a teen ager, while helping his father and grandmother save two thousand sheep from themselves ahead of a sudden rainstorm, Doig came to the realization that days of endless work for little money was not for him. He went off to college and then grad school at the University of Washington. In 1968, he was my teaching assistant for Washington State History, but that's not why I like his writing.

Doig invented a fictitous community of Scot immigrants who homesteaded the prairie in the 1890s and most of his books follow the members and their descendants through the 1980s. Besides being very entertaining tales of the West and how people are the same no matter what their environment or era, his stories really speak to me.

My grandparents and great grandparents homesteaded Montana some distance east of Doig's Two Medicine country, but the experience was the same. (That's my grandmother with my two uncles in front of the sod house in about 1919.) Frank and Elsie laid claim to some land on the Milk river in hopes of finding a measure of prosperity and freedom only to learn that the measure of prosperity was very small and the measure of work very large. Within a year of that photo the Wilmas proved up their claim and sold out to move further west to Washington. Most of the other homesteaders of the 1910s moved on as well having been lured to Montana by stories of bumper crops of vegetables. Only the 1910s were unusually wet and then the rains stopped. Doig tells the story of my grandparents.

A frequent description is of the abandoned homestead, silent testimony to some family's admission that Montana was not for everyone.But Doig doesn't stop speaking to me there. He also writes about working and growing up on the farm, or the ranch, or just "the place." That was my dad's life for more than ten years and although we did not live on a place, I was privileged to witness him wrestle with dim-minded sheep, nut and brand cattle, tractor a field with a D-4 Cat, and to listen to him jaw with other farmers about low prices, high water, scissorbills, and yay-hoos. In one particularly memorable (for me) scene, Doig's camp tender (the guy who rode up into the mountains to take summer sheepherders their weekly supplies) used a fork to cook a flawless fried egg over a campfire in a cast-iron skillet. My dad could do that.

So, I am reading Ivan Doig, slowly, carefully. When I finish this book I will have just one more, then I will have to start over or find a new favorite author.

The Big Apple

2008-11-10T10:08:00.000-08:00

Every year, two so far, Lorraine joins the staff at Forbes.com in welcoming contestants for the Boost Your Business award of $100,000. Entrepreneurs compete online and in person to convince venture capitalists that they would make the best use of the award. Lorraine's job is to work with each of the five finalists the day before to polish up their pitches. I get to tag along to offer my perspective and to help her enjoy a few days in New York. If you watch the video you will see our cameos. Look at the end for some glowing words about Lorraine. You can also look at each of the contestants' pitches and even vote for your favorite. I thought the Honey Wear people had the best pitch.

We went a few days early and found ourselves in the middle of the annual New York City Columbus Day Parade complete with marching cops and firemen, musical floats, politicians, and high school drum and bugle units. Not just New Yorkers participate. There were police officers and sailors from Italy. and lots of Italian cops from New Jersey. One county even sent its jury transport bus to be in the parade (in New Jersey jury security is very important and they are proud of their measures). We were at the very beginning of the parade so we got to see the various parade personalities in their ceremonial sashes interact. Here is my slide show of the parade, or at least the beginning. I got a kick out of the fact that even the sanitation workers have a dress uniform, green of course.

The hilarious thing about the Columbus Day Parade is that despite the fact that it is in The Big Apple, there is a decided small town feel to the floats and the marching units. Even the Teachers of Italian have an entry. I spotted one news crew doing its location standup in Italian, obviously for an audience in Italy.

I got to see my first Broadway show, the musical Mama Mia. I remarked to myself that these singers and dancers were pretty good, but wait, this is Broadway! I thoroughly enjoyed the experience although I have yet to go buy any Abba albums. To demonstrate the crossroads of the world that New York is, the couple next to us was French, the people behind us were Italian, the ones in front were German, and the ones in front of them were Swedish.

To show how New York has improved over its reputation we walked back to our apartment from the theater. The streets were well lit and we felt entirely safe. We stayed in a condo on 10th Avenue in the neighborhood once known as Hell's Kitchen. We rented the condo by the night from a connection Lorraine has.

Oversight

2008-11-05T15:31:00.000-08:00

July 14, 2008
I was recently nominated to be a member of the Seattle Police Department Office of Professional Accountability Review Board. This is a seven member panel of citizens which oversees the office that investigates allegations of police misconduct and the discipline system. (That's me, lower right, at the police academy in 1970, not the new board.) This is actually the second iteration of this board which, for seven years, consisted of three members. Complaints about the structure and authority of the oversight system led to two different evaluation committees in 2007. The new setup was signed off by the mayor and the police officers guild, and now the city council will enact legislation to implement the changes. One change is expanding the board from three to seven members.

I had seen in the newspaper that the city was looking for people with a law enforcement background. That was me. And I needed a new intellectual challenge. This seems to be a good fit. Of course there will be meetings, lots of them.

We won't be reviewing individual investigations, but will be monitoring the whole process, conducting community outreach, and keeping up with other developments in the field of police accountability.

August 12, 2008
The City Council confirmed my appointment last night. Here is my testimony before the Public Safety Committee of the Seattle City Council a week ago.

November 1, 2008
The review board job is slow to get off the ground. We have had just one meeting and most of it was taken up with training on how to conduct meetings, how not to have meetings (too many emails can be a meeting), how to preserve records, and how to talk to the press (try not to). With seven accomplished and busy people, just finding times when we can all meet proved the biggest challenge. We want to have two meetings a month, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, to allow for public participation. When we finally came up with one good date, I will be out of town. But I pledged to call it in (which we can do) from Oregon.

The other aspect of the job has been training. I participated in sessions for the officers who staff the internal investigations section, for lawyers wanting to help mediate complaints, and, every Thursday evening, the community police academy.

On top of all that the city council sent me to Cincinnati for five days for the National Association of Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement conference. Folks from all over the nation and several foreign countries gathered to share information on structure, trends, problems, and accomplishments. Being so new to the job I had little to offer.

But I learned many things including the unique issues of domestic violence by police officers (far greater than with the general population), the tightening standards for officer dishonesty, and the extent to which civilian oversight bodies have reduced the number and types of complaints.

One thing that gets a lot of play in the press is racial profiling, the idea of targeting police services based on race. When I was a DEA agent in the 1970s we did racial profiling as we looked for drug couriers at the airport. The process was even written down. In the 21st Century this is frowned upon (profiling, not writing things down).

The problem is that, absent some spoken slur, it is nearly impossible to demonstrate a racial element in police interactions with the public. In hundreds of racial profiling complaints against the LAPD perhaps three could be tagged as having a racist element.

Instead, the presenters said, we should be looking at the constitutionality of the stops themselves. If an officer stops a SUV with heavily tinted windows at night in a high crime area for a tail light infraction, why did the occupants spend half an hour seated on the curb in handcuffs? Some issues just require a new approach and, of course, more training.

Dead Relatives

2008-11-02T12:37:00.000-08:00

I have always been interested in history and in the history of my family. My maternal grandmother, Pebble Flood, commissioned some family history research in the 1920s to support her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. That research floated around the family for seventy or eighty years. In about 1990, my father's older brother wrote an autobiography which included some interesting tidbits about the Wilmas and the Dorns.

With this information to build on I started compiling a family tree. I read books and took classes and was fortunate enough to live in San Francisco where there were a couple of excellent genealogy libraries. The personal computer helped in keeping track of it all as I collected over three thousand names and relationships. I even added research on my wife's family, mostly Irish from New York and San Francisco. I discovered that Lorraine's Irish grandmother was born Jewish.

After a couple of years reading, taking notes, and lots of postage (no email then) I managed to put together a pretty reliable family history back as far as Rollo, the Norse raider who set himself up as the Duke of Normandy. One of his descendants conquered England. I posted all this on the web and it attracts inquiries from distant cousins, some of whom can add to the story.

Adoption Day

2008-11-01T15:46:00.000-07:00

At the King County Courthouse most of the product is heartbreak. People come there to be convicted and sentenced and to sue and be sued. Even the winners leave having paid a great cost for the chance of justice. Plaintiffs, defendants, jurors, and witnesses queue up at the screening tables all wishing they were somewhere else. Lawyers carrying thick file folders wear their officious faces and speak with contrived authority. Courthouse workers greet each other and speak of weekends and food oblivious to the pain around them.

The idea of making new families is completely out of character there. The tiny courtroom sits on the third floor with a view of Third Avenue and the Pioneer Square area. A glass wall separates it from a waiting area where happy, nervous people and fidgety babies and children laugh and chat. One at a time the families file into the courtroom while the people in the waiting room watch through the glass hoping to learn something of what would happen to them. A chalkboard next to the window helps distract the kids as they wait for their case to be called.

Robbie and Meranda's prospective mom and dad had lost out on adopting another child before and they were pretty nervous that this adoption might not go through. Every phone call and voice mail message threatened disaster and sadness, but all the news was good and 9:00 a.m. finally rolled around.. A couple of aunts were there (when we describe relatives, we always use their relationship with the children) along with the family minister. With me and the social worker we are quite a crowd. Meranda wore a nice maroon velvet jumper and Robbie's necktie might have looked better with another shirt, but he was more than presentable.

Then our case is called we file into the courtroom where a white haired judge greets everyone. One aunt lines up behind the judge to catch a video of the proceedings.The lawyer hired by the parents announces his business and the judge asks for everyone to introduce themselves, even us spectators. I rise and state, "I am the children's CASA. I have been with them five-and-a-half years." The judge also asks the kids if they are good with being adopted and they both nod. He even asks them their new name which they manage to recite.

After pronouncing the children adopted, the judge invites the parties around to his side of the bench where everyone poses for snapshots. Within a total of about seven minutes the process is done and we relinquish the court to a couple carrying an infant and more happy relatives.

The new mom fights back tears as do I. I have represented these kids since Meranda was an infant and so neglected she could not hold up her head. They experienced three other prospective sets of parents until Tom and Janet were able to come through and the best home for them. Amazingly enough the kids do not exhibit any special needs and have every prospect for a normal happy life ahead of them.

My job being done, I gave Meranda and her mom hugs and went about my day.

I have one other case that has lasted nearly as long as Robbie and Meranda's, but that one is steering towards a return home, another happy ending.

Journeys

2008-11-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

Click here to see how Lorraine and I spend our vacations.

Click to see our albums of Normandy, Brittany, and Paris.

The shot at the right is us, off our bicycles, near Mt. St. Michelle in Brittany in 2006. This old monestary is the number one tourist destination in France, maybe Europe. What you don't see is the wind that comes up from the English Channel every afternoon.

In 2007 we cycled through Southern Vermont. What you might see are the many hills. We also spent time in Burlington.

Advocating for Children

2008-11-01T12:55:00.000-07:00

May 7, 2008

I have a volunteer job that is some job. I am a Court Appointed Special Advocate sometimes called Guardian ad litem or just CASA in the King County Superior Court Juvenile Division. It is my role to investigate, report, monitor, and advocate in cases where kids are removed from the home for neglect and abuse and then report to the court on what is happening and what should be done. The kids have social workers, but the workers' job is to comply with state and federal law and departmental policies and procedures while still trying to restore families. And note that I say social workers. Any case going longer than two years (I have two cases five years old) the kids can get two or three workers. More on The System another time.

I had to go through an application process, provide references, be interviewed, undergo a background check, take twenty-four hours of training (plus twelve more hours every year). All that does is teach you what you don't know.

Then you make a choice from among dozens and dozens of gut-wrenching cases involving drugs, alcohol, insanity, and just plain criminal behavior. I have a leg up on most of the other volunteers. I have a background in investigations so reading reports and case files and interviewing witnesses was a snap. And I have a pretty good ability to keep emotions out of the situation.

What I wasn't prepared for was the mystifying array of social services that come into play when children become dependent. There are psychological evaluations, educational evaluations, drug and alcohol evaluations, domestic violence evaluations, and others I don't remember. And these evaluations trigger services with acronyms like PCIT and TF-CBT. The people who come up with these concepts must be really smart.

The CASA's job is to look over the shoulder of the social workers and their department and see that the kids are getting everything they need. The squeaky wheel does get the grease and CASAs help keep kids from slipping through cracks and help kids stuck in cracks. For it's a big dumb system. I could tell you stories and you probably read about some of them when, tragically, a child dies. In those cases the kids either don't have CASAs or the CASA program is so small as to be ineffective. The latter is the case in most small jurisdictions. Better no advocate than one not doing a good job.

Most dependent children are not in foster homes. Dependent just means they are under state supervision and their parents are ordered by a court to undergo certain services like drug and alcohol treatment. If kids are actually taken out of a home the first stop is usually a relative. Most of my cases have involved a relative placement. Or they are dependent in-home. Only when there are no relatives do kids go to licensed care.

And some kids have problems so profound that an institutional setting is needed. The stories of kids being bounced among foster homes are horrific, but they don't speak of how the child assaulted other children or tried to burn the house down.

Clout

What still amazes me after six years as a CASA is the extent to which I can actually influence the outcome in court. Chalk it all up to persistence. Let me set the stage.

Child dependency cases are heard by commissioners, lawyers appointed by the elected judges to handle these kind of routine matters. In many cases the commissioners come out of the ranks of family law practitioners so they have a leg up on the business. Not only do they know the language of social workers and child protection law, but they know the types of people that routinely end up in dependency court. So imagine a judge's bench and the concurrent clerks and courtroom specialists who keep the paper moving only there is one bench for spectators. It's really for the overflow of parties to the case.

Instead of one table for one side and one table for the other there are three tables; one for the State people, one for the parents and their lawyers, and, in the middle, one for the CASA and his lawyer. (Actually most CASAs are women, but this CASA is a man and this is his blog.) So right off the bat this volunteer is given equal status with the other "parties." These cases used to be closed so the courtrooms have little in the way of spectator seating; just chairs or benches along the back wall.

As the cases drag on it is usually only the CASA who can provide any sense of continuity. New social workers and Assistant Attorneys General get assigned, and the public defenders juggle so many cases they have substitutes as often as not. After about a year – most cases go years – the CASA is the only one with any institutional knowledge. It may come as a surprise that this civilian volunteer has all the information that the people who are paid to be there need. I have slipped notes of correction to the AAG who has no clue who these kids are and who is sitting next to a substitute social worker.

6/4/08
The Last Visit

The other evening I visited R and M who I have represented for over five years. M was about six months old then and was "delayed," a child development term meaning she wasn't growing well. She couldn't even hold up her head. Through the inspired help of the staff at Childhaven she got back on track. They are now seven and five.

But through a number of missteps by The System, some unavoidable, the kids did not find permanency until just a few months ago. They moved in with a lovely couple who just wanted to be caring parents. The case is approaching the point where R and M will be adopted which will conclude my involvement with them. A hearing is coming up so I needed to file a report and for that I needed to see how they were doing.

Monday afternoon was lovely and the kids were playing on the front porch. They greeted me with "Hi, Dave" and rushed to show me their bicycles (R just got the training wheels off) and the storage shed their new dad was building for them. The shed is not just for storage. It will include a playhouse in the upper story. M wanted to show me the lovely flowers, but only if I was unafraid of bees. I assured her I was fine.

The judges like to have photos of the kids to go with the reports so I brought along my digital camera. I posed with each of them while the other took some pictures.

Naturally, I visited with the prospective adoptive parents and got a good picture of how they are doing. Both R and M wanted to show me all the family snapshots of the great adventures they had had such as a Pacific beach, motocross races, and just a trip to the park.

The next step for them is adoption and then I will be out of the picture.

6/9/08
Indian Cases

Probably the most complex kinds of cases we see in dependencies are those involving Indian children. Before about thirty years ago, Indian children were commonly adopted off the reservation to non-Indian families. Naturally the tribes took issue with this latest depredation by the United States of their identity and culture.

Congress passed a law which gave the tribes the last word in handling any Indian child who goes into dependency — foster care. A tribe can get involved in the case in almost any way they want, from taking the case entirely away from the state court, to helping, to doing nothing. And if an Indian child is to be adopted, the tribe has final say on where the child goes. Some children have found homes in non-Indian families only to have the tribe come along later and say, no, we want the child with us. The child has no say in the matter other than through an advocate — me.

So the trick in these cases is to find out if a kid is an Indian. Easy to say. There are more than five hundred tribes recognized by the U.S. Government and many more not recognized. There are Canadian first nations which have cultural and political relationships with U.S. tribes and can lay a claim to a child and Native Alaskan community. If someone says the kid has Indian heritage, we have to write letters to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and to all the possible tribes and ask if he or she is one of theirs. Some tribes write back and some don't.

Even if we don't hear back from tribes, they can still come into the case and undo everything that has been done. So it is critical to engage these tribes early, if we can.

Some tribes are large with sophisticated governments and large, profitable casinos generating cash to benefit the members. Other tribes are very informal with the barest of structure, very poor, and might only have a post office box for contact. The hardest situations is where a tribe is made up of idividual bands and each band has rights under the law.

I am fortunate with the one Indian case I've had. The kid was clearly a member and the tribe had a large casino (getting bigger) along an interstate. They have a lawyer who attends all proceedings and they have money they shower on services for the kid. Or just shower him with money. But with the growth of Indian gaming some of the tribes are now more reluctant to extend membership to someone with tenuous ties to the reservation.

Summer Solstice 2008

2008-06-30T10:41:00.000-07:00

Here in Seattle is the neighborhood of Fremont, "The Center of the Universe." In addition to a colorful bridge across the Lake Washington Ship Canal Fremont has an nuclear missile and a statue of Lenin, both obtained surplus after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At one time Fremont was something of a funky artists' colony, but gentrification sent them packing for more reasonable rental markets. It was during the funky years that they started celebrating the Summer Solstice, something suitably non-traditional. The event became formalized by the neighborhood association.

The parade prohibits motors, animals, and signs. Everything else is a go. Naturally someone thought they would march nude and it caught on. Ten years ago there were maybe a dozen men and women who painted themselves up like Celtic warriors and rode their bikes along the parade route. This year there must have been a couple of hundred.

Here is my photo record.

Marketing a Mystery

2008-06-04T10:42:00.000-07:00

I have just completed entering the edits on my other book Tiny Details, a mystery. This is the first book I wrote and I tried to sell it in 2000 without success. After eight more years of experience I dusted it off, revised it, and sent it off to my editor who offered several thousand corrections. Now it's ready for prime time.

I will do as before, assembling lists of publishers and agents and sending off query letters and sample chapters. The mystery market is very different than the historical fiction market so perhaps it will catch an influential eye and find a place in the publishing world. I mail off the first query letters to publishers. I approach publishers first since they pay royalties directly to the author.

A literary agent, the only avenue to the large houses, takes a fifteen percent commission. That's a standard and probably fair share, but it does come out of my end. So the small publishers get first crack. Down The River, is still under review at one publisher who thought enough of the first fifty pages to ask for the whole manuscript. One agent in New York who I had not heard from in months and months wrote back today that she liked the story, but had some reservations and declined. It was the most thoughtful reply I have ever had from an agent or a publisher. At least she read it and for the most part, she liked it. I sent her a thank you email.

Writing

2008-05-02T12:50:00.000-07:00

Getting Published - Now and Then 05/02/2008
I have written two works of fiction and I am actively trying to get one, Down The River, published. The process of getting published has changed dramatically over the past five or ten years. At one time a novelist pounded away at a typewriter (or prevailed upon a skilled typist) until he or she had a manuscript. The process of creation and revision entailed laborious finger and mind work until the likes of John Updike or Kurt Vonnegut had several hundred pages of masterful prose in typescript. Tom Wolfe has his signature IBM Selectric (if you don't know what that is, don't ask). The number of submissions to publishers and literary agents was physically limited by the endurance of writers and the availability of typists. A manuscript was singular as in one original and perhaps one copy (Assuming the use of carbon paper – if you don't know what that is, don't ask.) Photo copiers came into wide use in the 1970s making the idea of an original rather quaint.

Enter the digital revolution, desktop computers, and the word processer. Even in the days of the 8086 microprocessor (if you don't know what that is, don't ask), the desktop computer with one or two floppy drives soon became a credible and efficient way to transcend the barrier of the skilled typist, muscle- or power-driven keys, a dancing type element, ribbon, and eraser or correction fluid. The writer could create, type (more accurately keyboard, now a verb), edit, and produce a clean printed copy in a fraction of the time and trouble as with a typewriter. The writer didn't even have to know how to type because mistakes dissolved under the backspace and delete keys. The programs automated carriage return, paragraphs. margins, page numbers, footnotes, and even centered titles. Everyman and Everywoman became a potential blockbuster novelist.

The digital revolution not only changed writing habits, but it changed reading habits. Books, magazines, and newspapers encountered more competition as the number of television channels grew exponentially from four or five to four or five hundred. Magazine subscriptions lapsed, articles became shorter to accommodate busier days, and publications even disappeared. The short story as a commercial product neared extinction. The number of writers increased as evidenced by the proliferation of writing schools. Fifty years ago there were two writing schools in the U.S. In the 1990s there were more than two thousand.

Book publishers and book sellers consolidated to make publishing (really printing) more efficient. The publishers slashed their lists and even established writers found themselves swimming upstream in a crowded marketplace. The bad news was that even if you were a good writer you might not get published. But the good news was that even if you weren’t a good writer, you could get published.

Prospecting 05/05/2008
Numbering among thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of aspiring novelists I have a manuscript. Now I want to get it published.

The most direct route would be to seem to send the book to publishers and wait for a reply. Or perhaps send the book to a literary agent who will use his or her liquid luncheon dates to extract a great contract and a hefty advance – less his or her fifteen percent. It’s just a function of printing and postage, right? Wrong.

First of all, the biggest publishers will not talk to, read letters sent by, or open emails from authors. And they certainly do not answer the telephone. This traffic is called “over the transom” referring to the old-fashioned ventilation window over an office door. Manuscripts were too large to fit in the mail slot so the letter carrier just threw it over the open transom to crash to the floor inside. Over the tramsome. Small publishing houses will talk to authors, but these are publishing HOUSES, as in single-family residences with an attached garage full of unsold books. I overstate, but small houses do only a few titles a year. That leaves literary agents.

The good news is that agents, and even publishers, want to meet good writers and they offer their names to books of listings that writers pay to read. The most popular one is the Writer’s Market, a thick, $50 book with thousands of book, magazine, and other publishers, and literary agents. And it has a current how-to guide for placing your book or article, writing compelling letters, and even formatting a manuscript. Even better, there is an online version included in the purchase of the book that is updated daily. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that there are tens of thousands of wannabe Stephen Kings out there simply inundating agents and publishers with proposals and sample chapters. With modern word processing technology the task of preparing and mailing manuscripts and information becomes easier for the writer, but harder for the reader.

I have been doing everything I am supposed to, reading the listings, finding companies and agencies that handle what I have written (historical fiction and maybe literary fiction), and sending them letters. Sometimes the agent or publisher wants something on one page. A few want sample chapters, or a synopsis, or an author biography.

To date I have sent out 128 queries. About 10 wrote back for sample chapters or even the full manuscript (by email). I call those “nibbles.” Of those 10, one is still considering the sample chapters. All the rest either sent back form letter replies – “Dear Author. We have carefully reviewed…” – or did not respond at all. My compliments to agencies that at least have a mechanism for acknowledging the query.

I am down to about half a dozen agencies left to contact so I save this list for Friday mornings. That’s when I select two or three to send queries to. Then it’s a case of just watching the mail.

On Writing 5-6-2008
Having just related the still-unfinished journey of an author I realized that I left something out. Why? Not why I left it out. Why write? Writing should not about making money, although for many it is a living and none of us will say no to a handsome royalty check. Alas, focusing on the money will undoubtedly lead to disappointment. Writing should be about telling the story that you have inside. Getting published is one indication that the story is a good one and commercial support is a good endorsement. But telling the story is the important part.