Hail to Halloween

This column was published in the Herald the day before Halloween 2007.

When I was a boy, I took Halloween seriously.

My mom recalls that just after my eighth birthday during the first week of October, she reminded me to write thank-you notes for the gifts I received.

“I will,” I promised.

But two weeks later I hadn't written the notes, so she asked me about it.

“Oh Mom,” I said, “how can I write thank-you notes when I’m so busy planning my Halloween costume?”

What I loved about Halloween was the permission to become someone else, to try on different personalities, to dream outside my limitations and assume the profile of a monster, a hunchback, a president.

The year I dressed as Lincoln, I tried out my costume before Halloween by standing on a corner at the end of our block. With a top hat made from black construction paper, I wore my dad’s dark coat and an eye-pencil beard, and I waved to motorists who, after doing a double-take at a pint-sized Abe, waved back.

As a mummy, I wrapped myself in torn sheets, then walked stiff-legged into my sister’s room to conduct a pre-Halloween fright test.

My Frankenstein success one year led to my Dracula triumph the next. My inspiration came from Boris Karloff movies and a stack of monster magazines I adored.

Through it all I discovered my love of drama and illusion. I learned to be resourceful, to use elements of my costumes from one year to the next. And I learned that although I loved playing a selected role in the evening theater of Halloween, I was always content to wake up the next day as myself.

And by the way, not once—as I read some years ago in a letter to the editor—did the earliest origins of Halloween send a satanic spirit to whisper into my ear.

In fact, the first time I read my own words in a daily newspaper was two decades ago when I wrote a letter respectfully disagreeing with a woman who’d written to say that Halloween should be abolished because it encourages the devil and pagan rites.

What’s often overlooked is that in the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 as All Saints' Day to honor Christian saints and martyrs and to replace the pagan harvest celebrations. This celebration was preceded by an evening of bonfires, parades, and dressing up as saints, angels, and, yes, devils.

So our modern day Halloween is derived from an evening grounded as much in Christian celebration as in pagan ritual. For youngsters, such discussion is just grown-ups overanalyzing a fun evening.

And fun is what the children from Dublin’s Happy Talkers and School of Imagination will be having this Halloween when they don their costumes and join Dublin city staff at city hall.

“Mayor Janet Lockhart has arranged for her staff to celebrate Halloween with our children,” said Mitch Sigman, who with his wife Charlene and a team of speech pathologists, teachers, and therapists provides care for youngsters with mental, physical and developmental disabilities. “With city hall decked out for the celebration and the staff in costumes, our children will trick or treat together.”

This is what Halloween is all about—the fun and freedom of stepping beyond our limitations, of gathering and sharing candy with friends, and of becoming anyone we dream to be.

Terror in a Russian Cornfield

This column appeared in the Herald in October 2007.

When Marina Strong moved to the Tri-Valley from Russia ten years ago, she couldn’t understand a certain habit of Americans.

“Everyone was always smiling,” said Strong, her accent and blue eyes reflecting her Russian heritage. “I wasn’t used to this. It’s not that we weren’t happy in Russia. We were. Eventually I came to enjoy the smiles of Americans.”

Strong, who lives in Pleasanton with her American husband and son, recently reminisced about growing up in a beautiful region of Moscow. Among her memories is a visit from Fidel Castro to her elementary school , and the fear she shared with fellow students that Ronald Reagan might start a nuclear war.

“We made posters at school begging Mr. Reagan not to push the button,” she said. “We were all afraid.”

Another memory—one she will never forget—involves an evening when Strong was 12. She and her friends, Galina and Angelica, got up the courage to ride their bikes to secretly harvest a few ears of corn from a field just behind a forest, near the Moscow River, a place forbidden to young girls.

“Boys went there all the time,” Strong said. “So we three, we gallant three, decided to go.”
It was the last day of a summer vacation spent flying kites and riding bikes.

“That summer we three were the whole world,” she said. “We were the three princesses in The Firebird, the three who battled the witch Baba Yaga, the Troika.”

Strong described her friend Galina as “a smart and brutally honest preteen, tall with a boyish haircut and hot temper who liked to argue about little things.”

Angelica was “a romantic girl with wavy black hair and blue eyes who made the boys quiet when she walked into a room.”

And Strong? She was “the glue that held our trio together whenever misunderstanding or jealousy lurked,” she said.


The cornfield was large and the stalks were high, with a grassy-fresh smell. The corn was irregular, grown as cattle feed, so the girls would have to search for the larger, ripe ears.

They left their bikes near the road and moved deeper into the field, chatting nervously.

“I remember asking Angelica if she’d gotten a call from an older boy we’d recently met from Denmark who was going to start at our school the next day,” Strong said. “He had bubblegum—which was rare in Russia—and all girls were already dreaming about him.”

Galina was suspicious that the boy’s gum was just a lure, and told Angelica he was just leading her on.

Angelica disagreed, saying he was kind and tall, wore knit shirts, and was not rude like other boys.

“I remember dusk had fallen and I was dreaming about that handsome boy,” said Strong, “wondering why he hadn’t thought of me when, suddenly, a scream broke my fantasy.” She looked to see Galina’s hand pointing, her mouth open, the color leaving her face.

It was a body, and the girls could see his boots in the dirt.

“We gave a quick look at each other, then at the boots,” Strong said. “They were black and dirty, in an odd position.”

Without speaking, the girls knew he'd been dead for days. They dropped the corn, forgot about their bikes, and ran.

Strong’s thoughts raced along with her legs. “I thought he must have been killed for stealing the corn. It was a prohibited place, and I thought if I survived this, I’d be grounded forever.”

When she got home, she said nothing to her parents and couldn’t sleep that night. The next day, Strong met her friends at recess.

“We secretly discussed the murder scene,” she said, “and whether to notify the police.”

The girls decided to go back, and if the bikes were gone, they’d report the stolen bikes and the dead body. If they found the bikes, they'd then decide what to do next.

“After school, we took a bus to the field,” Strong said. “It was quiet. The bikes were where we left them. But what about the body?”

Strong and her friends wanted to do the right thing, to be brave, so they began to search. But they couldn’t remember where the body was. So they searched all afternoon.

“And then we saw them,” she said. “The old black boots.” But the boots were not in the dirt. They were on a full-grown man, weightless, hovering a few inches from the ground.

“We started to laugh,” said Strong, her face breaking into one of those smiles she now enjoys. “The man was just a scarecrow.”

Catching up with Hammett

This column appeared in the Herald on October 2.

Let’s try something fun in my column today.

My wife and I recently read, and enjoyed, “The Maltese Falcon,” Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled detective novel published in 1930. Many people are reading the book thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Called “The Big Read,” this national initiative is designed to restore reading to the center of America culture.

So to have a little fun as I share what I’ve learned about the author and his work, I’m writing the rest of this column in the black and white prose style of Hammett. Here we go:

I stepped through the door into the television studio. The lights glared as TV30’s able cameraman adjusted chairs on the set.

Suddenly, stepping from a shadow in the corner, there she was: a brunette in lipstick and heels. She held a thumbed over copy of Hammett’s book.

“Hello Jim,” she said, removing her glasses. “Ready to tape another show?”

“Sure,” I said, holding up my own copy of Hammett’s masterpiece.

She was Kathy Cordova, a woman who’d seen the inside of scores of books and interviewed dozens of authors on “In A Word,” the show we host together on Tri-Valley Community Television Channel 30.

This day, as long as the cops didn’t bust down the doors, we’d be discussing “The Maltese Falcon.” Joining us were two guests: Mark Coggins, a Hammett expert and detective fiction writer; and Hailey Lind, author of “Brush with Death.”

Sure, I learned a lot about Hammett that day, and you’d be smart to tune in to watch the show. But

I’ve learned even more since then. Here’s just a taste:

Hammett was born on a farm in Maryland in 1894. He quit school at 14 to go to work. In 1915, he was hired on at Pinkerton’s National Detective Service, where the whittled-down prose of the reports he wrote foreshadowed his later fiction.

In 1918, he did what most all-American boys did and joined the army to fight the war to end all wars. But he never got overseas. Instead he drove an ambulance at Camp Mead, Maryland. He was discharged honorably due to a bout with tuberculosis.

After moving to Frisco in 1921, he started penning short stories at the public library. He sent one to H.L. Mencken. Sure enough, it was published, and as they say, a writer was born.

“The Maltese Falcon,” in 1930, was Hammett’s second novel.

While Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot preceded Sam Spade, Hammett gets the credit for transforming the well-mannered detective story for American audiences.

In Hammett’s hands, the detective story took on an urban toughness, uttered through a prose style of slang and grit and realism. The motivations of a detective like Spade are often questionable, since his choices seem at once both selfish and altruistic.

Hammett’s 80 short stories and five novels are part of the fabric of American literature and culture. Every novel has been made into a movie. The most famous, of course, is John Huston’s 1941 “The Maltese Falcon” starring Humphrey Bogart, the film most credited with launching the Film Noir era in Hollywood.

Now, before I pull this page from my typewriter, toss it onto my editor’s desk, and walk off into the evening in search of another column idea, I want to illuminate for you knowledge-starved readers what I learned about the term “hardboiled detective.” Popularized by that great newspaperman Damon Runyon, a detective is hardboiled when he—or she—is fundamentally a good egg, but hard on the outside.

Who knew?

For information about the many events taking place in October to commemorate “The Big Read,” visit the Pleasanton Library www.ci.pleasanton.ca.us, or drop by Towne Center Books in Pleasanton. For TV listings of “In a Word” on Comcast or via webcast, visit www.tv30.org.

Local pilot looks back at 9-11

This column was published in early September 2007 in the Tri-Valley Herald.

Six years ago on September 11, 2001, after the Twin Towers had been destroyed, after our nation’s skies had been cleared of all air traffic, Bob Tucknott skirted the main entrance of the Hayward airport and drove a little known route onto the airfield to get to his plane.

“I was immediately run down by a security guard,” Tucknott said. “I explained the situation and told him to call the tower.”

Authorized to use any runway, Tucknott lifted off from Hayward for a short flight to Oakland. From there, he flew with his daughter, Renee, on a special mission to San Diego.

“I’d gotten a call from the director of the Alameda/Contra Costa County blood bank,” said Tucknott, who reminisced recently about his unique experience on September 11. “The director asked me to fly blood samples to San Diego by 11 p.m. that night. The samples were from a large supply of blood waiting to be shipped on a C-5 cargo transport from Travis Air Force to 9-11 survivors in New York and Washington D.C.”

A volunteer with Angel Flight West, which arranges free air transportation on private aircraft in response to health care and other compelling human needs, Tucknott received the call at 3 p.m. and got busy trying to obtain flight clearance. It took him three hours, but he finally got through to the head of the FAA.

“I was given a discrete squawk code that was given to the air traffic controllers from Hayward to San Diego,” he said. Tucknott also called the various controlling agencies to let them know the type of plane he was flying and the nature of his cargo.

“What an eerie flight that was,” he said. “As we flew that evening, there was complete silence on the airways. We were the only ones talking to controllers, who were all still at their positions.”
Tucknott said it’s usually difficult to get a word in edgewise with controllers, but this evening some seemed a bit bored and chatted with him and his daughter about their mission.

When Tucknott asked if any other airplanes were in the air, he was told two F-14 fighter jets were high above him. “It wasn’t until two years later I found out those F-14’s were actually escorting me to make sure I was who I said I was. They had orders to take me out if I deviated off course.”

As Tucknott landed in San Diego at 10:30 p.m., a crew was waiting to take care of his plane and carry the blood samples to a Red Cross truck for testing. Given the late hour, the weary couriers spent the night, then flew home the next morning using the same secret code and procedures as they had used flying down to San Diego.

“The flight was just as quiet,” Tucknott said, “though I started to pick up some police helicopter traffic flying in the L.A. basin.”

Tucknott, who owns an electrical contracting firm in Pleasanton, earned his pilot’s license 32 years ago. He has volunteered with Angel Flight West for 15 years, and has flown 236 missions for the non-profit organization.

His missions have included transport of children, deaf patients, rescue dogs, campers, adult victims, burn victims, and, among other human tissue, corneas.

In fact, Tucknott and a co-pilot once transported two corneas in the span of three hours harvested from an accident victim in the Stanford area to a recipient who was prepped and waiting in San Luis Obispo.

“The controllers recognized the urgency of the situation and gave us priority handling,” Tucknott said. “God was good to us and gave us a strong tail wind going down, which got us there in record time.”

Tucknott said the entire flight and transport were conducted without signing one piece of paper.

“This seemed a little unusual in today’s world with liabilities and the value of the cargo we were carrying,” he said.

Tucknott smiled as he went on to say that by the time he and his co-pilot were finishing their lunch in San Luis Obispo, the cornea operation was complete and the patient had a new set of eyes. To support the missions of pilots like Bob Tucknott, and to learn more about Angel Flight West, visit www.angelflight.org.