Tag: oakland

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The Privateer Lynx

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At Jack London Square in Oakland: The Lynx, an “interpretation” of an 1812 Baltimore clipper-type schooner built in Maryland near the outset of the War of 1812. We saw it while on the Oakland ferry and went over to its berth to check it out. It was commissioned by a Baltimore merchant syndicate and was intended to be a raider of British shipping (remember “letters of marque and reprisal“?). The Lynx was captured in April 1813, despite having fled up the Rappahannock River from Chesapeake Bay to escape larger British warships. The British were so bent on taking the Lynx they sent boats to follow it upriver where they did indeed capture it. The Brits took the boat to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and pressed it into service for the duration of the war. They were so impressed with the boats speed and maneuverability that they brought it to England after the war and studied and recorded every detail of its design and construction so that it could be reproduced (a process that today we call “reverse engineering”).

The current Lynx was built in Maine and completed in 2001 and is used by a private foundation as a sort of floating classroom. It’s staffed by professional sailors who teach schoolkids the basics of how sailing gear works, how the ship’s guns work, and what role the boat and similar ones played in U.S. history. I went out on the Lynx on Sunday afternoon for a cruise out past Alcatraz. Great trip, and one that I’m doing a radio story on. Oh, the ship’s motto: “Be excellent to each other and to your ship.”

(The mini-narrative above is from Craig Chipman, captain of the Lynx, and Richard Conlan, a crew member).

More here: Lynx, America’s Privateer.

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Boat Ride

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Walked from KQED over to the Ferry Building and met Kate, who had ridden the 7:55 ferry from Oakland. We got right back on and rode back as the dusk deepened. This was the view from the Alameda ferry terminal, before we made the short hop back to Jack London Square. Calm, nearly warm night. Beautiful on the water.   

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Oakland: The Coverage

Working for the news department of a local radio station, I’ve been paying close attention since Saturday night to the incident in which a paroled armed robber shot and killed four police officers. One observation, in the age of disappearing media sources and shrinking newsrooms: lots of good coverage from the journalism dinosaurs, little or none from our next-generation darlings, the blogs. The former have been swarming the story; the latter offer rehashes of what the dinosaurs report. Not to say that new-type media have not been useful: the Twitter stream on Oakland has been a good source for both news links and to sometimes disturbing online reactions (“disturbiing” defined: rationalizations/justifications for the killing of the police officers; more on that later). If one is looking for an object lesson in what news organizations do well that independents and bloggers do not do well–yet, anyway–the reporting in this case over the last several days is a decent example. Below are some notable examples of local coverage from the last day. I’m starting with a story that we at KQED produced yesterday evening. Reporter/anchor Cy Musiker, who began hustling after the story as soon as he heard about it Saturday afternoon, did a great job at capturing the city’s mood. The rest of the links are to stories that appeared sometime Monday.

KQED Radio News: Oakland Mourns Police Officers

Cy’s Monday evening report.

San Francisco Chronicle: Oakland Killer Was Linked to Rape

Chronicle reports, and OPD confirms, that on Friday (day before shootings) the OPD had learned of a DNA match linking Mixon to a rape earlier this year. OPD reportedly investigating link between Mixon and second rape, too. The Chron did a good job with court records and turned up details of the crime (attempted carjacking) that sent Mixon to prison. Good details on his background as known at the time of his trial and conviction. The story also expands on earlier reports that Mixon was suspected of an earlier murder.

Los Angeles Times: Lovelle Mixon’s parole record

Very detailed chronology of Mixon’s contacts with parole officer.

Los Angeles Times (blog post): Slaying of four Oakland officers raises concerns about parole system

“Concerns” is putting it mildly.

San Francisco Chronicle: Gunman had spent years in and out of prison

Contains a few more biographical details for Mixon.

Oakland Tribune: Parolee stood over wounded police officers and fired again

More details on shooting, per OPD sources. Mixon is said to have disabled both motorcycle officers, then fired again at close range to finish them off. Also, the story names the type of rifle Mixon is supposed to have used in his shootout with SWAT officers, an SKS (Soviet origin; see: http://www.sks-rifles.com/ or http://www.hk94.com/sks-rifle.php and prepare to be charmed).

San Francisco Chronicle: Woman says she pointed police to Oakland killer

Anonymous first-person account from woman who says she hesitated before telling an officer where suspect was hiding. Also note the Monday details of neighbors prying plywood from apartment door to inspect shootout scene.

S.J. Mercury: Cop killer was depressed about heading back to prison, family says

A little more detail from family on Mixon’s background, and other reaction across the city. Interesting detail from one resident of shootout neighborhood: “One woman, hosing down her driveway two doors down from the apartment where Mixon was killed, said some of those lives could have been saved. She said neighbors knew immediately where Mixon had run, but they didn’t tell police — who combed the neighborhood — until nearly an hour later. But in East Oakland, lamented the woman, Elaine, who didn’t give her last name, that cooperation doesn’t easily happen. “It makes you feel bad. But you just don’t want to be a snitch. The word, ‘snitch,’ it’s almost worse than murderer.”

Oakland Tribune: Street shrines for slain officers draw crowds, debate

A pretty good writeup on the range of emotions expressed in Oakland on Monday–especially at the scene of the shootings.

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Bridge and Fog

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A favorite cheap excursion: Oakland to San Francisco and back on the ferry ($4.50 each way if you buy a 20-ticket book). We had rain showers early in the afternoon, and then this fog blew in over the bay. Somewhere in this picture are a couple of 50-story tall bridge towers. After we passed under the bridge, the fog swirled away from a tower for a moment (below). We took the ferry back to the East Bay after dark, and later in the evening a front blew through and cleared out the clouds.

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Sausage Factory Confidential

Well, maybe all those MoveOn phone calls added up to something after all. I wrote before about Saturday’s telephone session, calling voters in Ohio and New Jersey (both the candidates we were calling to support, Sherrod Brown and Robert Menendez, won; in Brown’s case, he beat a Republican incumbent). Then:

–We had a couple people over on Sunday and made another 280 calls or so all together for Senate candidates in Pennsylvania and Missouri. Both of them–Bob Casey and Claire McCaskill–won. In Casey’s case, I printed out some background material on him, including a Wikipedia article that (accurately) describes his conservative views on abortion (he’d like to see Roe v. Wade overturned) and gun control (he doesn’t like it). But MoveOn, which I think it’s safe to say has an image of being on the left edge of the Democratic Party’s left wing, was calling on his behalf 1) to help knock off Casey’s opponent, radical right-winger Rick Santorum, and 2) to further the Democrats’ strategy to win back Congress (another conservative Democrat it worked for: Heath Shuler, elected to the House from North Carolina).

In any case, one of our guests started reading about Casey and exclaimed, “I don’t like this guy at all. Why am I making calls for him?” I didn’t really disagree with her thoughts about Casey; after all, how many more Liebermans do the Democrats need? But my stronger feeling was that we’d been given a job and I wanted to complete it. Luckily, I kept the new anti-Caseyite on board by giving her some Missouri voters to call; Claire McCaskill is a much more palatable candidate from a Berkeley liberals point of view.

–On Monday, I went into the MoveOn office in the early afternoon and stayed late enough that my car got locked into the city of Oakland parking garage I was using, a couple blocks away (not that it was that late: Oakland’s swinging downtown turns the lights out as soon as the local officeworkers head home, and the garage closes at 7). I spent part of the day calling MoveOn volunteers to see if we could get them to commit to more last-minute calling; most of the calls were to people in the East Bay, including half a dozen or so to people with Berkeley phone numbers. I was a little chagrined that among the Berkeley folks I contacted, no one had done the calling they had committed to, and no one wanted to do any. The charitable course would be to withhold judgment and recognize my own lack of past involvement; later, I’ll take the charitable course. For now, I think a lot of people in Berkeley feel like they’re taking a stand by living here and tolerating or partaking in the wild and crazy atmosphere, which is so enlightened compared to anywhere else you can think of.

I think I remember calling into two states on Monday: Maryland, for Senate candidate Ben Cardin (he won). Then, at the tail end of my shift, into Arizona’s 1st Congressional District, which is an amazing chunk of territory: 58,000 square miles or so, more than half the entire state (and bigger, by itself, than the entire state of Illinois). We called on behalf of the Democrat running there, a lawyer named Ellen Simon. At one point, I reached a guy who said he had four mail-in ballots, cast for Simon and other Democrats by himself and family members, but he didn’t know what to do with them now that it was too late to mail them in time to get them counted. I thought it would be easy to find out the details of Arizona’s law on this, but nowhere I looked–state and county and Democratic Party websites, gave a definitive answer. As a last resort, I had the brainstorm of looking up the candidate’s home phone number, since I knew her hometown. Surprisingly, there was a listing online. I called, and got a guy who said that Ellen Simon was out on the campaign trail. I explained what I needed to know, and this guy–her husband, I presume–told me that all the voter needed to do was bring the signed ballots into a polling place and they would be accepted. As it turned out, though, Simon needed those four votes and then some: She lost by 13,000 votes.

–On Tuesday, MoveOn opened the Oakland office at 5 a.m. I got there about 5:20, and there were already about 10 people making calls or getting ready for the day. Since I brought my laptop, I made calls through the group’s online call site: first to the 20th District in New York; then to the 2nd District in Connecticut; then to the 1st District in Iowa; then to MoveOn volunteers to try to rally people one last time to make more calls.

The whole feeling of the day was different: First, people saw light at the end of the tunnel. For both the people making the calls and the people getting them, they knew the blitz was almost over. But something else was different from even the previous day.

The entire calling process is a vast numbers game, nearly impossible to get a grasp of when you’re calling number after number in far-off states for candidates you may well have never heard of before you started dialing the phone for the day. At the beginning of the calliing campaign, the phone lists are pretty rough. I’m not sure of the criteria that landed people on our rosters, but at a minimum, I’d guess two factors were present: They had been registered Democrats, and they hadn’t voted in one or more elections over the last few years. When you start calling through the raw lists, you get lots of what seem like fruitless calls: hang-ups, disconnected numbers, people who tell you in no uncertain terms they love President Bush and wouldn’t think of voting for a Democrat now. Many, many calls are unresolved: A machine picks up, and you leave a message; the people on the other end won’t tell you how they’re voting, even if they say they’re Democrats; some say they’ve already voted. Occasionally–very occasionally, someone will tell you they plan to vote for the Democrat in the race and might even tell you what time they plan to go to the polls. So what you and the tens of thousands of other people calling from around the country are doing, one number at a time, is winnowing down the lists, culling out the bad numbers and the hostile voters one by one until, on the morning of the election, your left mostly with those who have indicated they’re going to support your candidate.

So while it was still dark in Oakland Tuesday morning, I was calling people in New York to make sure they were doing what they had said they were going to do: Get out to the polls and vote. The aim isn’t to get every single promised voter out the door, but rather to nudge enough of them that they might make a difference in a close race. And the assumption was they all the races we were making calls on were very close.

So: the New York 20th. Kirsten Gillibrand–the online calling interface advised it was pronounced JILL-uh-brand–was running against a pretty well entrenched Republican (though one, I heard later, had a possible history of domestic violence to explain during the campaign). She won.

After making 20 or so calls there and getting mostly cheerful- or relieved-sounding people, the calling system started spitting out numbers for the Connecticut 2nd District, for a guy named Joe Courtney. With all 242,000 votes in the district counted, he’s ahead by 170.

Then on to the 1st District in Iowa, where a college professor named Dave Loebsack was running against another well-established Republican. My 24 calls into his district all went to a little town called West Liberty, just east of Iowa City. I got lots of machines and precisely one voter who said they planned to go out and vote for Professor Loebsack (pronounced LOBE-sack). He won.

–After about five hours of that fun, I went home, took a nap, took the dog for a walk, and voted. I came home and, urged on by a MoveOn email, logged on to the calling site and made some last-minute calls to New York, to Colorado, to Idaho. When Kate got home, we went back to the polling place to drop off her absentee ballot, picked up a couple hamburgers, and came home to watch the returns. I was surprised that the broadcast networks all stuck with their prime-time programming. So, we had a diet of CNN, MSNBC and even a dash of Fox News until 10 p.m., when we switched over to the still Leslie Griffithless KTVU news. Sometime after 11, our neighbors Jill and Piero came over and we opened a bottle of champagne to toast the results. The last time we did that was 1992, the night Bill Clinton won, in the street in front of our house. You know, that was really a long time ago.

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The Uni Experience

Uni is what’s left of United Airlines after you subract Ted, whatever that is (I’ve never flown Ted, but gather it’s the kinda cool pared-down Southwest-like version of United; one shudders at the thought). I’ve flown United for years and years; one of the big things it has going for it is that it has skads of flights between San Francisco and Oakland to O’Hare, and it’s usually cheaper than those alternatives that don’t force you to connect or fly overnight.

To save money and help cut its workforce, Uni (and most of its competitors) push online reservations and checkin. That’s great if you don’t need to check a bag; you print out a boarding pass at home and go directly to the security checkpoint when you get to the airport. If you’re one of those who needs to check bags — more and more of us in the new no-fluids-in-the-cabin era — the check-in process is pretty bad, at least in Oakland.

On the Friday before Labor Day weekend, United’s “Easy Check-In, with Baggage” lines were ridiculous — at 5 a.m. It only took a minute to see why. The scores of people waiting to check bags were being served by three or four clerks. Luckily, I got moved through the line because my flight was only an hour off — only an hour! — and they wanted to get all the baggage on board.

Today, the Easy Check-In, with Baggage line was a lot less intense at first glance. Maybe 15 people in line, some who had already gone through the automatged check-in process and were just waiting for some kind Uni soul to come along and tag their bags so they could go to their gates. This time, though, just one person was working the half-dozen kiosks at the counter. She was doing double duty trying to take care of someone whose flight had been canceled. Another worker was dealing at length with the two people in the first-class line; she wasn’t in a hurry to address the plebeian mini-throng growing at the counter. Meantime, a supervisor type and another worker were standing behind the counter beneath three signs that said “Economy Check In/Position Open.” When I approached them and asked whether I could check in at that counter, the supervisor guy gave me a look like he had caught the scent of dog crap and said, “No.” After a few more minutes of conversation, he went over and talked to the lone worker at the Easy Check-In desk, then said, “See you later,” and sauntered past the people waiting along the counter without a word to them.

In the end, it was really no big deal to me. The reason I have time to sit and write about it now is that my flight to Denver, where I’m going to ride my bike, is two hours late. And the experience was not entirely negative: I admired the patience and aplomb of the single counter worker who managed to deal with a lot of impatient stares without losing her cool; it was pretty impressive. But Uni — what are you trying to do? Make me find another airline?

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How Not to Get Off a Bike

Late Thursday afternoon, I went out for a short ride through the Berkeley and Oakland hills; just a way to wake up my body for a planned 600-kilometer (387.5-mile) ride this weekend. I also wanted to see how my “new” bike — a beautifully painted old Bridgestone RB-1 frame I just had built up with parts from my old RB-1 — handled on a course I know pretty well. The route took me south along Skyline Boulevard past the place where I had a pretty bad crash in January 1991. Whenever I ride past the spot, I remember the fall and the aftermath. It all came back Thursday, too: How quickly I hit the road, the ambulance ride to the hospital, the gruesome picture I took of my face when I got back home.

I turned around, rode back up the hill I had just come down, and headed back toward Berkeley. The road is rolling, with a few short, curving descents and a couple of short climbs. The downhill sections are a little tricky, with some bad pavement. I rounded one right-hand turn, skirted some badly patched asphalt and picked up speed as I headed for a left-hand turn. I was probably going 20 to 25 mph. Just before I got to the curve, I hit a hole in the road and fell hard on my left side. I struck the pavement with enough force that my glasses flew off, lost their lenses, and went skidding down the road. I thought I heard my helmet hit the ground, too, but it didn’t show any signs of damage.

I’m OK. I came out of the crash with road rash on my left knee, hip, hand, elbow and shoulder and a pulled muscle (I think) in my upper back or left shoulder. Oddly, my right elbow also got a pretty good scrape, too, and I had a tennis-ball-sized knot on the inside of my right leg just above the ankle. I wound up going down to Kaiser Hospital in Oakland in an ambulance and spending about four hours there, mostly waiting and watching what was happening with people who were a lot worse off than me. About half an hour after I was rolled into the emergency room, a “Code 3” ambulance (one transporting an urgent case, operating with lights and siren) arrived with a woman in the midst of some sort of seizure; she died about 20 minutes later, about 30 feet from where I was lying. Eventually, a couple of nurses had enough of a breather from the more dire cases that they could spend some time scrubbing out and dressing my abrasions so Kate and I could leave.

What’s shakes me is how quickly and decisively something like this can happen. One second: spinning along, nurturing a picture of middle-aged bike rider as road ace. Next second: lying in the road, groaning, feeling a mixture of shock, fear, pain, and foolishness and wondering, What did I hit? Is there a car behind me? Am I going to get run over? How badly am I hurt? Is the bike trashed? What are my glasses doing over there?

After maybe half a minute or so, I untangled myself from the bike and stood up. A driver coming the other way stopped and asked whether I was OK. I think I told him, or her, that I’d see whether I was or wasn’t. That car moved on. Another came down the hill, the same direction I had been riding. The woman driving, Sylvia, stopped and got out and got me to sit down. I reaized my neck hurt. A cyclist named Dave came down the hill and hit the same hole I did and nearly fell. He cursed and then stopped to help, observing that it was the second time he’d hit that spot and that it was all but invisible because it was in a shady spot. Another rider, Doug, stopped as he rolled up the hill. The three of them convinced me it was a good idea to call 911; Dave made the call, then gave me his phone to try to call Kate; Doug, who lives nearby, agreed to hang onto my bike since I couldn’t take it to the hospital.

After another 20 or 30 minutes, the Oakland Fire Department and paramedics and police showed up. I was put in a neck brace and strapped to a backboard. I warned the paramedics, Elise and Dawn, that I weighed 215 pounds; they hefted me onto their gurney and told me I was the lightest person they’d had to lift all day. Then they drove me down the hill to the hospital. Eventually, I got hold of Kate, and she waited with me until I got cleaned up. When we left, several doctors and nurses, including the young guy who had attempted CPR on the woman who had died, told me to get well and made a point of telling me I needed to get a new bike helmet since I had probably damaged the one I had been wearing.

Friday afternoon, Kate and I went up to Doug’s house to pick up my bike. I was surprised to find that there doesn’t appear to be even a nick in the beautiful paint job (the handlebars are trashed, though). We loaded up the bike and then drove to where I fell. Doug had gone out and spraypainted the rim of the hole, which surrounds a manhole cover. Even though it was about an hour and 45 minutes before the time of day when I hit the spot, the shade was already crossing the road, and, even with the warning paint, I could see how close to invisible the hole was. A foot or so to the right or left, and I would have ridden home without incident (or run into some other obstacle). And I’d be out riding today instead of explaining why I’m not.

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Coming Attractions

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“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

–Sinclair Lewis, “It Cant Happen Here,” (1935)

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On the marquee of Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre, whose owners are given to displaying extracurricular messages. Kate spotted it during the past week, and we drove over after midnight this morning to take a picture.

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