Category: random

As quietly as possible, officers encircled the man they tracked over the last year. They could see his make shift camp site as they approached.

“Gun!” one of the officers shouted. Another yelled, “Police! We have you surrounded!”

Seconds later, the single report of a gunshot echoed over the rock-strewn landscape. The chase had concluded and the man dubbed “The Ballarat Bandit,” was no longer.

The desert camp where the Bandit shot himself with a .22 rifle, ending a yearlong manhunt about a mile outside Inyo County, where he was well-known to local authorities. In death, the Bandit became an even greater mystery when every effort to identify him met with failure.

In 2003, he made himself known to law enforcement. The Bandit stole a geologists car and wallet and used his credit card to purchase supplies, including filling his gas tank in Tonopah.

During the year-long pursuit he stole food, weapons, cars, wallets, and even a child’s little red wagon in Nevada, which he used to transport a stolen battery to jump-start a stolen car. He was neat and precise in his habits, cleaning his campsites so thoroughly not even a square of toilet paper, much less a fingerprint, remained.

In one instance, authorities discovered the Bandit’s camp near the base of a 9000-foot mountain. They launched an assault at dawn with a K-9 unit and a SWAT team.

They chased the Bandit up the slope following his tracks and came within 50 feet of him, but the Bandit eluded them He sprinted five miles up and over the mountain and across the valley beyond leaving law enforcement officers in the dust.

A couple of months later, he again escaped by jogging through desolate backcountry to the Reno area. Officials hunted him from helicopter and horseback, from the triple-digit heat of the desert to the snow-capped High Sierra Mountains.

Suspected of being a terrorist, the Bandit set up paramilitary style camps, well stocked with high-tech firearms, overlooking the Tonopah Test Range, the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, NAS Fallon and the government’s secret installation, known as Area 51. He was also believed to be a mental case or some sort of folk hero.

When possible, he avoided human contact and confrontation. He did, however, have a temper, as investigators found when they discovered he had shot a stolen vehicle full of holes when it became stuck in the mud, kicked a dent into the side of the stolen truck when it wouldn’t start, and disabled the vehicle of the man he bunked with in a remote cabin after the man asked him to leave.

For the owner of that isolated cabin, his house-guest was irritating and lazy, constantly talking about his hatred of the Bureau of Land Management. Still others reported brief interactions with a lean, highly energetic man with bright blue eyes.

Either way,the bandit burglarized uninhabited ranch homes, farms and cabins in remote areas. He took batteries, macaroni and cheese, soup and other nonperishable food, pots and pans, guns, cars, clothes and cooking spices.

But all that changed when an off-duty BLM ranger spotted a campsite on his way through Death Valley. He stopped to check it out, discovering marijuana plants, several weapons and ammunition.

Inside the vehicle, a pickup truck stolen in Nevada’s Humboldt County, the officer found the geologist’s driver’s license. He disabled the truck and left the park, alerting authorities to the camp.

But by the time rangers reached the scene, the Bandit had returned, grabbed a plastic bag of .22 bullets from the cab of the truck, a few cans of food and a sleeping bag, and fled on a stolen ATV.

Temperatures in Death Valley at the time were in excess of 120 degrees, and the Bandit had only one small 2-quart water container him when he fled. The heat, apparently, was beginning to affect him for his usual careful habits faltered.

And it only got worse as he went further south, avoiding the settlements of Tecopa and Shoshone where he could have found water, and descending further into the dry desert heat until he ran out of gasoline for the ATV. A National Park Service ranger spotted him sitting near a callbox on California Highway 127 near Ibex Pass and called for backup.

Three hours later, as officers converged on his remote campsite, the exhausted Bandit was out of options. He stripped off all his clothing, stretched out under a tarp held up and shot himself.

The only thing found in the pocket of the shorts removed before he died was a handful of marijuana seeds. It seems he had, in fact, thoroughly erased himself.

It was a hot, quiet day at the Samaritan Cemetery in San Bernardino as the man known as the Ballarat Bandit was finally laid to rest. John Doe #39-04, the identity assigned to him by the coroner’s office, seemed to have taken his all his secrets to the grave.

Eighteen-months later the Ballarat Bandit authorities identified the Bandit as George Robert Johnston, left his family after being jailed in 1997 after officials found 4,000 marijuana plants on his Prince Edward Island farm in Canada. Perhaps it was prison that drove him to the open desert and to take his own life, fearing more confinement.

It’s a secret that sleeps with the resting bones of the still-mysterious Bandit of Ballarat.

At first I wasn’t going to share this, and then I asked, “So why write at all?” It’s a re-discovery that re-opened my eyes: the power of simple prayer.

Towards the end of 2012, I was down, nothing was going my way and it showed. Everyday, I found it hard to keep going.

Tired of the perpetual downward cycle, I gave up and asked God for help — I mean REALLY asked for His help. By this time I was operating on a couple of hours sleep in a week-long period.

And soon my outlook changed.  Now, I’m calm, the world proceeds as it should, and I have nothing to do with either.

Something’s shouldn’t be so easily forgotten.

“Big Bill,” was born in Ireland and served as a pilot in Great Britain’s Royal Flying Corps during World War I. By 1918, William Blanchfield was a pilot with the U.S. Air Mail Service, having immigrated and applied for U.S. citizenship.

In 1921, Blanchfield was assigned the Reno-Elko run.  The Nevada State Journal describes one of his flights:

“During the month of November 1922, Blanchfield made his phenomenal run from Elko on the wings of a hurricane. The thermometer registered 16 degrees below zero at Elko and the field manager there told him it was impossible to make the flight. But Blanchfield, with that soldier tradition of generations, demurred. He said that the mail must go. And he won. But the fight he made with the blizzard is still talked about in aviation circles.”

Such exploits made him a national hero. But it was his death that left an indelible mark.

Friday afternoon, August 1st, 1924, Blanchfield flew over the Knights of Pythias Cemetery off Nevada Street in his DeHaviland DH-4 biplane. A group of mourners were gathered below for the funeral of Air Mail Service mechanic Samuel J. Garrans, who had died in an accident three days earlier.

Blanchfield planned to say goodbye his friend by circling the cemetery three times, then dropping a wreath on Garrans’ grave. He had jus’ completed the second circle, something went wrong.

His plane went into a flat spin, crashing into the side of a home on Ralston Street. The impact split open the planes gas tank, setting the craft and the house on fire.

Blanchfield was trapped in the wreckage. When his burned body was removed from the wreckage, his hands were still grasping the controls.

His funeral was at St. Thomas Aquinas Cathedral. He was laid to rest at in veterans plot at Mountain View Cemetery.

Reno Air Mail Field was renamed Blanchfield Air Field (also known as Blanch Field) in his honor. It’s now the site of the Washoe County Golf Course.

Originally, I posted these in 2006. Then I decided to unpost them, but I’m putting them back up so they can be shared by anyone and everyone in the radio news business. Besides it clears one more file from my computer….

Stick with Who, What, Where and When. Avoid Why or How. If a listener would like to know why or how, they can pick up the newspaper. Think in terms of, “noun, verb, noun, verb.”

Once you have the four-Ws in your mind, tell the story to yourself, and then write it out in no more than two or three sentences. This takes some practice.

Stay in the present tense. The subject “says,” not “said.” Remain in the NOW. If it is snowing, that should be the lead story. If a pile-up is clogging the afternoon commute, lead with it.

Be LOCAL, however if a lead story isn’t obvious, look at the local headline of the paper for an indication.  If the first large LOCAL headline is the state budget or an attempted kidnapping make it your first story lead.

Use a bullet-point style of writing. The idea is to be “quick-in and quick out.”

Keep sentences down to 10 words if possible. When using newswire copy, rewrite the lead sentences. Each sentence is generally 25 words long. This is because they were written by someone who is a newspaper reporter. Avoid using compound sentences.

Don’t use numbers if you can help it. When you cannot avoid using numbers, round the number up or down. Then use “near,” “around,” “above,” “below,” or “about” to add accuracy to the story.

Stay away from radio-speak like, “The 1300 block of…,” instead just use the street name. It just means that you don’t “know” the actual address anyway, so why telegraph it.

If you have two numbers that cannot be avoided, add them together. “Just above 5-thousand,” sounds better than, “two-thousand-one-hundred and three and another estimate of two-thousand-nine-hundred and ninety-six…”

Delete quotes from your story. That is what actualities are for. Instead use a generic phrase like, “The police say…”  Also avoid repeating the subject’s name. “John Smith says he’ll run for governor next month. He’s a high school teacher.”

Remember “district officials say…” works as good as, “School district superintendent Joe Blow says…” Police sergeant Jim Badge says…” can be replaced with “Authorities say…”

The word “That” is over used in many cased. “He says that he’s a construction worker,” is reduced by a one-word if rewritten to read, “He says he’s a construction worker.” Use contraction as much as possible.

Avoid language that is too technical or designed to make the article sound “educated.”  The word “accused” works as good as “alleged.” Replace words like, “residence,” with “home” or “house.”

When editing actualities, use only six to 10 seconds of recorded material; anymore and the immediacy disappears.  Wrap it with two-lead sentences and close with a single sentence.

Remove words that tend to editorialize. For example: “The nominee gave an rousing speech last night…,” should be edited to read, “The nominee gave a speech last night…”

Watch out for words that are unnecessary. “The police are looking for a thief that is described as…”  The word’s “that is” are not needed to complete the story.

Don’t write, “This unidentified woman says…”  Instead make it read, “This woman says…”

Remember:  This only a guide and not a set of rules.

“I’ll never drive at night again,” 86-year-old Patrick Carnes is heard telling the Nevada Highway Patrol trooper who pulled him over after he passed by too close to him as he stood by a tractor-trailer he had stopped.

“I’m only following him because he’s going to Elko,” the elderly man is also heard to say.

He was talking about the big rig truck and trailer he was following westbound on I-80, a few miles east of Wells about 9 in the evening of April 13th. It would be the last time Carnes’ would be seen.

Interstate 80 is one of the nation’s most important freeways; it carries thousands of travelers each day. It’s most desolate part is the one that slices through northern Nevada.

At night, inky darkness swallows everything. Some call the road “The Big Lonely.”

Earlier in April, Carnes and his dog, Lucky drove to Ohio to visit family. The day before he was last seen, he packed up his dark green Subaru station wagon and head back towards Reno.

After the Trooper gave Carnes a traffic warning, the World War II veteran continued into the night.

The following day, Carnes car was found abandoned at the Pumpernickel Valley off-ramp, a three-hour drive from where the Trooper had talked with Carnes. There was no sign of foul play and the car had gas, but Carnes and the dog were nowhere to be found.

Investigators were quick to notice that Carnes’ vehicle was on the south side of the freeway. However, he was travelling west, which should have placed the vehicle on the north side of the interstate.

That told officers, someone had dumped the Subaru.

Despite their immediate findings, they searched the desert for Lucky and Carnes for several days. Nothing was found to show where they had gone.

Then the Trooper, who pulled Carnes over, heard about the man’s disappearance and decided to check his cruiser’s dash-cam. The video shows the two men talking and tractor-trailer speeding by.

Though the vehicle zipped by quickly, authorities were able to freeze-frame the trucks’ trailer, and zoom in on the upper left hand corner. There, a logo is visible, though so far , no one recognizes it.

Two years before Carnes’ disappearance, the FBI quietly created a task force to look into the possibility that a serial killer working as a truck driver, was operating along the I-80 corridor.

Three years earlier 62-year-old Judy Casida of Cold Springs, Nevada,  went missing along the same stretch of roadway. Furthermore her white, Mazda pickup was also found abandoned at the same off-ramp.

When investigations stall, good detectives are open to calling on unusual resources.  Seven months after Carnes disappeared, psychic Elaina Proffitt, a former Reno resident and a veteran of a number of high-profile criminal cases became involved.

While she confirmed many of the investigators suspicions, none of her findings are directly available to the public. Authorities did say she left then with other avenues to explore in the case.

One unsettling theory that can’t be dismissed is this might be the work of a pair of serial killers, working as a team. To the east, Utah authorities are looking for a young man who disappeared in May 2012 along I-80 near Dugway. To the west, an elderly hitchhiker vanished in April in California’s Humboldt County.

There is also the case of the skeletal remains found off of State Route 89 between Truckee and Calpine in 2003 in the central part of Sierra County. It took authorizes nine-years to identify the remains.

Charlene Rosser of Eureka, California, went missing in October 1998 after having last been seen in April 1998. She was also known to accept rides from truck drivers.

For the last couple of years I’ve searched for a friend that I went to school with and so far he’s proving very hard to find. I have very scant information, though I’m in touch with his sister, Ina who lives in Colorado.

Thomas James Smith was born April 11th, 1960 in West Germany, and has gone by the nicknames, “Tommy,” “Tom,” and “T.J.”  He and his family were assigned to Requa Air Force Station in Klamath in 1974.

He was in my 8th grade class and all the way through our senior year, graduating in 1978. Shortly after graduation, his family was reassigned to Colorado Springs, Colorado.

I spoke with him one last time in 1979, while I was stationed at Warren Air Force Base.

Time and again I’ve run his name and date of birth through an Internet search and have come up with very little. What I have been able to find is that he has a wife named Deborah Smith, who I believe is in Olympia, Washington and that she’s been looking for him as well.

Furthermore, after Tom disappeared from Deborah’s life he was in a four-year relationship with another woman and he walked out of her life with her camping gear and hasn’t been seen since. Finally, this woman says he has a “Tenbears” tattoo on his buttocks and a tribal paw print on one of his forearms.

I’ve put our inquiries to various police departments in Washington and Colorado, but I’m beginning to fear the worst.

When the two men headed into the desert of southern Nevada in the winter of 1902, they were hoping to strike it rich. They had been present when Paiute Indian prospector Tom Fisherman wandered into Tonopah with gold ore.

Fisherman received a ten-dollar grubstake from Jim Butler and Tom Kendall, to find a claim where the rock was found. But, Tom immediately got drunk, and the only information they could get from him was the rock was found thirty miles to the south.

After giving up on Fisherman, Kendall and Butler grubstaked Harry Stimler, a half Shoshone Indian, and William Marsh, both native Nevadans from Belmont to find the gold. As they set about hunting for the ore ledge, a dust storm arrived.

However, despite the conditions, they found what they were looking for. They named their first claim the Sandstorm and soon other prospectors joined them and a small city of tents and dug-outs appeared.

Stimler and Marsh eventually dubbed the new settlement, Gran Pah, which in Shoshone means great water. It was later anglicized to Grandpa, as in the Grandaddy of all strikes, which it remained until October 1903 when the name officially  to Goldfield.

By that time many of the structures in the town were a mixture of mud and empty whiskey bottles. A year later, the rush was on, and demand for housing had become so great that carpenters worked around the clock, with new residents were arriving on foot, horseback and by wagon.

Soon Goldfield would be Nevada’s largest city.

Perhaps it’s hard to spot Trinidad Bay from the ocean in December, or perhaps the brigantine Cameo’s captain needed a refresher course before he began. At any rate, in 1850 the ship’s captain missed the bay and reported back to San Francisco that the bay was “a myth.”

His pride must have been stung when survivors from a group led by Josiah Gregg reached the city shortly after and reported Trinidad Bay’s existence. Gregg’s group had fought their way across the Coast Range and through the redwoods to reach the bay at about the time those on the Cameo were trying to find it.

The ocean-going group, an expedition from the Trinity mines, had left the diggings in November 1849 to travel to Sacramento Valley and, via Sutter’s Mill, to San Francisco. Once there, they chartered the Cameo and headed up the coast.

Their intention was to find Trinidad Bay. After Gregg’s party “re-discovered” Trinidad Bay, San Francisco newspapers played up the event and re-kindled interest in the Humboldt Coast. In early February 1850 two vessels sailed from San Francisco in another unsuccessful effort to pinpoint the body of water from the ocean.

Cameo advertised for passengers and freight, resumed the search for the shy body of water in March. Eleven other vessels followed her.

Due to a rough sail up the coast, she hove to near Trinidad Head on March 16 and put ashore a four-man landing party. Foul weather forced the brig’s captain to continue up the coast without those on board knowing the shore party had located Trinidad Bay.

The four knew when they found an inscription locating the bay. Gregg’s party had carved it into a tree near the headland Dec. 7 of the previous year.

Harold Del Ponte died January 20, 2013, in Crescent City.  The lifelong Del Norte County resident’s 96 years read like a local history lesson.

He was born December 31, 1916, delivered by Dr. Fine, the namesake of the bridge over the Smith River. Raised by Swiss immigrants who homestead 200 acres in Klamath, Harold received all of his elementary education in the one-room Terwah Schoolhouse in the Terwer Valley before attending Del Norte High in Crescent City.

After a couple of years at Humboldt State University, he obtained a degree in forestry from Washington State University. In a newspaper article during his fifth supervisor campaign, he credited his forestry degree as making him a better supervisor for Klamath during the “Redwood Park controversy.”

He worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Del Norte, Trinity and Plumas counties before being drafted into service during WWII.  Harold remained in the Army Air Corps and U.S. Air Force Reserves as a retired major for 35 years.

From a Humboldt State University publication, “The Humboldt News Letter,” dated November 6 1944, a small article appeared about Harold’s ability to integrate soldiers: “Capt. Harold Del Ponte (’34-’36) is at Biggs Field, in charge of communications maintenance on all aircraft assigned to that base. Has both white and colors soldiers in his section and is rapidly becoming an authority on race issues.”

After the Second World War, he returned to Klamath, and ran the family dairy farm.

Harold was the longest-running Del Norte County supervisor, serving from 1953 to 1973, representing Klamath during the devastating 1955 and 1964 floods and the 1964 tsunami. In the aftermath of disasters, he became the point man for recovery efforts in Klamath, where he owned the Hunter Valley subdivision, which he created, allowing people to live there while they recovered from the disaster.

One of Harold’s most involved and longest duties began in 1947, when a man from the National Weather Bureau walked into the Klamath post office inquiring where he could find a dependable soul to become Klamath’s next weather observer.  The postmaster suggested Harold, who accepted the position assuming he would commit to it for a couple of years.

Fifty-five years later, in 2003, Del Ponte was given the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Benjamin Franklin Award for more than 20,075 weather observations.  The award ceremony turned into a grand event honoring all the achievements of Harold’s life with more than 250 people in attendance and the Crescent City Council and Del Norte supervisors declaring the day “Harold Del Ponte Day.”

Harold never ran for political office beyond Del Norte, but he maintained close contact with many outside politicians to better serve his community. The strongest friendship being with former Del Norte supervisor and U.S. Congressman Don Clausen, who represented Del Norte from 1962 to 1982.

To this day, there is a Del Ponte legacy that beckons tourists from Highway 101 in Klamath with a giant yellow sign reading: “Tour Thru Tree.” Since 1976, Harold owned and operated one of only two redwoods in the state with tunnels large enough to drive a car through.

Harold asked two nephews, an engineer and a tree faller, if they would carve the tunnel into the tree. Offered compensation of either $600 or half the proceeds from tourists, the nephews took the cash up front, not knowing that the tree would draw thousands of tourists from across the globe.

Paralyzed from the neck down in a 2004 accident, Harold spent the final years of his life in the Crescent City Convalescent Hospital. He is survived by his wife Judy, his two sisters, Valeria Van Zanten, 99, and Rena Tryon, 92, and his daughter Lynn Russell and son, David Del Ponte;  granddaughters Amy Anderson, Sarah Taylor, Stephanie Wyrobeck, and Carmen, Kathryn and Lesley Del Ponte; ten great-grandchildren including David Elerding, Theron, Keana and Olivia Anderson; Nate, Daniel, Carmela, and Gabbreila Gilbert, and Trinity and Steven Taylor; and was was preceded in death by first wife, Grace.

As a note of personal interest, Valeria was my third-grade teacher and the principal of Margaret Keating School at one point. She is also my sister, Deirdre’s Godmother. Harold and Valeria’s mother, Alice Del Ponte (1889-1987) taught me and all three of my sibling catechism lessons for our First Communions at their home near the entrance to the Klamath Glen.

Known by its slogan, “We are Canada’s merchants,” the Hudson’s Bay Company is the oldest commercial corporation in North America and one of the oldest in the world. And its reaches extended all the way to Del Norte County.

Founded May 2, 1670, it is also in the history books as having once been the largest land owner in the world, perhaps inspiring a satirical interpretation of its initials as standing for “Here Before Christ.” Satire aside, the grand lady of the north controlled the fur trade throughout most of then-British controlled North America for several centuries.

The company launched expeditions that to some degree influenced the boundaries of the Pacific Northwest. Serving as the only government available to many areas of the continent before large-scale settlement began, the company remains in business today.

The company evolved from a tip that French traders Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Medard des Groseilliers received from the Cree tribe that the best fur country lay north and west of Lake Superior. The Indians also told the two men a “frozen sea” lay farther north.

Following up on the information Radisson and des Groseilliers sought French backing for a plan to set up a trading post on the Bay. Although the French government declined, the men were successful in convincing a Boston firm to finance them.

In 1668 the British commissioned two ships, Nonsuch and Eaglet to explore possible trade into Hudson Bay. After successful trading during the winter of 1668-69 the company received a Royal Charter from King Charles II.

It was given dominion over a 3.9 million square mile area known as Rupert’s Land. The company’s success led to bickering with competing trappers who also sought the wealth furs brought.

Not until 1870 was HBC’s monopoly dissolved. The company controlled nearly all trading operations in Oregon Country as its trappers worked their way from company headquarters at Fort Vancouver near the mouth of the Columbia River.

Its trappers were deeply involved in the early exploration and development of this area, traveling down the Siskiyou Trail and as far south as the San Francisco Bay Area. Trapping “brigades” worked their way through Northern California in the 1830s.

They included Edwin Young, known as an “American visionary,” who led a herd of horses and mules over the Siskiyou Trail in 1834 from this area’s mission to British and American settlements in Oregon. Young returned in 1837, purchased 700 head of cattle and drove them over the Siskiyou Trail to Oregon.

For many colonial settlers, the only source of cash money was furs and hides. High dollar hides were deerskins, valued at 50 cents for a doe and $1 for a buck’s skin.

The worth of buckskin entered into commerce lingo as the word “buck,” slang for one dollar. Not only did the fur trade become a major factor in drawing the boundaries of the United States, especially its northwest corner, fur traders discovered the Oregon Trail and provided guiding during the country’s western expansion.

Because of their own prejudices, much of the western exploration history of American Mountain Men, Canadian Voyageurs and Native American fur trade from the 1500s through 1840 is racially colored.