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“Ron Schmitt just called me, saying the police refused to go to his church and investigate some vandalism,” my editor, Angela Mann said, “I’d like you to go up and take a look around. I think there’s a good story in this.”

Ron was a Sparks’s city councilman and part of the lay-clergy at the Holy Cross Catholic church on Vista Blvd. I called him on his cell-phone and asked if he could meet me at the church.

Ron said he would.

About fifteen minutes later, I pulled into the nearly vacant parking lot. I gathered my camera and note pad and walked towards the front door of the building. I noticed right away that the glass doors were missing, having been replaced with plywood boards.

Carefully I pushed the door hand and found that the door frame was still in working order. I went inside the church.

Once inside I found I was walking on tiny shards of glass from the now-shattered doors. I continued through the front of the building towards the voices he heard in the back.

“Hello, I’m with the Tribune,” I said as I held out a hand to the two women in the back office.

One of the women shook it, saying, “We were told to expect you.”

“Is it okay if I have a look around?” I asked.

“Certainly,” the woman answered.

Turning, I went back out to the front of the building. I wanted to look over the damage and develop a few questions as I waited for Ron. As I was viewing the damage I noticed a small hole in the wall near a picture frame.

Jus’ as I was looking for something to climb or stand on, so I could get a better look at the hole, the church priest, Father Wolf came into the room.

He asked, “Did you get a look at the back office?”

“No,” I answered, following the priest to the back of the church.

A double pane window had been shattered in the business manager’s office. There were small bits of glass strewn all about the small room.

It was starting to look like the damage wasn’t jus’ simple an act of vandalism. However I needed more evidence before I could say anything.

Looking outside the back door, near the business manager’s office, I searched the gravel-covered ground until I found what I was looking for.  I then went back inside.

“Father, was there any other damage?” I asked.

“Yeah,” the priest responded, “They busted up a piece of stained glass.”

Asking if I could have a look at the stain glass, I was shown to a room off the main hallway, where a red and white stain glass series of crosses rested against the wall.

Father Wolf told me that the glass had been hanging on one of the busted out front windows. The damage to the glass was severe.

There were three holes about the size of silver dollars busted out of the wood framed stained glass. Father Wolf speculated that the vandals must have rammed a metal bar or pipe through the windows and the doors to bust them out like they had.

Walking back out into the front of the church I put all the pieces together. Then I called Angela, to report my findings.

“This church was shot up,” I told her.

She immediately decided to call Ron with my findings. The councilman arrived at the church in less than five minutes.

While I waited for the councilman, I poked around the front lobby. I stood in front of the busted out glass doors and looked around the room, where I happened to notice a small dimple in a free-standing wooden cross.

It was a dent, no deeper than a quarter of an inch and it looked fresh, judging from the newly exposed wood and chips of paint at the cross’ base. It was while looking at the paint flakes that I found the other half of what he was looking for; a piece of flattened metal no bigger than a dime.

Then I moved over to the wall and climbed up on a table top in front of the hole in the wall, I had started to look at before the priest had called me away. There I saw what I believed to be another piece of dull metal.

Ron walked through the front door just as I was climbing down from the table top. He had a look of anger on his face.

“I just got off the telephone with Chief Dotson,” he said.

“And what did he have to say?” I asked.

The councilman smiled wryly, “He didn’t have much to say because I read him the riot act.”

Ron explained how the police were called around eight that morning when the damage was first discovered. They had refused to come out and investigate because it was jus’ a case of vandalism.

“I told the chief that had they done their job like they’re supposed too, I wouldn’t have had to call the newspaper and that a reporter wouldn’t be doing their work for them,” Ron said.

Then he added, “By you finding bullets and casings — that make this situation even more damaging for the police.”

Ron also told me that Chief Dotson was on his way to the church.

“I speculate that he’s looking to do some damage control,” Ron finished.

While we waited for the chief to arrive, I walked the councilman through the building and to each piece of the puzzle. I even walked the councilman outside the back door and pointed out the spent shell casing and shoe prints.

That’s where I decided to try a minor experiment. I told Ron to watch as I picked up the spent shell casing between my thumb and pointer finger with my left hand, then setting the casing back down where I had found it.

“What the hell did you do that for?” Ron asked incredulously.

“It’s a little test to see if they test it for prints,” I said as I looked up, smiling at the taller man.

“Well, what if they do? Your prints will come back and you could be accused of being the person who shot the church up,” Ron replied.

“That’s why I had you watch me do it,” I replied, “and you saw what I did and I’ve told you why. So you’re my witness.”

The councilman’s face grew into a broad smile.

Chief Dotson arrived within minutes. The councilman escorted him to the back of the building.

I tried to walk back with the pair but I was waved off by Chief Dotson.

Angela arrived a few minutes after that to look at the damage. That’s when one of the two women said that she had found a strange piece of metal on her desk when she first opened her door.

“Really?” asked in astonishment, adding, “Where’s it now?”

She said that she had thrown it out because she didn’t think it was worth anything. I dug through the garbage can near the woman’s desk and found the slug of metal.

Angela took a photograph of it as I held it in the palm of my hand. Then I handed it to Chief Dotson.

Outside on the front lawn was another police officer. He was bent over looking in the grass, searching for more bullet casings.

He had already picked up the casing in the back of the building. And it didn’t take him long to find two more identical casings in the grass.

“We probably won’t find any finger prints on these,” he said.

“Does that mean you’re not going to send them to the lab?” I asked.

But he didn’t answer me. I suspected he had been instructed to say as little as possible to me as I was an investigative reporter and his words could end up in the next morning’s newspaper.

The case was never solved and nothing was ever said about my finger prints being on evidence.

Steve and I were in the middle of a shift change at KEKA. Our sister-station, KFMI, was on an automated reel-to-reel system with pre-recorded voice drops, so we we’re the only two in the building or scheduled to be there at that time.

A sudden rapping at the back door alerted us that someone else was at the station. Steve walked to the door and reached for the knob.

For me, time appeared to slow down at that moment. I had the thought: don’t open the door — but I was too late to say anything.

As soon as the door moved away from the frame, a man pushed his way into the building. He was swinging a large butcher-knife wildly through the air.

In a matter of seconds he had cut Steve in the arm at least twice. As he continued to press into the station he yelled something about getting Satan off the radio.

Steve in the meantime, slipped past the attacker and rushed out side into the parking lot. The intruder turned as if to give chase but instead he jus’ stood in the doorway.

That gave me time enough to pick up one of our three tele-type machines and slam him in the head with it. He dropped like a bag of wet cement and rolled down the ramp that led up to the backdoor.

Grabbing the knife, which he had dropped, I turned and walked back inside to the control room. There was nothing but dead-air coming from the speakers as I pushed the microphone button to calmly say, “If you’re listening right now, I need the police at the station on the end of G Street. One man has been stabbed and another man has a serious head injury.”

From there I went outside to find the assailant trying to pick himself off the ground. I gave him a swift, vicious kick in the ribcage, which dropped him to the asphalt once again.

In the distance I could hear sirens, so I knew help was on the way. I located Steve, who was hunkered down behind his truck, and started first-aid on him.

Both the knife-welding man and Steve were taken to the hospital, while I filled out an endless stream of police reports. I did this while I returned the station back to its normal music-intensive format.

A couple of days later, Steve returned to the station with a few hundred stitches in his arm to show-off to co-workers.  As for me, I got a $350 bill for the repairs needed to the tele-type machine I had used as a bludgeoning device.

Kyle was sitting on the couch in the living room. His legs were crossed and  hands were folded behind his head.

He was watching “Barney and Friends. ” It’s a show about a big purple T-rex that befriends a group of kids, sings, dances and tells stories.

I was in the kitchen washing up the remainder of our breakfast dishes.

Suddenly in the very serious voice of a five-year-old, Kyle says, “This show’s stupid, but  I like it.”

We were jus’ sitting down to dinner when Adam recited a then-popular commercial tag line. Only he changed the ending to something less than proper.

“How do you spell relief,” he said, “F-A-R-T.”

Everyone but Deirdre and Marcy laughed. Marcy was too young to really understand what we were laughing about at the time.

Deirdre on the other hand, had a puzzled look on her face. She was thinking about what Adam had jus’ said.

Suddenly, she exclaimed, “Huh-uh! That’s not how you spell relief!”

“Oh, yeah,” Mom challenged her, “Then how DO you spell relief?”

Deirdre answered, “R-O-L-A-I-D-S.”

It took ten minutes for our laughter to subside.

The three of us were on our way to Tulsa to drop Tim Robbins off with his mom and step-dad. Tim is Kyle’s step-brother and had been in Reno, visiting for the summer.

We were starting to feel the need for food as we hit the city limits. And so the search began to find ourselves a restaurant, where we could go in and sit down and enjoy the air conditioning and lunch.

Then, I saw it; a Hooter’s. It was a place that I had only been to a couple of times in Reno before the establishment was run out-of-town on a rail by a bunch of well-meaning prudes.

I knew neither Kyle nor Tim had ever been to such a revealing food-monger before and since it was the three of us boys, it would be a fun time. 

The moment we stepped inside, both Tim and Kyle stopped dead in their tracks. Kyle was as red a radish, while Tim simply stood motionless, his mouth agape.

I jus’ laughed at them and followed our waitress to our table.

“Click” was the sound that the handcuff made as it dropped across Dad’s wrist.  He didn’t appear to mind as he wasn’t paying attention to me and was in the middle of a telephone conversation.

I had found the handcuffs on Dad’s nightstand.

They were in the little black pouch made of leather webbing.  To me, at three-years-old, they must have looked like a bright, shiny toy.

Having tried them on my own hands, I found they were too big.  They fell off and landed on the floor. 

So I wondered outside and onto the car port, where I made the cuffs click some more as I pushed the movable part through the locking part. I eventually locked one of the cuff’s to the frame of my tricycle. 

I rode my three-wheeler into the house and locked the remaining cuff to Dad’s wrist. 

Dad’s telephone conversation ended suddenly ended and the search was on to find the key. Eventually, the handcuffs had to be removed by another Air Policeman who came by the house.

And that after all the searching was over, the key was found in Dad’s watch pocket of the jeans he was wearing, but no one had thought to look there.

Across the street, on Azalea Drive, from the Wright’s home was a small cluster of pine trees. We kids loved to play in those trees much to the outrage of Mrs. Evelyn Wright.

She and her husband Custer, had lived across from the pines for years and she had watched them grow from saplings into tall, full branched trees. They were also the main subject for many of her paintings.

That she painted, was something none of us kids knew, or at least I didn’t know it at the time. And she worried that with us kids playing around and climb on the trees, we’d damage their natural beauty as she saw it.

What I was aware of was what I thought to be her over-protective attitude towards the trees and to this end I did my best to irritate her at least once or twice a week by climbing as high as I could into the tallest of them. Yes,  it was a rotten thing to do, but then for the most part I was a rotten kid.

Whether those trees exist now or not, I don’t know. I also don’t know whatever became of Mrs. Wright’s many paintings of them.

I’d sure like to find one.

The smell of smoke was in the air, so I stepped outside the house to have a quick look. I saw a large plume rising in the south and it appeared to be getting bigger.

I walked down the street a few steps in order to see if I could tell where it was coming from; it was the Wolcott’s home.

The moment I saw it, I raced to the Yurok Volunteer Fire Department at the end of the street, pushed the siren button, opened both station doors and wrote the fire’s location on the chalkboard. Then I raced on foot, up Azalea Drive towards the home I saw burning.

Without slowing down other than to check the door for heat, I stepped inside the smoke-filled house and called out for anyone who might be inside. At first there was no answer.

However I heard somebody coughing in the front room area. So I headed in that direction, crawling along the floor.

It was Hugh Wolcott, who had asthma and had been in attic trying to fight the fire. He was having difficulty breathing.

I helped him outside to the front lawn, where he told me his missus was still inside the house.

Back inside I went to see if I could locate Mrs. Wolcott. I called out for her, but there was no answer.

So I continued deeper into the house, towards the bed rooms. That’s where I found her.

She was standing in front of her dresser, putting on a blouse. She saw me standing in her doorway through the reflection of her mirror.

“You’re house is on fire,” I said, adding “I got Mr. Wolcott out and he’s waiting for you in the front yard.”

She turned and growled, “I know it’s on fire! Now get out of my house!”

By this time fire trucks were pulling up in front of the home, so without arguing, I went back out the front door. I decided to leave it to someone else to get her out of the house.

Fortunately, Debbie wasn’t home at the time and the house sustained more damage from the smoke than the flames. But it didn’t stop her from thanking me with a kiss on the cheek for having done what was needed.

As for Hugh Wolcott, he died in December of 1982

There some mysteries that seem to simply linger; one of those for me is the strange disappearance of Star Polumbo. I was on the air at KOZZ when she was reported missing.

Star grew up in the Tucson, Arizona area. She had a job and was living with her grandmother here, when she simply vanished.

Star had called her mother, Gail Polumbo, April 25, 2000 saying she was being followed and that her phone was being tapped. She also talked about moving back to Arizona in order to start over.

Jus’ after midnight on April 26, Star was discovered wondering a restricted area of the Reno-Tahoe International Airport. She claimed that she was looking for her sister, who had run out on the airport’s tarmac.

The officer who picked her up told investigators he believed she was hallucinating at the time. I guess with nothing to hold her on, the decision was made to drop her at the Reno Hilton.

She was seen in and around the front entrance at valet parking. But she never checked in to the hotel.

Her disappearance was the topic of conversation a couple times around the break room at the Reno Hilton. I was working there as a security officer at the time.

During one of these conversations, it was mentioned she had been a clerk at the Palace Jewelry and Loan, a local pawn shop, something I’ve been unable to verify. The Palace also happens to be the pawn shop once owned by convicted murderer, Darren Mack.

Meanwhile on April 27, her car was discovered illegally parked at the airport. The car held many of her personal items including her purse and cell phone.

Reno Police Detective Dave Jenkins said also found in her car were three emails, all addressed to the White House. In them, she claimed the federal government was trying to kill her.

Investigators also found the drawing of a woman, bound and gagged. She also had two books on how to change one’s identity.

Eight-months later, in December, Linda Fields, owner of the Silver Dollar Casino in Elko reported Star had been in her casino. Fields says Star became nervous after seeing a man looking through a window of the business.

Fields says Star left her casino with another woman. However the woman’s identity has never been confirmed by investigators.

Star vanished from that point onward. And I’m sure her family would like to know what happened to her.

Beyond being a missing person’s case and the possibility Star met with foul play is the ugly discovery that Star had fallen into prostitution and using methamphetamine. While at the casino she told Fields she was running from her pimp and it’s now suspected her possible hallucination and paranoia were brought on by her alleged drug abuse.

Like I said some mysteries simply linger.

It was my last night on the air at KEKA as I was being transferred back to Reno. It had been difficult and somewhat sad two-weeks of goodbyes from staff and new friends until that time.

One staff member in particular was the hardest person to say goodbye to: Elizabeth Erdman. She was fresh out of high school and was also preparing to head east for Purdue College in a few weeks. 

She had never worked in radio before, and she was simply given a couple of instructions on what button to push here and there and left to her own devices.  It certainly wasn’t fair and she was talking about quitting even before she really got started.

I immediately saw her potential and decided that if she wanted my help, I’d offer it.

She accepted my guidance and though she never got over the butterflies in the stomach feeling, Elizabeth became a good announcer. I was proud of her and the progress she had made in the couple of months we worked together. 

That final night, she came to the station jus’ to hang out with me as I finished my final shift. It was very kind of her. 

Across the hallway, in our AM-studio was a guy by the name of Frank. He had a dry sense of humor most of the time but this night he was off the wall. 

Who started it, I’m not certain – but before I knew it, Elizabeth, Frank and I were engaged in massive rubber band fight. We ran up and down the short hallway and small foyer that lead to the business offices, zinging each other with one rubber band after another. 

We laughed and carried on as we shot at each other, ducking, dodging, missing and hitting throughout the evening hours. We finally had to stop as we had used up every rubber band in the building.

At midnight, I signed-off for the last time. And as I did, it occurred to me I had jus’ had the most fun I had ever had at the station in all the months I had been there.