Generations and Other True Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  When his balloon hit the power lines on August 15, 1992, Dr. Foster was fifty-one years old. He suffered third-degree burns over 80 percent of his body.

  Score: 131.

  “That’s way off the scale,” he says. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

  He remembers taking off in the Patty and flying along on a straight and level course. “I was doing well that morning,” he says. Then he remembers a downdraft grabbing the balloon like a huge hand and pushing it into the power lines.

  “He lost altitude real fast and was unable to compensate for it,” Gordon Trosper says. “Other pilots in the immediate area said there were some squirrelly winds which were causing the balloons to react strangely.”

  The impact wasn’t strong enough to break the lines, and Mr. Trosper, who arrived within a minute or two, says Dr. Foster apparently wasn’t touched by them.

  “The power lines carried 69,000 volts,” he says. “If Coy had gotten directly across one of them, it would have just blown him apart.”

  Instead, the highest of the three power lines burned through the flying wires—the stainless steel cables that attached the basket to the balloon—and sent the detached balloon sailing off across the city. At the same time, the lower power lines arced through the wicker basket, burned holes in the Patty’s fuel tanks, ignited the propane inside and turned the basket into a ball of fire.

  “I remember an explosion,” Dr. Foster says. “I remember searing heat and pain. I remember falling with the basket, and saying to myself, ‘You’ve got to get this fire out.’ I remember rolling in the dirt.”

  People ran from houses along the street and pulled him farther away from the burning basket. His crew arrived and poured cold water on his hands. An ambulance came and took him to a hospital.

  “They took X-rays,” he says. “They put a tube down into my lungs to breathe for me. After that, I couldn’t talk. I vaguely remember getting lowered onto the helicopter, and they gave me some morphine, and that’s the last thing I remember.”

  The doctors who met him at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas told his family and friends not to expect him to live. “And if he lives,” they said, “there’s no way to know what he’ll turn out to be.”

  He spent two months in a coma in the Parkland intensive care unit. Per Lindstrand flew to Dallas to sit at his bedside. Caroline Street came to the hospital three and four times a day—as often as Parkland would allow. Balloons and Airships magazine in England declared “Coy Foster Day” among balloonists in Europe and America. Letters, cards, faxes, and gifts arrived at Parkland from balloon pilots all over the world.

  “And I wasn’t aware of any of it until I woke up,” Dr. Foster says. “I received letters from other balloonists who had had accidents similar to mine. They wrote straight from the heart. It was very emotional, very personal to have someone share their innermost feelings with me. They were looking back at it. I was still in the middle of it. And it was very helpful to me.”

  After he awoke from his coma, he says, “I knew I was going to make it.” He spent another month and a half in the hospital, regathering his strength, undergoing skin-graft operations. So much of his skin was damaged that his body couldn’t provide enough for the grafts. The surgeons had to take only tiny pieces of what remained and send them to a laboratory in Boston, where scientists have learned to grow sheets of new skin from samples of the patient’s own cells. The lab-grown skin then was shipped back to Dallas and grafted to Dr. Foster’s body.

  On the day he’s telling about this, he has been out of Parkland only two weeks. He’s sitting at a table in the Charles Sprague Physical Medicine Rehabilitation Department at Zale Lipshy University Hospital, where Carol Cook, an occupational therapist, is helping him try to make a fist with his left hand, a feat he won’t achieve for another month.

  “That’s my main hand,” he says. “I’m a left-handed surgeon, and my worst burns were on the left side. When I climbed out of the fire, I wouldn’t have given you anything for that hand. I thought I was going to lose it.”

  Kathy Tisko, a physical therapist, is with him, too, massaging him, moving him through exercises to stretch the scarred and grafted skin, guiding his workouts on the bicycle, the treadmill, and other machines to help him build up the strength and mobility of his body.

  “That’s my job right now, is to get well,” Dr. Foster says. “And when you’re in the shape I’m in, you’ve got to start from ground zero. I have to learn to go to the bathroom—which is not easy, by the way. I had to learn how to walk, to balance myself, to climb stairs. It’s like being a baby again.” He hasn’t yet learned to feed himself. He hasn’t yet learned how to write, which frustrates him. “I’m going to have to work very, very hard for months and years to see how much I can get back,” he says.

  Both his elbows have been locked by abnormal bone growth caused by the fire. He won’t be able to move them again until surgery frees them. He has bad days, he says, when he’s discouraged and depressed. But he’s happy to be alive. His therapists and his friends say that most of the time his mood is upbeat and determined.

  “He’s got tremendous courage and fortitude,” Mr. Trosper says. “He’s doing everything possible that he can do to make the best out of a bad situation, to regain as much as he can of his former self.”

  “After I woke up,” Dr. Foster remembers, “the very first thing I decided was that I wouldn’t worry about anything on the business or professional side of it. It would be foolish of me to start worrying about that now. It’s not a priority. I’ll practice medicine in some way, I think. But will I be a plastic surgeon again? I don’t know. I have to take it day by day.”

  Ms. Tisko estimates that he will be doing physical therapy all day and into the night, every day and every night, for six to eight months, minimum. “This man works hard,” she says. “He already has made impressive gains. He gets ten gold stars.”

  FEBRUARY 8, 1993

  Caroline Street rises at 5:15 a.m. and gets herself ready for the day and makes breakfast. At 7:00 a.m. she gets Dr. Foster up and helps him dress. He eats, then she drives him to Zale Lipshy and leaves him there. At 8:00 a.m. his therapy begins. At noon Ms. Street returns to the hospital and has lunch with him. At 1:00 p.m. Dr. Foster returns to the Physical Medicine Rehabilitation Department and continues his therapy until 3:30 or 4:00 p.m. Ms. Street drives him to the home they share in Highland Park, helps him with his bath and changes all his dressings. Then Dr. Foster starts all over again, stretching, bending, keeping his parts moving so that he doesn’t become stiff.

  “Coy is dependent on me now,” Ms. Street says. “He needs me. It makes me very careful, because I don’t want him to feel that I begrudge doing things for him, or that I’m doing it because I have to. I’m not. I do it because I want to do it, because I care.”

  They have dinner together, watch a little TV, then Ms. Street helps Dr. Foster prepare for bed.

  “We don’t go out a great deal now,” Dr. Foster says. “We spend a lot of time with friends—about twice a week. And Caroline and I spend a lot more quality time together than we used to. Our relationship is much, much closer now, and the love is much, much more. It’s more defined for me now than it was before the accident.”

  On January 18, he underwent surgery on his left elbow, to free it from its locked position. Temporarily, the operation has made his home routine even more complicated than before. As soon as he returns from the hospital in the evening, he must strap on his CPM, a battery-operated continuous passive motion machine which extends and flexes his left arm every ninety seconds, to keep the freed elbow from freezing up again.

  He must wear the machine every night from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. Sleeping while strapped to several pounds of moving metal isn’t easy, he says. “When you turn out the lights and everything is quiet, it sounds like somebody’s driving a tractor around the room.” And he worries that if something goes wrong with the CPM, it could injure him without his knowing it. “I have no f
eeling in my fingers. If they somehow got caught in the machine, it could chew them up without even waking me.”

  But his years as a young intern and resident physician prepared him somewhat for the ordeal. “In my surgical training, we slept on little single beds in call rooms when we were on emergency call,” he says. “So I can sleep on a rock and lie still. I rarely move at night. I may sleep eight or ten hours without moving.”

  In several weeks he will undergo surgery on his other elbow, and there will be more surgeries over the next two or three years, but most of them will be minor compared to those he already has undergone. He’s proud of his progress. But the better he does, the more he must preach to himself to be patient.

  “I’m anxious to get back to work,” he says. “At times I’m very frustrated, very irritated that I can’t do what I did before. But my slate was wiped clean by the accident. I couldn’t do anything except breathe. And I had to learn how to do that again after being on the machine all those weeks. It’s way too early to decide what occupation I’ll follow for the rest of my life. Whether I’ll ever be able to do plastic surgery again, I don’t know. But I don’t think there’s any question that it will be in medicine.”

  Despite his losses and his uncertain future, his love for the sport that nearly killed him is still strong. Nor is he yet through with it.

  “Many people think the feats I did during the ‘80s were risky,” he says. “And I’ve proven by my own experience that the worst can happen on a nice day on a fun flight just as easily as if you’re flying for a world record. I can say right now, officially, that I’m retired from world records. I’ve done enough. I don’t need to do any more. But I have every intention to go up in a balloon again. It’s much more likely that you’ll be injured seriously or killed if you get in your car than in a balloon. I’ll take the odds on a balloon anytime.”

  Per Lindstrand is so sure that Dr. Foster someday will take to the skies again that he has reserved for his friend “Serial No. 1” of a new series of balloons.

  “The type of balloon that I build will be up to Coy,” he says. “I’ll hold that serial number for him until he’s fit enough to see and tell me what he wants to do. But there’s no doubt at all that he will go up again. None at all. He’s got that old Texas spirit, you see.”

  April 1993

  There are better detective stories than The Maltese Falcon, I suppose, but I don’t know what they are. Dashiell Hammett’s tale has everything a reader could desire: sex, greed, betrayal, murder, a great cast of characters, and—the icing on the cake—a jewel-encrusted bird intended as tribute to a medieval king.

  It also has San Francisco, the perfect setting for such a story.

  Where The Falcon Dwells

  It’s still the perfect spot for a murder. The lights from Bush Street barely penetrate the gloom, barely illuminate the graffiti near the alley’s mouth and the fire escape that zigzags up the wall at its dead end. Anything could happen here in the black, smelly emptiness, and no one would know for hours.

  The wooden railing that Miles Archer broke when he fell and the steep hill down which he rolled are gone. The spot where he died is covered by an ugly building as dark and forbidding as the alley. Its sign, around front on Stockton Street, advertises the Green Door, a massage parlor that promises “A Touch of Ecstasy.”

  But the small bronze plaque, high on the alley wall, reminds of the death: “On Approximately This Spot Miles Archer, Partner of Sam Spade, Was Done In By Brigid O’Shaughnessy.”

  Mr. Archer lived and died only in the imagination of Pinkerton-detective-turned-writer Dashiell Hammett. But in the centennial year of Mr. Hammett’s birth, pilgrims from all over the world have journeyed to this spot to imagine that foggy night in 1928 when Mr. Archer caught a bullet.

  “Hammett fans aren’t like Elvis fans. They don’t swarm,” says Don Herron, who leads grueling three-hour walking tours up and down San Francisco’s steep hills to places where Mr. Hammett lived and worked before his death in 1961, and where the characters in much of his fiction hatch their intrigues and bump each other off.

  “Hammett fans appear alone or in pairs,” Mr. Herron says. “They’re quiet. They’re devout. Last May, I had a guy from Glasgow, Scotland, who had saved up for twenty years to come and visit the Hammett sites. You should have seen him. He had an epiphany. He was in heaven.”

  In The Maltese Falcon, in which Mr. Archer meets his doom, and four other novels and dozens of short stories, Mr. Hammett invented an enduring hero—the hard-boiled private eye—who, along with the cowboy, has become a symbol of America around the world.

  Many detective-story devotees consider The Maltese Falcon one of the greatest crime thrillers ever written. It’s also one of the most popular. Originally published as a serial in Black Mask magazine, the novel appeared in hardcover in 1930 and has sold well in several languages since.

  In it, Mr. Hammett created the cynical Sam Spade, destined to become grandfather to hundreds of wisecracking, tough-guy sleuths who have spellbound readers, radio listeners and movie and TV viewers for more than sixty years.

  Millions who have never read the novel have seen the 1941 movie, starring Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, Mary Astor as the murderous Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre as villains in pursuit of a mysterious black bird. The ancient jewel-encrusted statuette is worth a limitless amount of money and blood.

  Even the foot-high falcon made for the movie is worth a small fortune. Christie’s, the New York auction house, has announced that it will sell the prop on December 6. Once the property of the late William Conrad, who himself played a hard-boiled detective on TV, the bird is expected to fetch between thirty thousand dollars and fifty thousand dollars.

  In the late 1940s and early 1950s, families gathered around the radio to hear actor Howard Duff play Sam Spade on a weekly radio mystery sponsored by Wildroot Cream Oil hair tonic.

  But it’s the book that draws true Hammett fans to San Francisco, the scene of its crimes, a city drawn so vividly it becomes one of The Maltese Falcon’s strongest characters. Sam Spade’s “burg,” as he calls it, is full of fog and darkness. Its alleys, streets, and back rooms simmer with intrigue.

  And the city that still draws Hammett fans has changed amazingly little from the clammy night when Mr. Archer was murdered.

  “Nearly all of San Francisco was built after the 1906 earthquake and fire, and not much has been torn down since,” says Joe Gores, who, like Mr. Hammett, is a private-eye-turned-mystery-writer. “The faded signs of long-gone businesses are still visible on a lot of the buildings. Hell, a lot of the businesses from Hammett’s era are still where they were then.”

  Mr. Gores is sipping a Bloody Mary at the bar in John’s Grill, a dark-paneled restaurant where Sam Spade dines on chops, a baked potato, and tomatoes in The Maltese Falcon. The meal is still on the menu, where it’s called “Sam Spade’s Chops.” The bartender also will mix a “Bloody Brigid,” which comes in a souvenir glass with a black falcon on it.

  Outside on Ellis Street, John’s sign advertises the restaurant as “The Home of the Maltese Falcon.” An upstairs dining room is decorated with poster-size stills and pages of dialogue from the Bogart movie. A glass-fronted bookcase holds copies of Mr. Hammett’s novels and a copy of Hammett, a novel written by Mr. Gores in which the tough-guy detective is Dashiell Hammett himself.

  So far as Mr. Gores knows, John’s Grill is the only Dashiell Hammett museum. The restaurant, which is called by its true name in The Maltese Falcon, is next door to the Flood Building, where the Pinkerton detective agency had its office when Mr. Hammett was on the payroll. But the names of most of the buildings in which Sam Spade fends off unfriendly cops and too-friendly women and plays cat-and-mouse with the villains of The Maltese Falcon are disguised.

  Mr. Gores, working from internal evidence in the novel, has identified nearly all the hotels, office buildings, restaurants, theaters, and apartment buildings involved in the chase
after the black bird.

  Most are still serving the same purposes. The St. Francis and the Sir Francis Drake, which are fancy hotels (under different names) in the novel, are still fancy hotels. The Geary Theatre is still a theater, though now closed for renovation. The Cathedral Apartments, which in the book is the Corona, Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s building, has gone condo and is still a swanky place to live. The Hunter-Dulin Building, the home of Sam Spade’s office, is still an office building.

  And 891 Post Street is still a nondescript apartment building with a laundry on its ground floor. “I’ve spent whole days just walking the 800 block of Post street, feeling the past,” Mr. Gores says.

  In the novel, Sam Spade lives in a fourth-floor apartment in the yellow brick building. In the late 1920s, Dashiell Hammett lived there. It’s where he wrote The Maltese Falcon.

  The white marble lobby with its white columns—surprisingly elegant, considering the building’s dreary exterior—resembles a little Greek temple. It’s locked to visitors. A sign visible through its glass door advertises studio apartments for five hundred dollars a month.

  “There’s a guy who got an apartment there, he has convinced himself that it’s the one Spade lived in,” Mr. Gores says. “This guy, he shows up at conferences and stuff, all dressed up as Sam Spade. He has cards printed that say he lives at Sam Spade’s address. Suddenly his life’s work is to live in that apartment and look as much as possible like Sam Spade.”

  Mr. Gores, a disciple and scholar of Dashiell Hammett, has published eleven hard-boiled detective novels of his own. He takes quiet pleasure in the fact that critics often compare his work to his hero’s.

  “Hammett is one of the world’s great writers,” he says. “And Sam Spade is a wonderful character. Hammett always said Spade is the guy that private eyes would like to have been, and thought they were in their gaudier moments.”