No Heavy Lifting

by Rob Simpson

  As Terry negotiated, Tiffany Spencer had returned to the station to do some urgent lobbying of her own.

  “[Managing Editor and anchor] Bob Jones told me that they were going to give the story to [police reporter] Jerry Drelling, which was a logical assumption because I was only an intern,” Tiffany remembers. “But I fought for the story. I told Bob Jones I was going to do the story, it was my story, and he agreed. I did the story and afterwards Bob came and said that I had shown him I had guts, and that when my internship was over he’d offer me a part-time job. He didn’t have a full-time job at that point.”

  A little more than a week later, Tiffany was working part-time. Two weeks later, reporter Collette Pritchard left permanently for the mainland and Tiffany was hired full-time. A break is only a break if the opportunity is fulfilled.

  “My chances of getting a job here permanently were very slim, but because of that incident, I got hired.”

  Peter returned to the station in time for the five o’clock news. Both he and Terry joined the anchors on the set to describe the details of the afternoon on live television.

  “Me on set, which was totally ridiculous,” Peter recalls. “I mean, I was totally a mess, dressed like a pig, sweating, and just looked horrible.”

  Not to mention the trauma. Despite that, and not unexpectedly for those who worked at KGMB, the management thought of the station first.

  “Our camera supervisor comes back and goes, ‘How are ya, are ya okay?’ He goes, ‘You know, I can’t spare you tomorrow, you’re gonna have to come in,’” Peter recalls. “I was, like, ‘Fine, whatever.’ I was just totally in shock.”

  Bob Jones came back and told Peter that no matter what anyone said, Peter was not coming to work the next day. Terry was also flabbergasted.

  “What happened to Peter was such a shocking thing, I mean, he really thought he was going to die,” Terry states. “That’s major trauma, that’s like being in Vietnam for an afternoon you know? And . . . I had to help talk the station into giving Peter the next day off. They were just gonna let him go to work like nothing happened. And that just appalled me, it really did.”

  Peter put the work request in perspective.

  “I probably should have gone to work because the next morning everybody on the fucking planet was calling me.”

  Peter would eventually appear on the Oprah show, on an episode about news people who became the news. It seemed to be an exciting conclusion to the saga for Peter’s friends and well-wishers. For Peter himself, the notoriety was fleeting. But the emotional impact of the trauma

  will last.

  The view of Waikiki Beach in the foreground and downtown Honolulu in the distance from the top of the Diamond Head crater. Peter was taken hostage in the foothills off to the right.

  “Pretty much a peak experience,” Peter reflects. “I think I learned a couple of things. First of all, death is so easy, man. You could just be gone like that. In an instant, and it’s not scary and it’s not bad. I think what’s really weird is the idea of dying . . . the death. Death seems like it’s just ahhhh, it’s the dying that seems like it could be a real drag.”

  “I can’t even imagine going through what he went through,” Terry adds. “I think everybody noticed that Peter was upset for a long, long, long time after that. I mean, he was just louder, and more amped . . . and he had to deal with the guy saying [in court] that when he finally got out of jail he was going to come after Peter.”

  “It fucked me up for a while,” Peter concludes.

  ~

  Ulysses Kim served time in the Halawa Correctional Facility and on the mainland due to overcrowding in Hawaii. He won a $199,000 settlement in 1999 for apparent mistreatment at Halawa. He was arrested again in 2007 not long after his release and again in 2012 and 2013 for various offenses.

  Peter and his family moved to the mainland three years after the incident.

  Tiffany is a leading real estate agent on the island of Kauai where she lives with her husband and kids.

  Terry and his wife live on Oahu. Besides being a photog’, he’s been the preeminent movie reviewer on the local TV news since the early 1990s.

  FLIGHTS

  “We might be experiencing some lumpy air today.”

  Continental Airlines captain before Honolulu to Sydney, November 1988

  On a Horizon Air flight from Boise, Idaho, to Portland, Oregon, in 1998, the flight attendant in the front of the plane was yelling to the one in the back, “Get down, get down!” The aircraft appeared to be plummeting through turbulence. We weren’t enjoying ourselves. That was my 420th flight.

  On a flight from Honolulu to L.A. in June 1995, my 215th, the jumbo jet we were in was about to land. About 300 feet or so off the ground, the engines fired back up to full throttle, the wheels came up, and the beast headed back out over the Pacific.

  “There was a plane on the runway,” the pilot informed us. “We’re gonna come around and try that again.” My heart was pumping and my palms were sweating for the ten- or twelve-minute reapproach that seemed to take about an hour.

  On a Porter Airlines flight in March 2013 to little Billy Bishop Airport (also known as the Island Airport because it’s built on an island in Lake Ontario, just off downtown Toronto), my 1,208th flight, we were only about 100 feet from the ground when the wheels came back up.

  “We’ll come around and try that again,” the pilot finished after explaining that we were moving too quickly to attempt a landing. Seemed better than bouncing into Lake Ontario. Not that big a deal, but it did get my heart pumping again.

  I’m not the most organized cat in the world, nor am I the anal-retentive type, but for whatever reason, starting just a few flights into my long travel career, I decided to log them. On pieces of cardboard, usually the backs of reporters’ notebooks, I write in rows the month and year, the airline, the departure city, draw an arrow, and the arrival city. Often there are extra cities and arrows in between to mark the legs of each journey. I didn’t count my two skydives. The plane has to take off and land with me in it to count as a flight. Let’s hope that trend continues.

  On my 29th flight, from Honolulu to Sydney, Australia, in December 1988, our airplane hit an air-pocket over the equatorial doldrums. We dropped a few thousand feet. My buddy Tom Towers and I were playing cards; in fact, I was whipping him for about the eleventh time out of twelve at a French-Canadian game called Mille Bornes. Suddenly, our jumbo jet started falling. Our stomachs rose to our throats, only to fall back down into place with gusto as the plane sank into some solid air. At the beginning of that flight, the pilot had warned us about moderate turbulence. He gave no warning about the plane dropping like a rock near the equator, where the cyclogenesis that creates weather systems in the northern and southern hemispheres is practically non-existent. There’s no warning to give.

  The term “being in the doldrums” came from that area of the sea, where sailing vessels in olden days would get stranded in open water for days due to lack of wind. In modern times, at 33,000 feet above that calm, open water, the lack of high-pressure systems and such leaves a little more space for those aforementioned air pockets.

  Twice I was on Aloha Island Air flights between Honolulu and Lanai, and it felt like some little-kid-God had our airplane on a rubber band, bouncing us up and down between the islands. On one of those occasions, the only passengers on the flight were my then-wife, Nora, me, and our friend Sweetie Nelson. It was December 1993, my 155th.

  As bad and as terrifying as some of these experiences in the air were, the two worst-ever flights were the 52nd and 400th.

  The former was a Midway Airlines flight between Chicago and Detroit in July 1990. Northwest, the airline I was originally scheduled to fly, cancelled all of its evening flights due to thunderstorms. Midway was, like, “Hell yes, we’re going!” I paid fifty bucks to hop on this alternative. I was heading to a party to
meet a bunch of college friends and wasn’t about to miss it.

  It. Was. A. Live. Ing. Night. Mare.

  We took off, hit the clouds, and bounced violently through the sky for the next forty-five minutes. The lady next to me worked for the Internal Revenue Service, was doing paperwork, and never batted an eye. I figured she was either as cool as a cucumber or, because she worked for the IRS, she didn’t give a shit whether we crashed.

  We lurched, we plunged, we climbed, we thumped, and we rattled continuously. The wings actually seemed to flap as I gripped the armrests with my fingers and the floor with my toes, through my shoes. When we came down out of the clouds near Detroit, the transition to the smooth air was stark. What a great feeling of relief that was, although I think the journey took about four years off my life.

  Flight 400 was a Delta flight with the Idaho Steelheads hockey team between Fresno, California, and Reno, Nevada, in March 1998. We were going from a game against the Fighting Falcons to a game against the Renegades, a team coached by Ron “Flockey Hockey” Flockhart. Flockhart had been suspended for a game or two for going nuts on a ref, so during the match he sat next to us in the press box and drank beer. The flight there was so bad, I thought Steelheads captain, Jamie Cooke, had suffered a heart attack. He turned blue, frozen, and speechless. I recall a lot of lateral movement, like the plane was being blown sideways, and then we’d just drop for a second or two before climbing back up.

  This was life in the old WCHL. The West Coast Hockey League, known to many as the “Western Cocktail Holiday League,” was the only AA circuit where all of the teams flew everywhere, instead of travelling by bus, except for between Fresno and Bakersfield, California. For that reason, and a respectably high weekly salary cap, the league attracted some decent former NHLers and AHLers. Ex–Philadelphia Flyer and L.A. King (and Gretzky’s childhood chum) Len Hachborn played for the San Diego Gulls; ex–Washington Capital and Detroit Red Wing Darren Veitch played for Phoenix; ex–Ottawa Senator Darcy Loewen played for Idaho; and there were many others.

  Most flights were on Southwest Airlines with its cattle-call boarding process. It was open, every-man-for-himself seating. Southwest used to have 737s with two areas, one in the middle of the plane and one in the back, where three seats faced three seats across from one another on both sides of the aisle. It was funky sitting backwards for take-off and landing, but the “lounge” made for easy and entertaining card playing. Six or seven of us would sit together in the lounges and play Snarples literally from the time we sat down until the plane pulled up to the destination gate. The “ding” of the captain parking the plane and turning off the seat belt sign marked the official end of the game.

  On yet another Southwest flight, in December 1999, while many of the other passengers moaned and gasped and gripped as we tried and failed three times to descend through a thick fog into Seattle, our little card playing group hardly noticed the drama at all, simply relishing the fact that we got to squeeze in another hand or two.

  Oddly, the 300th and 500th flights were also significant. Life lined up so that these big, round numbers always seemed to match significant, benchmark flights.

  Flight 100 came in Hawaii in September 1992 during my days as a news reporter at KGMB-TV. We left Kahului Airport on Maui on a little Twin Piper propeller plane, what I referred to as a “Chevette with wings.” (The Chevrolet Chevette was a little smaller than a Honda Civic is now.) The proprietor and pilot of All Pacific Air was hired by the station to fly me and a camera guy around the perimeter of Haleakala (Holl-lay-ock-a-la) in search of the remains of a tour helicopter that had crashed. On a fixed-wing, four-seat aircraft, ripping through the trade winds, we bounced along the side of a 10,000-foot-high mountain, hoping to spot carnage. The Australian-born chopper pilot and the six Japanese tourists on board were dead. That we knew. We just didn’t know where to find them.

  Haleakala in English means the “house of the sun.” It’s the giant, dormant volcano that makes up the eastern half of the island, and about 75 percent of Maui’s land area in general. Not sure what dormant means; I guess it means “barely not active,” since Haleakala has erupted with lava flow three times in the last 900 years, the last time less than 300 years ago.

  Sitting in the back seat with my knees in my face, I wasn’t worried about being swallowed up by lava, but I was worried about All Pacific returning safely to the airport. There was cloud cover from the summit down to about 7,000 feet, preventing us from seeing the top of the mountain, but not from seeing the blue-coloured wreckage. What did prevent us from spotting successfully was the fact the chopper had crashed into a gulch at about the 3,000-foot mark. It was spotted later and photographed from another helicopter.

  I do recall interviewing the pilot’s daughter. She was a hottie, and I barely managed to resist the temptation to hit on her. Dictionary definition of “too soon,” I guess.

  She was pretty calm and pragmatic about the whole thing. Her now-late father, Peter Middleton, had been buzzing around the islands for two decades, and she was well aware of the risks. We also had to interview

  the tour-company people from Hawaii Helicopters. It was one of those moments when you couldn’t help but feel like an asshole, asking about recently killed people and the safety record of the business. I didn’t enjoy the vulture element to local news.

  Much like the two dozen flights before and after my 100th, the two dozen or so before and after my 200th flight were also very routine; Honolulu to Hilo, to Kahului, or to Lahui and back, or a trip to the mainland to visit friends and family. The somewhat-monumental flight 200 came as the Hawaii portion of my career wound down. I was in New York, staying with a bunch of goons, college and post-college buddies, looking to interview for gigs and relocate, when we randomly decided to go to Jamaica.

  It was January 1995, and we flew Air Jamaica. We paid a whopping twenty-five dollars to upgrade to first class and drink champagne and enjoy extra legroom. We got it simply by asking at check-in. All but one of the six of us moved up. It was remarkably casual, but then again, we were flying to the land of the Rastafarians.

  This was my first trip to the Caribbean. It’s incredibly undeveloped in a lot of ways — sorry, “developing”— a fact that hit us in the face as we rode by endless tin shanties along the side of the road on the way from the airport at Montego Bay to Negril. The general population is extremely poor, and the town was considered a bit sketchy. This didn’t prevent us from roaming out into the local scene and attending reggae concerts. We also frog-manned into Hedonism II.

  We weren’t staying at the all-inclusive luxury resort; we were staying next to it. Pointe Village featured standard condo rentals, a pool, and some evening entertainment on the beach. There were families.

  At Hedonism, there weren’t families. There were nude heterosexuals playing shuffleboard, doing naughty things in the hot tubs, and swinging on a beach trapeze. The beach was sort of cut in half and there was a clothed side as well, but those wearing bikinis or shorts weren’t allowed to cross the line into “Nude World” unless they dropped their skivvies.

  Our fearless leader Tommy, who had arranged our accommodations and proximity to Hedonism, wanted us to experience the resort’s famous weekly toga party one evening.

  We did this by going Navy Seal.

  One by one we frog-manned from Point Village to Hedonism. There were guards at the fences that ran down between the properties to the beach, so we had to take the water route. In the dark, one guy would slowly side paddle or backstroke out about sixty yards, turn left, slowly paddle another 100 yards beyond the swim ropes that marked Hedonism’s area, and then turn and quietly make his way under that rope to the shore. This would be a beach landing the exact opposite of Normandy. There were no snipers; the only bombshells were inside. Every two minutes or so, another one of us would arrive. Really good toga party. I met two sisters from St. Louis, and I don’t mean nuns.

 
The strange coincidence with significant flights continued with flight 300. It was on Delta, flying back from my one and only Super Bowl. Brett Favre had led the Green Bay Packers to a 35–21 victory over Drew Bledsoe’s Patriots at Super Bowl XXXI in New Orleans in 1997. Among a number of tantalizing special teams runs, Former Michigan Wolverine, Desmond Howard, had a ninety-nine-yard kickoff return for a touchdown and was named MVP. New Orleans makes Las Vegas look like church; plus, it is authentic debauchery, not commercialized or somewhat fabricated.

  The best part about the trip was that Albertson’s grocery stores, headquartered in Boise, Idaho, paid for the whole thing, with some help from the local Pepsi distributor. The late Jim Reynolds, an Albertson’s VP at the time, loved our local sports radio station and was a huge supporter of the new hockey team, the Idaho Steelheads, who were one winter away from their inaugural season. I was to be their play-by-play man and was already handling the same gig in the summer for the local baseball team, the Boise Hawks of the short-season, A-ball Northwest League. Both clubs were owned by a group of men who called themselves Diamond Sports, as innovative and progressive an organization as you could find in minor-league business. I hosted an hour-long talk show in the off-seasons called Pepsi Proline. Standard stuff, we took calls from local fans and interviewed guests by phone, many of them from the NHL level. We were trying to entertain, educate, and inundate our inexperienced hockey audience, who were also our potential season-ticket buyers.

  During my first winter in Boise, while there was yet to be a hockey team, Jim agreed to the wonderful idea of sending me and a sidekick to the Super Bowl.