Some of you know that I'm an airplane buff, especially when it comes to "lightplanes" --- little private planes like Cessna 150s or Beech Bonanzas. I can't fly one and don't own one, but I love to watch 'em. And there aren't too many small aviation fields in Western Pennsylvania that I haven't visited at least once, including Pittsburgh-Monroeville Airport, which is tucked over on the north side of business Route 22.
And that brings us to the case of one John H. Dobbs Jr. of Memphis, Tenn., who was flying to Latrobe for a meeting on Tuesday.
By the way, the media listed his name as "Dubbs," but there's no one named "Dubbs" in the FAA database as being from Tennessee and holding a private pilot's license.
As you will soon see, this is just one of a chain of many, many errors that add up to one big clusterfarg.
Anyway, when the skies got dark Tuesday, Dobbs, who is rated to fly a plane on instruments (but who, like many private pilots, probably doesn't fly on instruments that often), decided to put in for the night. So he called air-traffic control, got permission to land at Pittsburgh-Monroeville Airport, and brought his twin-engine Beechcraft in for a landing.
Dobbs apparently brought the plane down a little hard and blew out two tires on the landing gear. (A report available online and dated July 7 indicates that the asphalt runway at Pittsburgh-Monroeville was in "poor" condition at that time. Maybe Mr. Dobbs hit a pothole?) This, in and of itself, is not unheard of, though I'm sure he wasn't happy.
Then he tied the plane down, and because Pittsburgh-Monroeville isn't staffed, he left a note on the door of the little golf course that abuts the airport, giving his cell phone number, name, and the address of the motel where he'd be staying.
These are all of the sorts of things that neighborly private pilots do. In retrospect, Mr. Dobbs probably should have taped the information to the side door of the plane, as we shall soon see.
A few hours later, the airport manager and another unidentified man (we'll call him Cletus), showed up, saw the plane, and according to the Post-Gazette, got "suspicious." I'm not certain why would get suspicious seeing an airplane at a public, licensed airport, though I suspect that Pittsburgh-Monroeville, like most small fields, doesn't get a lot of out of town visitors. (And it's not likely to get a visit again from one John H. Dobbs Jr. of Memphis, Tenn.)
In any case, Cletus called the FAA in Altoona and asked them to check on the plane's ownership by running a check on the "N-number" --- that's analogous to a car's license plate. But someone (no one is saying if it's Cletus or the Altoona folks) mixed up the number and checked the wrong plane. And then the police arrived.
The cops called air-traffic control in Moon Township and were told that the airplane had flown in from Tennessee and was planning to depart the following morning for Latrobe.
Now, this is where it gets confusing: On Tuesday down in Tennessee, as you may remember, a man escaped from prison after his wife shot a prison guard. Adding 1 and 1 and getting 3, or possibly 5, the authorities concluded that the plane might have been stolen by the fugitives, or perhaps by terrorists, who were presumably looking to crash the plane into Al Monzo's Palace Inn.
Why fugitives would be headed to Latrobe isn't clear. Nor can I say why terrorists on their way to Latrobe would stop in Monroeville first. Perhaps they wanted to buy new burkas and kaffiyehs at Burlington Coat Factory, or maybe they needed a Krispy Kreme fix (are jelly doughnuts halal?).
But now, the FBI joint terrorism task force got involved.
Of course, since everyone had the wrong registration number (and no one apparently thought to walk over to the airplane, write down the correct number, which was painted in big letters on the tail, and recheck it, which could have been done from any computer with an Internet connection), they couldn't figure out who the owner of the plane was.
Comes the next morning, and a worker from the golf course sees the note, and walks over to the airport manager and gives it to him.
A-ha! Handed this crucial bit of evidence, which had been cleverly concealed in broad daylight (OK, in broad moonlight), the forces of law and order leapt into action, arrived en masse at the hotel, and roused poor Mr. Dobbs for questioning.
Alas, he wasn't a terrorist, and sadly, police say he's "unlikely to face local charges," probably as a result of the legal technicality that he didn't actually do anything wrong. (Crafty lawyers win cases all the time by exploiting that loophole.)
Nevertheless, I'm sure he was loaded back into his plane and warned to get the heck out of Monroeville by sundown, or else face the terrible wrath of the zoning hearing board. But from now on, Mr. Dobbs will know better than to properly notify the authorities and make a perfectly legal landing at a public airport!
And now, as Jon Stewart says on "The Daily Show," it's your moment of zen. Says a police lieutenant to the Post-Gazette: "It actually showed the system worked."
If the "system" involves poor communication and garden-variety paranoia, then it worked like a charm!
I don't know about you, but I feel safer from terrorism already.
...
P.S. Is this the right place to point out that Monroeville police are among the highest paid in the state? Erm, probably not.
...
To Do This Weekend: As for myself, I'm going to steer clear of Monroeville for a while, because I've probably just guaranteed myself a ticket. As for you, check out the St. Martin de Porres Parish Festival tonight, tomorrow night and Sunday afternoon at the old St. Peter's Church grounds, 704 Market St. The Larry Placek Combo will perform and a Saturday night "polka Mass" is planned. Call (412) 672-9763. ... Pure Gold plays a free concert at the Renzie Park bandshell at 7 p.m. Sunday.
Nothing to see here. Disperse and return to your homes!
(The story you are about to read is true. Only the names have been omitted to protect the author from a punch in the nose.)
Act 1, Scene 1
Setting: Int. Port Authority bus, day.
Dramatis personae
J.T., a balding writer from the Mon Valley, dressed in a short-sleeve dress shirt and tie, and carrying an umbrella;
Man 1, an unshaven 20-something white male, dressed in T-shirt, shorts, and baseball cap;
Man 2, a college-age white male carrying a backpack;
and various bus passengers.
(The scene opens on J.T.'s point of view. He is seated at about the middle of the bus. Various bus passengers are seated along both sides of the aisle. Man 1 is walking toward the rear of the bus, making his way along the aisle, asking the passengers a question. We cannot hear the question until he approaches J.T.)
Man 1 (sotto voce): Hey, man, can I use your cell phone?
J.T.: Sorry, I don't have a cell phone.
Man 1: S--t! (He moves one seat back, and says to Man 2): Hey, man, can I use your cell phone?
Man 2 (he is seated behind J.T.): Um, I guess. Who are you calling?
Man 1: I gotta call the courthouse, man. I'm supposed to be there at 1 o'clock, I think. I don't want them revoking the bond or no s--t.
Man 2: What's the number?
Man 1: 350-xxxx.
Man 2: Hold on. (He removes a phone from his pocket and dials the number, then passes the phone to Man 1.)
Man 1: It's ringing. Wait. What the f--k! S--t! (Voice louder now.) Hey, everybody remember this number ... 350-yyyy. F--k! (He hands the phone back to Man 1.) They changed the f--king number, man! Can you believe that? They changed the number! Only in Allegheny County, right? F--k! Who changes a number at the courthouse?
Man 2 (dialing the phone again): 350-yyyy, right?
Man 1: Right. Oh, man, thanks.
(Man 2 passes the phone to Man 1 again.)
Man 1 (into phone, loudly): Yeah, hello? Hello? Is the magisterial judge? My name's ----
If you can believe conservative talk radio and religious leaders, our American culture is headed straight down the sewer. There are days when I start to agree. Like the other night, when I saw what I think might be the first-ever commercial for K-Y Jelly on network TV, and during the 9 o'clock hour.
Actually, to be perfectly accurate, it wasn't for K-Y Jelly (which, by the way, tastes lousy on toast), but for something called "K-Y heated massage oil and personal lubricant." I suppose this could have entirely non-adult uses, couldn't it? It's a personal lubricant, so maybe the K-Y people intend for you to use it on squeaky hinges and rusty tools. ("Hey, ma! I can't free up the bolts on this here plow! Fetch me some of that there personal lubricant!") And there are perfectly innocent massages, though perhaps not in most of those massage parlors that advertise with those little tiny ads in the back of the newspaper.
But I think those of us over the age of, oh, 10 understand what the product is really for, especially when the commercial shows us two randy people sitting on a bed, making eyes at one another.
Now, women have long had to sit and watch while television advertised every form of pill for curing what the ads euphemistically call "E.D." (which does not stand for "emergency department," although if the condition caused by these pills lasts more than four hours, that's where you should go) and for "personal male enhancement." I particularly liked the ones featuring Mike Ditka throwing a football through a tire, and "Smiling Bob," holding up a little hot dog. (Get it? A wiener! Ha ha ha ha. Subtle.)
So why shouldn't the female of the species be targeted by some of these products, too? After all, turnabout is fore ... er, fair play, right?
It's just that I'm not sure that I want to watch any of these ads while I'm sitting around, scratching my feet and trying to understand why people watch a show as badly written as "CSI: Miami," or why everybody loves Raymond.
For years, local TV has run several ads every hour for lawyers encouraging you to sue if you think medical malpractice, poorly designed products or partly cloudy skies are responsible for your being poor and miserable. I saw a new one recently from the king of the Western Pennsylvania ambulance chasers, urging you to sue the government if your road isn't maintained properly and you think it may have been the cause of your recent car accident, rather than the fact that you're a lousy driver. Thinking about taking him up on that offer? Guess where the government gets its money from? You, you nitwit! I guess now there's no fee unless they get money from you. (Notice how they rarely run ads encouraging you to sue for legal malpractice.)
Local TV is also big on commercials for phone sex lines ... oh, excuse me, "chat" lines. (Maybe I should try calling one of those up sometime, on someone else's phone, just to "chat." "So, what's new? How's your mom? Good. Are still working at the phone sex place?") Now we've got network TV commercials for enhancing your sexual pleasure.
Is there anything that advertising executives wouldn't do commercials for? Fifty years ago, one of the best science fiction radio shows, "X-Minus-One," did an episode ("The Parade") where aliens hired an Earth advertising agency to create a campaign that would soften people up for an invasion.
One wonders if McCann-Erikson, BBD&O, et al would be willing to whip up a publicity blitz to change the image of terrorism.
I can hear the slogans now ...
"Gee? No, Jihad."
"Al Qaeda Can't Wait for Muhammed."
"Reach Out and Bomb Someone."
Maybe I'm overreacting, but I don't think so. Yesterday, I saw a billboard that chilled me to the bone. Apparently, a Jimmy Buffett impersonator is doing a concert in the Mon-Yough area.
It's not bad enough that people pay good money to see Jimmy Buffett; no, now they're forking over money to watch someone imitate Jimmy Buffett. If that doesn't prove that American culture is declining at an alarming pace, I don't know what does.
Remember those watercolor paint sets you used to have as a kid? Imagine having to paint pictures without any greens. Oh, you could get by mixing blue and yellow, but it would be annoying.
Or, imagine that suddenly you couldn't get strawberry ice cream. Again, there are dozens of flavors of ice cream, so it wouldn't be a terrible problem, and you could always chop up strawberries and mix them up with the vanilla ice cream, but it would be aggravating.
That's something analogous to the problems that oldies lovers have faced for 30 years. The man who holds the copyright to literally hundreds of the biggest pop music hits of the 1950s and '60s refused to release them in any form --- tape, CD or LP --- after the early '70s.
I'm talking virtually everything by Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell, The Orlons, The Dovells, The Tymes and early recordings by Bob Seger, Don Covay and The Kinks, along with dozens of so-called "one-hit wonders" --- groups that had one or two popular records, but then faded from view.
So if you were a DJ or just a music buff who wanted to play '50s and '60s pop, you could paint a musical picture using records that were put out by Motown, Capitol, Atlantic and Chess, but everything on the Cameo, Parkway and Wyncote labels was out of reach, unless you found a scratchy 45 rpm record in a thrift store. (This, by the way, helps to explain the oversaturation of Motown artists on oldies radio, even though Cameo-Parkway had more hits on the charts from 1960 to 1967 than Motown, and why it's been easier for years to get Hank Ballard's version of "The Twist" than Chubby Checker's better-known hit version.)
Who was responsible for depriving oldies buffs of their bad rock fix? The man's name was Allen Klein, and he was a record promoter who, among other things, managed Sam Cooke, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones for a time. In 1967, his company, ABKCO, acquired control of Cameo-Parkway Records, a major independent label in Philadelphia that had fallen on hard times. Soon, there were allegations of stock market fraud made against Klein, along with lawsuits and countersuits. Klein served a brief prison sentence in 1979 for income tax evasion.
But why wouldn't Klein re-release the old records, maybe to raise some money for his legal problems? No one knows. Pure stubbornness, maybe? Since he'd been tangling legally with many of his stars, and had been attacked and vilified by the press, perhaps it was spite. Klein withdrew from the public spotlight and became a virtual recluse.
Or perhaps Klein thought that by withholding the product from the market, he could drive up the demand. Well, it worked. As record collectors (and we can be an odd bunch; the movie and book "High Fidelity" have a lot of truth to them) concocted wild conspiracy theories, the careers of many of the stars whose original recordings were buried in the ABKCO vaults faltered. Some went back into different recording studios and badly remade their old hits, so they'd have some current products to sell.
More often, though, bootleggers made pirated recordings of the original hits, transferring those scratchy 45s to CDs made overseas, where copyright laws are less stringent. (And in a few cases, they make them in this country and just label them "Made-in-Wherever" to try and circumvent the law.) These were CDs that were "mastered" in someone's basement, and most of them sounded like it.
In any event, a big chunk of rock 'n roll history has been missing for a long, long time. True, that was hardly a threat to western civilization, but it was a little sad.
So imagine my surprise the other night when, doinking around on the Internet, I stumbled onto the ABKCO website, which was promoting a box set called "Cameo-Parkway: 1957-1967."
No ordering information. No track listing. No suggested retail price. This had to be a joke, right?
Nope. Apparently, with almost no publicity, ABKCO (still controlled by Allen Klein and his family after all of these years) has issued a four-disc box set of Cameo-Parkway rock and pop.
Did I say almost no publicity? Scratch "almost." I could only find a handful of reviews of the set, one each in the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Detroit Free Press, another in the Ottawa Citizen up in Canada. Apparently there was a feature on NPR's "Fresh Air" a while ago as well, but I missed it.
A check on Amazon's website revealed that not only is the set legit, it contains 115 songs, which is unusually generous for a box set. And the list price is less than $60, meaning that some online stores are selling it for a little as $45.
Needless to say, I almost broke my arm ordering one. (Order your copy by clicking on this Amazon link, and Tube City Online gets a tiny little cut. And thank you!) A search of various newsgroups and chat rooms reveals some people kvetching because the songs are in mono, not stereo, but that's a little like complaining about the Statue of Liberty for turning green because it's made of copper. These songs were recorded to be heard in mono, after all.
Most of the people in the target audience for Bobby Rydell or The Orlons were listening to the music on transistor radios or portable record players (the iPods of their day), which were hardly know for their breathtaking hi-fi sound. Would stereo be nice? Sure. But the lack of it is hardly a deal-breaker. (It just goes to prove that some people will complain about anything.)
Hell, a lot of us oldies freaks are just going to be thrilled to finally be able to paint pictures with all of the colors again ... maybe while eating a big bowl of strawberry ice cream!
...
Correction, Not Perfection: I wrote last week that Cox's store on Fifth Avenue in Our Fair City was built in 1955 and expanded in 1972. That was wrong; the new addition was constructed in 1968, according to Gerry Jurann's "Looking Back" column in a recent issue of The Daily News. Mea culpa.
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