Yesterday I was talking on the telephone when I heard them; two sonic booms. The sound was loud enough to rattle the windows of my house, though not disruptive enough to change the conversation I was having about sandblasting media…
I knew they were sonic booms because I’m 47 and I used to hear them periodically when I was a child growing up in Missoula, Montana. A sonic boom has a very characteristic sound, unlike a firecracker or a gunshot, in that it’s a double noise. This is caused by the dual pressure waves emanating from the nose of the aircraft and the tail. I remember learning this as a child, because my mother allowed me to buy a book at the Missoula Mercantile entitled something like “SST” which stood, of course, for Super Sonic Transport.
At the time, there was a great debate as to whether commercial supersonic aircraft should be allowed to fly over the United States, and this book was a timely and informative source of popular information on the subject.
After I got off the phone yesterday I drove down and bought my bag of abrasives, returned home, then got on the Internet to look for news. Indeed, two fighter jets had scrambled due to a small passenger plane having violated the temporary no fly zone around Boeing Field.
The last time I was in Missoula, I spent quite a bit of time going through the microfilm morgues of both the Mansfield and the Missoula Public Libraries. I was looking for something else, but chanced across the following news story from page five of the Missoulian, dated July 13, 1985. The text within the image is essentially illegible, so here is a transcription. Please forgive me for not including the human interest story of one Karen Simons who “likes the sound caused by military planes flying at speeds of more than 2,000 mph at altitudes in excess of 80,000 feet.”
Reconnaissance aircraft pegged as noisemakers
Supersonic, high-altitude, photo-reconnaissance aircraft out of California’s Beale Air Force Base apparently are responsible for recent sonic booms that have jarred windows and shaken walls in the Missoula area.
Staff Sgt. Cliff Davis of Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls said Friday that Air Force SR-71 “Blackbird” aircraft of the 9th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing have been flying over U.S. air space on training missions and refueling exercises.
Built by Lockheed and classified as top secret, the 107-foot–long planes fly at more than 2,000 mph at altitudes in excess of 80,000 feet, said Davis, who called them “the world’s most advanced strategic reconnaissance aircraft.”
Davis, who has been handling sonic boom complaints from Missoula and neighboring towns, said Thursday that the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command in Nebraska has been helping with complaints. Friday, however he said complaints are being processed by Beale AFB.
Davis said the Air Force and the Federal Aviation Administration try to choose flight corridors that avoid highly populated areas. He said Beale officials have been notified of the Montana complaints and that they’re going to try to work out the problem.
What’s interesting to me about this story is that it became news because it happened in 1985. My memory is that sonic booms were more or less gone by the early 1970’s. There’s clearly a bit of unintended irony as well, because if the story is being reported in the newspaper, with a photograph of the airplane included, it really can’t be “top secret.”
What’s disturbing about the two sonic booms over Seattle yesterday is that it caused massive telephone call overloads to the 911 emergency systems in the area. First off, it’s a testament to how lame, ignorant and fearful so many people are who would call 911 for such a thing. More disturbingly, it demonstrates to terrorists or potential terrorists how easily the 911 system can be overloaded and brought to its knees. What better way to initiate an attack than to disable the fundamental emergency reporting network?
In a less dour vein, it reminds me of a simpler time, when there were separate phone numbers for police, fire and other services. When people would see a UFO, they would often call the police, which makes me to wonder what the police were supposed to do about it; arrest the UFO?
The following is a transcription of the sensational story written by Larry Howell that appeared on the front page of the Missoulian on May 2, 1985. This is the “official” version of events, which I’ve written about previously.
A 28 year old man firing a shotgun out the window of a third floor apartment in downtown Missoula kept dozens of police officers at bay for 4&1/2 hours Wednesday before negotiators talked him into surrendering.
No one was hit by the shotgun blasts, but one reportedly came within 3 feet of a scurrying motorcycle officer and at least one other was aimed at officers, authorities say.
The man, identified as John W. Munro surrendered at 8:16 p.m. ending a tense drama that began at 3:41 p.m. when 9-1-1 received a call that shots were being fired into the alley between the 100 blocks of Main and Front Streets.
Munro’s apartment in the Missoula Apartments looks east into that alley, toward the Glacier Building, where police sharpshooters set up with high-power rifles and scopes.
Police Capt. Don Millhouse said little is known about Munro, except that he told negotiators he had recently been released from a Veterans Administration hospital. Several evacuated residents of the Missoula Apartments said Munro was a loner who’d moved in a couple of weeks before.
Millhouse said one witness told authorities that after firing the first shots, Munro yelled “Are the cops coming? I want to go to the hospital.”
Several early news broadcasts reported that Munro was a Vietnam veteran. However, because of Munro’s age – he would have been 18 when U.S. troops evacuated Saigon- Millhouse said it didn’t seem possible for him to have been in Vietnam. Millhouse was unsure how many shots were fired, but estimated it at a dozen, including the two he said were directed at officers.
Motorcycle patrolman Brent Sells said that when he peeked around a corner in the alley Munro fired close enough that Sells felt the sting of flying gravel.
“It sure got my adrenaline going.” Sells said, adding that another officer told him that the blast hit 2-3 feet behind him. He added that Munro had blown out a window in a nearby building when he saw several officers behind it.
Officers from the police and sheriff’s office were involved in the standoff, and they sealed off the entire block. While a negotiating team talked to Munro over the phone, other officers were informed of his actions by the sharpshooters on the Glacier Building’s seventh floor.
The negotiating team included officers from both departments as well as two FBI agents who acted as advisers.
Police had first believed Munro might have some sticks of dynamite, but they turned out to be flares.
Munro also had an ax, and during the latter part of the siege he chopped a hole in his floor and dropped a lit flare onto the bed of the apartment below, starting a fire, Millhouse said.
While firefighters were dousing the fire, Millhouse said Munro fired one shot through the hole. He also fired into the hallway when he opened his door to get a portable phone supplied by negotiators.
Earlier Wednesday a man whose description fit that of Munro had visited two other downtown bars and a bank carrying either a shotgun or shotgun shells and a bottle of pills.
Millhouse said Munro had asked negotiators over the phone for a prescription drug. “He asked the negotiators once for a medicine a doctor had prescribed for him but we didn’t have that kind.”
Munro yelled out the window at one point that he wanted to see his doctor, a man named Jim Crawford whose office was supposedly at St. Patrick Hospital. There is no doctor by the name Jim Crawford listed in Missoula. A little later, Munro yelled “What’s the answer?”
Police Captain Scott Graham yelled back, “We’re working on it.”
Munro was taken to St. Patrick Hospital after his surrender, where he is under heavy guard.
A man identified as John Munro clutches a shotgun as he peers from a third-floor window Wednesday afternoon.
Munro’s window as it appeared in 2010. A higher resolution image can be found here.
Law enforcement officers anxiously watch for John Munro, 28, to reappear at the window.
Officers Bill Wicks, left, and Al Baker escort Munro from the apartments.
When I was a child I was brought up as a Lutheran. My father was Irish, and had been put through a Catholic grade school which I gather he really hated. He became an atheist, but he didn’t really talk to me about it. My mother, brother, and maternal grandmother were Lutherans, and so I went along with their program by default. This was the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, so the Sunday school programs were rather liberal. Most of what we did involved studying various workbooks, and not so much reading the Bible itself. As an adult I actually regret this, as when I encounter allusions to the Bible in art or literature, I usually have to go look it up to understand what’s going on!
Sometime in the summer of 1976 or 1977 I went to the county fair and encountered a Christian booth that was giving away Jack T. Chick tracts. I was immediately taken by what I was seeing. I hadn’t really read comic books as a child, with the exception of MAD magazine, which is not really a comic book anyway. I probably read Archie or Richie Rich a handful of times.
Chick’s version of Christianity was vastly more hardcore than the mild-mannered Lutheran religion that I had been exposed to. Yet it was so much more emotionally compelling than what I was exposed to in Sunday school that I read every Jack T. Chick tract I could get my hands on! At one point I think I mail ordered a huge compilation pack that included most or all of the issues that were in print at the time.
One tract in particular stuck out: Big Daddy. This was a rather infamous creationist manifesto, a direct and ruthless attack on the theory of evolution by natural selection. My religious thinking was beginning to come to a head with me sometime in about my junior year of high school. I remember taking a biology class that included a section on evolution, and the instructor had to spend the first part of the class simply addressing the negative creationist feedback he had received over the years.
But several things were in my favor, as far as the search for the truth goes. One was that the biology class set things out in an orderly progression, where one piece of evidence logically flowed to another piece of evidence. In contrast, Chick’s manifesto was a scattershot hodge-podge of criticisms, not a logically coherent theory.
I remember having a sort of teenage epiphany walking home to lunch one day with my friend John. I was talking about evolution and the biology class. John had known me since early grade school and was rather shocked to hear me express doubts about evolution.
“Matt, you’re a scientific kind of guy, what are you doing believing in all this creationist nonsense?’
Indeed, one of the saving graces of this period was that I had discovered the non-fiction books of Isaac Asimov. I don’t know what essay it was, but I had a genuine epiphany when I discovered Asimov’s treatment of the second law of thermodynamics. Asimov pointed out the great flaw in the creationist’s argument regarding the second law; the earth is not a closed system, and the second law only applies to closed systems. At this point I knew that Chick was full of shit, but the implications were deeper still, and this is why this episode rose to the level of epiphany for me.
The family I grew up in never “joshed” each other, or “told stories” or even “pulled your leg.” If this sounds rather emotionally rigid, you would be right. Obviously my friends didn’t adhere to this same kind of standard, and I believe the development of my “bullshit detector” was rather stunted. Even as an adult, I look back with sadness at how many times people have lied to me and gotten away with it, at least for a time. Again, I’m talking about the intuitive level, not the above board critical thinking level. I believe that critical thinking is like typing, it’s not a skill that one is naturally born with, it’s something you have to work at and develop.
So believe it or not, having a huge emotional infatuation with the tracts of Jack T. Chick then realizing that he was totally full of shit about evolution, made a huge impact on me. How could there be people in this world who spent their entire lives spouting nonsense and lies? How could there be people in this world who wouldn’t change their beliefs when exposed to strong evidence or logical argument?
Obviously the older I got, the more I realized that the world is absolutely chock full of liars, con men, frauds, and bullshiters of every kind!
I became a complete atheist by reading a rather odd pair of books. The first was the Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. Bierce’s book was an anthology of biting aphorisms, often quite blasphemous. But one theme that was constant in his book was that there are, and have been, many religions in the history of humankind, each of them believing itself to be the One True Religion. Simple logic dictates that they can’t all be right, and in fact most of them must be wrong because they all contradict each other. This is a simple concept, but it made a big impact on me.
Eventually I read Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell. This was the first time I learned that various logical arguments had been proposed for the existence of God. The argument from first cause, the argument from design, etc. Russell systematically demonstrated that all of these arguments are fallacious. Russell’s book was also a valuable exposure to the nature of logic expressed in a linguistic fashion as opposed to the mathematical proofs of geometry that I was familiar with.
So by the time I started college in 1980, Jack T. Chick was an embarrassing episode in my mental development, kind of like admitting you liked some really bad music for a certain time period…
Only recently did I even start thinking about Chick again as a result of becoming interested in “underground” comics in general. I became a fan quite late in the game, largely as a result of Denny Eichhorn giving me a whole set of his Real Stuff comics, and seeing the documentary Crumb. Just a few years ago, Fantagraphics opened a retail store in Georgetown, which is literally just over the hill from where I live. Through Fantagraphics I was reacquainted with Jim Blanchard, an amazing cartoonist and graphic artist in his own right. I had actually met Blanchard in the late 1980’s when I came into a Kinko’s that he was working at. I allowed him to keep some copies of some photographic portraits I brought in. He eventually re-drew and incorporated some of them into his graphic compilations.
During Super Bowl Sunday, 2010, Jim was kind enough to loan me a rare parody-documentary tract called “The Imp” which was a rather scathing criticism of Chick. Unknown to me, during the 1980’s Chick had become associated with other individuals with beliefs just as far-out as his, and he integrated their stories into his own tracts. Blanchard also gave me a copy of a fantastic video documentary on Chick that included interviews with at least two people I was familiar with.
Chick is an enigma; obviously he’s not in the same aesthetic niche as Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Peter Bagge, or any other “underground” comic artist. You won’t find his tracts for sale at Fantagraphics, nor even many Christian bookstores. According to the documentary, Canada considers Chick’s comics “Hate Literature!”
I’m sure I’m not alone in being one of those people who was affected in some weird and possibly profound way by Jack T. Chick. I think I’ll start asking people for their own stories…
Recently I got an e-mail from a graduate of my high school. It contained a link to a website which was put together to organize a 30th anniversary reunion for the class of 1980. Part of the website had a page dedicated to those of our graduating class who are now deceased. This reminded me of a strange incident that involved the most famous member of our graduating class: Steve Albini.
Steve and I graduated from Hellgate High in Missoula, MT in 1980. Back then I was pals with Steve to some degree. He formed Montana’s first punk band called Just Ducky. Their first public performance was at a bar downtown called the Forum. Steve asked me to project a movie I had made using the “direct stock” method, which involves creating images on the exposed film itself, rather than using a camera. The most well known film maker that used this method was Stan Brakhage.
Steve was also a columnist for the school newspaper, called the “Lance”. I think his column was called “Paparazzi” which was my first exposure to that word. I knew several other people on the Lance staff as well.
In a high school the size of Hellgate, it wasn’t entirely unusual for a student to die during the school year. During my senior year of 1979-1980, not only did one student die early in the school year, but a second one did as well! Unknown to me at the time, Steve Albini and several other members of the Lance staff organized a morbid “dead pool” into which each member put in five dollars. Each member of the dead pool then picked a week of the remainder of the year. If a third student died during that week then the “winner” would collect the money. If no one died, the staff would use the money to buy pizza at the end of the year.
But word quickly got out about the dead pool, and it was immediately dissolved. I remember watching a student who knew one of the deceased students confront Albini and physically threaten him. I suspect that if it came to blows, Steve would have gotten the worst of it, as he was no great shakes as a physical specimen… But that never happened, and as the school year went on, this little scandal was forgotten about.
But tragedy struck a day or two before graduation, as one of the most popular students in school was killed in a high speed automobile collision. This kid was not only a star athlete, but a top-notch student, and all around well liked guy. During the graduation ceremony we had the obligatory moment of silence for him, though if memory serves, they were quite blatant about having everyone pray for the kid.
Later that summer, I got to talking with another student who had been on the Lance staff, Steve D. Steve D. and I were fairly good friends until he became a born again Christian and I lost touch with him. I had forgotten about the connection between Albini’s dead pool and the death of the well-liked athlete. I asked Steve if he participated in the dead pool, and he sheepishly admitted that he had. I asked him which week he picked and he was quite chagrined to admit that he had picked the week that the popular athlete died!
I always wondered if he considered having participated in the dead pool a sin, and asked Jesus to forgive him…
A recent article that appeared in Martin Gardner’s column Notes of a Fringe Watcher reminded me of an incident that occurred to me when I was in high school. This is a comment of mine that originally appeared on Metafilter.
I used to watch the national evening news on TV with my father virtually every night from about 1968 until about 1981, when I moved into the dorms. I remember watching the evening news broadcast somewhere in the late 1970′s which reported that the WHO had announced the eradication of smallpox.
The news in and of itself was mind blowing to me, even as a high school kid, as I had no idea that an eradication program was even in effect. I knew enough about the history of epidemic disease to know that this was an absolute milestone in human history, the epidemiological equivalent of putting a man on the moon.
But then my father dropped an even more profound bombshell on me, rather casually in fact. “I had smallpox.”
This was astounding, as even then I knew that Jenner had come out with his vaccine in the late 1700′s. By the time my father was a child, the smallpox vaccine was commonly available. The fact that my father survived smallpox, growing up in Butte Montana in the 1930′s, amazed me further still. He showed no scarring that was visible.
“Why weren’t you vaccinated?” was all I could think of to ask.
“My parents didn’t believe in it.” I still couldn’t understand, as I suddenly started having to make a bunch of inferences. My father is an emotionally private person, and many things I’m very curious about I just don’t ask about. He’s Irish, so I had to assume his parents were either Catholic if religious, or atheist. My father is an atheist. As far as I know, the Catholic Church has never opposed vaccination, though they are, of course, saddled with a boat-load of other irrationalities…
So all I could gather from my father was that my paternal grandparents opposed vaccination on some sort of nebulous anti-government, anti-medical establishment, anti-something-or-other irrational reason.
So when I hear about people who oppose vaccination all I can think of is “Yeah, my father contracted smallpox because of people like you…”
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