SATURDAY, MAY 23, 2020
Baker City, Oregon
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OUR VIEW
Time to call
Legislature
There is a growing probability that Gov. Kate Brown will call a
special session of the Oregon Legislature within the next few weeks to
deal with expected budget shortfalls created by the COVID-19 virus
outbreak.
Brown should call the special session and shouldn’t wait very long to
do so.
That’s because the state is beginning to stagger after weeks of closed
businesses and high unemployment. Already, Brown has asked state
agencies to create a plan to slash their budgets by 17%. And earlier this
week state economists predicted the state will be facing a $3 billion
shortfall in its budget.
Oregon faces another challenge — the state constitution demands a
balanced budget.
Unlike the federal government, Oregon can’t put everything on a
virtual credit card and let the future take care of itself.
That creates steep challenges for lawmakers and their jobs during
the special session will be crucial. What simply cannot happen is a
divergence away from the budget woes and how to deal with COVID-19
into yet another series of legislative battles over issues tied to party
dogma.
We don’t have the time now to watch the special session descend into
chaos because a group of lawmakers suddenly decide to resurrect some
fl ashpoint issue from the past. The only goal must be to face the budget
shortfall and balance the budget, and then get back to dealing with the
virus outbreak.
Anything less will be a betrayal of voters. Party leaders and the
governor need to meet before the special session and craft an agree-
ment that narrowly defi nes what the special session will tackle. That
agreement must be clear and precise and include provisions that there
will be no deviation from the pressing matter — the state budget — at
hand. Oregon lawmakers no longer have the privilege of wasting away
days on the legislative time clock fi ghting over pie-in-the-sky, New Age
political initiatives. Lawmakers can do that later. Policy issues that are
not related to the state budget and the COVID-19 outbreak should be
jettisoned.
As is always the case, elected leaders from both parties will have an
opportunity to do some good work if a special session is called. They
will be presented with an opportunity to face a serious set of problems,
work on them together and solve them.
Wasting time in any other fashion is simply that — wasting time.
Time the state does not have.
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Baker City Herald. Columns, letters and
cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of
the Baker City Herald.
Your views
Wish there were more
dine-in options in Baker
When will Baker reopen? It’s
been a week and most restau-
rants are still closed except for
takeout. I refuse to order takeout
from a dine-in restaurant, I mean
what’s the point, right?
I notice all the local restaurants
have a “shop local, support local”
signs but still are not open. So I
can’t support what won’t open.
A group of neighbors and
friends now go to Boise to shop
and dine and we’ve learned to
enjoy the day out once a week.
Glad Idaho has open shops
and great restaurants for us to
dine in.
Thomas Wilcoxson
Baker City
OTHER VIEWS
Editorial from The Dallas Morning News:
The next two weeks, which include Memorial
Day, will be a test of our resolve to gather safely.
Gov. Greg Abbott is right to widen reopen-
ing, but its success depends on Texans’ common
sense.
Most businesses in Texas have the go-ahead
to reopen, albeit with restrictions. Families and
friends are also sure to gather in larger numbers
on Memorial Day for the fi rst time in weeks.
Abbott deserves praise for navigating a diffi cult
course through the medical and economic chal-
lenges posed by the coronavirus. Offi ce buildings
can reopen if businesses operate with no more
than 25% of their workers in the offi ce and prac-
tice social distancing protocols. Child care is back,
a necessity for working parents and a dry run for
the challenges schools will face.
Restaurants will be allowed to increase to 50%
capacity. Youth sports competitions and camps
can resume by the end of this month, and sum-
mer school can begin on June 1.
Although this sounds like a return to normal
life, it isn’t, at least not yet. There is much about
this return to a more normal existence that we
can’t predict. The coronavirus is still a threat. We
should wear masks, sanitize surfaces, socially dis-
tance and take other precautions to protect each
other. And older people with underlying health
conditions should be especially careful.
Statewide, a declining infection percentage
supports the governor’s decision to gradually
loosen the reins. Challenges will differ from
county to county, city to city and neighborhood to
neighborhood. How we deal with those challenges
will determine the next steps.
Key to this is close cooperation between state
and local governments. More diagnostic testing
and contact tracing, with special focus on poten-
tial hot spots, is required to keep the state ahead
of the virus. This is good public health policy and
a way to build public confi dence in the future.
It is important for us to remember that Ab-
bott’s orders establish the minimum statewide
requirements for reopening the economy. All of
us have sacrifi ced in some way to keep ourselves
and our neighbors safe, and it may be quite
awhile before we can expect to enjoy the Texas we
knew in the way we knew it before the coronavi-
rus so dramatically changed our lives.
The best way to make sure that our sacrifi ces
haven’t been in vain is to do all we can to protect
those gains.
Skyjackers actually had a ‘golden age’ in the US
I grew up in Western Oregon
during the 1970s and ’80s, which
means I also grew up knowing who
D.B. Cooper was.
In a manner of speaking, anyway.
To be precise, the only people
who actually know D.B. Cooper’s
true identity are the man himself
and, possibly, some of his friends
and relatives.
(And Cooper very well might be
dead.)
Nearly half a century has passed
since a man in a business suit hi-
jacked a 727 fl ight from Portland to
Seattle and then parachuted from
the airliner over Southwestern
Washington the day before Thanks-
giving 1971, with $200,000 in $20
bills strapped to his body. Yet even
after all that time, Cooper’s actual
identity, and what became of him,
persist as one of the great myster-
ies in America’s crime annals.
(The skyjacker actually bought
his ticket using the name “Dan
Cooper,” but a garbled phone call
led to his being identifi ed in an
early media report as “D.B.” and
“D.B.” he remains.)
Thirty years after Cooper’s caper,
America was again transfi xed by
skyjacking.
The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks were quite different, of
course, having in common only
the commandeering of commercial
aircraft.
In the Cooper case nobody, except
possibly Cooper himself, was killed.
Yet aside from these two
episodes, separated by more than
a generation, I wonder whether
many Americans know much about
the history of skyjackings in their
JAYSON
JACOBY
country. In particular I wonder
whether any signifi cant number of
my compatriots realizes that there
were a few periods when airlin-
ers were hijacked more often than
banks were robbed.
I certainly did not.
Thanks to my ignorance, I was
predisposed to be captivated by
Brendan I. Koerner’s 2013 book,
“The Skies Belong To Us: Love and
Terror in the Golden Age of Hijack-
ing.”
I read the Baker County Li-
brary’s copy a few years ago and
found it an unusually compelling
work of true crime, a genre that is
among my favorites. When I saw
a nearly pristine hardcover earlier
this year at the Library’s winter
book sale — this being in the halcy-
on, pre-pandemic period — I could
hardly pass up the $1 bargain.
My second reading — and no
good book deserves only a single
go-through — both refreshed my
appreciation for Koerner’s narra-
tive skill and further piqued my
interest in a topic that seems to me
curiously underrecognized.
Considering how many tens of
millions of us are so accustomed to
X-ray screening and other airport
security measures that we scarcely
think of the procedures except
as annoyances, it strikes me as
passing strange that the rashes of
skyjackings Koerner writes about
aren’t more deeply ingrained in our
history.
For a nation that will forever
be scarred by memories of 9/11,
the reality that at times in the
past airliners were hijacked in
America’s skies almost literally
on a weekly basis — and on a few
occasions more than one in a single
day — seems like rather more than
a footnote.
If nothing else, because many of
the skyjackers from the 1960s and
’70s whom Koerner writes about
were motivated at least in part
by their opposition to the Vietnam
War, I would have thought their
actions would join campus protests
and urban riots as symbols of that
raucous era.
But I do not believe this is the
case.
Certainly the skyjacking that
dominates “The Skies Belong To Us”
— the June 3, 1972, crime perpe-
trated by Roger Holder, a disgrun-
tled Vietnam veteran, and Cathy
Kerkow, who grew up in Coos Bay
— is nothing like as well-known
as, to name just two incidents, the
1968 Chicago riots or the Rolling
Stones’ disastrous free concert at
Altamont, California, in 1969.
Part of the explanation is obvi-
ous enough — no one died in the
skyjacking that Holder and Kerkow
pulled off.
And although neither of the pair
disappeared as Cooper did — in-
deed, both government offi cials and
the media knew their fi nal destina-
tion was Algiers, Algeria — Holder
didn’t return to the United States
for 14 years, having spent most of
the intervening time in France.
Kerkow remains a fugitive, her
whereabouts, and even whether
she’s still alive, unknown. Kerkow,
who would be 68, is still wanted by
the FBI for air piracy.
If somebody hijacked an airliner
today, I feel certain that, in the ab-
sence of a war or an impeachment,
the crime would be the lead news
story even if nobody was hurt.
This level of publicity would
refl ect both the extreme rarity of
skyjacking in the past two decades
and the lingering effects of 9/11.
Yet consider this excerpt from
“The Skies Belong To Us” — “Be-
tween 1961, when the fi rst plane
was seized in American airspace,
and 1972 ... 159 commercial fl ights
were hijacked in the United States.
All but a fraction of those hijackings
took place during the last fi ve years
of that frenetic era, often at a clip of
one or more per week. There were,
in fact, many days when two planes
were hijacked simultaneously,
strictly by coincidence.”
This stunning statistic prompts
the obvious question of how the
skyjacking epidemic could continue
so long when we know that security
measures such as X-raying baggage
— technology available during most
of that era — can prevent most
hijackings.
Koerner answers that question in
great detail.
I was especially fascinated to
learn that in 1972, the peak year of
what Koerner brands the “Golden
Age of Hijacking,” when more than
30 planes were taken over, U.S. Sen.
Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania
introduced a bill to require airlines
to mandate every passenger walk
through a metal detector.
The Senate passed an amended
version of Schweiker’s bill 75-1.
But after intense lobbying by the
airlines, which argued that manda-
tory screening of passengers wasn’t
feasible, the bill died in the House of
Representatives.
The airlines’ reluctance to
endorse a law designed to protect
their customers’ lives might sound
contrary to the industry’s interests
but it’s easily enough explained —
the number of passengers continued
to rise despite the increasing odds
that a person’s fl ight to, say, Seattle
or San Francisco would instead land
in Havana or Algiers.
Koerner’s book is a treasure
both as a work of history and of
true crime. But I think its greatest
contribution is to highlight the stark
changes, over a relatively modest
period, in an activity — commercial
air travel — that is authentically
American in much the same way
that freeways and shopping malls
are.
I suspect almost any reader
would fi nd it fascinating that fl y-
ing, an intensely regulated and
regimented way to travel, was, little
more than a generation ago, so
loosely controlled that most any-
body with a pistol or a road fl are,
or even a briefcase that allegedly
contained a bomb, could turn a 747,
at least for a while, into his own
private Air Force One.
And I used to think it was amaz-
ing that airline passengers were
allowed to smoke cigarettes.
Jayson Jacoby is editor
of the Baker City Herald.