I didn’t want to put this in the main jail feed, but I did want to make note of it: YouTube is telling me that “The Wrecking Crew” documentary is available for free (with ads).
I know that great and good FOTB and highly valued contributor pigpen51 was a fan of this movie, so I figure it’s worth your time to watch.
Today is Saturday, so I feel like I can run a bit long. And there’s been one thing missing from this series to date: trains. I’m sure at least some of my readers are train fans, right?
“On the Track”, a 1940s film made by Carl Dudley for the Association of American Railroads. Mr. Dudley was apparently a fairly well known railroad film maker.
Bonus video #1: from 1952, “Northwest Empire”, a Union Pacific promo film about travel around Oregon and Washington.
Bonus video #2: “At This Moment”, from 1954. Propaganda film about the importance of American railroads.
I have to admit: “Kelly” is kind of cute in that 1950s way. I can see why someone would send her a dozen roses.
Richard Penniman, better known as “Little Richard”.
Little Richard did not invent rock ’n’ roll. Other musicians had already been mining a similar vein by the time he recorded his first hit, “Tutti Frutti” — a raucous song about sex, its lyrics cleaned up but its meaning hard to miss — in a New Orleans recording studio in September 1955. Chuck Berry and Fats Domino had reached the pop Top 10, Bo Diddley had topped the rhythm-and-blues charts, and Elvis Presley had been making records for a year.
But Little Richard, delving deeply into the wellsprings of gospel music and the blues, pounding the piano furiously and screaming as if for his very life, raised the energy level several notches and created something not quite like any music that had been heard before — something new, thrilling and more than a little dangerous. As the rock historian Richie Unterberger put it, “He was crucial in upping the voltage from high-powered R&B into the similar, yet different, guise of rock ’n’ roll.”
…
He was at the height of his fame when he left the United States in late September 1957 to begin a tour in Australia. As he told the story, he was exhausted, under intense pressure from the Internal Revenue Service and furious at the low royalty rate he was receiving from Specialty. Without anyone to advise him, he had signed a contract that gave him half a cent for every record he sold. “Tutti Frutti” had sold half a million copies but had netted him only $25,000.
One night in early October, before 40,000 fans at an outdoor arena in Sydney, he had an epiphany.
“That night Russia sent off that very first Sputnik,” he told Mr. White, referring to the first satellite sent into space. “It looked as though the big ball of fire came directly over the stadium about two or three hundred feet above our heads. It shook my mind. It really shook my mind. I got up from the piano and said, ‘This is it. I am through. I am leaving show business to go back to God.’”
He had one last Top 10 hit: “Good Golly Miss Molly,” recorded in 1956 but not released until early 1958. By then, he had left rock ’n’ roll behind.
He became a traveling evangelist. He entered Oakwood College (now Oakwood University) in Huntsville, Ala., a Seventh-day Adventist school, to study for the ministry. He cut his hair, got married and began recording gospel music.
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By his own account, alcohol and cocaine began to sap his soul (“I lost my reasoning,” he would later say), and in 1977, he once again turned from rock ’n’ roll to God. He became a Bible salesman, began recording religious songs again and, for the second time, disappeared from the spotlight.
He did not stay away forever. The publication of his biography in 1984 signaled his return to the public eye, and he began performing again.
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The NYT obit for Roy Horn wasn’t up when I was writing last night, but it is now.
We are all mourning the loss of #RoyHorn of #SiegfriedandRoy. S&R invented, created, pioneered the very idea that a magic show could be a full evening in Vegas. If not for S&R there would be no P&T in Vegas. He was so full of life, wild, and unpredictable. We will miss him. pic.twitter.com/sHW5NAyBMu
— Penn Jillette (@pennjillette) May 9, 2020
Forty years ago today, at about 3:40 in the afternoon Pacific time, five losers tried to hold up the Security Pacific Bank branch in Norco, California.
The five guys involved in the robbery were pretty much a loose collection of friends and relatives. There were two sets of brothers involved. The ostensible leader of the group had converted to a form of fundamentalist Christianity in the 70s, and had also become obsessed with a lot of the global catastrophe thinking going on at the time (Jupiter Effect, earthquakes, etc.) The main purpose of the robbery was to get funds so they could build and stock a compound. When the s–t hit the fan, they planned to retreat there with their families and ride out the apocalypse.
It didn’t go as planned. The robbers had planned to set off a large explosion as a diversion, but that failed, and the robbery was pretty much blown right away. Riverside County Sheriff’s Department responded, with the first officer on scene within seconds. The five robbers had managed to accumulate what even I would call a truly impressive stash of guns, ammo, and improvised explosive devices, and a firefight broke out between the RCSD and the five robbers. The responding deputies were outgunned, but continued to engage.
The robbers tried to flee in their (stolen) getaway van, but a lucky shot from one of the RCSD officers killed their getaway driver and the van crashed. The remaining four robbers hijacked a work truck from a passing driver (still shooting it out with RCSD) and fled.
The robbery team then proceeded to lead law enforcement (RCSD, the California Highway Patrol, and the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department) on a merry chase of approximately 25 miles (possibly 35 miles: sources differ) through the Inland Empire, into the San Gabriel Mountains, and up a dirt road. They were firing at the officers and throwing IEDs the whole way: according to Wikipedia, 33 police cars and a helicopter were damaged by gunfire.
Once they got into the mountains, the robbery team repeatedly pulled ahead on the dirt road, then stopped in an attempt to ambush the responding officers. At the time, the radio systems they used did not inter-operate: officers from one department, who could communicate with their department’s helicopter, were relaying messages on the one available “mutual aid” frequency to the other departments warning of ambushes.
The robbery team was finally stopped by a washed out area of the dirt road, exited the truck and ambushed the officers chasing them. Deputy James Evans of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department was shot and killed. Two deputies behind Evans (D. J. McCarty and James McPheron of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department) brought into play the SBCSD’s only rifle: a stolen M-16 that had been dumped from a moving car, recovered by the department, and kept when the military said “We don’t want it back”. Supposedly, it didn’t look like much, but it fired.
(At one point, responding law enforcement officers pulled over and commandeered a lever-action rifle from a target shooter who was walking along the road. This particular area was in common use as an informal range, and the robbery team had practiced shooting there. Unfortunately, the lever-action rifle the deputies commandeered was a .22.)
When SBCSD started firing back on full-auto, the robbery team decided it was time to make like the trees and get out of there. They fled into the forest. Three of them surrendered or were captured the following day. The fourth one was tracked down by a law enforcement team, was shot multiple times when he refused to surrender, and apparently killed himself with a shot to the chest from his .38.
There was, of course, a trial. From the account I’ve read, it may have been the closest thing to a courtroom circus California ever saw before OJ. The trial lasted 14 months: at the end of it, the three surviving bank robbers were sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. All three remain in the California penal system today.
The definitive, and (to the best of my knowledge, only) account of this story is Peter Houlahan’s Norco ’80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History. I’m embarrassed to admit: I’d never heard of the Norco robbery until I saw a reference to Houlahan’s book somewhere. I was in high school at the time, and I thought I was fairly aware of current events and the world around me. So finding out there was a major bank robbery and shootout in California that wasn’t North Hollywood and that I’d never heard of kind of blew my mind.
I have mixed feelings about the book, though. The early chapters about the background of the robbery team and especially the leader kind of bugged me. Houlahan seemed to be kind of condescending about the more mainstream aspects of the leader’s Christian beliefs. And he didn’t answer the one question I have: where did these five losers, who were either under-employed on unemployed, get the money to accumulate all those guns and ammo? (He doesn’t say anything about them stealing weapons: all of their purchases were apparently legit over the counter sales at gun shops. Stealing guns: bad. Bank robbery: A-OK?)
Once he settles down and actually gets into the robbery, though, Houlahan’s book became much more interesting to me. I think he did an excellent job of profiling many of the law enforcement people involved, especially several members of the RCSD and their struggles (both before and after the robbery). Andy Delgado’s story is especially compelling to me. I think he was also pretty strong on the lack of preparation by RCSD and the other agencies involved for an event like this. The departments were still armed with mostly revolvers and shotguns, and almost no rifles (officially). They also did a sorry job of managing PTSD for the responding officers. Several of them (including Glyn Bolasky) left law enforcement afterwards. (Deputy Bolasky recovered from his injuries, and, after leaving law enforcement, joined the Air Force and became a Lieutenant Colonel.)
Houlahan’s also pretty good about the trial, which I haven’t gone into a lot of detail about. I’ll refer you to his book if you want that part of the story. And, to his credit, he tried really hard to be precise about firearms and firearms terminology. There are a couple of places where he slipped up (repeated references to the robbers having a “.357 rifle” in their intended getaway car: I’m pretty sure he meant “.375 H&H”).
Wikipedia page on the Norco shootout, which also doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the trial.
Someone has posted a documentary/training film, apparently made by the Irvine Police Department in 1982, on YouTube. (Officer Rolf Parkes, who is credited in the first video, was with RCSD at the time and was injured in the shootout.) It is longish (close to an hour) but broken up into three chunks for your viewing pleasure, and well worth watching. (The transfer quality is also better than some of those vintage Motorola videos.)
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
(Houlahan’s book was nominated for a best fact crime Edgar this year, but lost to The Less People Know About Us: A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity by Axton Betz-Hamilton. And, yes, those are affiliate links, and if you buy the books through this site, I do get a kickback.)