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I received a lot of feedback about my remembrance of pal, Larry “Lash” LaRue, getting robbed as a young man working at Taco Bell, but none funnier than the following from Jim Fogarty, who worked with Lash at the Omaha World-Herald, back in the early ’70s.
Fogarty writes:
As far as I’m concerned every day with him was just like the Taco Bell robbery.
I recall once when he walked back from the police station (where I remained) to the newspaper office. He sat down at the re-write desk and immediately pitched face-first into the typewriter keys. Two things had happened. First, he got stung by a bee and didn’t know it. Second, he was allergic to bee stings and didn’t know that, either. He was back in the office by four p.m. writing the story of his bee-sting near miss.
Lash also was a rebel … When he was given crappy assignments he would make masterpieces out of them – and then complain about how crappy they were.
One day the desk got a call about children on their bicycles being attacked by a bird on 92nd Street in Omaha. He drove out, watched what happened each time a kid passed under a certain tree (instant attack and pecks on the head).
Then Lash borrowed a bike and put himself in harm’s way, again. And the newspaper photographer got a perfect photo of the bird – frozen-in-time – as it took its first peck on Lash’s dome. LaRue took the photo to experts who immediately pronounced the attacker to be a “King Bird,” known to be overly protective of nests occupied by baby King Birds. Front page, that was.
Then one Saturday they sent Lash to cover the circus parade – from the train to the downtown auditorium. As any good journalist would do, Lash covered a six-year-old boy watching the parade instead of the parade itself. But to demonstrate his disdain for the assignment, he wrote this lead: ‘A six-year-old boy will love a circus parade as surely as a mongoose will suck a duck egg.’
He turned it in to fellow-rebel Al Pagel who was manning the city desk that day and who let the lead go through, all the way to the next edition. Senior editors were so horrified that they said nothing – to Pagel or LaRue.
###
Lash wasn’t the only legend at the Omaha World Herald. In a May 9, 2013 column for the Tacoma News-Tribune, Lash wrote about his pal Fogarty getting back at a radio reporter who would steal his copy, put it on the air as his own, and basically scoop Fogarty on his own story. You can read that story HERE.
Jim Fogarty, still lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where he is a co-owner of Legacy Preservation, a company that publishes limited-edition personal biographies. You can phone him at (402) 305-7180, email him at Jim@legacypreservation.com or find out more about Legacy Preservation at www.legacypreservation.com
It turns out that my pal, Larry “Lash” LaRue, who died last November, was ahead of his time. I already knew that, but a recent article I read reminded me that Mr. LaRue knew way back when, what social scientists are just figuring out now.
In the 1960s, when Larry was working his way through Long Beach State, he had a gig as the overnight guy at Taco Bell in Long Beach. On the wall behind him was a clock imbedded inside a giant Mexican sunburst.
Late one night, this young kid comes up with a gun, sticks it through the window, and demands all the money. Instead of giving him the cash, Larry whispers to the kid to put the gun down out of sight. “There’s a camera hidden in the clock,” Larry tells him, “just act normal.” The kid looks scared, then says, “OK” and puts the gun down.
Then Larry in a loud voice says, “Yes Sir, two bean burritos and a taco,” speaking for the benefit of the make-believe camera.
He puts the order in the bag, gives it to the would-be robber, then tells the kid to take off before they both get caught. The kid runs off with his bag of fast food, and Larry calls the police.
It turns out that Larry’s dad, Al LaRue, was a lieutenant on the Long Beach Police Department at the time. His dad was irate. How stupid are you, he wanted to know. You risk your life for a couple of hundred bucks that doesn’t even belong to you? Are you insane?
But Larry wasn’t insane. He just didn’t want to get the kid in trouble over a couple of hundred bucks in the Taco Bell register.
The Taco Bell robbery story all happened before I knew Larry, but he told about that night on several occasions when we were out drinking, and I laughed every time. Because it was funny and because that’s the kind of guy Larry was.
Now, 50 years later I read a story on Zocalo by sociology professor Anne Nassauer. The professor writes that social scientists are using closed circuit TV recordings of robberies and other events to discover what makes people act the way they do. Setting up social experiments with human subjects in a lab or doing a survey is always limited by the awareness of the subjects that they are part of a test. And because they are aware, they consciously or unconsciously act as the think they should act.
But on closed-circuit TV, you get a picture of the subjects who are part of a real-life experience rather than a closely controlled experiment. And with the ubiquitous presence of surveillance cameras, there is lots of material to choose from with a wide range of cultures and nationalities. It turns out that most of us follow scripts during encounters with other folks.
“How are you,” somebody says to you.
“I’m good,” you say, even though you may have a toothache and your wife just filed for divorce. “And how about you?”
“I’m doing just fine,” the other person says. “Have a great day.”
“You too,” you answer.
It’s a script, and with some variation, most of us follow it dozens of times a day. It turns out to be the same thing with robberies.
The robber brandishes a gun, bursts into the store, and shouts in an angry voice, “Give me all the money!”
And the clerk? He or she puts their hands up, and turns over the cash.
It’s all part of a script. But it turns out, that’s not the way it always goes. In about a third of robberies, the victim does not follow the script. And when he or she goes off script, it throws the entire robbery dynamic out of sync – kind of like when an actor unexpectedly starts to ad lib in a play.
Sometimes, the clerk doesn’t put up his hands. Sometimes the clerk reaches under the counter, pulls out his or her own gun, and shoots back. Sometimes the clerk is fed up with people just marching in and demanding money and tells the robber to get lost.
Here’s the Zocalo account of a robbery caught on video in Riverbank, California.
‘Two robbers enter the Circle T Market in Riverbank. One carries a large assault rifle, an AK-47. Upon seeing them, the clerk behind the counter puts his hands up. Yet the elderly store owner finds the weapon absurdly big and casually walks up to the robbers, laughing. His shoulders are relaxed and he points the palms of his hands up as if asking them whether they are serious. Both perpetrators are startled upon seeing the elderly man laughing at them. One runs away, while the one with the AK-47 freezes, is tackled, and is later arrested by police. They had robbed numerous stores before.”
Which brings us back to the robbery at Taco Bell so many years ago. It doesn’t always work out as well as one might hope. The young robber could have shot my friend Larry LaRue and killed him before Larry and I ever met. That could have happened, but it didn’t.
It could be that the young robber took the lesson to heart, gave up his plan to be a criminal, and lived a happy and productive life. We would all like to believe that, but it is almost certainly not what really happened. And that’s OK.
Larry did his best for the kid, because that’s the kind of guy Larry was. And maybe in the end that is all that really counts.
Do you have a dissenting opinion or any opinion at all on the subject? Contact me at george@georgeleecunningham.com and let me know. Meanwhile, you can always subscribe and get an email reminder of blog postings. Your name will not be shared and you may cancel at any time.
California natives are found of describing the four seasons as fire, mudslides, drought, and earthquake.
That, of course, is more whimsical than real, but California is an extreme state and the weather is no exception. And it does somewhat tie together. A rainy winter, causes the brush to grow thicker which means when the drought rolls around, there is more dried-out wild vegetation to burn. On the other hand, the authorities also warn that a drier winter means the underbrush will be even drier than usual, which means that the fire season will still be bad. There is no winning. When the vegetation burns away it leaves the hillsides bare, which means that when the rains return there will be massive mudslides.
Earthquakes are the outlier in all this. They can happen anytime in the year and they always exacerbate whatever widespread disaster is taking place at the time.
I think there should be another disaster season in California – the whacky-politician season. California left alone is the most beautiful state in the nation. When politicians and political activists get involved, the entire state turns into a giant refried mess.
What brings this to mind is that this is the fire season in California. The hills are burning away and the haze and ash hangs in the sky like a post-apocalyptic preview for the end-times.
Welcome to the Golden State.
As it turns out, the last week of forest fire in Northern California alone has put more pollution in the air than an entire year of automobiles and trucks state-wide. That fire, although huge and expected to burn for weeks to come, is only one of several forest fires in the state so far this year.
And that’s not the worst of it. Pollution from cars and trucks has been studied to death and even exaggerated in order to support expensive and onerous air-control regulations that add to the cost of cars, trucks, and fuel. The pollution from forest fires has not undergone the same level of scrutiny. Each different species of trees that burn put a different mix of particulate matter into the air, a mix whose health effect is little understood.
A secondary effect is how forest fires set back efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide that is thought to be a major factor in global warming. Living trees soak up carbon dioxide and release oxygen into the air. Burning trees release the carbon dioxide they absorbed over the years back into the air in sudden and massive amounts. No matter where you stand on global warming, California summers do appear to be getting hotter and the climate getting dryer.
But global warming is not the only reason for the increase in massive wild fires and maybe not even the primary one.
Former California Republican Assemblyman Chuck DeVore recalls forest product industry folks telling him in 2005 how difficult and expensive it was to do business in California. Over the ensuing years, the California timber industry shrank to less than half of what it formerly was.
The shortfall in timber was made up by wood imports from other countries. As the forestry industry declined, undergrowth in the forests was no longer being cleared and sick and dying trees no longer being removed. The environmental maintenance once performed by the timber companies was no longer taking place.
One result has been the intensity and frequency of fires has increased. All the burning underbrush and dead trees, which act as kindling, results in a fire that becomes so hot that it sterilizes the soil and makes it difficult for the forest to recover.
Eight months ago, the U.S. Forest Service and Cal Fire issued a joint warning that 129 million trees have died on 8.9 million acres in California because of years of drought and an infestation of bark beetles. The problem is that the Forest Service is spending so much money on fire suppression that there is less available each year for reforestation, removal of dead trees, and watershed management.
Spending more money of forestry – clearing out the undergrowth and taking out dead trees, would do more to reduce pollution than declaring war on refineries that supply the gasoline and diesel fuel we use in our cars and in the trucks that companies use to deliver the goods we need to market.
And it would create jobs. The underbrush and dead trees could be buried in a landfill, where they would decompose and eventually create methane that could at some point be drawn off and used as fuel, or they could be burned in an incinerator with scrubbers that would remove most of the pollution. Neither of those solutions is perfect, but in the real world, perfect is an ideal, not a reality.
It seems like common sense, but this is California, where common sense is not as common as one might think.
Do you have a dissenting opinion or any opinion at all on the subject? Contact me at george@georgeleecunningham.com and let me know. Meanwhile, you can always subscribe and get an email reminder of blog postings. Your name will not be shared and you may cancel at any time.