Off the I-15

A lot of my time on the job is spent on the crime beat, which could easily leave me pretty cynical. But sometimes I get to cover stories that are touching and even inspiring. On Monday, for instance, Matthews Hamilton became one of my heroes. Most of my heroes aren’t famous. They’re people I know personally, like my friend Brian Pace, who graduated from college with a biology degree and immediately headed down to Ecuador to help clean up the site of a massive oil spill in the Amazon rain forest using oyster mushrooms. The mushrooms, through some chemical process that I don’t really understand, basically eat up the oil and render it harmless. Pretty cool stuff. But I digress.

Matthews Hamilton, my new hero, is a 16-year-old recovering from leukemia. Although his cancer is in remission, he still can’t go to Barstow High School with his twin brother and 15-year-old sister. He has to wear a mask over his face to keep from getting an infection that could land him back in the hospital. He can’t do tricks on his skateboard or bike like he used to.

Under the circumstances, a person could easily be pretty depressed, especially when that person is a teenager. When I was 16, I remember carrying on as if the world was coming to an end over much less serious problems. But Matthews struck me as one of the best-adjusted kids I have met. He’s polite, smart, and interested in the world around him. When he couldn’t go to school any more, he made new friends at the hospital. When he couldn’t ride a skateboard, he picked up the guitar. While teenagers can be notoriously hard to get a good quote from, Matthews not only had thoughtful answers to my questions, he also had questions for me. When did I decide I wanted to be a reporter? How many people work for the Desert Dispatch? Do I like my job? He said he wanted to take a photography class, so I let him take some pictures with my camera (it belongs to me, not the paper, so I can take risks like handing it off to a 16-year-old).

It’s nice to be reminded once in a while that the kids are all right and some people can make the best of hard-luck stories.

Abby Sewell | reporter

Emily Lambert probably won’t drive for another six years. David Pallante has at least four years until he gets behind the wheel — and pays at the pump.

Despite being years away from their 16th birthdays, these two students, and many other Newberry Springs Elementary School fifth-graders, knew exactly what was up with gas, the price.

While interviewing students at Newberry for a story about a proposed increase in school meal prices, many stressed that the high gas prices were more of a concern to their parents than an extra quarter for lunch. With gas prices in California up nearly 50 cents from last year and a 25 mile drive to school facing some parents, gas is the biggest concern, according to their kids.

Emily, 10, said her parents drive her from Barstow to Newberry for school each day and seem to spend a lot of money on gas. David, 12, said his parents do the same thing. When asked if they, and other fifth-graders, heard their parents talk about prices going up, all they could talk about was gas.

“That’s expensive,” said Emily. Other’s clamored about what they had heard from their parents about the price at the pump. It seems the price of gas was a daily discussion in most households and one the kids were privy too.

One student held up 10 fingers and told me that he heard gas was going to reach $10 a gallon soon. His teacher, Sheril Helms, quickly corrected him, showing only four fingers to indicate the possible gas ceiling.

Aaron Aupperlee | city editor

I got two questions. Ed Frawley had 10 minutes of photographs and narration.

The father of an 82nd Airborne Division soldier woke up the military to the horrors of some soldiers barracks with a amateur video, a couple of photos thrown together with a plea to anyone who watched to call Senators, Reps, the local newspaper and demand change. People watched, 142,455 on one You Tube iteration, and the Army responded.

The problems at Fort Bragg, N.C., where the photos were taken, were remedied. Every barrack worldwide was inspected, and the Army began discussing fixing the barrack problem.

On Thursday, Secretary of the Army Peter Geren visited Fort Irwin. The visit had been planned months in advance, but the timing meant that barracks would be the issue at hand. I was allowed to ask Geren two questions about barracks and that was it.

Soldiers wanted me to ask more. After talking with 11th ACR soldiers in the box on Thursday, I had an idea of the questions they wanted answers to. They wanted to know how much it would cost to fix their barracks, and if the Army would be willing to spend that on them.

I asked Geren that question and he ducked.

So who really changed things here? The professional journalist with my pen, pad, fancy digital voice recorder and a photographer to tag along or a concerned father with a few snap-shots, a determined voice and YouTube.

Last week we ran a story about “Leaving Barstow” an independent film that recently wrapped up production. After talking to the filmmakers, I was intrigued enough to make the two-hour drive to Newport Beach after work yesterday and check out the movie’s premiere at the Newport Beach Film Festival.

As the title might suggest, the film depicts our city as a land of little opportunity and lots of meth, and the plot centers around various people who hope to leave it. Being a relatively recent transplant myself, I wasn’t offended. I would guess that native Barstonians will be split between love and hate of the film, if it ever finds distribution and makes its way to theaters.

Some people will probably relate to it, like the man who reportedly said to director Peter Paige when he came across the film crew on Main Street, “Leaving Barstow? That’s what I gotta do!” Others will probably feel that a bunch of outsiders had no right to typecast Barstow without really getting to know the town and its good features.

The film centers on 18-year-old Andrew, who is socially inept, smart and angsty. He works in a bookstore — a dead give-away that none of the filmmakers are actually from Barstow, which doesn’t have a bookstore — lives with his single mom, who seems to be bent on recapturing her youth through cleavage-baring shirts and an inappropriately young aspiring country singer boyfriend. Andrew’s main sources of support are his best friend, Carlos; his teacher/father figure Mr. Johns; and a late-night radio DJ who goes on long, rambling on-the-air rants because, as he puts it, “There’s nobody listening at this hour, and if you are awake, you’re probably on meth.”

Enter Jenny, the attractive newcomer, who somehow got stuck in Barstow on her way to L.A. and dreams of an acting career. We never find out how Jenny ended up marooned in Barstow working at a Chinese restaurant and living in her grandmother’s apartment; or why Mr. Johns, who makes it clear that he didn’t want to end up as a high school teacher Barstow, got derailed from his chosen path. Likewise, we never find out exactly what Andrew’s ambitions are, outside of leaving his hometown.

Being a reporter, I like to have details and specifics, so some of the film’s omissions left me fretting. The vagueness may have been intentional, to make the story more universal, or maybe it simply came about because the movie was written by an actor in his 20’s who was more interested in the characters’ inner struggles than in nitty-gritty details.

The acting is definitely the movie’s finest feature. The characters felt like real people, with human flaws, loves and dreams. I didn’t feel that I was watching people acting; I felt as if I was simply a voyeur in the lives of these people for two hours.

The storyline was a little overly dramatic, piling bad luck on poor Andrew’s head until I wondered if he was going to go on a shooting rampage. Overall, though, it was an intelligent, heart wrenching movie about people who feel trapped in their lives. Unfortunately for Barstow, if the movie ever reaches theaters, our town will probably become a national synonym for that feeling. But hey, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right?

Check out more info and the film trailer here.

Abby Sewell | reporter

This one might even come as a shock to my parents.

I actually thought it was an April Fools joke when I came into the office on Tuesday morning to learn the police department had called in the explosive experts from Fort Irwin to examine a potato gun. True, the concept of a spud gun may be foreign to most, but for me and a couple of friends confined to the back roads and farm pastures of Ada, Michigan, it was a good time on a weekend night.

I did not see the gun confiscated by the police on Tuesday but I imagine it looked similar to the contraption my friends and I used to launch entire potatoes hundreds of yards with just a few squirts from a hair spray can, essentially a long plastic tube with some sort of ignition device at one end. I won’t go into detail about how to make a potato gun — as noted in the article, it is illegal to possess one in California.

My childhood pursuits were short-lived. Only on a few nights did my friends and I sneak onto the high school football field to conduct distance and accuracy tests. We could easily shoot the spud the length of the field but could never hit the broad side of barn, which I believe we tried once. Other nights we drove around the back roads launching spuds into farmers fields and stirring up quite a ruckus among the cows and llamas. Llama farming was really taking off in Ada during that time, don’t ask me why.

We never hit anything, to our knowledge, and spent most of our time figuring out which brand of hair spray acted as a better propellant. We singed a few eyebrows and burnt a few fingertips and then moved on with our teenage lives.

By now some of you may have noticed a new byline popping up in the pages of the Desert Dispatch, attached to reports of machete-wielding home invaders, scrap metal thieves and other tales of crime and punishment. That name, Abby Sewell, belongs to me. I joined the paper on March 5 as Barstow’s new cops and courts reporter.

For those of you who were wondering — no, Aaron Aupperlee has not left the paper or fled the state. He’s still alive and well and working at the Desert Dispatch. In this age of newspaper layoffs, the Dispatch was able to hire another reporter to join the small Barstow office so that Aaron can concentrate on editing.

I came to Barstow from Oregon, where I was working as a general assignment reporter at a twice-weekly paper called the Molalla Pioneer. The biggest story in Molalla centered around an ongoing legal battle over a pet deer. Before that, I lived in Portland, where I went to college and then worked odd jobs and tried to make it as a freelance writer for a couple of years before deciding to pursue a full time career as a reporter.

I had never laid eyes on Barstow before I arrived in town three weeks ago, but I’m no stranger to the desert. I grew up in Tucson, before fleeing to the greener pastures of Oregon. I liked living in Oregon — nice people, beautiful scenery, good coffee. But I also missed the desert. Nine months of rain every year starts to get to you after a while. So, when I started looking for a reporting job at a daily paper, I looked to the Southwest.

Coming from a newspaper job where I reported on pretty much everything outside of sports, the cops and court beat appealed to me. There’s always action, you get a picture of human nature at its best and worst, and people can’t complain to a crime reporter, “Why do you always write about the bad things?”

In my first couple of weeks on the job, I have found Barstow to be full of nice people and weird and interesting news. When I’m not on the job, there are plenty of hiking spots within an easy drive and Las Vegas just two hours away. What more could a reporter ask for?

— Abby Sewell

The contestants changed outfits three times. Former Teen Miss and Miss changed four. Sixteen-year-oldKassy Alexander’s favorite cardio activity is playing soccer, and she likes to spoil herself with a strawberry and cream frappuccino from Starbucks and a pedicure. She wore a sea-foam green dress. Leslie Ray, 21, likes to run on the treadmill and then go shopping with friends and eat ice cream. She wore a lime dress.

I know all this, and more, because I took notes. And I know the colors of the young women’s dresses because I asked my photographer, Aileen.

About mid-way through Saturday’s Miss Barstow Pageant, I could not believe I was furiously scribbling down the contestants’ favorite activities, their indulgences and counting wardrobe changes. I certainly did not get into this business to cover pageants. But by the end of the night, I certainly didn’t mind.

True, I did joke about covering Miss Barstow for most of the week leading up to the pageant. Pageant day is a long day for a reporter — it’s a longer day for the contestants and their mothers I am sure — and not one that will expose any government injustices, help the down-trodden or win a Pulitzer.

There are, however, many reasons why covering the Miss Barstow Pageant is great.

1) The gym is replete with stories.

Each contestant, each parent, each grandmother sitting in the gym chairs is a potential story, and they are not going anywhere for hours. I chose to focus on sisters this year but could have done stories on moms and grandmas who sew dresses, make-up experts that cannot drive yet or the little 7-year-old who wouldn’t smile with her mouth open and was pretty sure she wouldn’t win just because she lost her two front teeth a few months ago.

2) People are genuinely excited.

For most of those involved, this is a big deal. Like interviewing the quarterback after a big win, the contestants are normally up-beat and willing to talk about what it took to get where they are, how they are feeling and what they expect. Parents too are sometimes a little too anxious to grab the reporter’s arm and tell you how great their daughter is. This is a nice change from the all too routine practice of pulling teeth to get comments on a normal news day.

3) Great interviews.

All reporters know the horrors of interviewing a 10-year-old:

Q: Did you have fun today? A: Yes.

Q: What was your favorite part? A: Everything.

Q: What do you like about pageants? A: I like being in pageants.

Not so at the Miss Barstow Pageant. Even the two-year-old I talked to was comfortable enough to give me a good facial expression and say she was having lots of fun. The pacifier in her mouth made her a little hard to understand. The younger kids gave great insight into competing and the importance of sisters, and the older women did not seem to flinch when I started asking questions. Anne-Shirley Harpole, who won Teen Miss, was obviously comfortable answering questions and proved to be a great interview. And Miss Barstow AlyxBurnett was so unreserved with her emotions that I believed her when she said she was overwhelmed and left it at that.

4) And it’s just fun.

Everyone is dressed up. Everyone is excited. The audience is cheering. The girls are crying — some in joy, some in disappointment. Flash bulbs are exploding everywhere. The gym is a mob scene at the end. I told my photographer, it’s like being a real reporter, covering a real big event. And who doesn’t like that feeling.

5) Beauty queens can even make me look good.

Me interviewing Miss Barstow Alyx Burnett.

and me interviewing Teen Miss Barstow Anne-Shirley Harpole.

Even though I felt a little silly writing down that fifteen-year-old Victoria Herrera’s secret spoil is carneasada French fries from Amigos (I like Robertizo’s better) or that Danya Hawes wore a chocolate colored dress, better sounding that a brown dress, the pageant is still important and something I don’t mind taking notes at.

This post also is blogged on my Pluck blog “Leftovers” at  www.desertdispatch.com

Aaron Aupperlee | city editor

Authorities arrested a real Yuri Orlav this week in Thailand. Viktor Bout, 41, a reputed Russian arms dealer dubbed the “Merchant of Death” for his aid in fueling African civil wars, bears a striking resemblance to the Nichols Cage character in the 2005 film “Lord of War.”In the film, Cage plays a Russian arms dealer who profits nicely from the surplus of guns after the disenegration of the Soviet Union and the unrest besetting Africa. In reality, Bout did the same thing.According to the Associated Press, Bout could face war crimes charges for running guns on behalf of former Liberian leader Charles Taylor and the Sierra Leone rebel group, The Revolutionary United Front, responsible in part for the artocities committed in connection to “blood diamonds.” His guns have also been connected to a long list of countries and terrorists organizations in Asia, Africa and South America.  Stephen Rapp, chief prosecutor of a U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal, said weapons were delivered into the war zone “at the time they were conducting operations with names like ’No living thing,’ and being paid for those shipments with diamonds dug by slave labor.”At the end of “Lord of War,” Cage’s character goes free after agents track him down and discover his cache of weapons and documents in New York City. The rationale, according to Orlav:”Some of these men are the enemies of ‘your’ enemies. And while the biggest arms dealer in the world is your boss - the President of the United States, who ships more merchandise in a day than I do in a year - sometimes it’s embarrassing to have his fingerprints on the guns. Sometimes he needs a freelancer like me to supply forces he can’t be seen supplying. So. You call me evil, but unfortunately for you, I’m a necessary evil.”Bout’s fate appears to be less Hollywood. Thailand wants to prosecute him for involvement with terrorist attacks. The United States wants him on similar charges and the United Nations is considering war crimes.Aaron Aupperlee | City Editor

I try not to think about philosophy or mathematics in the shower but sometimes, it’s inevitable. I was in the shower thinking about the story about babies born on Leap Year that I had to write for today when I started thinking about dog years.

If dogs age seven years for every year a human ages, and if Leap Years occur only every four years, how old would a dog born on Leap Year be?

It turns out that question is not nearly as confusing as it sounds once you work it out on paper.

• A boy or girl born on Feb. 29, 2000 would have aged eight years after celebrating their birthday on Friday but it would only be their second birthday.

• A dog born on March 1, 2000 would have aged 56 dog years by Friday. 

• A dog born on Feb. 29, 2000 would have aged 56 dog years by Friday, but would only have celebrated 14 birthdays.

City editor Aaron Aupperlee called the Barstow Humane Society to verify this logic, and the worker there emphasized that the number of birthdays a dog has doesn’t change its biological age. She said the average dog lives for about 16 human years or about 102 dog years. Leap year dogs live for the same amount of time.

“Trying to cheat to make you younger doesn’t count, even for a dog,” she said.

Jason Smith — Staff Writer

We can add modern art to the list of things I don’t really understand.

I was working on an article today about the 99 Cents Only store that’s going into the Barstow Shopping Center at the 1300 block of East Main Street. Henry Chu, the corporation’s vice-president of marketing was trying to impress upon me how clean and orderly the company keeps its stores.  He told me that the stores are so clean that German photographer Andreas Gursky took a photo, “99 Cent,” of the company’s store on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.

The photo sold for $2,256,000 at a Sotheby’s auction in 2006, then the highest price ever paid for a photo at auction, according to Photo District News Online.

The painting can be seen at the 99 Cents Only Store Web site. 

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a nice looking photo. It’s a nice looking store. There’s wide aisles and good lighting. Bright packages. The brightly colored packages of candy make me want to hit the office vending machine (for the fifth time today.) That’s all well and good, I’m just not sure a photo of a discount store is worth more than what I’ll probably make in a lifetime.

Of course, “99 cent” is a deal, pun intended, compared to Gursky’s “99 cent II, Diptych,” sold to an unnamed private collector for $2.48 million in 2006, according to Photo District News Online.

A March 2007 article found at Popphoto.com, theorized that the photos may have been priced higher because they were sold at a contemporary art sale, and not with other photographs. The article cited the Sotheby’s catalogue entry for the photo sale and compared Gursky’s work to Jackson Pollock, Donald Judd and Andy Warhol.

Here’s what the catalogue entry said:

“Andreas Gursky’s powerful large scale photographs have quickly informed the way that we view the ‘the fetishism of our material world’ and have immediately become a part of established artistic vocabulary … Executed on a grand scale, his photographs survey the post-Capitalist landscape, searching for the signifiers which define our daily lives.”

Please don’t ask me what any of that means, I’m going to go read a comic book. Possibly Spiderman or maybe the Green Hornet if I’m feeling uber-sophisticated.

Jason Smith

Desert Dispatch, Staff Writer