My history of bvank robberies

I have been in two bank holdups in my life. In San Francisco, the guy in front of me in line was acting strangely. I remembered his face because he looked just like a co-worker, though it wasn’t him. Just after he got to the teller window, he put a wad of bills in his back pocket and the teller became hysterical.

 

Apparently, he gave her a threatening note. She couldn’t tell the police what happened. I was the only person who could identify him. A week or so later, an FBI agent came to my house and asked me to look at some pictures. When I selected the guy, the agent gave me a knowing look. “He has held up about 10 banks,” he said.

 

Is bank robbery really that easy?

 

In the other, I was cashing a paycheck at a bank in Arlington, when several masked men with guns came into the bank, one jumped over the door for the tellers and demanded money.

 

The teller in front of me again was hysterical. I wasn’t. Why? Because she could see the man behind me pointing a gun and I couldn’t. Also, there were no choices to be made.

 

What could I do? Run away? Confront the gunman? No. All I could do was stand and wait. And so I was not afraid. (Maybe it just hadn’t sunk in.) In fact, I even insisted on cashing my check before I talked to the police. I get more stressed over selecting an entrée at a restaurant or a route to take in the car.  I know: It doesn’t make sense.

 

 

 

Not quite a veteran

 

The Richmond organist asked those who had been in the military to stand when their service’s theme song was called. As a former Army reservist, I never stand when this happens. A veteran is considered anyone who served 180 days or more on active duty, which I did not.

 

But this time, at the reenactment of Patrick Henry’s famous speech, reservists were asked to stand as well. I got up reluctantly and found that only about five men, all of them old, stood in an audience of 150 to 200. Then there was one Marine, two from the Navy and no one from the Air Force or Coast Guard.

 

So was the organist scraping the bottom of the barreL? Maybe things have changed. With the draft dormant, the military doesn’t reach as deeply into society as it used to.

 

 I was never called up for active duty after my six months in 1964, but many reservists today are. In fact, it was amazing that I wasn’t pulled into the Army full time. In the next six years. The Vietnam war was raging, but I don’t believe most of my fellow reservists and I were in any shape for battle. I think we were mostly a paper force to deter the Communists.

 

Many two and three-year soldiers served abroad or in useful duties in this country. I never did. I had two months of basic training at Fort Gordon in Georgia and four months of advance training as a supply clerk at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. Then I was sent home for weekly meetings and yearly summer camps for 5 ½ years. (I got pretty impatient as a thriving journalist when I had to clean out stoves and wash pots on weekends.)

 

I was certainly not eligible for veterans’ benefits. I never saw the Army move so fast as when I got up to about 177 days on active duty. They rushed to get me out before the 180-day trigger for the Gi Bill and VA hospital eligibility took hold.

 

At the final physical exam, the doctor asked me, “With your asthma, how did you get into the Army anyway?”  Well, I probably could have gotten out of it, but I did not want to skirt my patriotic duty in that way. I might have felt differently a few years later. For one thing, the Vietnam jungle probably would have finished me off before any bullets did. The Florida Everglades were bad enough!

 

So maybe I was right in standing up at that ceremony, though I probably won’t do that again. I entered the military voluntarily, and I appreciate the recognition given me. But I still admire the people who risked their lives and whose routines were disrupted even more than mine

 

Happy Veterans Day!

 

 

Kennedy's Derth 60 Yeaes Ago

 

When I covered President Kennedy’s dedication of the Delaware Turnpike on Nov. 14, 1963, I had no idea he would give one of his last speeches.

 

Eight days later I was returning to the Delaware State News office from a lunch with the staff in Dover, when a shock went through the newsroom.

 

“President Kennedy has been shot,” shouted a lady who had been typing copy on a teletype machine. “I just heard it on the radio.!”

 

The Associated Press was slightly behind on the story, and our AP machine for small newspapers was a little slow. But we kept reading more, and news editor Joe Smyth, the publisher’s son, decided to put out a special edition, even though the daily run had already been delivered.

 

 He made the decisions, but I put the front page together (with help from linotype and other backroom operators).  I remember that the headline typesetter, who did everything by hand, came in and shouted: “We don’t have enough s’s for assassinated.” Smyth said to make a mirror image.  The newspaper carriers, working by car, took the new edition and made their second delivery of the day.

 

The next day I drove to Washington, just to be immersed in the whole scene. A gloomier day you will never find. Besides the rain, there were mourners in front of the White House, and deep grief across the city.

`

It was on TV that I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, on Sunday. And at Smyth’s house I watched the sad Kennedy funeral procession the following Monday.

 

If a tragic assassination were to happen, I was convinced it would have happened at UC Berkeley, when Kennedy spoke on March 23, 1962. “Some crazy will try to take a shot at him,” the city editor of the Daily Californian student newspaper told me. She left me to run the office and coordinate coverage while the rest of the staff went to the stadium to cover the speech. When all was quiet, she told me to come and watch the speech too, and I did.

 

The assassination led to the discovery of an incredible gaffe by the Delaware State News publisher, Jack Smyth, uncovered by the Wilmington New Journal. The paper quoted an editorial Smyth had written critical of Kennedy’s spending just a few weeks before Kennedy’s death. “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and his name is Jack Kennedy, and he should be shot literally before Christmas,” he wrote. In defense, he said he meant “figuratively,” but the damage was done.

 

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The weekend that shocked Washington

 Fifty yers ago, all of Washington was obsessed with the Watergate scandal and President Nixon’s efforts to wiggle out of it. The Associated Press assembled a team just to cover this history-making event.

 

Though I was not part of that team, I was at the helm of the main Washington news desk on Oct. 20, 1973, when I plunged into this story. Margaret Gentry, the Justice Department reporter, told me: “The Attorney General just left the building. I have a hunch he is going to quit.”

 

Mike Sniffen and I called in staffers on overtime, preparing for a big story. And sure enough, Elliot Richardson and his assistant, William Ruckelshaus resigned, refusing Nixon’s order to fire the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who was finally given the heave-ho by Solicitor General Robert Bork. The White House correspondenrt dictated the story to us.

 

This “Saturday Night Massacre” could not have happened at a worse time for Nixon. The popular show “All in the Family,” was interrupted by reporters running out of breath on the White House lawn to report this shocker on camera. The firing of Cox was a turning point in Nixon’s downfall.

 

The next day there was going to be so much reaction that the assistant bureau chief, Walter Mears, made me manage the desk again on Sunday, the day my beloved Oakland A’s were playing in the seventh game of the World Series on TV.

 

 To make up for it, Mears sold me his tickets to a Washington Redskins game (a real privilege when tickets were hard to come by). It was a great game, won by Washington, with injured quarterbacks Billy Kilmer and Sonny Jurgensen taking turns hobbling off and on the field to fill in for each other. (The A’s and the Redskins both won!)

 

The Washington news media, even the New York Times, felt blindsided by the Washington Post, which came up with scoop after scoop on the scandal. Almost in retaliation, the media piled on Nixon every chance it could get, even though it may have been merited. 

 

Somehow Watergate seems tame today compared to controversies erupting more recently. There was a complete consensus to get rid of Nixon, even in his own party. That wouldn’t happen now.

 

I still think he could have survived the mess if he had somehow destroyed the White House tapes, which were so incriminating.

 

Footnote: I just looked it up. Nearly three-quarters of the people in this country were not born yet when all of this happened. To them, it is just like me hearing about World War I or the Spanish-American War when I was growing up.

 

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Another October, 29 years later, is still stuck in my mind. That’s when two men, called the “D.C. Sniper,” killed most of their 17 victims in the Washington-Richmond corridor in 2002. Sara’s soccer games were called off, and people were frantic.

 

On a trip from South Boston, we stopped at a Wendy’s in Ashland for dinner one night. When I took the dog to relieve herself in the woods behind the restaurant, I thought it would be a great place for a sniper to hang out. I looked carefully before stepping in.

 

In the restaurant, a server warned, “There has been a sniper attack in Richmond. Be careful out there!” Actually, the snipers fired from a car and killed a patron at the Home Depot far away in Arlington, where we were headed.

 

Several weeks later, the sniper killed someone outside the Ponderosa Steak House in Ashland, next door to the Wendy’s where we got the warning. The snipers had hung out in the same woods where I had taken the dog on our previous visit.

 

So scary! The snipers were finally caught at a rest stop in Maryland. One was executed and the other is  still in prison.

 

 

 

 

Chairman of the board? No thanks!

I have a lot of trouble managing people or serving on boards f directors. Am I the only one?

 

Maybe it started when the guys in my college fraternity elected me president because I was the oldest.

 

One of them threw a beer bottle onto the driveway of the Mormon church next door, just missing one of the worshipers. They called the police, who came to our door. Nobody would confess.

 

“If no one will admit it, we will just have to arrest your president,” the cop said. Nobody came forward. No law student was there to say, “That’s impossible.” But the officer left and I breathed a sigh of relief.

 

Or in the Army, when I began basic training as a squad leader. When the sergeant told me at lights-out that I had to find someone to clean stoves all night, I selected the closest guy, my bunk mate, lying above me, and then went to sleep.

 

When he came back the next morning, he was furious. Fortunately, I was relieved of the job in a week after getting a hairline fracture in my leg from marching. He got the job. I’ll give him credit: He never retaliated against a cripple.

 

I enjoy serving on some committees where we exchange ideas. But I made the mistake of joining boards of directors of four Washington area choruses at different times. The longest I could last was two years. A new person would always come and say “Hey, let’s try this!” And I didn’t want to say, “What a stupid idea! Been there, done that.”

 

When I complained about one board’s website, the executive director told me, “Websites don’t matter!” Really? I never heard that before.

 

On one board, I was the only person to question the new budget. Why doesn’t it compare the new figures to last year’s? “What? Oh, we never include that!”

 

Then there was the time I was an administrator for the Facebook pages of two choruses. One was raising money and I accidentally put the other chorus’s email address on it to make contributions. I eventually fixed it, but a manager of the contributing chorus was furious with me. Hmm, maybe she had a point.

 

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Sports: A few times I was in the Oakland Raiders’ press box to help the Associated Press sports reporter cover the game. I was sent to the visiting team’s locker room to get comments from the players.

 

Since the Raiders played so well in the late 1960s, I usually ended up talking to really big linemen who were miserable and angry after a terrible defeat. A common quote would be “They just scored more points than we did.” I was too afraid of these violent brutes to ask them anything more substantial.

 

Of course we never published such a quote, but I’ll bet it would get printed today. TheWashington Post is now focusing on locker room chatter to go beyond facts of the game, which presumably everyone saw on TV.

 

Typical was last Sunday after college games. “I’m just so happy that we won,” said a quote from one incisive article. “This is a huge moment for this team,” said another. Still more: “It’s a great feeling, like nothing I have ever felt before.”

 

Ah, I now have more knowledge and wisdom about this vital sport!

 

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Don’t miss “The Wizard of Oz” by the Halifax County Little Theatre Thursday through Sunday.  At the show last Sunday, I loved the good acting, music and scenery of this musical, based on the famous movie.

 

I could hear the actors clearly. The filmed graphics made you feel like you were in a real tornado. I can see why they scheduled the show at the high school. The Prizery stage couldn’t have held all of those munchkins!

 

Best actor award (drum roll) goes to: Toto, the dog. How can they get a real dog to behave like that? The credits after Toto’s name say Matilda LaMonica. Best supporting actor: The real live pony!

 

When to keep your mouth shut

 How do you handle touchy situations with a boss who is doing something unethical?

 

There is the right way and the wrong way.

 

First the right way: When I was the Associated Press correspondent in Las Vegas, one of AP’s very top executives came to town for a convention.  He met me at the casino where it was held.

 

We got near a craps table. “Show me how it is played,” he said.  I explained it as we watched some gamblers toss the dice and shell out cash or rake it in.

 

 The next day, he told me he had lost all his money at the craps table and asked if there was a bureau fund. I said no, but I could lend him $100. I eagerly went to the bank, deciding that this was a really good investment. If Mr. Big owes you money, it it gives you a lot of leverage. 

 

When I brought the cash to him, he told me he had second thoughts and got his wife to wire him some money. 

 

When I told the Reno correspondent about it, he said, “This story really made my day. But I think we should keep this to ourselves.” Our little secret! No problem, nothing happened.

 

Then here is the wrong way!

 

After our Saturday shift in Washington, D.C., a colleague and I visited a bar nearby. My friend and I were chatting with the attractive barmaid, when we told her we both worked for Associated Press. “Oh?” she said. “I have an interview here to work for AP an hour from now.” 

 

My friend and I looked at each other in disbelief. Saturday night at a bar? She must be putting us on, we thought. We couldn’t resist hanging around for another hour to see what happened. Big mistake. 

 

At the appointed hour, one of my bosses walked in with a high-ranking executive from New York, who was staying in the hotel across the street. They recognized us and my boss had the look of a deer in the headlights. Still, we all greeted each other with meaningless chatter. Sensing their mood, we decided to beat a retreat.

 

 My friend said to keep quiet about it, but I just couldn’t resist telling one of my friends at AP. I swore him to secrecy, but of course he spread it all over the office. 

 

The Washington boss confronted me days later and said, “Everyone thinks I am having an affair. I’m not!” I refused to believe this incident was the reason for my demotion several months later. 

 

It turns out the barmaid was hired, and I ran across her months later at the AP bureau in New York, where she launched a very successful career.

 

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Some more thoughts:

 

Wasn’t the Sixth and Main band great at the Harvest Festival? It’s amazing that they could play a four-hour set.

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Why don’t they just abolish the kickoff return in pro football now that the rules have changed? Oh, I know: they can have more commercials!

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The coldest place in South Boston is the produce section at the supermarket.

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My dentist used to tell me after filling a tooth: “Yes, you may have dinner, but it must be an elegant dinner.”

 

Southside jazz isn’t dead after all

Trevor Percario’s music is an oasis in the desert that is  Southside Virginia jazz.

 

Only a few months are left to catch the 22-year-old pianist’s music before he heads for the big time in New Orleans.

 

On Sundays from 11:30 to 1:30 p.m., Percario plays at Crema & Vine in Danville, spinning out standards such as “Take the A Train,” “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Tea for Two” on his electric keyboard. Besides the familiar melodies, listeners can hear some cool jazz improvisation. You won’t hear anything avant-garde. “I am trying not to stray too much from the atmosphere of the venue,” he says, entertaining a mix of listeners and people who want to socialize.

 

“For my last time in the Danville area, I just wanted to play music that I would enjoy doing,” he says.

 

Why would he leave his Chatham home and Southside for the big city? “I have to be surrounded by musicians who are better than me in that genre,” he says. “Music is all I care about right now.” He also can play bass guitar and can sing as well.

 

Percario, whose father is a noted guitarist, has had a one-track mind for music since he was 5 years old. When his father taught his brother to play a song on the piano, Trevor picked up the tune right away by ear and then took piano lessons.

 

He played for the University of Lynchburg jazz ensemble, then the Liberty University jazz combo and the combo Flat Five in Lynchburg before moving on to the University of Augusta in Georgia. It was there that he played in a jazz ensemble led by the fabled trombonist Wycliffe Gordon. Other groups include the Danville Jazz Sextet, Define Jazz and his current group, On the Margins, appearing at Crema & Vine on Oct. 14.

 

At Crema and Vine, on Main Street near the Danville Museum of Fine Arts & History, he has been arranging music bookings and doing promotional work as well.

 

As a jazz fan and part-time pianist myself, I was thrilled to see this music form alive and well in someone so young.

 

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At the other end of the age spectrum, I recently met an astonishingly accomplished jazz musician, Bill Joor, who has lived in Alton for the past eight years.

 

Bill, now 88, has played trumpet and harmonica and sung in a 48-year career in Las Vegas, Nashville and elsewhere with an amazing list of performers. Just a few: Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, Tom Jones, Carlos Santana and Jimmy Durante. He has recorded with Kenny Rogers, Roy Orbison and Frank Sinatra.

 

Oh, I left out South Boston, where he played in “Chicago” with the Halifax County Little Theatre in 2017.

 

Besides musicals, his favorite music is jazz. I have never been a fan of harmonicas, but when I listened to a recording of his, I told him, “I didn’t know a harmonica could do that!”

 

Maybe Southside isn’t a jazz desert after all!

 

 

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Maybe not a classical desert either. Svetlana’s Smolina’s concert at The Prizery last Friday was a brilliant triumph. When her left hand switched to play the melody, and the right hand the accompaniment, it sounded like two different instruments. 

 

As a pianist with sore hands, I marveled at how she could hit the keys so hard and make such magnificent runs for almost two hours.  

 

Her choices of Tchaikovsky, Liszt and Chopin pieces were familiar enough to capture a non-classical audience yet varied enough to thrill aficionados.

 

After intermission, she said, “This is the best piano I have ever played.” Wow! Congrats to the volunteers who tirelessly raised money for the Steinway years ago.

A surprising forecast from long ago

“California is in trouble. It is growing too fast, and its problems are becoming too big to handle. The state is overcrowded, polluted, and running out of water. And its population is becoming increasingly diverse, which is creating social tensions.”

 

Was that from the Los Angeles Times this week? No. It was from Collier’s magazine on Aug. 17, 1954, in a cover story called “The Troubled Future of California.” The state had 12 million people then and has 39 million now.

 

As a 12-year-old, I remember seeing the article on newsstands, the first bad thing I had heard about the high-flying state I lived in. I was amazed to find this article summarized through a search on Bard, Google’s AI chatbot.

 

The article went on to say: “If California does not take steps to address its problems, it could become a major liability to the nation. The state is already a major economic powerhouse, but it could become a drain on the federal treasury if it cannot solve its problems.”

 

Well, with its high incomes and relatively young population, California has donated more in federal taxes than it has received in benefits for a long time. Rather than being a drain on the U.S., the state has the fifth largest economy in the world, behind Germany and ahead of the United Kingdom and India.

 

People often think of California as wall-to-wall people, but a recent map book of the state showed about 30 pages of mountains, deserts and rural areas. Only three or four showed the packed Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco Bay regions, and parts of the Central Valley.

 

Easterners love to complain about California, but I know a lot of young people who have moved there from the East. There is a reason the place is so crowded, salaries are high and everything is expensive. People just want to live there.  Though its growth has stalled, it’s a bigger draw for bright minds than Austin, Tex., and other newer tech hubs.

 

 When I was editor of the Kiplinger California Letter in 2007, I received a distraught phone call from a man visiting San Clemente, Calif., just north of San Diego. “I sold my home in Buffalo for $200,000 to move out here, but I can’t find even a condo for less than $1 million.”  It’s amazing what some sunshine and a beach will do to make a home more valuable.

 

Well, I guess my family missed our big chance.We should have owned California by now. Like Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford and the other rich titans of the 1800s, my ancestors settled early and made the right investments. They went to the Sierra Nevada foothills in 1851, just after gold was discovered, and opened a hardware store and a bank in the booming town of Placerville.

 

But while the big guns were getting rich, the family gave numerous bad loans and somehow frittered away its bank in the next generation. They stayed and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. Growing up, I had “a view to die for” on the hills overlooking the San Francisco Bay. But then the…well…downside of California appeared, when a storm caused our house to slide just enough in 1958 to make it nearly unlivable. We moved into a new house—under an earthen dam on a major earthquake fault.

 

We thought we had another opportunity when we discovered some cereal boxtops my grandfather had saved in the 1920s or 1930s They actually gave him California property north of the Russian River. My father drove us there once…and the land was on the side of a very steep hill, virtually worthless. Eventually I gave the land away (maybe a mistake?)

 

I left the state for great job opportunities in Washington D.C. and elsewhere and lost track of California. Amazingly, my boss at the Kiplinger Letter came up to me in 2000 when she needed to replace the editor of the Kiplinger California Letter. “I’m asking you,…uh…ordering you, to take over the California Letter,” she said.

 

“I’d love to,” I said. “You’re kidding,” she responded, aware of its small circulation. “No, I’m ecstatic.’ For one thing, I could spend more time with my aging mother in Placerville.

 

So I rediscovered the state after being gone for 40 years and liked what I found. Service industries were booming. Smog had diminished remarkably. The scenery hadn’t changed. The Collier’s forecast might still come true, but it hasn’t yet 69 years later.

My “ride” with Lance

 

I was taken aback when a bed & breakfast guest asked me one summer if I wanted to ride bikes with him.

 

Me? I hadn’t ridden in years. But I had been spinning on an exercise bike at a gym. It uses the same muscles. Why not?

 

That experienced bicyclist literally left me in the dust on the dirt trails on our farm. But I thought, “I may be 57 years old, but I can do this!”

 

I rode around our neighborhood in Arlington and then I began commuting the 6 miles to work in Washington. It was incredible! There were bike trails all the way and I didn’t get on roads until the last two blocks. I rode over Memorial Bridge and past the Lincoln and Washington monuments, where I ruined more tourist photos as I passed by! Then I went up the Ellipse and to my office only two blocks from the White House.

 

I didn’t have to wait to board buses, I didn’t get stuck in traffic jams, and I avoided crowded subways. It made the two worst hours of the day into the two best.

 

At my office building, I took the freight elevator on hot days so I wouldn’t stink up the passenger elevator. There was even a shower on the ninth floor.

 

I became more productive at work. I slept better. I did’t have to go to the gym anymore. After I biked up a steep hill on the way home, my family was impressed when I arrived sweaty and out of breath.

 

Pretty soon I rode on weekends, too. I thought I would stop biking when I retired, but instead I found the Thursday Bike Group of retired cyclists who navigated the Washington area every week. I think the real reason they met was for the lengthy lunches.

 

And in the South Boston area, I have ridden in recent years with Walt Hampton, Lee Sandstead, Ray Weiss, Bob Plapp, David Hudson and others. We have traveled both on roads and the Tobacco Heritage Trail. (I haven’t ridden much in the past six months though because of a sore knee.)

 

When. the Tour de France rolls around every year, I watch it on TV, marveling at these amazing athletes and the beautiful routes they take. Wouldn’t it be great to ride with them?

 

No wonder the high point in my bike riding came in 2009 while I was handling my mother’s estate in Placerville, Calif. Her next-door neighbor, an avid cyclist but 20 years younger than me, suggested we go and see the Tour de California. We loaded our bikes on his car and headed the 30 miles to Sacramento.

 

I was thrilled when the sponsors of the race let anyone ride the course just before it began. Because it was a “time trial,” the race was only a circle of downtown streets over just a few miles. We got a feel for zipping past hundreds of onlookers, imagining ourselves in the Tour De France.

 

As we rode off the course later, we encountered a group of riders warming up. Wait, can it be? Really? No, it couldn’t be! It was Lance 

Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France champ, though later disgraced for his use of drugs. We rode alongside Lance! For just seconds, anyway. As he and his Postal Service team were warming up, we accelerated as fast as we could, but he quickly lost us. Still, our Tour de France fantasy pretty much came true!

They enjoyed this disaster? How could that be?

 

I wasn’t going to write a column about the Blue Ridge Rock Festival though I was immersed in it all weekend. It was too depressing. I only write good news.

 

“Oh, you must write about it. Tell everyone about the good things, not the bad,” said a bed & breakfast guest, Korey Schroeder, from Springfield, Mo.

 

 I was thinking: What is good about spending thousands of dollars to come to a remote place like this and endure long waits and terrible storms, only to be sent home? More than half the audience was complaining of an apocalypse on a Facebook page, “Screwed by the Blue Ridge Rock Festival.”

 

“Oh, tell them about how much we liked the South Boston area,” she said. “When the concerts were cancelled, a lot of us found this to be a cool little place. Everyone was super friendly, and we especially enjoyed the wineries, Tunnel Creek, Woodbine, and the Springfield Distillery. Everything is so close, in proximity.” They found other displaced concertgoers making the best of a cancelled festival, enjoying themselves at World of Sports, Mexico Viejo and other locations.

 

There are thousands of complaints on the Facebook site about long waits for buses, overflowing toilets, impossible parking, water shortages and poor communication.

 

But Schroeder says, “We got there on Thursday and saw two bands before the storm. We were there all day Friday and had few issues. I think everyone realized it would be delayed Saturday, and we were able to mosey around local areas and find stuff to do. It’s a good economy booster for you guys.”

 

Personally, I was so glad not to be there. But most of our guests were philosophical, not angry, “You can’t’ do much about Mother Nature,” said one.

 

Our guests did see some improvement from 2022, when there were hours-long waits for buses to take them from the parking lot to the venue. A guest in a wheelchair found service for the handicapped considerably improved. Food was more plentiful, and things were more organized.

 

But that all fell apart when the unexpected storms came through and evacuation was chaotic.

 

Most of our guests left a day early, and we gave them a refund for one night. Refunds of tickets have been promised, as well, though that is sure to be complicated.

 

The consensus at the breakfast table the last morning: The festival, if it continues, should be smaller. Fewer bands and fewer fans would be easier to handle. Does it really need to be “the largest rock festival in North America?”