Delivering the Cream of the Crop

By Corey Lyons
Contra Costa Newspapers
Jan. 26, 2001

PLEASANT HILL -- Nathan Vanek, with his perpetual smile, steers a large milk truck onto Oak Park Boulevard and steps on the gas.

When the clutch suddenly fails, Vanek, appearing relaxed, tries to navigate the 1966 Chevy behemoth to safety.

"Oh my goodness," he says, while coasting down the busy boulevard toward one of his customers' homes.

Milking in the new millennium is an unpredictable adventure indeed, but Nate the milkman always finds his way.

Like a figure seemingly lifted from the set of a 1950s sitcom, Vanek makes his daily rounds through the East Bay with a nostalgic sense of purpose and an unflinching spirit.

"Just weavin' through the neighborhoods," says the 28-year-old owner of Pleasant Hill-based Nate's Dairy.

In an era of online shopping and 24-hour convenience marts, the milkman is about as difficult to find these days as a beehive hairdo.

But from behind the wheel of his trusty walk-through van, Vanek delivers the chilled goods to about 100 customers from San Ramon to Martinez.

To his customers, the young milkman is a mythical figure from a bygone era, a man embraced by young and old alike.

"When I stop at a day care center, you should see them they start shouting like they're at a rock concert," Vanek says.

The milkman trade, which initially began as a conservation effort for World War II, began to crumble once the first supermarkets sprang up.

By 1973, only about 10 percent of Americans were still getting milk delivered to their homes.

But Vanek, who took over a 35-year-old family business, isn't worried about his place in history. The dairy courier sells about 55 cases of Foster Farms milk or nearly 500 half-gallon cartons each day.

He does not use computers, Web sites or toll-free numbers to help pitch his service. He simply scrawls order numbers into a three-ring binder and relies strictly on word-of-mouth for advertising.

"The stuff is fresh, and it keeps me from going to the grocery store," says Sheri Kehoe, a Pleasant Hill mother of two who has been using Vanek's goods for six years.

"Plus, it's so cool to have a milkman I had one as a kid."

A few years ago, Vanek took over the family business founded by his uncle Ed Vanek and father Nathan Sr. Vanek's wife, Sandra, pitches in each week, delivering milk to several customers on Fridays from the distinct spotted-cow van that Nathan Sr. used to drive on his own routes.

"She's a hard worker," Vanek says of his wife, whom he met at Bible study and married in June. "She can work circles around me."

Hard work is a necessity in this antiquated business. In the land of milk and money, the competition is stiff. Vanek is confident that nothing will spoil the family fun, despite more tech-savvy and deeper-pocketed competitors like Webvan, an online grocer that delivers everything from apricots to zinc tablets.

He points to his own personalized service to the homes of scores of time-starved working couples; he estimates that he saves the average customer about $40 a week.

"It's once or twice a week that they won't be at the grocery store, being tempted to buy more things they don't need," he says. "I know that. Because I'm a compulsive shopper well, before I got married, anyway."

Also, Vanek adds, his milk is fresher than his competitors' because only a minimal amount of time is spent transporting the milk from the cow to the front door.

Californians today chug 70 million gallons of milk per year, said Jeff Manning, executive director of the California Milk Processor Board in Berkeley.

Vanek had one customer from Concord whose thirst for milk was unquenchable.

"He was a big guy, about 300 pounds, and I'd drop off five gallons for him on Monday and add six more on Thursday," Vanek says.

Once, Vanek watched in amazement as the man drained a half-gallon carton right in front of him. "I couldn't imagine. How can somebody drink that much milk?"

Not that he's complaining. Vanek has forged a special bond with his customers, one of whom has been receiving doorstep delivery from the Vaneks for 25 years. One customer loaned him luggage for his honeymoon; another gave him an automobile engine.

Clutching a pair of gray crates full of milk, Vanek hustles toward a front door on Hardy Circle in Pleasant Hill.

"Once the second delivery goes well," he says, looking over his shoulder, "it's all good."

Pearl Harbor Comparisons Difficult for This Woman

Note: This story was a sidebar that accompanied my front-page story titled, "Twin Tragedies." It is also included on this blog.

By Corey Lyons
Contra Costa Newspapers
Dec. 7, 2001


BERKELEY -- Miyako Fuchida Overturf grabs a tiny replica of a Japanese Zero plane from a cluttered mantel above her fireplace. She regards the silver relic carefully, rotating it between her fingers.

"This is what my father used to fly," she said, before her voice trailed off. Her father, Mitsuo Fuchida, is a significant name in a dark chapter of American history. A gifted Japanese pilot, Fuchida led the stunning air raids over Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, a sneak attack that jolted America into World War II.

For the past four decades, Miyako, 64, has lived a quiet and relatively anonymous life in Berkeley, where she raised two children and married a former U.S. Marine. But the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have reopened old wounds for a guarded woman whose father helped produce the worst naval disaster in U.S. history.

"When I heard people trying to compare the two events on the news," she told the Contra Costa Times, breaking years of silence, "I didn't like it. It made me very upset."

Indeed, "America's second Pearl Harbor" became a familiar refrain in the days after the suicide strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, politicians and war veterans grasped for ways to describe the size and scope of the strikes, which killed about 800 more people than the bombings at Pearl Harbor.

But many Japanese-Americans, including Miyako, find the link to Pearl Harbor particularly offensive. The 1941 airstrikes, they say, did not target civilians, and occurred at a remote military base when most of the world was already at war.

Her father participated in a political operation, not a terrorist one, Miyako said. "Of course, we don't see that from this side," she said, sitting on a sofa in her two-story Berkeley house. "From the Japanese perspective, Pearl Harbor is why my father became a hero."

A petite, resolute woman with an easy smile, Miyako was only 4 years old when her father, a lead pilot, led a wave of Japanese warplanes across the Pacific Ocean.

Capt. Mitsuo Fuchida, a gaunt man with a mustache fashioned after Adolf Hitler, led the first wave of airstrikes from the Japanese carrier Akagi. "Tora! Tora! Tora!" was the three-word message that Fuchida sent to his superiors early that Sunday morning, indicating that surprise had been achieved.

When the mission ended, the heart of the American naval fleet was left battered and smoldering. About 2,400 people were killed; 1,178 injured; 188 planes destroyed; and eight battleships destroyed or damaged.

"A detailed survey of the damage was impossible because of the dense pall of black smoke," Fuchida wrote in one of his books, "I Led the Air Attack on Pearl Harbor."

"I think the U.S. knew that war was coming," Miyako said, "but didn't think that Japan was capable of such a big operation. And that's why it is called a surprise attack."

Nonetheless, Fuchida learned to regret his involvement in war, especially Pearl Harbor.

In a dramatic spiritual transformation after the war, the famous pilot became a Christian minister and toured the world promoting peace. His conversion from Buddhism began in 1950 when he befriended Jacob DeShazer, an American prisoner of war in Japan who circulated a startling essay in which he forgave his captors.

"He accomplished a lot," Miyako said of her father, who died in Kashiwara, Japan, on May 30, 1976. "He showed a lot of guts to face all these unknown people, and I admire him for that. A lot of people thought he was faking when he became a Christian, but he proved his sincerity."

Miyako, whose father was gone a lot while she grew up, also admired the independent strength of her mother, Haruko.

In 1960, Haruko allowed Miyako to move to the United States with a student visa to attend the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. She had promised her mother that she would return in a year.

It never happened. Once at school, the interior design major met Jim Overturf, a U.S. Marine, whom she married in 1963. Overturf, a 59-year-old retired carpenter who still wears a military haircut, said the United States still has a difficult time acknowledging the devastation of Pearl Harbor.

"To this day, it only occupies brief chapters of most history books," he said.

Miyako, a semi-retired seamstress, said her father remains a fixture of national pride in Japan. Still, she has no idea how the world accepts him today.

Some will call Mitsuo Fuchida a villain, others a proud soldier who found redemption. There is nothing she can do about either interpretation. She was too young to remember how she felt when the bombs rained on Pearl Harbor.

But she will always remember squeezing her father's hand as they walked through the streets of Tokyo, and watching strangers stand and salute him.

Twin Tragedies

Note: The following story was part of a project I worked on to look at the differences between 9-11 and Pearl Harbor. The story ran on the front page on Dec. 7, 2001. While looking into this story, I tracked down an amazing story, which ended up running on the front alongside this one: the daughter of the Japanese pilot who led the air raid over Pearl Harbor. She lives in Berkeley. I interviewed her.

By Corey Lyons
Contra Costa Newspapers
Dec. 7, 2001

As black smoke and flames curled into the sky above Pearl Harbor 60 years ago today, America had suffered a devastating blow that President Franklin D. Roosevelt described as "a date which will live in infamy."

In one jarring surprise attack, Dec. 7, 1941, became recognized as America's permanent scar. So when the World Trade Center crumbled and vanished from the Manhattan skyline on Sept. 11, the country struggled to grasp the magnitude of the strikes. Immediately, politicians and journalists compared the terrorist attacks to Pearl Harbor.

But perhaps unlike any other American tragedy -- including the bombing of Pearl Harbor -- the horror of Sept. 11 was consumed immediately and unmistakably.

"We can see it instantly. And it is getting relentlessly reinforced to us," said Stanley Weintraub, a retired professor emeritus at Penn State University who has written extensively about World War II. "I don't think we've ever had that before."

Indeed, Sept. 11 brought horror up close and into sharp focus. The tragedy unfolded on live TV in front of millions of people who had trouble believing their eyes.

With Pearl Harbor, on the other hand, television did not exist to capture the images of flaming battleships. Details of the attack reached the United States in censored radio broadcasts.

The stream of horrifying imagery on Sept. 11 -- including workers jumping to their deaths from the burning trade center towers -- were shown over and over again. Quickly, CNN packaged and titled the devastation -- "America Under Attack" -- a label that became widely used in the media.

Meanwhile, dozens of newspapers nationwide, including the Times, produced extra editions that were delivered hours after the suicide attacks.

Frank Scandale, editor of The Record, a New Jersey daily, scrambled to produce an eight-page section shortly after the towers collapsed. It was the newspaper's first section of its kind since the assassination of President Kennedy, he said.

Thirty thousand copies, he added, "sold like popcorn."

Readers wanted to know why thousands of people were dying in dark piles of smoldering rubble. What happened? Who was responsible? Similarly, national leaders and media executives struggled to grasp the magnitude of the tragedy, which sent a clamor of fear coast to coast. Were more targets planned? Would a nuclear blast follow? Had the country been jolted into a war? Pearl Harbor inevitably surfaced.

"This is the second Pearl Harbor. I don't think I overstate it," Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., told the Associated Press on Sept. 11.

***
On Dec. 7, 1941, a crisp Sunday morning, an armada of Japanese warplanes ripped through a layer of clouds over Pearl Harbor, a U.S. military base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Without a declaration of war, bombs began falling on a neat row of U.S. battleships moored in the bay.

Amid the chaos, a voice crackled over the base radio: "Air raid, Pearl Harbor. This is not a drill." When the bombing ended two hours later, the U.S. Pacific Fleet was crippled. Nearly 2,400 people died, nearly all of them soldiers.

"We were surprised. We really didn't know what was going on that day," said Walnut Creek resident Bernard "Bing" Walenter, a Navy machinist aboard the USS Medusa when the strikes occurred. Walenter, 81, was eating breakfast aboard the Medusa, a repair ship tethered to the USS Curtiss, when explosions rocked the bay.

In the aftermath, he and his shipmates relied on short Navy bulletins for details of the attack, he said. "We didn't have the communication available today," said Walenter, who spent six years in the Navy. "I don't even know if I saw a newspaper for a couple of days after the bombing. "

It would have to be brought aboard," he added, "and nobody would get off the ship for days."

After the strikes, the Navy forwarded a standard three-word message -- "I AM SAFE" --to his parents in Illinois, indicating that he had survived, Walenter said.

The impact of Dec. 7, unlike Sept. 11, was not immediately grasped by Americans. The Japanese had bombed a remote military base thousands of miles off North America. Key details of the attack -- such as the full extent of the damage -- were withheld by the government for months at the least.

"Government statements were sketchy and downplayed the losses. Newsreel footage and photographs were not released for a year or more," said Jeffery A. Smith, author of "War and Press Freedom."

Americans had to imagine the horror. Lena Wilson, 78, who was working as a maid in 1941, was preparing a Sunday meal for a family in Oklahoma on Dec. 7 when a radio update interrupted a religious program.

"We all just sat down and went, 'wheesh,'" she said, wiping her brow. "It was unbelievable."

Nonetheless, she said, it took a full day for the news to sink in, when Roosevelt delivered his "date of infamy" broadcast. "It was a 24-hour delay," said Wilson, a resident at Quail Lodge, a retirement home in Antioch. "But Sept. 11 was immediate. I heard about it 20 seconds after it happened."

***
The Navy seized immediate control of the airwaves after the Pearl Harbor attack. Only minimal bits of information were broadcast to the nation.

"Even before the battle, the Army and Navy had imposed censorship that silenced the news out of Hawaii," said Mike Sweeney, author of "Secrets of Victory," which details press censorship during World War II.

On Dec. 8, the Army and the Federal Communications Commission requested that every radio station along the West Coast shut down at 5 p.m., Sweeney said.

"There was a fear that Pearl Harbor was only the tip of the iceberg and that California may be next," he said. "Radio signals, it was believed, could be used as honing devices that would allow bomb targets."

Stations returned to the air the next morning, with five-minute Pearl Harbor updates available every 30 minutes, Sweeney said.

During the war, the media cooperated with military censorship demands, fearing that Japan could collect valuable information.

"We were very careful to release as little as possible," said Stanley Weintraub, author of "Long Days Journey into War: Pearl Harbor and a World at War Dec. 7, 1941."

"It didn't make sense to have your population totally dismayed. You wanted to fight a war, and it was enough to tell them that some battleships were sunk and a lot of people were killed."

Indeed, the attack united a nation that had been divided about joining World War II. People were angry. They wanted revenge on the Japanese, and that included those living in the United States. Fear and hysteria led to the imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans, who spent more than three years during World War II locked inside internment camps.

Irene Nakano, an 86-year-old Antioch resident, spent most of the war interned in a barbed-wire barrack in Arkansas.

"I didn't think it would ever happen. I mean, we were U.S. citizens," she said.

The arrests of more than 1,200 Middle Eastern immigrants swept up in a nationwide dragnet since Sept. 11, Nakano said, was unfair and discouraging.

Chris Hirano, director of community development for the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California, said the arrests of Middle Eastern men -- most of whom were being held on immigration violations -- show that history can repeat itself.

"Our country has not learned from past lessons," he said. "I don't have the answers. But fear and ignorance are dangerous things. And they are the fundamental ingredients for racism and war hysteria."

The sprawling investigation of immigrants is one example of how fear gripped the country after an attack on U.S. soil that, unlike Pearl Harbor, did not yield a specific enemy.

***
The Sept. 11 attack was an extremely personal one, witnesses and historians said, because it singled out civilians with the intent of maximizing the death toll.

Scandale, editor of The Record and a former assistant managing editor at the Denver Post who covered the Columbine massacre, said no national incident compares to Sept. 11.

"This happened right outside our window," he said. "We're right there. This is a world event. It's unprecedented on American soil."

He recalled looking out his New Jersey office window one afternoon and admiring the sun-splashed twin towers, bathed in a gold glow. Amazing, he had thought. On Sept. 11, Scandale, stunned, watched as smoke poured from the 110-story buildings. Now, nearly three months later, fears linger.

Cities on the East Coast are wired to an unprecedented regional emergency response plan so they can shut down immediately.

"This is the new world order," Scandale said. "This is how we act now. This is how we respond. I'm not sure if we'll ever say, 'This can't possibly happen.' "Hijackers seized four planes and knocked down the towers and attacked the Pentagon. Anything is possible."

Nimitz Gets a Facelift with Scrap Tires

By Corey Lyons
Contra Costa Newspapers
July 7, 2001

OAKLAND -- A massive paver machine, its lights cutting through a layer of haze, rumbles along a stretch of freeway once punched full of potholes.

With an ear-splitting hiss, the machine dumps a fresh layer of black goo, a sticky substance mixed with ground scrap tires.

The nasty Nimitz is getting a facelift.

Construction crews are laying rubberized asphalt on a 25-mile stretch of Interstate 880, part of a major rehabilitation project on the East Bay's busiest freeway.

Workers began the $45 million job about three weeks ago. They are not expected to finish until late next summer because of heavy traffic flow.

Some lanes are being closed every night on weekdays as workers spread a 2-inch coat of smoldering rubber -- followed by an inch of spongy asphalt -- over the existing road.

The new surface, which melds ground-up tire rubber with tar and oil, promises to last longer and absorb sound better than its old, cracking counterpart.

Even better, transportation officials say, the project will gobble up more than 400,000 scrap tires.

"You've got 90 percent of your tire that will never be used after you wear out the edges. What do you do with it?" asked Saeed Shahmirzai, Caltrans' repaving manager for the Nimitz project.

In this case, it gets ground up into shredded crumbs and added to an asphalt paving mix. Caltrans has used recycled tire rubber in more than 200 rehab projects, diverting more than 2 million tires from landfills and illegal dumps.

Rubberized asphalt, which is becoming increasingly popular nationwide, is being used on an experimental basis in parts of the Bay Area.

But the Nimitz project is among the largest of its kind in California.

On a recent night under a thumbnail moon, contractors poured a black coat of asphalt in the fast lane of southbound I-880 near Network Associates Coliseum. An orange paver machine, traveling about 3 mph, unloaded the grainy substance over the road. A pair of smaller trucks, or "rollers," followed behind to eliminate flaws.

"They have to follow to get the wrinkles out. Because no matter how many times he goes over it, he leaves some marks," said Shahmirzai, pointing to a curdled crease of goo.

The repaving, which stretches from Mission Boulevard in Fremont to High Street in Oakland, includes construction firms working at opposite ends of the Nimitz.

The goal for each contractor is to repave a mile of one lane each night. A 24-truck fleet will dump 1,000 tons of rubberized asphalt in about 4 1/2 hours.

Crushed by big rigs and pummeled daily by East Bay motorists speeding toward Silicon Valley, I-880 has suffered a severe beating during the past two decades.

While mulling over the surfacing job along the bumpy freeway, Caltrans engineers scrutinized every crack and crater.

Arun Bhatnadgar, a transportation engineer, walked up and down the south end of the freeway project long before any work began. "I walked for two months," he said. "By the time I got home, I was a vegetable."

Any crack that measured larger than a quarter-inch was dug out and repatched. The remaining splits were filled with liquid asphalt, creating a flat surface on which to begin laying rubber.

Recycling alone makes the project difficult to criticize. According to the Asphalt-Rubber Technology Center, there are approximately 270 million waste tires generated each year in the United States -- or nearly one for every person in the country.

Most states, including California, do not allow whole scrap tires to be pitched into landfills. Whole tires do not stay buried for long.

And once they surface, they become major fire hazards and breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Last year, Caltrans used about 1.2 million used tires for its rehabilitation assignments.

Still, workers on the Nimitz often feel the wrath of angry motorists.

Some drivers roar by in the wee hours of the morning, hurling insults, objects and one-finger salutes.

"I've worked on a lot of freeways, and 880 is different it seems like everybody is angry," said Shahmirzai, 40, a Caltrans project manager since 1991.

Because of high traffic volume, contractors are limited to working late at night. And with an hour to set up and an hour to shut down, the window in which to work shrinks to about five hours. The crew also will likely shut down in late October when the mercury drops too low for asphalt to stick.

"I can just shut down the freeway on Sundays and finish in 10 weeks," Shahmirzai said. "But we can't take away that convenience."

Man Keeps Old Games Playing

By Corey Lyons
Contra Costa Newspapers
Dec. 8, 2002

Bryan Mao is a true pinball wizard, a man whose trusty hands have pried open the antiquated bellies of thousands of feeble machines and made them hum again.

Mao, 45, operates the largest video game repair business in Contra Costa County.

His office is a 4,000-square-foot warehouse in a business park off Arnold Drive, a place where old arcade units such as Space Invaders go for extended play.

Every month, the boyish engineer revives hundreds of sputtering relics from 1950s-era pinball machines to pool tables and jukeboxes. A humble fix-it business that started in his Pinole garage in the 1980s, Mao's shop has evolved into a full-service practice for nostalgic-minded East Bay customers.

One married couple wanted a Ms. Pac-Man repaired because they had met playing the game.

"Most people in the yellow pages under 'Amusement' fix some things, but they eventually end up here if they can't," said Mao, also an electronics engineer for Surgical Dynamics in Alameda.

The growing $7.4 billion video game market has turned a generation of youngsters and adults into at-home joystick enthusiasts. Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation 2 game consoles have created digital living rooms, leaving once-popular public arcades fighting for quarters.

It also has turned folks such as Mao into a dying breed who cater to a shrinking but loyal group of pinball arcade fans. Despite calls for help, he doesn't touch the new-generation consoles.

"They use very simple technology. And any time they lower the prices, I think they're using cheaper materials," said Mao, sitting in his windowless office. "I believe they only want the machines to run a year," he added, "so you'll have to buy new ones."

Mao, though, has plenty of faulty flippers or failing power driver boards to keep his mind and hands operating. Inside his 7-year-old Martinez shop, dozens of pinball and arcade machines crowd the floors like dead dinosaurs -- Star Trek, Attack from Mars, Bionic Commando and Pool Sharks, to name a few.

Nearby, an entire wall is devoted to hundreds of pieces that he uses to reassemble these 300-pound behemoths: screws, washers, changers, coils, darts, bumper caps and pop bumpers.

"I have 3,000 parts just for a pinball machine," said Mao, who was born in Taiwan and moved to the United States with his family in 1978. "It's a matter of learning how many things can go wrong."

It was his close friend, Stan Van, a retired video arcade operator, who encouraged him to start his own electronics repair business in 1984. "He's a good, honest kid," said Van, 64, who ran a popular shop in Concord for two decades. "I like him. If I were younger, I would have been partners with him."

In the early days, Mao would load his tools into the back of his Chevy and drive to affluent houses in Danville or Lafayette to keep flippers flapping or Pac-Man munching. He still does "house calls," charging $60 for a service call and $60 for the first hour, during which he usually finishes the job.

Asked about the appeal of these outdated machines, Mao said, "I guess some people want to keep a piece of memory in their minds."