Wading In

Thursday, September 19, 2013 FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA Finders are not keepers By Kelvin Wade From page A7 | September 19, 2013 | 4 Comments Imagine you’re walking through the mall parking lot and you find a wallet. You open it up and it’s stuffed with $2,000. Also in that wallet is the driver’s license of the owner, with his address clearly printed on it. What would you do? A 19-year-old Fairfield man faced a similar scenario and is now in court over it. Daniel W. Holochuck and a friend allegedly found an envelope with $1,900 in cash in Costco’s food court. The envelope, lost by a clerk, contained a transaction receipt. Since Holochuck and his friend didn’t turn in the envelope, Holochuck has been charged with a felony under an 1872 law requiring people to turn in found property when one has knowledge or means of inquiry to the owner. All I know of the case is what I’ve read, but setting aside the Holochuck case, what would you do in this instance? Glen James, a homeless man in Bos...

Time to get a library card By Kelvin Wade From page A7 | September 05, 2013 | Its National Library Card Sign-up Month and we have work to do. If you have a child or you know of a child who does not have a library card, it’s time to get them signed up for one. If there’s no library card in your wallet, you need to get signed up, too. I’ve always loved libraries. My parents took my brothers and me to the library often when we were kids. It was most likely because with five boys, anything you can do for free was a no-brainer. As a teen, I spent more hours at the Fairfield-Suisun library than I did pumping quarters into video games at the Gold Mine in Solano Mall. When I first started this column way back when George H.W. Bush was president, researching a column was a much different process. If I wanted the most basic facts on a given issue, it meant a trip to the library. It meant accessing newspapers, magazines and books. Tracking down specific information on a given subject was often a...

Thursday, August 29, 2013 FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA Time to restore respect for 1st responders By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | August 29, 2013 | 5 Comments On Sept. 11, 2001, 341 firefighters, 60 police officers and 10 paramedics were killed responding to the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center. After that awful day, firefighters and other first responders acquired a new level of respect throughout the country. People applauded as their trucks drove by. Americans thanked them ever opportunity they had. We placed firefighters and police on the same plane of respect reserved for soldiers. Traditionally, they’ve always been revered professions but 9/11 was a stark reminder of the sacrifice these men and women choose to make. But something happened along the way. When the financial collapse and Great Recession hit and people were looking to blame someone, police and fire unions took a big hit. Public employee pensions became the scapegoats across the country. During the 2012 pres...

Monday, August 26, 2013 FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA Accident convinces me to ditch my iPad By Kelvin Wade From page A7 | August 22, 2013 | 4 Comments I’ve been an insomniac for years. I used to embrace my insomnia by putting on a pot of coffee at night and doing some of my best writing while the stars were out. I wrote about having a sleep study a couple of months ago and one of the things the analyst told me is I have to stay off my iPad in bed. That hasn’t happened. But recently, my girlfriend Cathi stumbled upon a cure for my nightly iPad habit. So there I was in the middle of the night in bed with earphones in listening to an awesome version of Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Live and Let Die” while pummeling various victims in “Words with Friends” on my iPad when I heard a boom. I turned on a lamp and saw my Beagle, Theo, panting at the bedroom door. I thought he’d jumped against the door to get my attention. Lately, he’s had to go out a lot at night (a dog with the bladder of a mouse...

Thursday, August 15, 2013 No ‘What ifs’ in dog drowning incident By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | August 15, 2013 | Leave Comment In a horrific story, 21-year-old Bryan Cavanah was arrested for allegedly drowning a pit bull terrier in the Fairfield Civic Center pond. Witnesses say the man held the dog under the water until she didn’t resurface. In a televised interview Tuesday night with Fox40 News, Cavanah and his father, who owned the dog, claims Bryan had a “transient epileptic seizure,” and he has no memory of the drowning. A poster on the Daily Republic website claiming to know Cavanah confirms the man has epilepsy. If it’s true that this individual had some kind of seizure or medical issue that played a role in him drowning a dog, that doesn’t make the public feel safer. If he can do this to a dog and not know why he did it, then why can’t he do this to a child, several people have asked on the Fox40 website? It’s a valid question. What happens should this man be free and it’s yo...

Thursday, August 1, 2013 ‘Fruitvale Station’ destroys stereotypes By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | August 01, 2013 | Leave Comment Too often, young black men are seen as dangerous pit bulls in American society. And like a stray pit bull run over in the street, the lives of too many young African-American males are cut short through violent means. This is the message delivered in a controversial scene in the controversial new movie, “Fruitvale Station.” “Fruitvale Station” is first-time director Ryan Coogler’s film about the killing of 22-year-old Oscar Grant by transit police on the Fruitvale BART platform in Oakland in the wee hours of New Year’s Day 2009. Officer Johannes Mehserle, who claims he mistook his firearm for his Taser, fired one shot into Grant’s back. The film focuses on the final day of Grant’s life. The power of the movie is in its ordinariness. It demolishes stereotypes and gives the viewer a realistic look into the life of a young African-American man struggling to get ...

Thursday, July 25, 2013 It’s high time marijuana is legalized By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | July 25, 2013 | 5 Comments The Solano County Board of Supervisors will conduct public hearings at 2 p.m. Tuesday on a proposed ordinance to prohibit medical marijuana dispensaries in the unincorporated areas of the county. I suspect it’s a mere formality before they slam the door on medical marijuana. I think it’s obvious that the country is slowly moving toward legalization. This week, the California Democratic Party released a resolution calling on President Barack Obama to end the federal crackdown on marijuana. They note that we spend $20 billion on enforcement. The results are thousands of arrests and thousands dead from battles among Mexican drug smuggling cartels. In addition, The New York Times reported last month that federal data shows racial bias when it comes to marijuana arrests with blacks four times as likely to be arrested as whites and much more likely to be imprisoned. Meanw...

Thursday, July 18, 2013 Lessons from the Zimmerman trial By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | July 18, 2013 | What do we take away from the George Zimmerman trial? There’s real fear among African-American parents who are having discussions with their teens in the aftermath of this verdict. I guess to the same people who think a scantily clad woman is asking to be raped, a black youth in a hoodie is asking to be racially profiled. So there are discussions about dress, about walking with friends and walking away from confrontation. There needs to also be a conversation on how not to breed more George Zimmermans. By successfully morphing an A and B student into a dangerous thug, the trial results vindicates George Zimmerman’s patrol. But we don’t need armed wannabe cops with hero complexes roaming the streets. I’m part of my neighborhood watch group and have called police many times. Never has anyone from our group armed themselves and pursued anyone. That’s not what neighborhood watches do....

Thursday, July 11, 2013 Old enough to know better By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | July 11, 2013 | Leave Comment Several times I’ve had older readers write to me about a column and use racist and homophobic slurs in their emails. Most seemed to be unrepentant bigots. A couple seemed as though they didn’t know any better. Those emails and some recent public incidents make me wonder, should elderly bigots be given a pass?     Recently, butter queen Paula Deen saw her empire crumble after lawsuits that she discriminated against black employees. Before her weepy “Today” show apology, she released a statement to TMZ explaining that she grew up in the racist South and dropping the N-word was commonplace.     This past spring, during CBS’ “Survivor” season finale, former contestant Rudy Boesch, an 85-year-old former Navy SEAL, repeatedly used a homophobic slur on air, which no one condemned.     Former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, who is running fo...

Don’t have an unsafe and insane Fourth! By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | July 04, 2013 | Leave Comment Today starts a holiday weekend of celebrating. The key is to get through this weekend without seeing anyone in a uniform – whether it’s a cop, fireman or paramedic. Now Suisun City is doing a brisk business selling “safe and sane” fireworks. The proceeds will go toward the American Legion (and the various charities it supports) and two other nonprofits. The city will also receive some of the proceeds. That’s the good part. While these fireworks are legal to use in Suisun City, they’re still illegal in Fairfield. And of course, I couldn’t imagine any Fairfielders purchasing fireworks and using them within the city limits. (Wink, wink.) I hope you scofflaws are safe with those fireworks, because it’s hot and dry. The real problem is that the Fourth always sees its share of illegal fireworks. Illegal fireworks are ones that explode or fly through the air, such as  firecrackers, lady...

Thursday, June 27, 2013 Bye, Kmart. Hello, fun? By Kelvin Wade From page A7 | June 27, 2013 | Leave Comment I have to admit I was a little sad to hear that Fairfield’s Kmart will close its doors in September. It’s obviously a blow to the employees and longtime customers, as well as residents who fear the shopping center will sit vacant and blighted for years like the former Mission Village shopping center did before Walmart moved in. Kmart was one of my hangouts when I was a kid. My friend Dan, a.k.a. Chumley, and I used to ride our bikes down Air Base Parkway to Kmart. We’d buy toys like Star Wars action figures or Atari cartridges and have lunch in the snack bar. For a time, my brother Orvis worked security there so they didn’t mind us hanging out. It was where we chilled before the mall opened in 1981 and became the default teen hangout. From there we might go down and thumb through the catalog in Consumers Distributing and then stop by Thrifty for one of their famous cylindrical-sc...

Sleep problems? Do what I did By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | June 20, 2013 | I recently had a sleep study to confirm that I have obstructive sleep apnea. Cathi’s elbows to my ribs should’ve been confirmation enough. Sleep apnea, which affects 18 million Americans, is a disorder in which breathing is interrupted briefly but repeatedly during sleep, causing a person to awaken. This fragmented sleeping interrupts the sleep cycle, lowers the oxygen in the blood and leaves the person drowsy during the day. One of the hallmarks of sleep apnea is loud snoring. It is corrected by the use of a machine called a CPAP that forces air through your nose and/or mouth to keep your airway open so you get restful sleep. Two of my brothers have had sleep studies for the condition. We used to live on Davis Drive with the railroad tracks behind our house. At night with the walls shaking, one almost couldn’t tell if it was a freight train passing by or Tony’s snoring. My brother Orvis’ drowsiness from not...

Thursday, June 13, 2013 Guns, not NSA spying, the real scandal By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | June 13, 2013 | 2 Comments It’s been six months since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, where 20 first-graders and six adults were killed. You wouldn’t know it because all the talk in the news is about former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s explosive revelations about the NSA’s domestic telephone spying program and its Internet counterpart, PRISM. But the telephone-spying program is something we’ve known about for seven years. None of it is shocking, because after 9/11 it seems we’ll do anything to fight terrorism:     We gave the president unprecedented war-making power by an obscene vote of 420-1 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate.     The U.S. began a war in Afghanistan that still goes on, the longest war in American history.     We passed and reauthorized the Patriot Act, expanding law-enforcement powers and encro...

Thursday, June 6, 2013 Let’s all enforce our own driving laws By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | June 06, 2013 | Leave Comment Vallejo resident Anthony Cardenas, 52, became a local hero after painting his own crosswalk near his home on Sonoma Boulevard at Illinois Street. Cardenas claims the busy street is dangerous for pedestrians, so he painted the crosswalk and earned himself an arrest for felony vandalism and trip to jail for his trouble. Mr. Cardenas makes me want to place my tongue firmly in cheek and take matters into my own hands to make things safer. Have you ever had idiots zoom down your street in complete disregard for kids in the neighborhood? I’d love to creep outside at 3 a.m. with some cement and make my own speed bumps. The next time the speedsters come flying down my street, they’d make a sunroof with their own heads when they hit my new speed bump. BAM! Problem solved. Last week, my friend Nedra Polk asked me to write about the condition of Clay Bank Road between Air B...

Thursday, May 30, 2013 We need more restrictions on teen drivers By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | May 30, 2013 | 1 Comment When I was 15 ½ with my learner’s permit, I couldn’t wait to get behind the wheel with Mr. Bailey, my drivers education teacher at Armijo High School. My most memorable moment was when he had to step on the accelerator on his side of the special drivers ed car to get us going fast enough to enter the flow of traffic on the freeway. I had us creeping along like I was driving Miss Daisy. But when I turned 16, I got my license and my friends and I discovered a world of newfound freedom. A lot has changed. Back in the day kids couldn’t wait to get their learner’s permits at 15 ½ and license at 16. Today my almost 16 ½-year-old granddaughter is in no rush to get her license and anecdotally, her friends aren’t, either. They seem content to have parents taxi them about. Theo Huxtable’s admonition that “he who walks, walks alone” seems to be lost on this younger generation...

Thursday, May 23, 2013 2 measly years for a man’s life? By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | May 23, 2013 | 1 Comment Four teens who pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter in the June 2011 death of 70-year-old Travis Dairy owner Ho J. Kim were back in court this week. According to the reported terms of their plea deal, with good behavior and time served, they should be released before the end of summer. What the heck? I understand there’s a fifth teen who is being prosecuted for murder in this case, but this is all the justice these young thugs receive? I think back to my own father, who ran a liquor store in Vallejo during the mid-1980s. I worked for him and thought he was a tough boss, but to his customers he was cheerful, chatty and a fixture in the neighborhood (much like the way Ho J. Kim’s customers described him.) We were always concerned about the possibility of robbery. It eventually happened. Our assistant manager, a slightly built woman, was slapped and punched and knock...

Thursday, May 16, 2013 My most awkward teacher moment By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | May 16, 2013 | Leave Comment Mr. Scherr, my English teacher at Armijo High School, was just one of the people who responded positively to my column last week on teacher appreciation. However, writing about those influential teachers made me think of rather strange incident I had with a junior high teacher I had who we’ll call “Mr. Simmons.” Back in the 1990′s, Mr. Simmons invited me to speak to his class at a local middle school. It went off the rails early as he introduced me to the class as a stellar former eighth-grade student that had written an excellent essay on the attempted assassination of President Reagan. After my talk, I quietly informed Mr. Simmons that I was in the 10th grade at Armijo when Reagan was shot. But I thanked him for giving me credit for someone’s awesome essay. We laughed about it. Teachers have tons of students and it’s easy to get them mixed up. A year later, Mr. Simmons ...

 May 9, 2013 Blame these teachers for this column! By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | May 09, 2013 | 1 Comment This week is Teacher Appreciation Week. I hope students and parents take this week to say thank you to the people who work long, often thankless, hours shaping our children’s futures. These are the teachers who inspired me. Like my older brother Tony, I’d been in the gifted and talented program at my old school in Norfolk, Va. So when we moved to Novato in 1976, my third-grade teacher, Ms. Hutchinson, saw something worth cultivating in me. Not only did she challenge me, but she had me help my struggling classmates. She’s the one who recommended I be promoted from third grade to fifth. Lou Encalada was my sixth-grade teacher at Tolenas Elementary. While he had a great sense of humor and kidded with me often, he was also a stickler for discipline. Children with messy desks had them emptied in a pile on the floor and they had to organize them. (I was a regular.) He used calisth...

Thursday, May 2, 2013 Gun owners should drop dumb argument By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | May 02, 2013 | It’s time to shoot down the lamest argument in the gun debate. In what passes for the gun debate – whether it’s in Congress, on talk radio or in the letters to the editor of this and other newspapers – we hear opponents of tighter gun laws argue that new laws would only affect law-abiding citizens, since criminals won’t follow the laws. What if we used this logic in other areas? April was Sexual Assault Awareness Month and you may have noticed the various events SafeQuest Solano held, raising awareness and money for survivors. Never during any of the discussions did anyone stand up and ask why we even have laws against sexual assault, since rapists clearly ignore the laws. A rapist isn’t going to not rape simply because there’s a law against it. No, the law only stops law-abiding citizens from sexually assaulting people. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Laws are in place ...

Friday, April 26, 2013 Here’s how to combat Muslim stereotyping By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | April 25, 2013 | 2 Comments Heather Ah San’s articles in the Daily Republic this week about the Solano County Islamic Center’s Al-Iman Islamic School and the school’s students’ reactions to the Boston Marathon bombings garnered some predictable responses on the paper’s website. One respondent questioned the need for an Islamic school in the United States, while another compared it to a wasp’s nest that, presumably, should be destroyed. While those responses may seem extreme, I’ve no doubt they probably speak for a large number of Solano County residents and Americans as a whole. After all, according to a poll last year by the Arab American Institute, Americans have a 41 percent favorable view of Muslims and a 40 percent unfavorable view. I’ve always had a positive view of Islam, having come across the religion reading Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” It helped that my cousin ...

Thursday, April 18, 2013 It’s all about the kids By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | April 18, 2013 | 2 Comments I didn’t expect last week’s column on helping the children of Parkway Gardens to be remotely controversial. It began innocently a couple of weeks ago when Fairfield City Councilman John Mraz called to check on my health. He mentioned supporting Parkway Gardens’ Movie Night and wanting to get the Police Activities League involved, as well as finding lifeguards so they could open their pool during the summer. I spoke to Minnie Noble about writing a column to help drum up some financial support. Hours after I hung up the phone, I was admitted to the hospital where I stayed for the next eight days. I was so sick that for the first time in 21 years, I missed a deadline and failed to submit a column. While still in the hospital, I put together last week’s column on my iPad because it was a time-sensitive subject and I wanted to do something to help support those young kids. Although ...

Thursday, April 11, 2013 We can all help Fairfield’s next generation By Kelvin Wade “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” — Frederick Douglass It was a little more than a year ago when two people were shot and killed at Parkway Gardens. It’s a neighborhood that is certainly no stranger to violence and hard times. I can safely say that when I was a kid, no one was shot in my neighborhood. I never saw open drug dealing. There was no security and it was rare that police visited the neighborhood. At Parkway Gardens on the last Friday on the month, the children are invited to the clubhouse for movie night. They watch an entertaining film such as “Finding Nemo,” “Hotel Transylvania” and others, and have a meal. It started off as movies and snacks, but City Councilman John Mraz noticed that many of these kids from disadvantaged homes were food insecure. They looked forward to that meal. So Mraz provided sandwiches and fruit trays. Another evening saw spaghetti b...