Airman Takes On Antique Police Cars - The Law Wins

An active duty airman is in custody after damaging two antique police cars outside the Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department headquarters in Savannah early Saturday, police said.

Police officers working at the headquarters after 3 a.m. heard what sounded like breaking glass and looked out to see a man later identified as Isaiah Jacobson kicking the lovingly restored cars.

Officers charged 27-year-old Isaiah Jacobson, of Vail, Ariz., with interference of government property and criminal trespass. Officers said Jacobson was highly intoxicated, fell out of his chair after he was detained, and had to be treated for minor injury.

Turns out he was in town for training before his "night out."

Local officials not amused and antique car lovers everywhere are cringing and crying for blood.

History Is Where You Find It - Even On Burger Joint Wall

Our old pal Carl Nolte is at it again, spinning a wonderful yarn about the descendant of a heroic ship's engineer - and how he rediscovered his family history on the wall of a Walnut Creek burger joint.

Not your average burger joint, to be sure, as Fuddruckers likes to decorate its walls with bits and bobs of interesting history and "stuff" its owners find interesting.

So it was that Mark De Paula was on his way out of the door after dining there that he came face to face with a 109-year-old description of a story his family had repeated a thousand times around its dinner table.

An antique copy of a San Francisco Chronicle front page recounted the whole story in fading black and white, about how the Steamer City of Rio de Janeiro was holed upon its approach to bridge-less San Francisco Bay back in 1901, killing 131 passengers and crew - among them the great-grandfather of De Paula's wife.

Turns out Tom Brady was a ship's engineer aboard the Rio when she was opened to the sea on her approach to a fogbound San Francisco Bay. Most of the crew abandoned their posts in a hellbent race to get topside but Tom stayed at his post, giving the ship power until she turtled and went down in 300 feet of water - about where the South Tower of the Golden Gate is now.

The papers of the day credited Brady with saving lives and with staying at his post while all others were abandoning theirs. De Paula asked the owners of Fuddruckers if he could buy the paper but they declined, offering to present it to his wife's mother if she would come in for dinner sometime.

Last week the De Paula's visited Fuddruckers with Dorothy Landucci, Mark's 85-year-old mother-in-law and her husband Edo. De Paula hadn't told her about the Chron front page and she was staggered when Fuddruckers owners George and Rebecca Almeida presented it to her - and picked up the check for dinner.

"We are amazed and pleased we could pass on this page to somebody who had a real connection to this event," Rebecca Almeida told Carl. Here's the whole story if you like sea stories, history, and happy endings.

Antiqueswest Fan Mail: Another Friend Made

Sounds kinda corny but we don't care.

Our customers frequently become friends and Antiqueswest "Regulars" and that's precisely what we're shooting for here.

Got this note today from the proud new owner of a Lionel Hellgate bridge:

"Hello, J.D.
The Lionel #300 Hellgate Bridge has arrived!
Wow! It looks awesome! Thank you for packing it up so well. I really appreciate that. It made the trip in perfect condition.
It was a pleasure to do business with you, and I can't thank you enough for making this little gem available.
Sincerely, Marty"

Now that's what we want to hear! Thank you, Marty!

San Francisco Loses A Great Reporter: Malcolm "Scoop" Glover

Malcolm Glover was a kid in McCloud, Siskiyou County, when he opened the screen door of a local grocery for a well-dressed gent who had come to town. The older man turned out to be William Randolph Hearst, then summering at the Hearst family's Wyntoon estate nearby, and after dropping out of high school Malcolm found himself in the big city with a job as a "box man," a photographer, for the San Francisco Examiner.

Of such chance encounters great careers are made.

But as a shooter "Mal," well, was not so good. He enlisted and after he was finished with Hitler and Tojo he went back to work for the Examiner - and Hearst - as a police reporter. An editor thought "the beat" would toughen the kid up, get him ready for a real assignment. He stayed "on the job" for 56 years.

Photo: Malcolm on the job at Fifth and Minna, 1949, third from the right..

Say the number again, slowly, and think about it. He was very good at his work.

There are a lot of stories out there about Mal, or "Scoop" as he was known around the Hall of Justice. Most of them are true. He kept a drawer full of Kit Kats and a jellybean jar on his desk as "cop bait," and always responded the same way when a fresh-faced dispatcher who hadn't yet met him took an early morning beat call: "Yeah, honey, that's right... Glover. 'Glove' with an 'r' or 'Lover' with a 'g.'"

They remembered him after that.

He would get surreptitious calls from sources - either cops or b-girls or someone down at City Hall - and listen, eyes shifting and mouth barely moving, looking like an alligator in a pond waiting for the gazelle to come closer. Then he would get up, slowly, so as not to tip the Chronicle ace and dean of the press room, Bob Popp, and mosie off to meet his contact while Bob and Katherine from BCN and the Tribune man and everyone else started hitting the phones - knowing he was going to come in with an exclusive that was going to make them all look very, very bad.

Cop shop stories are almost universally black. You have to work the Hall and environs awhile to appreciate them. They are filled with irony and pathos and sadness and unbelievable pain. It does something to you.

After a year there I found myself angling for the "gunfighter's seat" at a local cop hangout, a chair with a good view of the door. Malcolm saw me do it.

"What's the matter, kid?" he growled. "You wanna see it comin'?"

He loved his wife and kids and would coo to them over the old, heavy black phones we used into the 90s, then switch over and take the details of the most disturbingly grisly atrocity du jour, switching back to his wife again without missing a beat.

He had access to the Hall like no one I've ever seen, hanging around Records or Homicide until the crush of TV cameras and other reporters had gone and then quietly sidling back to pull a mugshot or arrest record. After awhile his editors stopped trying to bring him back into the "cubicle farm" at Fifth and Mission, begrudgingly admitting he was too valuable a resource.

Mal left the paper in 2002 and died last Monday at 83.

He was my rabbi, the cop shop guy who brought me into the newspaper game and taught me a helluva lot.

I'll miss him.

Oregon Toy Collector Loses $350,000 Collection To Thieves

We love antiques. No, I mean we love antiques.

And we are really feeling the pain of Oregon toy collector Frank Kidd, who visited a storage site for his collection of antique toys recently and found they had been stolen by thieves.

This video by The Oregonian captures the pain he is feeling. And we feel it with him. Let's hope we can catch these people...