The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (3 page)

A North Carolina native whose hobby was penning gospel lyrics,
^*
Seavenes had joined the Navy shortly before D-day. He served aboard the USS
Beale
during the invasion of Okinawa, then sailed into Nagasaki right after the city had been flattened by the “Fat Man” atomic bomb. These historic adventures convinced Seavenes to become
a Navy lifer. He was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, when his second son, Willie Roger Holder, was born on June 14, 1949—Flag Day, as proud and patriotic Seavenes was
fond of pointing out.

In the mid-1950s the growing Holder family relocated from Virginia to Alameda, California, home to one of the nation’s foremost naval bases. Seavenes was gone for months at a time on the USS
Rogers
, a destroyer that prowled the waters of
the western Pacific. With four young children now taxing the patience of his wife, Marie, he longed for an assignment that would let him come home each night.
When the job at Coos Head opened up, the opportunity seemed like a blessing from above.

In August 1959 the Holders piled into the family’s Ford Crown Victoria and headed north up Highway 101, thrilled to be starting life anew in southwestern Oregon. Seavenes was in a jolly mood during the ride, talking up all the hunting and fishing trips he had planned for the kids. Ten-year-old Roger was most excited about the fact that his father had rented a four-bedroom house, a major upgrade over their cramped Alameda bungalow. He would finally have a
room all to himself.

But when Seavenes showed up at the real estate office to collect the house keys, he was told that the property was no longer available and that his mailed deposit would be refunded. Seavenes knew exactly what that meant: the agent with whom he had arranged the lease over the phone hadn’t realized that
the Holders were black.

The family camped out in a hotel room while Seavenes scrambled to find more permanent accommodations. He was rejected by several landlords who made little effort to conceal their bias: Coos Bay had just a single black family at the time, headed by the proprietor of a downtown shoeshine stand, and many residents were dead set against darkening the town’s collective
pigmentation any further.

The Holders eventually settled into a house in the blue-collar Empire neighborhood, on the peninsula’s western side. The landlord, an eccentric older woman who drove a tractor and smoked cigars, provided Seavenes with a shotgun, advising him that he might need it to fend off intruders. Her warning quickly proved correct: two nights after the Holders moved in, a pickup truck full of rowdy men pulled into the family’s driveway at two a.m. “Niggers go home!” the trespassers yelled as they waved flashlights through the Holders’ windows and pelted the door with rocks. From that point on, such menacing late-night visits became routine.

The family’s tormentors operated in the daytime, too. When Marie went shopping for groceries on Newmark Avenue, housewives would spit in her face as she walked the aisles, or hiss that she’d better
not touch the vegetables with her unclean hands. The children were taunted whenever they dared play in the local park; the oldest child, eleven-year-old Seavenes Jr., started carrying a small hatchet in order
to protect himself.

The elder Seavenes pleaded with his family to turn the other cheek, assuring them that the bigots would soon tire of their bullying. And so on September 9, Roger and his younger brother, Danny, were packed off to Madison Elementary School to begin the fall semester. The very next day several older boys cornered seven-year-old Danny on the school’s playground. The leader of the pack knocked him to the ground, then kicked his prone body at least a dozen times. The beating was severe enough to land Danny in the hospital, where doctors briefly feared that the boy
might lose a testicle.

The petrified Danny initially refused to identify his attacker. The police eventually coaxed him into fingering the culprit, but the boy was never arrested. When news of the assault started to make the rounds, Coos Bay’s progressive residents declared themselves aghast at their racist neighbors’ campaign of terror. An emergency meeting of the Madison Parent Teacher Association was called to discuss the matter, and a local weekly paper chimed in with a soul-searching editorial on its front page:

A majority of the school’s parents banded together to beg the Holders to send Danny back to Madison, promising Seavenes and
Marie that no more harm would come to their youngest son. And the embarrassed police vowed to protect the family against
further racial harassment.

But the spirit of reconciliation did not last. Embittered by Danny’s beating, Seavenes filed suit against the State of Oregon for failing to protect his family’s civil rights. When his superiors caught wind of the case, they ordered him to drop the matter and report back to Alameda at once. The Navy did not want to risk antagonizing
Coos Bay any further.

As their distraught parents packed up the house, Seavenes Jr. and Roger spent an unseasonably warm October day exploring the woods around Empire Lakes, a popular recreation area. They came to a secluded stretch of shoreline, where they spotted a boy and girl dipping jars into the water. Fuming over his family’s humiliation, Seavenes Jr. whispered to Roger that they should avenge poor Danny by beating up the two kids. But Roger nixed that plan—he just wanted to see what the kids were doing with their jars.

The Holder boys approached the water’s edge. Roger saw that the girl was around eight years old; the boy appeared to be her little brother. She was pale and slight, with prominent ears and oversize glasses. Roger asked what she and her brother were doing.

“Catching salamanders,” the girl replied.

Roger peered at the muddy water inside the girl’s jar and laughed. “Those ain’t salamanders,” he said. “Those are tadpoles, see? Tadpoles—baby frogs.”

The girl reached into her jar and pulled out one of the minuscule creatures by its tail. She dangled it right in front of Roger’s face, so he could inspect its frilly gills and nascent limbs. “I know a baby salamander when I see one,” she snapped. When Roger could say nothing in reply, the girl broke into a wide grin; she was obviously pleased to have won the argument.

The girl’s brother tugged at her sleeve—he wanted to head back to the picnic area, where Mom and Dad were waiting. “Well, next time I
see you, I hope you’ve learned more about salamanders,” the grinning girl said to Roger while screwing a brass lid onto her jar. “Bye-bye.”

“Good luck with them salamanders!” Roger Holder shouted after Cathy Kerkow as she and her brother disappeared into the woods. He was certain that she heard him, though she never did look back.

Four days later the Holders’ Crown Victoria headed south down Highway 101. The family had been run out of Oregon after
less than three months.

A
S
C
ATHY
K
ERKOW
entered junior high, her parents’ shaky marriage finally fell apart. Bruce moved north to Seattle to pursue his music, leaving Patricia to care for their four children all by herself. The split was a minor scandal in conservative Coos Bay, where
divorce
was still a dirty word; the consensus was that only the lowest of scoundrels would abandon their kids to
chase bohemian dreams. The town rallied behind the much-loved Patricia, who took a full-time secretarial job at Southwestern Oregon Community College (SWOCC) to
make ends meet.

Because of her demanding work schedule, Patricia relied on Cathy to help run the household. Though barely more than a child herself, Cathy was expected to mend clothes, prepare roasts, and make sure her three younger brothers were dressed for school or church on time. While her friends from the neighborhood were outside on South 10th Street, running footraces between the lampposts or playing games of Truth or Dare, Cathy was often stuck inside her family’s second-floor flat, tending to chores. The sweet and quiet girl never complained about her responsibilities as assistant mom, nor voiced any sadness over her father’s departure. But there was pain
beneath her placid surface.

When she entered Marshfield High School in 1965, Kerkow was going through an awkward phase. The shy and gangly girl threw herself into the sorts of extracurriculars that proper young Coos Bay ladies were supposed to enjoy: chorus, the Latin club, and a Christian
group that provided
meals to elderly shut-ins. She
made straight B’s and became close friends with one of her fellow sopranos, Beth Newhouse, the daughter of
the town’s leading attorney.

As Kerkow progressed through Marshfield, though, she shed her gawkiness and blossomed into a talented athlete. She took up running, which had long been the biggest sport in Coos Bay—the town’s temperate climate allowed for year-round training, and the surrounding hills were ideal for strengthening young legs. The Marshfield track team was a powerhouse in the late 1960s, led by the best schoolboy miler in the United States, a scrappy carpenter’s son named Steve Prefontaine. Kerkow made the varsity squad as a junior and set a school record in the eighty-yard hurdles, an achievement that earned her special mention in Marshfield’s yearbook alongside her
friend and classmate Prefontaine.

Junior year was also when Kerkow began to take full advantage of her newfound ability to set male hearts aflutter. Endowed with a cherubic smile and lithe curves, the sixteen-year-old Kerkow had matured into the sort of intimidating beauty whom boys often lack the courage to approach. She started going steady with a handsome jock named Dennis Krummel, a baseball star who had grown up in her neighborhood. They made the rounds at Coos Bay’s teenage hotspots, cruising past the Egyptian Theater and feasting on
hamburgers at Dairy Queen.

Intoxicated by her first taste of adolescent freedom, Kerkow began to display a rebellious streak that she had long suppressed, one rooted in the trauma of her family’s dissolution several years before. The once-dutiful daughter now quarreled with her mother and retreated from the more wholesome aspects of high school life. She quit the track team, broke up with Krummel, and started to date a surfer who was in his early twenties. Kerkow would watch him ride the chilly waves off Bastendorff Beach, where scruffy types smoked grass and drank Rainier beer at all-night crab boils. The couple tooled around Coos Bay in his wood-paneled station wagon, with Kerkow’s well-toned legs dangling from the passenger-side window. The Marshfield boys would sigh whenever the woodie passed, chagrined to realize that fair Cathy was now
well outside their league.

Cathy Kerkow in the Marshfield High School yearbook, 1969.
COOS HISTORICAL & MARITIME MUSEUM

Kerkow was so busy enjoying the perks of her feminine wiles that she never paused to contemplate her future. And so when she received her Marshfield diploma in June 1969, she had only the vaguest notion of what to do next. Much like her absent father, she harbored pie-in-the-sky dreams of becoming a professional singer. But her main ambition at the age of seventeen was more mundane: she wanted to hang out with cool boys who would take her to
the coolest parties.

The next two years of Kerkow’s life were a blur of fleeting romances and halfhearted attempts at adulthood. After spending the summer of 1969 working at
a sawmill in Prineville, she returned to Coos Bay and enrolled at SWOCC to study oceanography. But she was a lackadaisical student, accumulating just a bare minimum of credits. She also worked a succession of menial jobs, all of which she lost in short order. She was fired from a Rexall drugstore, for example, amid accusations
that she had stolen amphetamines for her surfer friends; she lasted less than three weeks at a Payless drugstore after her boss deemed her too lazy to
operate the cash register. Kerkow was eventually reduced to taking seasonal positions to fund her leisure: stocking shelves at a housewares store during the holidays, picking
shrimp in the spring. She supplemented her meager income by shoplifting; she loved to give the salesclerks a cordial nod as she walked out the door, lipstick and stockings
stuffed in her purse.

As she floundered in Coos Bay, Kerkow tried on a range of different identities, looking for ways to define herself as something more than just another aimless college kid. In October 1970 she traveled two hours northeast to Eugene, a city that many in Coos Bay considered a latter-day Gomorrah, to attend a symposium featuring high-ranking members of the Black Panther Party. Kerkow cared nothing for the Panthers’ radical politics, but she swooned over their style and attitude: the black leather jackets, the berets perched atop Afros, the fiery speeches about the system’s rot. Above all, she knew the Panthers were feared and reviled in Coos Bay; to embrace them, however superficially, would make her dangerously hip.