Author Archives: Doug

I’M WATCHING YOU

01 Tuesday Aug 2017

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“Where did you come up with this story?” A friend commented, after reading my new novel, Whom Fortune Favors. “I never knew you had this much imagination.”

Now, I’ll take a compliment any day, even if it is not quite accurate. So I didn’t correct my friend by saying that when it comes to writing fiction, I’ll choose observation over imagination every time; because stories worth writing are everywhere around us, in our families and friends and the untold trials and triumphs of the people we see every day. Far from sitting at home imagining things, we writers are more likely to find inspiration by thoughtfully listening to someone who despises us for who we are, or how we look, or for the ideals we hold. Our best stories happen when love and understanding overcome ignorance and hate.

If you identify as a writer, you’ve probably already met someone with “a great idea for a book.” They may sit at the bar and relate the action and events of a complex plot until your eyes glaze-over. That’s imagination. But these barstool authors seldom describe the depths of their characters; the motivations, obsessions, fears and compulsions of the people they are writing about. That’s observation. And observing the human condition is the only way to give depth to characters whose voices will advance our plot through dialogue.

Of course, writers like Ray Bradbury, J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling can floor us with imaginary landscapes and creatures. But I believe that they are actually the keenest observers of all, because when I read Harry Potter I am in the head of a pre-adolescent with an unhappy home life who is discovering his magical powers. Hermione, Ron Weasley and Draco Malfoy are as real as the kids playing next door, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Dumbledore and Hagrid in mufti at the local supermarket. When Rowling writes dialogue, I’m in that conversation. That is why J.K. Rowling is a genius; she makes her characters so genuine and familiar that we hardly notice that the magical spells and fantastical beasts are not real.

That is what observation does for us – it gives us insight into the human condition – and helps us to understand how people react to events and relate to each other in the crisis points and sweet moments of their lives.

Isn’t that what we really want to write about?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Write of Passage

22 Saturday Jul 2017

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Everybody likes free stuff, unless it is their stuff being given away by other folks. So when I Googled my pen name and “free” I was a bit miffed to see my books being offered for free as a “Kindle [pdf]” at various places on the internet.

You may know about these online bulletin boards, where college kids seek free copies of the textbooks and other published works which–in their minds–they are entitled to.  For €99 a subscriber can download thousands of “pirated” books which have been posted there. So, two things: If you self-publish your books online you might want to check to see if your projects are available (supposedly) elsewhere. And (2), if someone is offering your book for “free,” relax. It is probably a scam which will only burn the subscriber.

Take Usenet.nl, for example. The front for this bogus company is located at Via XXV Marzo, 4 Domangano, San Marino Italy, which I discovered when I saw that they were offering several of my books free of charge, with a subscription to their service. However, the RIPOFF REPORT website shows that this is a scam which never delivers a product and does not allow users to unsubscribe after they provide their credit card information for a “free” 14 day trial. In fact, Usenet.nl is basically a collection agency which wears subscribers down until they cancel their credit cards.

How about Motoauthority.com? This is another slick scam, piggybacking on the legitimate websites of Motorauthority.com (with an r) and Moto-authority.com (with a -), which are very reputable on-line providers of aftermarket motorsport products. The crooked website with the slightly different name would have you believe that they have converted your eBook to a pdf for redistribution, but in my case, that was nonsense. What they DID do was to skim the information about my book from my author website, which is why I don’t post sample passages any longer.

So, relax. This happens to every author as a “write” of passage once we publish on the internet. The crooks probably don’t actually have that novel you poured your heart and soul into and their shenanigans will not effect your sales in the least.

I, for one, just laughed it off. Hey, I’m so famous now that people all over the world are clamoring for copies of my books! Sure. Right …  if only THAT was true.

My Unknown Shipmate

05 Friday May 2017

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Shipmate

The Second World War ended five years before I was born, so when I literally stumbled over this gravestone I was both mystified and intrigued. How did a German U-boat sailor find his eternal rest behind a gas station at the corner of Farewell Street and Van Zant Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island?

This was in the summer of 1972 when I was young and newly enlisted in the US Coast Guard. I never would have noticed the grave in the small military cemetery had I been travelling back to my ship by automobile, but in those carefree days my friends and I got around quite handily by walking and hitchhiking. And since there was no internet, I had to ask some of my older shipmates to learn that, yes, a U-boat had indeed been sunk near Block Island in the closing days of the war.

Some years later I was steering a Coast Guard 40 foot utility boat across Rhode Island Sound when I noticed a magenta warning on the chart, “UNEXPODED ORDINANCE, MAY 1945.” Some of the saltier fishermen in Point Judith remembered the two day bombardment which had sunk the U-853. Others had tales of U-boat sightings close to shore on misty mornings, and even of being approached by German sailors looking for any fresh bread, milk or eggs that the Rhode Island men might have aboard their trawlers. There were also two huge bronze propellers, said to come from the fabled U-boat, on display in front of a dive shop on Thames Street in Newport.

The U-853 was calling to me.

When I finally dove to the sunken wreck, it was with a group of divers from Connecticut who claimed to have abundant deep diving experience. But when we got down to the U-853 in about one hundred feet of water, it was little more than an eerie pile of rusty steel melting into the bottom, where men had died and were still entombed. My not-so-experienced companions quickly gulped most of the air out of their dive bottles by blowing giant bubbles from their regulators while rooting around for souvenirs on a former mother lode of relics which had long ago been stripped clean. It was almost immediately time to go up, which was fine with me even though I still had plenty of air, since my overwhelming impression of the experience was, I shouldn’t be here.

Still years later I was a crewmember on the US Coast Guard’s sail training ship Eagle for a port call in Hamburg, Germany, which coincided with the 60th anniversary of the Eagle’s launching there as the Segelschulshiff Horst Wessel. We were graciously received by the City of Hamburg and many people were delighted to see “their” ship once again. Of course everyone in the Coast Guard knows that the Eagle once sailed under the Nazi flag and that it was taken from the Kriegsmarine as a war prize after WWII. Many of the Eagle’s current crew are familiar with the subtle reminders of the Horst Wessel which have been covered, painted over or redesigned — like a bad tattoo — to fit the ship’s new American image. But when we were shown a long-lost newsreel of the Horst Wessel being launched, and then stood at the very spot in the Blohm&Voss shipyard where Adolph Hitler and Rudolf Hess had stood in 1936 to cheers of “Zeig Heil!” as our ship slid down the ways … that made the hair on our necks stand up.

We were also privileged to meet several old men who had sailed on Horst Wessel, back in the day. Most of them had volunteered for the Kriegsmarine late in the war, when Horst Wessel was armed with anti-aircraft guns and sent into the Baltic with a crew of raw recruits. Few survived the war, but they felt young again to stand on the decks as our shipmates, as surely as if our service to the ship was not separated by six decades. This is the way of a square-rigger, after all, where tradition and the lore of the sea dictate a common bond among all who have served under sail, everywhere and always.

So for many years I have considered the entombed sailors in the U-853 to be my unknown shipmates. Nearly all of them had trained aboard Segelschulschiff Horst Wessel. They had stood watches on the same decks, climbed the same masts to set the sails, and had held the spokes of the same ship’s wheel in their hands, as had I aboard the Eagle.

Which is why I sat down and wrote The Sailmaster as my therapy.

I am not D. B. Cooper

29 Saturday Apr 2017

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Forty-six years ago a man calling himself Dan Cooper bought a ticket on Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle for $20 cash and walked onboard a Boeing 727 with a bomb-like device in his carry-on briefcase. After takeoff he demanded that the airplane should land to be refueled for a flight to Mexico, at which time he allowed the passengers to disembark in exchange for two parachutes and $200,000 in cash. After the airplane returned to the sky, he lowered the aft boarding stairway and was never seen again.

Whether by mistake or design, it was some wag in the news media who coined an alias-within-an-alias when he gave the hijacker the familiar epithet “D. B.” Cooper.

For two decades after the hijacking, upon learning that that my name was Cooper, a new acquaintance would invariably ask, “Are you D. B. Cooper?” Or, “Any relation to D. B. Cooper?” This was all in jest, of course, since I’m five or ten years too young, one or two inches too short, and my eyes are way too blue to be DB. Not to mention, how could any of us be related to an alias? However, those little icebreakers often worked in my favor when they made it easy for me to talk with new friends, and gave them a hook to remember my name.

You might say that DB gave me the gift of gab, even if I had to start every conversation with no, I am not D. B. Cooper.

It wasn’t until five years ago that the hijacker’s faux moniker became a more serious issue for me, when I decided to self-publish my books. Early in the process,  I learned that there was a platoon of writers on Amazon Kindle and Create Space named Doug Cooper, or Douglas Cooper, or Douglas S. Cooper, or D. Scott Cooper,  ad infinitum.  In fact, the only variation of my name that wasn’t being used by another author was D. S. Cooper. So, what the heck. After all, initials worked pretty well for E. B. White, A. A. Milne, C. S. Lewis, H. P. Lovecraft and H. G. Wells.

Of course, I wasn’t counting on the sheer tonnage of words that have been churned out about DB over the years, which now take precedence over my pen name on every search engine. So, if you look online for books by D. S. Cooper you’ll have to get past a plethora of books about D. B. Cooper, of which there may be no end.  It seems that some devotees will always keep the flame for the DB myth, especially after eight-year-old Brian Ingram found fragments of twenty-dollar bills bearing the serial numbers of the Flight 305 ransom on the banks of the Columbia River, nine miles downstream from Vancouver in February of 1980. I have no idea how they got there.

Here’s the thing:  It is too late for me to change my copyrights, covers, ISBN numbers and so forth, so I guess I’ll just ride out the name confusion and keep writing as D. S. Cooper.  I’m not sure if it’s helping or hurting my book sales, but I can tell you for sure that I am not D. B. Cooper.

Since everybody of a certain age seems to have a pet theory about DB, here’s my take: The Flight 305 skyjacking was an incredibly stupid misadventure by a man who knew a little bit about a lot of things (more Cliff Clavin than James Bond) and got in way over his head. My best hope for the poor guy is that he never deployed his parachute and that he perished before impacting the brutally unforgiving terrain upstream from where those fragments of ransom money were found.  The important thing to remember is that I am NOT D. B. Cooper.

And the next time you endure TSA security screening at the airport, give a nod to good old DB, because the  Federal Aviation Administration first mandated the examination of all carry-on baggage a few days after my — I mean his — nutty stunt.

 

 

The Flying Cars Are Coming!

13 Wednesday Jul 2016

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The idea is ever so alluring to non-pilots; drive your airplane from home to the airport, fly to the next city airport, and then drive to your final destination. It would have to be safer, since you could land on the way and drive if the weather turned sour, and with a rocket-propelled ballistic parachute, what could go wrong?

Yet a pilot would ask, “don’t they have rental cars where you’re going? Or friends?” Or, how about all the times we’ve been offered an airport loaner car for free, with a request to bring it back in the morning? And since we can read weather forecasts before we fly, and the safety record of ballistic parachutes is a mixed bag, is it any surprise that experienced pilots are not enthusiastic about the promise of a flying car?

Even if they do produce the flying car for only $280,000 (out of my league!), it might be a hard-sell to pilots, since it comes with a 100 HP ROTAX  engine subject to this manufacturer’s warning: “Never fly the aircraft equipped with this engine at locations, airspeeds, altitudes, or other circumstances from which a no-power landing cannot be made, after sudden engine stoppage.” That makes the proven and dependable 180HP IO-360 in a new Cessna 172 look pretty good, for about the same money. By the way, the Cessna has four seats and can be flown at night and in instrument conditions.

Still lusting for a flying car? Consider that after an exemption from the FAA, the folks behind one prototype tout the payload of their design as 460 pounds, which sounds ample for two people, until you consider that a full fuel load of 23 gallons cuts that useful load down to 319 pounds. Better start yourself and your flying companion on that diet! Not to mention that to a pilot’s eye, all of the flying cars look like aerodynamic nightmares. It’s no wonder that the FAA has issued a new statement which re-considers allowing 20 hour “sport” pilots to fly these machines. Cooler heads have prevailed, and the feds now say that they will determine the pilot licensing requirements after flight testing is complete, if that ever happens.

As a car, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has granted a 3 year “hardship” exemption to make one design road-able, with no guarantee it will be permanent.  And not that it matters to those of you ready to plunk down $280K to look super-cool while driving around town, but insurance costs are likely to be sky-high, and the miles you drive will count towards the Time Between Overhaul (TBO) for your ROTAX engine, which was never intended for stop-and-go propulsion.

There is one thing which the flying car is very good at: Raising capital investments. Their promise of a “new level of safety, convenience and freedom” is estimated to have raised at least $11.5 million towards their $10 billion goal, with $30 million in pre-orders claimed. Of course, it would be cheaper to buy one of the six 1949 Moulton Taylor Aero Cars which actually flew fairly well, but never went into full production. Because even then, like the atomic refrigerator for your mom’s kitchen, it was a nifty idea which was not very practical.

Finally, if you visit my home airport as a transient pilot in your new flying car, you should make advance arrangements for the car gates, because the manager may not answer his cell phone to give you a code to exit from the airport without a gate pass when you want to.  Just saying…

Happy Flying!

I, Amputee

01 Friday Jul 2016

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Luckiest Day

All I had to do was push the throttle forward and pull back on the stick, and none of this would have happened.

That’s why my eyes glaze over whenever someone tries to sooth the reality of life-changing injuries with some mystical nonsense like, “Everything happens for a reason.” In my case, I know the reason; I didn’t add power and pull back on the stick  when the glare of the late afternoon sun got in my eyes, and a gust of wind pushed my right wingtip into the trees at the little grass airstrip where I was landing my airplane.

Also, you might have heard it said that shock always numbs the pain immediately after a traumatic injury. This too, I can report, is bunk. I was dazed and confused after the nose of the airplane augured into the ground, and I might have been content to take a little nap right there, except for the pain, which was immediate and intense. I couldn’t move or see my legs, both of which were still attached, although they had been thrown out the window next to my seat when I was turned sideways by the impact, with my seatbelt still fastened. In fact, the only limb I could move was my left arm, which I used to grab my cell phone and call my friend Mike, who lived at the far end of the runway.

By then the greatest volunteer fireman in the world had arrived, willing to sit on the wing of a crashed airplane in a pool of 100 octane avgas and talk to me while keeping some traction on my legs. The rest of the Berkley Fire and Police departments were not far behind, and with some technical advice about airplane structures from Mike, they soon had me out and strapped to a backboard, just as the Med Flight helicopter was landing to whisk me away.

“How are you doing?” the flight paramedic asked.

“I want drugs.”

This, from  non-drinker who hesitates to take anti-histamines because of the side effects.

I have to admit that I got a little nervous when I heard the Med Flight crew passing their assessment of my injuries to the ER on the radio, but that was also when I managed to close my eyes and do some deep breathing. I was in good hands.

The ER crew at Massachusetts General Hospital was playing the Top Gun Anthem on the stereo when the Med Flight guys wheeled me in. Maybe they always do that for the helicopter crews, but it actually made me laugh, considering how I got into this mess. They told me that I had multiple compound fractures of both legs, and a severely dislocated right shoulder. Then they asked me at least a dozen times if my head or chest hurt, as if they ought to.

Of course I couldn’t see what the orthopedic team was doing when they came in and hovered around my legs, but I soon realized that they were re-arranging the bones into a semblance of alignment. So I did my best to sound nonchalant when I asked, “Hey Doc, will I walk again?”

“I think so,” the surgeon replied.

 

Flying With The Flock

27 Monday Jun 2016

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Pig Roast.jpg

It’s that time of year for fly-in events, large and small. Seaplane pilots will be headed to Greenville,  Piper Cub aficionados have taken a sentimental journey to Lock Haven,  and nearly everyone will be winging to EAA AirVenture at Oshkosh.

Best of all, nearly every weekend someone will open their hangar door and invite their friends to stop by. This month we had a pig-roast at Plymouth (above), the EAA Pancake Breakfast at Cranland, and our own Taunton Pilots Association breakfast-on-the-grill at KTAN. Like a car show, we like to look at airplanes and talk to other owners and pilots about flying. (By the way, studies at leading universities have shown that one out of three of the flying stories told at these aviator conclaves may be true!)

And if the truth be known, like the old warriors at the VFW post or the ladies playing canasta every Thursday, sometimes we just like to be with our own kind.

After all, doesn’t everyone know that airports — especially municipal airports — attract posers and pretenders with their political agendas and backroom deals? But when it’s just us pilots and our friends and our airplanes, we can forget about all that self-important drama for a day. Whether we’re a millionaire in a jet, or a homebuilder in a beautiful new ship that came together in our garage, or just some old guy like me in an ordinary old Piper Cherokee,  we’re all just people who share the same sky.

Happy flying!

Who Killed Bader Field?

13 Monday Jun 2016

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Bader skyline

Bader Field used to be the Atlantic City Municipal Airport (KAIY). It’s still there in  the very shadow of the boardwalk casinos, but as an airport, Bader Field is dead. The runways are all closed and a minor league baseball stadium and concert venue dominate the grounds.

Historic Bader Field was the first place ever called an ‘air-port.’ It opened in 1910 and the Civil Air Patrol was founded there in 1941. Glenn Curtiss, Charles Lindbergh and Admiral Richard Byrd flew there, and for three decades it was the site of the Black Pilots Association and the Powder Puff Derby. The first attempt to cross the Atlantic by air (a dirigible) departed from there and during the 1960s and 70s Allegheny Commuter Airlines flew flights to Philadelphia and New York, until Atlantic City International Airport opened at the former Naval Air Station, fifteen miles away.

Bader_NJ_86Jun_Dash7

The airport was 68 years old and operating smoothly when it saw a dramatic increase in charter flights as the first boardwalk casino opened in 1978, less than five miles away. Four engine airplanes carrying 40 passengers were shoe-horned onto the 2,948 foot runway by Resorts International, and in one year (2001) Bader saw 10,683 takeoffs and landings. In 1986 Atlantic City received a grant for improvements from the FAA, along with an obligation to operate the airport for 20 years. But only four years later in 1990, the city appealed to U. S. Senator Frank Lautenberg for legislation that would remove that grant obligation so that the airport could be closed due to ‘unsafe levels of air traffic.’ Others say that the land had become too valuable and a proposal to build 4000 time share condominiums on the airport’s 143 acres was the reason, but in any event Lautenberg’s legislation failed and Bader Field remained opened, even as the city stopped properly maintaining the facilities.

Then in 1996, without consulting the FAA, the city began constructing Sandcastle Stadium near Runway 29/11 on the airport property. A court battle ensued, but after a settlement the stadium opened in 1998. By 2006 less than a dozen aircraft were based at Bader Field,  and transient airplanes accounted for nearly all of the air traffic there.

On May 15, 2005 a Cessna Citation jet bound for the casinos attempted to land at Bader with a 10 knot tailwind. The jet  overran the end of the runway and splashed into the Intracoastal Waterway. All aboard were rescued by a passing boater, but the jet’s right engine was never shut down, and the Citation’s wet and  wild gyrations after all hands abandoned ship were caught on camera. The accident is still a popular video on You Tube.

It’s too late to save Bader Field, which Atlantic City closed as soon as the grant assurances expired, ninety-six years after it opened. But a Casino is being built a few miles away from my home airport, and many of the pilots and aircraft owners here fear that our community airport could repeat Bader’s sad history if we don’t learn from it. Unfortunately, there are some futurists here in Taunton who espouse only tremendous benefits and opportunities from ‘the whole new era’ of the casino. Some of them seem to be putting personal gain ahead of what is best for our airport, for there is certainly money to be made from ‘expansion’  when the gaming industry comes to town.

And to those who say that extending our runway at Taunton to 4,000 feet would never allow jets into our little airport, please consider that after the jet crash at Bader Field, the NTSB found an airport diagram on the control yoke directly in front of the pilot which read “airport closed to jet traffic.”

Proving once again that if you build it they will come.

 

 

 

 

A Whole New Error?

08 Wednesday Jun 2016

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setp“Further evidence of the trend to turboprop aircraft replacing piston power.”

That’s what one of my home airport’s commissioners recently said about this picture; a brilliant prediction since the headline hyping Cessna’s new turbo-prop airplane read “proof of a growing trend in aviation,” and many of the popular aviation magazines have been telling us as much for years. Yes, the single-engine turbines are coming!

This commissioner’s business must be doing very well if he is going to buy into a seven-figure turboprop. More power to him. I like the turbines, and I’ll never pass on the chance to fly aboard one of them and see what these remarkable machines can do. The power and sophisticated gadgetry in the panel is amazing! For sure, I’d love to own and fly a sleek new TBM 900, but my 1964 Cherokee 180 is the best that I can do right now, and it serves my flying needs perfectly. It’s also safe to say that not many of the pilots at Taunton Municipal Airport will be trading in their Pipers and Cessnas for turboprops any time soon, no matter what the industry gurus divine in their crystal balls. When our airplanes finally wear out, it’s much more likely we’ll be building and flying Van’s RVs, Zeniths and other homebuilt ships at a fraction of the cost.

I think that this local fascination with the presumed future of aviation is really about Taunton’s nascent casino, which is being built less than three miles from our airport. You’ve seen the gaming industry commercials, with the beautiful young couples spinning the roulette wheel to a jazzy guitar riff, dressed to the nines for drinking and dining and going to shows. Those commercials are a far cry from reality, but there’s no doubt that in addition to the multi-million dollar airplanes, “a whole new era” at Taunton would see more Polo, Ralph Lauren and European sports cars around the flight line, in contrast to the pickup truck and dungaree look which we currently enjoy.

Some of the most avid pilots at Taunton smell plenty of jet fuel when they’re working, flying Boeings 737s, Air Force C-130s and Citation jets, but they keep their personal airplanes at our community airport for the “grass roots” experience of barbeque grills and carefree kids on bikes and J-3 Cubs in the pattern. It would be a shame to lose that to some up-tight commercial airport to serve the casino.

It’s not that I don’t want aviation to progress. There’s plenty of room for the new turbines, as long as they don’t build their corporate hangars on the grass/gravel crosswind runway that our tail-draggers and classic airplanes often use. Real progress would be getting self-serve fuel and removing the old phone poles and downed tree branches laying around. Real progress would be improving access to our airport so that anyone interested in flying airplanes could get through the fences and join the fun.  And don’t forget that New Bedford already has two long runways, instrument approaches, jet fuel and glitzy facilities for the high-rollers, all within fifteen miles of Taunton.

 

 

 

 

 

Why Do eBook Authors Quit?

30 Monday May 2016

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IMG_0444

Because nobody buys the book, of course.

Sure, there are some awful efforts  posted online, but some good reads only sell a few copies before they are forgotten. It’s frustrating to craft a project that goes nowhere, and most of us would rather be writing the next book before spending hours divining the power of keywords or solving the mysteries of  promotions for a finished work.

So here it is: Whether it’s a toaster or a novel, online sales are driven by customer reviews.

After all, if someone commits to reading Stephen King, James Patterson or Nora Roberts, they pretty much know what to expect. But who the hell is D. S. Cooper? That is why writers want to leave the reader with a jolt of emotion and the burning desire to tell someone about this book I just read! You want them to write a review as soon as they put the book down. And if I ever figure out how to do that, I’ll become a successful Kindle author!

It is very nice and productive to get feedback from readers on my website, especially when it develops into a continuing correspondence, but those e-mails do little to entice other readers, since only Amazon reviews push future sales on Kindle. So I’ll go ahead and belabor the point: If you want people to read your book  you’ve got to have some stars on the Amazon sales page.

On the other hand, no one likes to get snarked, or to get panned by a reader channeling a NY Times reviewer with broad criticisms such as, “needs more character development,” or “the author needs to set the scene better.”  That sort of stuffing always leaves me wondering if the reviewer even read the book.

But for all I know, the worst reviews are probably right on. After all, I’m just some guy with a notebook computer and an irrepressible urge to spin a yarn.