California's high-speed rail makes inaugural voyage

Passengers traveled the first run of the expanded route.

Editor's note: This reflects an optimistic look forward at one of California's most capital-intensive transportation projects.

FRESNO, Calif. (Feb. 23, 2028) -- The sleek train pulled into the depot on H and Mariposa streets like it has the past several years.

The whistle blew. Passengers disembarked. Some met warmly with family, and a few others hurried to their destinations in this Central San Joaquin Valley city. But most remained aboard, smiling from the windows at the crowd gathered at the station.

A porter hefted baggage and answered questions, while the station manager quietly met with the train's passenger director and several high-ranking officials from the California High-Speed Rail Authority. Previous runs have been limited to Fresno and Bakersfield and more recently to Merced.

They wanted the trip to be flawless. It is the first time the train, which can reach speeds in excess of 200 mph, has taken passengers along its entire 520-mile length, from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

"Today is a significant milestone and caps 14 years of world-class construction," said Authority CEO Jeff Morales, who earlier this month signaled plans to retire. "We had some bumps along the way, but our design-build approach and top-flight contractors did a fantastic job. Their work won us a lot of believers."

Puck Schmuck makes his political debut in Fairbanks

A cheap imitation, but you get the idea.

Author's note: Back when I was in seventh-grade, my friend Torg Hinckley and I created a character we called Puck Schmuck. He was a politician of sorts. A Zorro type inspired by our love of comic books. We ran him for election at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and our junior high. We thought it was funny. Nobody else seemed to.

I'm writing a memoir I suspect nobody will ever read. But here's a chapter from it.

After the resignation of President Richard Milhous Nixon on Aug. 9, 1974, we were all affected. The hippies celebrated. The press ran the story for months. And when President Gerald Ford was named, the entire country appeared to relax a bit. To me, it wasn’t that Nixon was all bad. After all, he created the Environmental Protection Agency, oversaw the first Earth Day, supported the Clean Air Act and, most importantly, stopped the Vietnam War.

But what stuck out to Torg and I was the image of Nixon flashing his peace signs. He did it regularly, usually with a big grin on his face.

About this time, Torg and I had gotten somewhat involved politically. I don’t mean we actually paid attention to politics, but we did start messing around in elections. Both our parents were politically active. They voted and made their thoughts known. His parents were liberal. My mom fancied herself a bit of a radical.

Our interpretation involved comics. We created a character who we called Puck Schmuck. Both of us were really into Yiddish words. They were so descriptive and rebellious. I mean, schmuck. It means a variety of things. But we fixated on it referring to somebody being a jerk.

We’d make lists of put downs, slang for genitalia, insulting racial and ethnic slurs. We were not politically correct. And it wasn’t a politically correct time. So we were terrible. We also watched a lot of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, Electric Company and Sesame Street. Maybe for balance.

I don’t recall how Puck Schmuck came about. Most likely it was Torg. He was quick and brilliant when it came to ideas. I loved it. Schmuck looked like a ghost, the old sheet over the head type. Actually, he looked just like the little phantoms the Pac Man creature chases on the video game. That game appeared several years later. I recall Torg showing it to me in an obscure quick mart store.

So Schmuck just remained our joke. We’d draw him a lot. He made commentary on various things. After looking at some of the cartoons we drew of the guy, a thought hit me. I figured to engineer a major prank. Our best yet.

“Let’s run Puck Schmuck for campus president,” I said one afternoon.

“What?” asked Torg. “Too stupid.”

“No, really,” I said. “It will work. Nobody likes the guy running. We’ll make a bunch of posters and encourage a write-in campaign.”

Confessions of a Hungarian Revolutionary

Imre Nemeth, fourth from right, was a freedom fighter.

Writer’s note: I finally was able to extract the story of my father’s involvement in the Hungarian 1956 Revolution on a sunny day in our tiny beach house on Camano Island in Washington state. It was 1998. My daughter had been pestering him, and he finally relented. When he started talking, I got out my notebook. What follows is his story. He now sits in a box in my garage. One of these days, I’ll take some of his ashes to the Danube River and sprinkle them at his favorite swimming hole off Margaret Island in Budapest. I posted this because I’ve seen so little written about the war, at least in English. This is just one man’s story, but it’s a piece of history important to our small refugee community that originally formed up in Seattle.

Apprentice electrician Imre Nemeth had been wiring a light switch in a tiny apartment pantry with his uncle. It was a day like any other, or so he thought. Work, eat, sleep. Repeat.

But this day would change his life and millions of others in the little Eastern European country. It was on Oct. 23, 1956 that he learned Hungary decided to kick the Russians out and stick a knife in Iron Curtain.

It was time. The cry for freedom was strong. But it was mostly young people like Imre who would repeat that cry and take up arms against Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a Cold War superpower that had occupied Hungary since the end of World War II.

Imre’s Uncle Istvan Nemeth, one of a dozen brothers in his oversized Catholic brood, was best known for being the one who got kicked out of the seminary for impregnating a woman he didn’t end up marrying. He was a humorous sort. Good for a laugh and a decent boss. He had begun taking Imre on side jobs for a couple of years.

The pair completed the small job and said their goodbyes. But as the 17-year-old Imre hopped off the streetcar to start his 2 kilometer walk home, somebody yelled: “Hallottad hogy tuntetnek radio?” Roughly translated it means: “Hey, did you see the demonstration by the radio station?”

Imre had no way of knowing what the next few hours would bring. While he and Istvan had been quietly working in another part of Budapest, the cultural and political center of Hungary, the seed of revolution caught fire.

Coming to a boil that day were the frustrations of a country that deftly avoided conflict in World War II until the waning days when its leaders no longer could stave off the rumblings of Russians on the east, the Allies in the west and the besieged Germans in the center. Hungary had arisen from that war beaten, poor and occupied by an emerging superpower bent on bending the rest of the world to a top-heavy derivative of Marxism.

Hungary had little choice but to sign a treaty with the Russians in 1945 that was supposed to last a decade. From Imre’s perspective and many others in the tiny Eastern European nation of about 10 million, by 1956 it was a year too long. They believed the Russians were sucking the factories and the country dry.

Grumbling had been going on for some time. In June of that year a half-dozen university students led by a member of the small Hungarian Air Force, a man named George Polyak, hijacked a Hungarian passenger plane, a well traveled DC-3, to West Germany and freedom. The news, although somewhat suppressed by the state-run media, sent a ripple through the Communist regime and the populace as the hijackers had hoped.

It was this creeping national discontent that spurred Nemeth that evening to act. A joke still on the lips of many Hungarians’ goes like this: “Hungary must be a really large country. The Russians still haven’t found a way out.”