Jonathan Kellerman - Time Bomb

All that and pictures, too- photo-snippets culled from textbooks and magazines, some of them sloppily hand-colored in crayon. Headshots of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and for reasons I couldn’t comprehend, Buddha, Shakespeare, and a rhesus monkey. Cloth-capped workers waiting in bread lines. Byzantine icons. Greek statuary. Dustbowl migrants with faces out of a Woody Guthrie song. The Egyptian pyramids. Butterflies. Two pages of ancient weapons- maces, halberds, long swords. A Sherman tank.

I tried to make some sense of it, but the words passed through me without being digested- literary fiber. My eyes blurred and my head began to hurt. I flipped to the last chapter in hopes of finding a summation, some central message I could make sense of. Something that would tell me why Ike Novato had sought out the author.

What I found was a two-page spread of a crayoned mushroom cloud captioned BEAR LODGE, R.I.P., THE GREATS. On the next page was a photo-reproduction of a newspaper story from The New York Times. April 21, 1971. The word LIES! in large red letters had been hand-printed diagonally over the copy. The red letters were grainy. I read through them.

IDAHO BLAST THE RESULT OF RADICAL BOMB

FACTORY ACCIDENT SAYS FBI

BEAR LODGE, IDAHO- Federal and local law enforcement authorities in this rural logging community report that an enormous explosion that took place during the early morning hours was the result of the accidental detonation of a cache of high explosives stockpiled by left-wing radicals conspiring to carry out a program of domestic terrorism and violent political protest.

The explosion, described by witnesses as a “fire-storm,” occurred at 2:00 A.M. and totally demolished a former lumber warehouse and several vacant outbuildings a half mile outside Bear Lodge, in addition to setting off fires in surrounding heavily forested areas that took six hours to suppress. Structures within the town of Bear Lodge experienced shattered windows and minor wood and masonry damage. No Bear Lodge residents reported injuries but ten people in the warehouse are believed to have perished.

“The ground just started shaking. It felt like an earthquake,” said Nellie Barthel, owner of the Maybe Drop Inn Tavern and Truck Stop in Bear Lodge, as she swept up broken bottles and glasses. “Or one of those sonic booms, but a lot louder. Then we saw the fire and smoke pouring into the sky from the east and we knew something had happened out there with those people at the old log depository.”

Tax documents obtained in Twin Falls reveal that the titled owner of the warehouse, Mountain Properties, had leased the hundred-year-old clapboard building the previous August for a six-month period to an “M. Bakunin”- believed to be an alias alluding to 19th century Russian anarchist Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin. “Bakunin’s” stated purpose on the lease agreement was “storage of agricultural materials and food.”

Employees and officers of Mountain Properties were not available for comment. However, residents of Bear Lodge (pop. 326) report increased activity in the vicinity of the warehouse during recent weeks, the “outsiders” hauling truckloads of fertilizer, sawdust, sugar and other materials along the quarter-mile service road leading to the four-story storage building.

“They must have bought the stuff somewhere else because they never came into town to shop,” said Dayton Auhagen, a buckskin-clad trapper who sometimes camped in the now-charred forests surrounding the warehouse. Auhagen described the warehouse tenants as “not from anywhere around these parts. But they minded their own business and we minded ours. That’s the way it is out here. We’re all individualists.”

Southern Idaho Regional FBI Agent-in-Charge Morrison Stowe had another view of the blast victims. “They were political radicals suspected of acts of urban terrorism or conspiracy to commit terrorism. The substances they were stockpiling are all potential nitrating agents and thus have a potential role in the manufacture of nitroglycerine-based explosives.”

Although he declined to specify the precise process of bomb manufacture, Stowe did say, “It’s not all that difficult. During the last couple of years there have been several manuals circulating among the subversive underground: bomb cookbooks that make do-it-yourselfing sound easy. What they don’t emphasize sufficiently is that nitroglycerine is an extremely unstable compound no matter how you cook it up. Minute variations in heat or humidity can set it off. We believe that’s what happened here. These individuals were manufacturing bombs, an accidental detonation occurred and they blew themselves up.”

Stowe added that while the force of the blast was so great as to render identification of bodies virtually impossible, eyewitness accounts combined with a “careful and longstanding investigation” led the Bureau to believe that at least ten individuals perished in the blast, including two young children, and that no members of the group escaped. He listed the blast victims as:

Thomas Harrison Mader Bruckner, 29, of Darien, Connecticut. A Columbia University graduate, teaching assistant in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding member of the violent Weathermen offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Bruckner was scion of an old Colonial family whose members have included several congressmen and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Catherine Blanchard Lockerby, 23, of Philadelphia and Newport, Rhode Island. A former Columbia University psychology student and Weatherman, Lockerby is described as Bruckner’s live-in companion and also the descendant of an affluent, socially prominent family.

Antonio Yselas Rodriguez, 34, of San Juan, Puerto Rico and the Bronx, New York. A convicted forger and burglar, Rodriguez is wanted on an outstanding fugitive warrant for escape from the Rikers Island prison in New York where he was being held for trial on assault charges related to a December 1970 South Bronx bar brawl. He is termed a “major suspect” in several bombings attributed to the Puerto Rican separatist/extremist group, FALN.

Teresa Alicia Santana, 26, of the Bronx, New York, is Rodriguez’s common-law wife and suspected FALN cell leader.

Mark Andrew Grossman, 24, of Brooklyn, New York. Former New York University political science student, Weathermen founder, and self-described “labor activist,” Grossman was wanted for questioning related to attempted sabotage of several Eastern Seaboard power stations.

Harold Cleveland “Big Skitch” Dupree, 39, convicted murderer and armed robber, paroled from Rahway, New Jersey, state prison in October of last year. Dupree was an official of the Black Fist prison gang and suspected founder of the Black Revolutionary Armed Forces, and was believed to be responsible for a string of armed car robberies in upstate New York.

Norman Samuel Green, 27, of Oakland, California. A former graduate student and teaching assistant in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, a former SDS official and antiwar activist, Green is believed to have been a prime force behind the “People’s Park” riots and other student protests at the Berkeley campus. He is thought to he the “M. Bakunin” to whom the warehouse was leased.

Melba Tamara Johnson-Green, 28, of Oakland, California. Norman Green’s wife and a former law student at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a member of the Law Review before dropping out one semester short of graduation. An SDS member, an antiwar and women’s liberation activist and a suspected recruiter for the Weathermen on the Berkeley campus.

Malcolm Isaac Green, 2, of Oakland, California, the Greens’ son.