FD-350 clipping, Minneapolis Tribune 4/8/79: D.B. Cooper feature and Cricket Theater play coverage

FD-350 (Rev. 12-6-78)

(Indicate page, name of newspaper, city and state.)

12G, 20G TRIBUNE Mpls. MN Date: 4-8-79 Edition: Sunday

Title: D. B. COOPER

Character: or Classification: 164-73 Submitting Office: MINNEAPOLIS

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Northwest 727 hijacker Cooper made a quantum leap into mists of mythology

By John Kerans

You can't tell a book by its cover. Nor a crook by the crime he's com- mitted. But if you can't read the book, or you can't find the crook— then surely some speculation's per- mitted.

Take the case of D. B. Cooper, who 7½ years ago used a bomb threat to take command of a 727 jet, then par- achuted to freedom with $200,000 ex- torted from Northwest Airlines. No trace of Cooper was ever found. And since it's the only such unsolved crime in American history, you could say Cooper wrote the book on skyjacking. But he took the book along the night he made his quantum leap. And that's where the specula- tion begins . . .

The playwright:

John Orlock began to wonder about D. B. Cooper a few weeks after the crime was committed. Orlock found a letter purportedly from Cooper re- printed in the New York Times and he clipped it out. Orlock still has that clipping, though it's yellowed with age.

(In the letter, "Cooper" said in part that he had only 14 months to live and that "I knew from the start that I wouldn't be caught.")

"I read it and got the feeling of a man who finally decided to do some- thing with his life. There was a great sadness and a great courage here," says Orlock, his fingertips touching the clipping.

"If this was indeed the case, that he was dying—and I am sure that he is now dead—then there was a certain justice here. It was a haunting piece of writing. Most importantly, I could feel a 'personality' emerging."

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More than a personality emerged. So did a play, "The D. B. Cooper Project," which opens Friday night at the Cricket Theater. Orlock cautions that the play is not simply about sky-

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jacking. "I just tried to write good characters. The skyjacking is just a hook. It's not about that. It's about people and how they respond under certain circumstances."

The circumstances here are those of failure. "Cooper is a man for whom nothing has ever gone right. His marriage went down the drain. His gas station folded. He's been passed over by the American dream. He's not a folk hero. He's a negative personality. But he has a transformation. He becomes D. B. Cooper."

But what if the letter was a fake? What if John Orlock was inspired by the contrivance of a prankster?

"No!" says Orlock firmly. "There is a feeling here that is right for me. The flow in the letter is thought-by-thought. It COULD have been a fake. But as a playwright, I would have had a hard time writing a better letter than this."

The article about the letter was published six days before Christmas. And it ran a little short. So somebody at the New York Times stuck in a holiday slogan to bring that column of the newspaper to its proper length.

It reads, "Remember the neediest." Right there on John Orlock's clipping.

The reporter:

Leverett Richards thinks the D. B. Cooper letter was a fake.

"It just didn't seem to jive with the facts in the case," Richards explains.

Richards certainly has the facts. They fill one full drawer of his desk in the newsroom at the Portland Oregonian. He's been following the case since the night it happened.

"Besides, Cooper couldn't have survived. It quickly became evident to me that he landed in Lake Merwin. That's up in Washington state, about

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35 miles north of Portland, where the FBI figured he made the jump. It's my bet that Cooper's body is still down there.

"I'm a pilot. And I've talked to pilots who were flying that night. There was terrific turbulence. Cooper couldn't have picked a worse night.

"If this fellow Cooper could organize a letter, he would have organized the skyjacking too and he didn't. Everybody I've talked to--pilots and parachutists--they all feel his chances for survival were pretty grim."

But Richards will concede one thing. It's a hell of a mystery. Last January, somebody found a plastic placard from the rear stairs of a 727 jet in the suspected drop area. But aside from that, there have been no other clues.

And what about Cooper's character? "He was a born loser," Richards snaps. He had no upbringing. That's no way to do things. I don't have much patience with those who think they can get rich at the expense of others.

"But you asked me about his character. Well, he was from a broken home or he had no family. Because no one has ever been reported missing that matches his description.

"Obviously, he has no military experience as a parachutist or a pilot. Otherwise," Richards rasps in disbelief, "he would have known you couldn't bail out there. It's rough country. It was overcast. And I don't see how he could have known the elevation."

Leverett Richards won't be coming to see "The D. B. Cooper Project." He can't get away from work. But his son--a research scientist at the 3M Company in St. Paul--has promised his father he'll see the show and report back.

The son is named Durkee B. Rich-

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ards. Abbreviated, of course, that's "D. B. . . ."

The storekeeper:

Just as firmly as Leverett Richards talks about D. B. Cooper in the past, then storekeeper Germaine Tricola describes him in the present.

"Of course, he's alive!" she says with a smile. "Cause nothing's ever been found. We've lost folks before, but we've always found the remains."

Until recently, Tricola ran the Ariel Store & Tavern. It's tucked into the foothills of Washington's Cascade Mountains, at a point directly below which Cooper is calculated to have hit the silk. Up the road lies Lake Merwin.

"Fell into the lake? He couldn't have. With the drought we had two years ago, something would have shown up. Body, parachute, money, bag--something. You could even see the tree stumps then."

For several years, Tricola--who moved to Washington from Hugo, Minn., 30 years ago--has staged a D. B. Cooper party on Thanksgiving. The party has drawn guests from as far away as Toronto and as near as the local FBI office in Portland. Tricola just sold the store, but the new owners plan to continue the tradition.

The Ariel Store & Tavern caters to the logging crowd. Rough men doing rough work, clearing away tall pines, fir and cedars clustered together so thick that the sunlight has a hard time getting through.

(A man on a parachute might have a hard time getting through, too. But there are plenty of "clear cuts" where the logging companies have toppled the timbers and taken them out on trucks.)

"We've had jumpers land right next

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to the store. Last year, a professional parachutist from Portland and two of his students came right down. I think that's what Cooper did.

"He was a man who liked a challenge. A loner. I don't think he needed the money. Maybe he didn't have anything to do on Thanksgiving."

If this is where D. B. Cooper landed with the $200,000 ransom, then he fell in with good company. A long time ago, before reforestation programs, the loggers had a slogan.

Simply put, it read: "Get yours and get out."

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The psychiatrist:

David Hubbard cursed the idea of a musical about D. B. Cooper when he learned of it.

"I'm of the opinion that this type of thing doesn't need to be perpetuated. Cooper represented no ideals and no values. He's not a folk hero. He was a man acting selfishly. The number of people who can be harmed by men who think they'll be immortalized is innumerable."

In 1971, Hubbard wrote a book called "The Skyjacker." It's the only psychiatric study of the "skyjacking personality," and it's based on dozens of interviews with men who committed the crime.

Hubbard's premise is that we are bound together by twofold gravity. One part is physical—which holds us to earth. Another is emotional—which holds us to each other. Skyjacking, he concludes, is a defiance of both realities.

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Hubbard also believes in "mutations." One man commits the crime; another emulates it. Cooper—he points out—was not the first to get together parachutes, bombs and disguises. A Canadian tried the same trick in Calgary three weeks before. Hubbard assumes Cooper read about it and tried to go the Canadian one better. He did—the Canadian was caught and Cooper was not.

"Cooper created nothing," says Hubbard. "He was an imitative creature like all the rest who followed."

There certainly were plenty to follow—though none succeeded. Eventually, the back stairs on 727 jets were modified to lock in flight. And that was the end of that.

"I took the notorious and made it commonplace," says Hubbard. "You want to take the commonplace—and D. B. Cooper was commonplace—and make it notorious. I don't buy that."

Psychiatrist David Hubbard does all his work at the Aberrant Behavior Center in Dallas. He lives nearby. Back in 1971, Hubbard—like Cooper—received $200,000.

But Hubbard's money came from a private benefactor. It was given to finance a study on skyjacking.

John Kerans is a free-lance writer.

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Legend of a hijacker comes to Cricket Theater

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By Mike Steele Staff Writer

On Thanksgiving Eve 1971, a mild-mannered man using the name D.B. Cooper hijacked a Northwest Airlines 727 and, somewhere south of Seattle, parachuted out clutching $200,000 in $20 bills. He hasn't been seen since.

It was a great mystery and Cooper became something of a folk hero. Songs were written about his dazzling escapade and D.B. Cooper took his place alongside Robin Hood, Jean Lafitte and all three musketeers.

Almost overlooked during the episode, however, was a letter received by several newspapers a month after the hijacking. It was written by a man who, claimed to be Cooper. The letter said, "I am no modern day Robin Hood. Unfortunately I do have only 14 months to live." He took the money, he wrote, "to gain a few fast grains of peace of mind."

One who didn't overlook the letter was playwright John Orlock. "I was fascinated by that letter," explained the 33-year-old writer, "especially a part where he wrote about living a life of agony, turmoil, hate and more hate. It was a beautiful piece of writing, straightforward and simple, the kind of letter a D.B. Cooper would have written. Let's face it, the hijacking was one of the great acts of imagination of our time, the idea of taking the money and leaving the airplane up there.

"I clipped that letter and put it in my files for a few years. I was thinking about it during that time, however, and it kept coming out in my mind as a musical, a small cabaret musical. Then five years ago we performed a rough draft of it in a workshop at Penn State where I was teaching. It only had five songs and only two or three of those original scenes remain today."

But he has worked and reworked it since, and last year "The D.B. Cooper Project" was done in a reading during the Cricket Theater's late-night works-in-progress series. It worked well enough that the Cricket is presenting it on its main stage beginning Friday through May 5, under Lou Salerni's direction.

The play, like most of Orlock's to date, will be a comic drama. It won't be the big, metaphorical statement he'll be after but, as he put it, "just people in a situation, a look at what happens when interesting characters are placed in a situation that will knock them around. I never start a play saying, 'I want to say this.' It's deadly. What really makes me cringe is when a playwright uses the title of the play as a metaphor in the play, you know, here comes the Streetcar Named Desire. I look for character and let metaphors find themselves through them."

Orlock's characters tend to be based on historical fact, then shot through with the writer's imagination. His "Indulgences in the Louisville Harem," one of last year's hits at the,

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lock's plays to date it is the way he begins with logical, historical situa- tions and lets those situations zoom through logic right off the wall, often into surprisingly tender emotions.

"The humor is so important," said Orlock, "in terms of holding an audi- ence. If you can make them laugh they'll follow you anywhere, right through logic into areas you could never get them to follow you normal- ly. You simply can't bore an audi- ence and move them too. I'm learn- ing that more and more, how to hold an audience and how I can turn that back in on itself or into a different level."

He pulls his comedy from many styles. "I've been watching Abbott and Costello lately," he said. "It's just absolutely primal, basic materi- al, beautifully built. The 'Who's on First?' sketch is to comedy what Bach is to music. I also watch old television series, like Sgt. Bilko. It was well written formally and just needs a content injection. And I love Moliere.

"What I'm after is situational com- edy, the kind that builds from char- acters to the point where the audi- ence finally says 'Oh, no, he isn't really going to do that!' It takes a bit more time to build those situations as opposed to just joke humor, but it's so much richer."

Orlock also wrote the 11 songs in this, his first musical. In fact, in the

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Cricket, featured a mesmerist from the International Institute of Science and Populism. The mesmerist, it turned out, was mute and had to be accompanied by a friend who said all his words for him though the ideas behind the words, we were as- sured, were the mesmerist's.

He has also written plays about a man who played the organ in a Bos- ton subway station and about the Golden Girl, the first female baton twirler to march with a college marching band. His latest play, re- cently given in the Cricket's works- in-progress series, "Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs," is about a 12th-cen- tury French cathedral builder.

If there's one thing that typifies Or-

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Camille Gifford and Don Amendolia in the Cricket Theater's produc- tion of "The D. B. Cooper Project."

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best tradition of musical theater, he had just completed the final one a week or so before opening.

"I have a background in piano," he said, "but I haven't composed much. I did do some small film scores and some commercial work, but not much. The one song last year in 'Louisville Harem' was my first the- ater song. I don't think I can really describe my style. I look for theater music, songs that are scenes in them- selves. I like a lot of early Kurt Weill music but I'm still exploring. This piece is scored for two pianos, harp and either percussion or strings. Not sure yet. I had a tuba in there first, but when the harp came in, I dropped it. The harp was an amazing instrument, perfect, ethereal flying music."

Orlock is a native of Philadelphia and has taught at both Penn State and Boston University. He set out to become an actor and director but about nine years ago took a playwrit- ing course that showed him to be a writer of some skill. He soon won a Shubert Playwriting award to study at Penn State, where he wrote his first full-length play.

"I felt the great satisfaction of hear- ing an audience respond," he said, "and found out how nice that could be. I wrote only off and on for a while but I was getting more and more reinforcement and finally in late 1973, when I began 'D.B. Coo- per,' I made the commitment to playwriting.

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He came to Minneapolis in 1975 be- cause he was tired of teaching and had heard the theater scene was promising. He and his wife loaded up a U-Haul and breezed into Minneap- olis on Labor Day. He spent the first year selling calculators at Dayton's by day, teaching theater at the Guild of Performing Arts at night. He wrote and directed a few shows there and finally, a year ago, was named a playwright-in-residence at the Playwrights' Lab.

"It is a very, very useful program," he said. "I'm still involved with it. It's an opportunity to take good ac- tors and a director and say, 'All right, I'd like to present this work.' And then work on it and see how it plays. Out of the Lab work I can hear the piece, rewrite it and work it out. I still like to work this way. The Cricket's works-in-progress series has worked out the same way. It's a very nice way to bring a play along."

Starting next fall, Orlock will be- come the Cricket's literary manager in charge of reading new scripts, helping with play selection and, of course, writing.

"Above all," he said, "it will be a steady salary. I'll phase out most of my teaching and be able to concen- trate on professional theater. In fact, until they asked me to take that posi- tion I had seriously thought about go- ing back to college teaching, just to put bread on the table. I wasn't too happy with those prospects. Believe me, it feels much better to be in the theater."

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