The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking Read Online Free Page A

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 onhamburgers 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 nowwell 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 tothe 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 ata 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 accusationsthat 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 tooperate the cash register. Kerkow was eventually reduced to taking seasonal positions to fund her leisure: stocking shelves at a housewares store during the holidays, pickingshrimp 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 stockingsstuffed 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.
    A few months later she bumped into her ex-boyfriend Dennis Krummel on the campus of SWOCC, where he was also a student. Krummel was wearing an Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps uniform; he said that he had just joined up, in the hopes of becoming a pilot after earning his degree.
    “Well, I’m with the Black Panthers now,” Kerkow blurted out in response, greatly exaggerating her involvement in order to maximize the