Tip for community journalists: Look for people with problems

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The cattle truck hurtling out of control missed the pen where Rosie & Ernie keep their pet wolves.

-- SF Chron, 11/29/91

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Here's a tip for community journalists still getting used to new beats. Rather than write about a city council meeting, for example, use the packet that council members get in advance of the meeting to look for "people with problems."

Key word: people.

For example, below is a story I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle. To get the idea for it, I flipped through a fat stack of tedious but essential paperwork on county government operations and found a letter written by a citizen. Her name was Daisy and she was asking for a stop sign.

Ho hum, right? In fact, it's just the opposite. I called her on the phone and listened, then went to her house to listen some more.

Out rolled the real story:

Daisy Bohnak was washing dishes when a Volkswagon skidded into her yard, taking out a $1,200 gate on the way up to her kitchen window.

"Lady, it was either come in here or run into the back of a truck," the driver reportedly said.

Bedeviled by fender-benders and roll-overs that occur with regularity in their front and back yards, Bohnak and her neighbors in this rural no-man's land are victims of Central Valley growth that has passed them by -- usually at speeds exceeding 55 mph.

"I moved into the country and look what I got -- a freeway!" Bohnak shouted over the roar of a speeding cement truck. French Camp Road passes through unincorporated Manteca, Stockton and French Camp, offering five pastoral miles with few stop signs, traffic signals, speed postings or patrol cars.

Before Ted and Daisy Bohnak installed a 6-foot gate for protection, their property overlooked black angus cows at pasture. "Now I look at out-of-state 18-wheelers," Daisy Bohnak said.

French Camp Road links Interstate 5 and Highway 99, providing an important cross-connection for truckers and a back roads alternative route to the Bay Area. French Camp's population of 3,020 has barely changed over the same five-year period in which traffic has increased by about one-third, said Bob Pico, who serves as chairman of the town's advisory council.

Pico, also a firefighter whose station house overlooks French Camp Road, estimates that the number of accidents has risen from one or two per year in 1985 to 10 or 12 a year now, turning residents' yards into target ranges for wayward speedsters.

Crashes, screeches and thump-thump-thumps

Luckily, a reserve firefighter and a registered nurse live closest to the trouble spot at French Camp and Union roads. Ernest and Rosalie Thomsen hardly need their radio monitor because they are on scene to hear the crashes, screeches and thump-thump-thumps.

Even when they are not called upon to help save lives, the consequences of accidents may interrupt dinner. A clipped power pole recently forced them to finish eating in the dark.

Sometimes accidents arrive on the Thomsen's doorstep. They were relieved when a cattle truck hurtling out of control missed the pen in their backyard, where they keep two pet wolves. they were annoyed when a man driving a Mercedes-Benz from Stockton to Manteca mowed over their persimmon tree and crepe myrtle bush before bogging down in the front yard.

"You hear a siren going and nine times out of 10, they stop at Union," said Brenda Severs, who lives down the road from the Thomsens.

Neighbors demand signs

The neighbors have banded together to ask for road improvements at the dangerous intersection -- a stop sign and speed postings if not a turn lane -- but San Joaquin County planners said they do not have the money. Developers increasingly bear such costs in the Central Valley, but this farm belt midway between two burgeoning cities has no benefactors.

"French Camp is dying on the vine," Pico said. No-growth advocates have held forth since the 1940s.

Kathy McMorris, 38, who as a child visited her Aunt Rosie and Uncle Ernie's farm at the intersection of French Camp and Union roads nearly every weekend, remembers playing in the walnut orchards, especially in winter when she could sink knee-deep in mud puddles and look for small fish. Nowadays, children are kept indoors or behind gates and fences protected by hedges.

There used to be another house on the corner, but the owners decided not to rebuild after a second car plowed through their living room.

Only sounds of nature

Ted and Daisy Bohnak remember taking their now-grown daughters for buggy rides across French Camp Road. The only sounds were of wildlife, wind, the clip-clopping and snorting of horses, and perhaps the cries of a newly weaned lamb. Today, they forgo outdoor conversation. "You'd have to scream at each other," Daisy Bohnak said.

Occasionally, the residents get revenge. Barbed wire along the Thomsens' orchard scratches paint off cars that venture tool close. A young woman, who tried to pass a truck on the right side of the road but instead became pinned in the Bohnak's driveway, sat silently, pale with fear, while Daisy Bohnak read her the riot act.

The area's first subdivision -- 12 houses planned for the area just east of the Bohnaks' farm -- may push idyllic days further into the past, but Daisy Bohnak, like her neighbors, has no intention of moving.

"If we have to," she said, "we'll just plant some more bushes."

San Francisco Chronicle, 11/29/91