Ripples of Sadness From Airline Crash

In a way, you were fortunate, weren’t you?

Lois Rosele looks up, as if the question hangs there in the air. A spark of anger has been lit. She looks down.

Fortunate that you had him for as long as you did?

Lois Rosele is a mother. She composes herself and looks back up.

“Yes, I was lucky,” she says. She is the mother of a son. “But I expected to be luckier.”

She is the mother of a son who died in the suddenness of the sunny afternoon two weeks ago when Alaska Airlines Flight 261 plunged, spun and tumbled nose first into 700 feet of cold ocean. Given the speed of the aircraft, the water might as well have been stone. The impact obliterated much of the airplane and its 88 passengers.

Rosele’s son, Brad Long, was among them. He was eulogized here Sunday along with his longtime partner, Bill Knudson. A memorial service drew 1,300 people, many of them prepped, as one friend said, for the biggest party Sacramento had ever seen.

The size of the crowd surprised only those who didn’t know Knudson and Long, who didn’t know about the intersecting circles of friends that Long and Knudson sat in the center of, circles that spun out from Northern California to Central Mexico, circles that included construction workers and chefs, real estate developers and kindergarten classmates, circles that in the past few days seemed little more than widening arcs of emptiness.

“They were the nucleus of everything we did,” says Nancy Wilson, a friend.

“What can I say that you wouldn’t say about anybody who had died?” asks Pat Savastano, another friend. “That they filled up your life? That when they were gone they left a great, gaping hole in your life? That the hole is there and there’s nothing to put in it?”

*

Almost all deaths are accidents of one kind or another. It matters little if the cause is a stray molecule or bullet, stripped gears or broken hearts; death comes according to its own schedule. But the more sudden its occurrence, the greater the sense of loss.

Eighty-eight people dead. Thousands of lives interrupted. Each of the deaths, each of the interruptions, a hole that can’t be filled.

Friends and family of Bill Knudson and Brad Long have been trying, talking in waning afternoon light, long into many nights, talking until they laughed and cried.

When the first sketchy reports of the plane crash went out, when all that was known was that an Alaska Airlines flight from Puerto Vallarta had disappeared from radar over the ocean west of Los Angeles, friends in two countries and several states immediately thought of Bill and Brad.

“When they were somewhere, they were that place,” says Wilson.

Judy Mason worked with Bill for 18 years at Inland Business Systems, the copy machine company he co-owned with John White. She was at her desk. She never listens to the radio at work. For some reason, that day she had it on. She heard the news bulletin.

“I just freaked,” she says.

John White was across the hall in his office. Mason screamed: John White! Get in here.

“Bill was a rock,” Mason says. “He never folded. I honestly believed, I envisioned the plane landing on the water and thought, Bill, being Bill, Bill’s going to be the hero.”

Knudson’s father, Gil, was an accomplished sailor. Bill grew up on boats in and around Newport Beach. He went to school at UC Santa Barbara and sailed the waters around the Channel Islands, the waters where the plane went down.

“It was one of his favorite places in the world,” says Mason. “He knew all those little islands. And he knew everything about what to do at sea.”

At Nancy Wilson’s office, the telephone rang. It was Bill’s mother, Betty. “Please tell me my son was not on that flight,” she told Wilson.

Lois, Brad’s mother, had the same thought as Wilson. Brad was an expert swimmer. Bill knew everything there was to know about water and the sea. If anybody could get out of something like that, it’s Brad and Bill.

*

Bill Knudson, after taking his degree in European history, moved to Sacramento to attend McGeorge Law School in 1968. When he graduated, he took a job in the Reagan administration’s state social welfare office.

Ron Zumbrun, who hired Knudson, says he was obviously the brightest of a very bright lot. “He wasn’t afraid to take a calculated risk. Taking those risks depends on how good your calculations are. His were very good.”

Knudson devised systems for finding and keeping track of deadbeat dads. The system became a national model. When Gov. Jerry Brown took office, Knudson, a political appointee, lost his job.

Without missing a beat, he and John White, a former clothing salesman, went into business buying, refurbishing and selling small apartment buildings.

Knudson had a genius for fixing things. Friends talk about his ability to listen to a diesel motor and diagnose its problems. He refinished wood, laid granite, plumbed houses.

It later became a joke: Bill walks into a friend’s house and the first thing he wants to do is move a wall. But Bill, we can’t afford to move the wall, they’d say. We could do it in a day, he’d answer. The Bill factor, they called it.

He and White prospered. Among the buildings they bought were two rundown motels at Lake Tahoe. When Bill moved up to the lake to supervise the renovation, White, the consummate salesman, started the copy machine business. He grew the business from zero sales to $3 million in a year. And lost money. He hadn’t a clue why.

He called Knudson: Bill, you gotta get back here. We’re going broke.

Knudson didn’t want to return, but White persuaded him to come, straighten things out, then return to Tahoe.

“He never left,” says White. “He had natural business instincts. He handled the business of running the business. I handled sales.”

Inland Business Systems grew. White and Knudson began collecting and restoring classic cars. For a long time they were domestic partners as well. Even when they broke up, they remained friends. They were active in local AIDS charity work, helping to organize what became an annual Summer Ball. Twelve years ago, at the first of those events, Bill met Brad Long, who had just moved to Sacramento.

Brad, 39, grew up outside Portland, Ore. He joined the Air Force right out of high school and flew as a crew member on B-52s. He married briefly and divorced.

Bill, whose 54th birthday would have been three days after his death, had an open, almost cherubic face, His hair was tousled, honey-brown and curly, “the kind,” Judy Mason says, “you want to run your fingers through.”

He was cheerfully good-looking. Brad, though, was classically handsome: dark hair, tanned, chiseled jaw, lean, and more conscious of himself, the kind of man who on a cruise to Alaska last year packed three tuxedos.

Among other things, they shared interests and talents for real estate and boating. They became a couple.

Brad went to work at a local real estate agency, excelling immediately. “He was a light that shone when he came into the office,” says Lori Wood-Gundlach, an associate and friend. “He never had a bad day and he communicated that to others.”

*

Bill and Brad bought and refurbished a series of yachts. They built a house along the Sacramento River and docked the boats in their backyard.

Together, they drew people by the dozens: business associates, relatives, fellow boaters, people they met at parties, friends of friends, mothers of friends, people who had dogs that were friends of their dogs, Kate and Jake.

Their circle was never too full.

“They ate alone, four, five nights a month, tops,” says Mark Zampella.

Brad usually did the cooking, and was fastidious about presentation. He lit candles even if dinner was cheeseburgers. Bill enthralled people with his latest projects, or his ideas for projects they should take on. He was so multifaceted that there was hardly a subject he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, talk about. He was, says Roland Menetrey, a near genius.

If you became a friend of theirs, you were suddenly the friend of scores of others. Bill and Brad would throw you together. The results could be comical: Buzz Oates, one of Northern California’s preeminent commercial real estate developers and a fairly crotchety conservative, would break bread with gay activists visiting from San Francisco.

“I told Bill I didn’t really understand the gay thing at all, but they were the greatest guys I ever knew,” Oates says.

“Brad was always a magnet,” says Lois Rosele, his mother. “Growing up, our house was always full of boys and girls he brought home from school.”

And once you were in Brad’s life, he kept you in. He stayed in touch. He still had friends from kindergarten.

For every person who remarks on Brad’s magnetism, another says the same about Bill. There was too much of Bill, one friend said. A lawyer, he gave all of his friends free and, they say, sound legal advice.

“He knew what was going on in your life. He made it a point to know,” says Laurie Patchings, whose Sacramento restaurant, The Virgin Sturgeon, served as a sort of clubhouse for the Bill-and-Brad gang.

Bill designed his company’s office building. With Brad, he designed their house. Bill knew how to make things work. Brad knew how to make them look. Friends joked that Bill was the designer and Brad was the design review committee.

Nancy Wilson recounts how a car rammed a hole in a brick wall outside her house. She came home one day and the wall was fixed--Bill and Brad.

“We loaned them a car once,” Menetrey says. “When they brought it back, he’d fixed the broken wiper blades and the hydraulic lift on the trunk.”

They traveled regularly to Puerto Vallarta, where Menetrey and Marge Morrell live for part of the year. Over dinner, Menetrey mentioned to Bill that they were going to remodel their kitchen. After Bill and Brad returned to Sacramento, faxes advising on the kitchen design started arriving.

*

It’s evening on the Malecon. The palm trunks are wrapped in strings of white light as men and women take the evening air.

The Malecon is Puerto Vallarta’s boardwalk, a seaside stroll for both tourists and locals between the beach and old Centro Vallarta, the heart of what was a tiny fishing village on the edge of Banderas Bay, a bowl scalloped out of the Sierra Madre. It sits five degrees below the Tropic of Cancer, warmed by ocean currents that seldom drop the water or the air below 75 degrees.

Just 30 years ago, it had only 3,000 people. Today it has 300,000, and more than a million additional visitors each year. Even with the growth, it retains a tropical ease.

Most Americans here come from the West, and especially the cooler reaches of the West, the fog and rain belts up north. The regulars, those who can’t really be classified as tourists, divide into three groups: retirees who have moved in; snowbirds, who come for the winter; and those, like Brad and Bill, who come whenever they can, grabbing a long weekend or a week.

“It’s more than just the weather,” says Pat Savastano. “In a couple hours, you’re in another country, another culture. I’m sitting here outside having my morning coffee and a flock of wild parrots is flying by. Every morning they come by. Then they fly back in the afternoon. That’s the rush hour in Vallarta, parrots.”

Savastano is a businesswoman in San Francisco. She and Nancy Charney have a house in the hills above Vallarta. Charney met Bill Knudson eight years ago. From a shared interest in boats, a deep friendship evolved.

Brad and Bill bought a house not far away. The house, which looked to be poised to slide down a very steep hillside, was in horrible shape. Friends who saw it said Brad and Bill have finally made a mistake, and it’s a big one. As usual, they knew what they were doing. The house, made newly gorgeous, became their southern anchor, and in purpose not at all different from their house in Sacramento, a place for friends.

Vallarta is an easy place for friendship, Charney says. It’s small, it’s foreign. “It peels back a layer,” she says.

“People stop by, just pop in to see if you’re home,” Savastano says. “Nobody would do that in the States. Why would you? Nobody’s ever home.”

Lori Wood-Gundlach says Brad was constantly offering the Vallarta place to people he knew.

“One woman in the office, a single mom with four kids, Brad sent them all down to Mexico for 10 days,” she says. “Our secretary has been down three times.”

Brad and Bill spent the winter holidays here. Last year, they sat 50 people for Thanksgiving dinner. Until last year, it was impossible to find turkeys locally. Bill packed them in his suitcase for the 3-hour flight.

Charney and Savastano tried to see Brad and Bill every time everybody was in town. They missed them this last trip. Bill and Brad had popped down just for the weekend. Bill had to be back for a business meeting in Sacramento on Tuesday. Roland Menetrey and Marge Morrell almost missed them, too. They usually plan dinner together, but had conflicts, so they took Brad and Bill to the airport for their flight home.

Brad and Bill always flew Alaska, always flew the same flight, 261. Because the flight left in midafternoon, they proposed having lunch at Islas Marias, a renowned chicken and rib place across from the airport.

They drank margaritas and talked. Bill begged Roland, a classically trained chef, to make paella as a birthday gift on his next trip down. Roland had to skip out to meet friends arriving on an inbound flight. Marge, Bill and Brad stayed and ate, then walked over to the terminal, where they met Roland, who says:

“We gave then a big hug, they got on the plane, and all of a sudden they’re gone.”

*

When the lives of Brad and Bill are recounted, it’s hard not to marvel at the extraordinary talents they had, the rich lives they lived, the good times, the comedy of a man with a million dollars in the bank stuffing a turkey in his suitcase.

They didn’t leave things undone, wishes unfulfilled. Bill collected cars, and for years he would speak with regret about having let go the one he loved the best: his first car, a 1967 green Mustang GT coupe. One day he got tired of regretting the loss and set about tracking it down. Eventually, Bill, being Bill, found it in a barn in Vacaville and brought it home.

Most particularly, it is hard not to marvel at their very rare talents for friendship.

Some friends think Brad and Bill, as a couple without children, paid special attention to building another sort of family. They achieved exactly that. Their friendships were so many and deep that you would be hard pressed to think of them as anything but family.

“Bill was not a touchy-touchy person,” says Nancy Charney. “But he’d turn to you after dinner and say, ‘I want you to know how much I love you, how much you mean to me.’ Just like that, out of nowhere.”

They shone so brightly that a stranger is tempted to say the people who knew them were lucky just to enjoy the light for however long it glowed. No one truly feels lucky in loss, however.

Lois, Brad’s mom, stands in his kitchen amid the gleaming granite counters and the pale peach walls. It’s a warm place, warmed more by the little sign he had framed in the corner, the one reminding him to always warm the dinner plates before serving. The kitchen looks out on the Sacramento River, where so many good times occurred.

Lois lost her husband last year, and another son not long before that. “God’s turned his back on me,” she told a friend. Brad was the center of what she had left. He almost made up for the other losses.

“I expected to have him for the rest of my life,” she says. “I thought I was going to be lucky forever.”

She stares out at the winter river, gray, cold and empty. It rolls on and doesn’t look back.