The Bad Air Sponge

In the go-go Cold War era of the 1960s, Ben Dooley controlled spy satellites in their surreptitious orbits, a “lucky assignment” that brought him to California and inside the Air Force’s big “Blue Cube” at the Satellite Test Center in Sunnyvale.”We were supporting about 200, 250 satellites, anything from weather to reconnaissance,” the retired colonel said of his work at what is now the Onizuka Air Force Station. “People don’t realize how busy it was.”

These days, though, Dooley’s adrenaline rushes come from another sort of juggling act:

As one of the 34 volunteer drivers for Road Runners, El Camino Hospital Auxiliary’s ride service for seniors, Dooley navigates an ever-demanding set of logistics, to ferry around seniors - some of them quite frail - one by one, in this car-dependent valley. For a growing number of residents who cannot, or should not, drive, Dooley and his fellow volunteers are a lifeline.

“One day we had 103 calls - we were busy,” said the 79-year-old, who, with 19 years logged this month, is the longest-serving volunteer for Road Runners. “When people get older you need to have something that gets your adrenaline going. With this job, when it’s busy, you’re wondering, ‘Am I going to make it to the appointment?’ That keeps you younger.”

In cars bearing the signature desert bird logo, Dooley crisscrosses the northern and western sides of Santa Clara County, logging as many as 160 miles in a day, taking nuns,

geologists, widows, retired judges, cancer patients and others to their appointments. Whether dialysis or chemotherapy sessions, or hair salon trips or grocery errands, or even visits with spouses in care homes, all are vital in their own way.But there’s something else about these trips, in between the walks to the car (and a steadying arm if needed) and the drives through long suburban blocks and curving hillside lanes: Conversation. Human kindness. A little socialization.

“This is a great program,” he said. “We see people at home and they have no way to get out.”

Good listener

Among the regulars, Dooley knows their spouses’ names, their kids’ names, their pets’ names. He knows how they met their husbands or wives, and when that was. He knows which kids have done well, which ones haven’t. He listens attentively when riders voice their fears, disappointments and small blessings.

On the way back, he might ask, in his soft Virginia drawl, how a session went, if they want to talk about it.

He’s noticed their absence when they become too sick to go out, and takes time to reflect when word comes of a client’s passing.

He’s also willing to do more than drive. Last month, he picked up a 92-year-old woman in Palo Alto clutching a vase of flowers. It wasn’t until they arrived at the address, Alta Mesa Memorial Park, that he understood her mission.

“Yes, I want to put these on my husband’s grave,” Dooley said the woman told him. It had been a year since he’d died. Her son was buried there, too. So Dooley helped find the grave and divide the flowers for her husband’s and son’s headstones. He also poured in the packet of flower freshener for the water.

“She said, ‘You’re just an angel,’ but I said, ‘Not always.’ ”

Growing demand

As the county ages, services like the Road Runners or Santa Clara’s “Heart of the Valley,” among others, will only see more demand.

Back when Dooley was recruited by an ex-Navy man who has since passed on, the Road Runners operated out of a trailer and two men could handle the 25 or so runs in a single day. Now they have eight cars and 35 drivers, and more are needed to cover the 10-mile radius around the hospital.

He shows off his 10,000-hour service pin, and his newest one, an 11,000-hour pin. And according to his calculations (about 15 miles for every hour of service), he’s logged about 166,000 miles. All those hours means he knows every hospital, outpatient clinic and hot lunch site for miles. (”All the retirement homes, mobile home parks, physical therapy places, too.”)

Straight-backed and tall, Dooley’s still pretty fit. And once a week, he still checks the fluid levels of all the vehicles. But does he think about a time when he might be using Road Runners himself?

“Oh yeah, I can see it coming,” he said. Then, he quipped: “I just wonder if they’ll charge me?”

IF YOU’RE INTERESTED

Call (650) 940-7016 to volunteer or seek Road Runners’ service.

The first thing a resident of Dearborn Towers, a 317-unit condominium building at 1530 S. State, sees upon exiting the freight elevator, which many residents use to take their dogs outside, is a sign that says Dearborn Tower Recycling Center.

John Bosco, a member of the building’s board and the green committee that organized the recycling center, said such signage was planned. Few residents in the building, he said, carry their garbage downstairs to the trash dumpsters. Most use the chutes located on each floor. But the signage, along with flyers posted in common areas in the building, reminds residents about the recycling center.

“You don’t want to tell people they have to recycle but you can make it easier to recycle,” Bosco said.

The center opened last August. It is roughly 20 by 20 feet large, its walls painted light green. A recycled air freshener hangs on one wall, and the lights turn on and off according to a timer. There are four dumpsters for commingled recyclables-glass, paper, cardboard and aluminum can all be tossed in together-and barrels for dead batteries, empty print cartridges, burned-out compact florescent bulbs and plastic bags from retail outlets.

While the City of Chicago requires residential buildings that contract with private waste haulers to have an “effective” recycling program, residents of Dearborn Tower organized to improve their building’s recycling system and increase the volume of recycled items.

“Since inception of the building in 2001, the program was in place to put (the city’s) blue bags in the trash room and to recycle cardboard-the cardboard was always recycled because people were always moving in and out,” Bosco said. But the volume of recyclables, according to Bosco, was low. Prior to the opening of the center, he said the building’s private waste hauler was taking away two two-yard dumpsters of recycled items once a week.

“We couldn’t believe that was the best we were doing,” Bosco said.

Now, since the opening of the recycling center, the company is hauling away four two-yard dumpsters of recyclables three times a week. Not only is the building diverting more refuse from landfills, Bosco said recycling saves the building money-the base price to haul away a regular trash dumpster costs $75, while a recycled dumpster costs $65.

Additionally, having the recycling program in place allowed Dearborn Towers to earn back around $20,000 under the city’s refuse rebate program. The program reimburses condominium unit owners who contract with a private waste hauler for taxes they pay for city waste hauling services.

Interest in Dearborn Tower’s recycling program is growing. Gail Merritt, one of the co-founders of the Alliance for a Greener South Loop, said Dearborn Tower’s recycling center is one of the South Loop’s best examples of how residents of a multi-unit building can recycle.

“Dearborn Tower is our role model for recycling,” Merritt said.

Mike Kelly, a resident of Dearborn Tower and founder, with Merritt, of AGSL, said he has given several tours of the facility and is speaking about the recycling program to other condo associations, including a group of Printer’s Row associations in March. Kelly said he has not encountered a condo that is recycling as extensively as Dearborn Towers.

“In conversations I’ve had with other condo boards, they’re asking the question, ‘How do we begin to adopt a full recycling program?’” Kelly said. “In some condos, they are providing receptacles for recycling but in the end it all goes to one garbage receptacle. That’s not really recycling. It’s much to the surprise of people who thought they were recycling the whole time.”

During a recent tour of the building and its recycling facility, Bosco explained that the green committee worked closely with the building’s board of directors, management and other committees to establish the recycling center. The group needed an e-mail list to inform the building of the program and monies to paint the recycling center, as well as sanction from the board to operate officially.

“We proposed [the green committee] like a business plan. We created goals, wrote a mission statement and talked about how our committee intersected with other committees,” Bosco said.

Kelly said condo associations should not “recreate the wheel” when improving recycling programs in their building. He also said it is important to secure support from a building’s board to operate transparently and openly.

“You can’t do this on an individual level,” Kelly said. “You need the support of the board.”

The recycling program continues to evolve. A month ago, the green committee established a pilot program on four of the building’s floors that allows residents to leave their recyclables in the floor’s trash room, with building staff taking it downstairs. The program, Kelly said, will probably be expanded to all floors.

“The committee always understood people have different recycling habits,” Bosco said.

The green committee in Dearborn Towers has other projects it is working on this year-repainting common space walls with environmentally-friendly paint, for example, and providing residents with biodegradable, corn starch baggies for dog excrement. Over the longer term, the group wants to work with other South Loop building associations to increase efficiencies in recycling.

“I think that if trucks, instead of coming to just our building, can get to 15 buildings, that’s where economies of scale comes in,” Kelly said.

Contact: mmaidenberg@chicagojournal.com

Top of the list of Reckitt product launches this year has been Air Wick Symphonia, a plug-in air freshener which uses two liquid refills. The innovation breakthrough, Bart Becht said yesterday, allows consumers to switch between scents. He called this “empowering”, suggesting one scent, smelt continuously, was quickly lost on anyone. Alternating scents, however, allows those present to continually enjoy perfumed air.· Next in the product pipeline is Finish Max in 1. This is better than previous Finish Max dishwasher products, Becht explains, because the clear wrapper around each tablet is made from a soluble film that does not need to be removed before being placed in the machine.

· Then there is Dettol All-in-1 to come. This new take on a well-established brand is a multi-purpose cleaner that gives “visible shine” as well as attacking “germs, grease and soap scum”.

· Vanish, a UK brand at first, has been introduced around the world with great success. It now has a “revolutionary” spin-off, containing “oxi action magnets”. The stain remover sachet can be added to a wash to attract all the “grime” in your washing machine and prevent colour runs from spoiling your whites.

Prosecutors say the woman behind the largest crack bust in Scioto County history is going to prison for 20 years.

A jury has found 27-year old Tomeka Lewis of Detroit guilty on various crack cocaine charges.

Prosecutors say Lewis was behind a trafficking scheme to bring 615 grams of crack cocaine from Detroit to Huntington.

Back in July, Ohio State Troopers arrested Lewis during a traffic stop on US 52 in Portsmouth.

After a 45 minute search, troopers found four cakes of crack cocaine hidden in a kitty litter box in the car’s trunks. Prosecutors also say the numerous air freshener products were found in the car to mask the odor of the drug and throw off the drug dogs.

The crack was valued at $300,000.

CHICAGO — Ever since she was a little girl in the Robert Taylor Homes, Linda Davis has hated cigarette smoke — hated it. The soft-spoken Swissotel housekeeper, who wears a four-star-crisp white apron and immaculate matching sneakers and socks, winces at the memory of her mom filling her childhood home with billows of tobacco exhaust.

To demonstrate how it makes her feel, she massages her temples as if fighting off another tension headache — the kind she gets only when facing the remains of cigarettes, pipes or cigars.

Especially cigars. “They’re the worst,” says Davis, 34, her ever-present smile curdling for a moment in disgust.Back when her mother turned the family apartment into a smoke box, Davis fought back by flinging open the windows, even when winter weather might discourage it. Now, when Davis walks into a Swissotel room and catches that telltale scent — and she can always catch it, thanks to her hair-trigger headaches — she sets about freshening the premises, changing the linens.

Then she turns the guest in, for which she gets a $10 reward — while the offender gets slapped with a $250 fine.

Swissotel isn’t the first Chicago hotel to ban smoking and levy stiff penalties against rule breakers. But with a top-to-bottom renovation of 632 rooms under way, Swissotel is getting extra tough, paying housekeepers such as Davis for turning in no-smoking scofflaws. This makes Swissotel the only hotel in the country that rewards staff for collaring smokers in its rooms, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association, a trade group in Washington.

As for why Swissotel went to such lengths to extinguish smoking, “It was quite simple, really,” says hotel manager Jack Breisacher. “The housekeepers spend between 30 and 45 minutes in the guest room and they were being impacted healthwise; they taste the smoke and breathe the smoke. So even without the meager $10 we give them, they’re quite on board.”

That goes for his guests, too: “We started a blog a few weeks ago and the response was unbelievably in favor. Of the 50 or so people who wrote in only two said, ‘We can’t believe you’re turning the maids into vigilantes.’ But some people are saying, ‘We can’t believe you didn’t do this sooner.”‘

What’s more, three staffers have since quit smoking. Breisacher’s thrilled, for the most part.

“I wish I could get my wife to stop,” he says.

The strategy also points to Chicago hotels as another front line in the city’s ongoing battle against smokers. Swissotel doesn’t just want to sweep out the ashes — it’s shooting for green certification from the city, meaning it has to prove the building has superior air quality. To that end, Davis maintains she’s caught a few people each week since Swissotel’s all-room smoking ban began Dec. 3. To date, 22 guests have gotten socked with fines — with two granted amnesty because it turned out that friends did the smoking, according to hotel officials.

While not on the level of “CSI: Swissotel,” Davis and her co-workers rely on circumstantial evidence to prove a case of surreptitious smoking. Besides using her sense of smell, Davis inspects for telltale signs of cheating. Smokers for example often use glasses as ashtrays then wash out the offending ash. The visual evidence may be gone but in many cases, odor lingers in the glass. Or a guest might spray air freshener in the room. That’s often a dead giveaway, because Swissotel doesn’t spray cheap scents in its rooms (let alone ones commingled with the aroma of stale ash).

When Davis thinks she’s got a live one, she reports it to John Weiss, Swissotel’s head of housekeeping. More sniffing ensues; if they make the determination that someone has been puffing in the room, they take it to the hotel brass.

So far no one has fought the charges for covert smoking, save those two whose pals did the puffing.

Some guests have even been fined after checking out.

How much dough has Davis made on all that illicit smoke? “It’s not really about the money,” she insists. “It’s about my health. It just slows you down.”

Even more so when some cagey puffers try to make a game of it. “I had one guest who stayed with us three days — and he would hide his cigarettes under a mattress,” Davis recalls.

“And he’d say, ‘Oh, you don’t have to make the bed today.’ But I’m going in there with a fresh nose.”

Does she feel bad turning in, say, big-tipping tobacco truants? “Sometimes,” she says. Then she remembers her headaches and gets ornery: “It gets me dizzy, like a hangover.”

A few steps north at the Michigan Avenue Marriott, a similar ban has been in place since September 2006, with an identical $250 fine. As for turning housekeepers into paid mercenaries on the no-smoking front, “We do not do that, but I think it’s a clever idea,” says Marriott general manager Doug Ridge. As for how many smokers they catch, Ridge estimates the number at fewer than a dozen per year.

“We don’t make money off it,” Ridge says of the fines. “Depending on how strong the smell of the smoke is, we lose the room from inventory for two to three days.”

Ditto at Swissotel, where it costs at least $400 to refurbish a room back to its pre-smoky state. The painstaking process begins with a total washdown of all surfaces — hard-cased woods get lathered in oil soap, draperies stripped, feather duvets and bed skirts dry cleaned, bathroom surfaces scrubbed.

When all that’s done, an ionizer the size of a large toaster oven — known to the hotel staff as “the red box” — sanitizes the air overnight.

Because it produces pure oxygen, no one can stay in a guest room while it runs.

While the policy change has been personally rough on some Swissotel employees — including Weiss, who admits to smoking nearly a pack a day — Davis loves the sharp drop in headaches she’s experienced as the hotel has phased out smoking. She celebrated her ninth year at Swissotel on Friday; about a decade ago, the building had roughly 170 smoking rooms on nine floors.

Maybe it’s all that clean air that’s making Davis extra feisty. “I know somebody’s been smoking up there sometime today,” she says, sounding more like a sly private eye than a meek maid. “And I’m going to find them.”