SUPPORTING CHARACTERS

Blake Walsh  played by Joe Mandragona

Warren Dully played by Ron Rogge

Edgar Thornton played by Joe Orrach

Harlan Grasso  played by Rod Gnapp

Ralph Ruts  played by David Barth

Stanley Dieffenbach  played by Bob Greene

Bill Vente  played by Howard Swain

Jeffrey Hillard played by Pete Qaurtaroli

Sylvia Daumier played by Val Diamond

Clement May  played by Geoff Hoyle

Harold Berg  played by Carl Bressler

Bunny  played by Heather Barberie

Special Agent-In-Charge Tucker  played by Cully Fredricksen

Special Agent Callaway played by Michael Sommer

Aloysisus Brodie played by Ed Holmes

J.C. Sullivan  played by Robert Kennedy

Tom Stanton  played by Ralph Miller

Ernest Maloney  played by Robert Ernst

Phil Cobb  played by William Hall

Deputy Park played by Benny Wills

Mr. Brewster played by Dan Stockton

Passionate Man  played by James Cranna

Bartender  played by Joe Goode

Blake Walsh (Kidnap Victim; Brother of Helen; Son of Horace and Natalie) - Joe Mandragona

To the extent that his sister Helen reveled in tree-climbing, fort-building, catch-playing, and other rough-and tumble youthful diversions, Blake was taken with fashion, delicate, fragile keepsakes and, as he grew older, interior decoration.

Blake began work at the Walsh & Son store wrapping gifts.  As he grew older, he worked in both the men’s and women’s department, and was particularly talented in identifying fashion trends.  Since the rate of change in men’s fashions was glacial, he eagerly and happily dedicated his time to reading women’s fashion and news publications, watching movies, and regularly traveling to San Francisco to see, first hand, the newest clothing designs from New York, London, and Paris.

Blake dresses impeccably in expensive suits, shirts, ties, and shoes.  The closet in his room remains jammed as he finds it almost impossible to give anything away. Blake makes and keeps friends easily, and can be counted on as a trusted friend.

Blake’s male friends find him riotously funny, and self-deprecating.  His female friends have someone with whom they can confide their most personal thoughts and feelings.  Blake is never judgmental, and always loyal.  As much as he can be counted upon for support for his friends during times of emotional turmoil, Blake feels increasing loneliness in his personal life.

A few nights after his father gave him an early college graduation gift, he drove across the valley to a speakeasy he’d heard workers at a San Francisco retailer describe.  Located on a mud bar in the San Francisco Bay near Fremont, Blake knows that none of his friends would occasion such a place.  Blake is surprised when one of the men he met at the speakeasy followed him home late one night.

While Blake thinks his travels to the speakeasy on the bay are undetected, both Natalie and Helen separately heard sobs from his room following many late night returns.  Separately, but at different times, they each followed Blake to learn where he secretly spends evenings away from home.

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Deputy Warren Dully had been with the Valley of the Heart’s Delight sheriff’s department for seven years when rookie deputy Alfred Ackle walked in, sat at Dully’s empty desk, and ate a very juicy peach.  When he was done, Ackle entered the sheriff’s office without knocking.  Dully returned from patrol to write his report, and had to peel the paper off his sticky desk when he was finished.  He was introduced to Ackle who said nothing when he asked about it.

Dully was raised on a dairy farm by Quaker parents.  In high school, he was a football tackle with a chance to attend a private university before he tore a groin muscle, and then got the head high school cheerleader pregnant.  Easy-going and accepting of what fate holds for him, he became a father four times, and bided his time until the sheriff was ready to retire.  Warren Dully is reliable, affable, and unflappable; qualities that power brokers extol, but rarely consider when selecting someone who will unfailingly do their political bidding.

Dully observes political expectations, but always finds ways to get out of often questionable, if not illegal, tasks sometimes required for the political support of the sheriff’s department budget.  Ackle, on the other hand, is quick to seize any task even hinted at by the powers-that-be.  Dully is professional, and never personalizes his actions as a law enforcement officer.  He didn’t admit it when it happened, but he really wasn’t surprised when Albion Munson announced Alfred Ackle’s candidacy for sheriff.  Dully didn’t even bother calling his political contacts because he knew it would only make them uncomfortable.

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Born mute, Edgar Thornton failed at every school he attended.  At age fifteen, he hopped a freight train passing through his home town of Roseville, California, and ended up south of Market Street in San Francisco where he hooked up with small-time grifters and thieves.  Resentful and angry at his core, he feels life has cut him short, and relishes getting back at those who he feels have had it easy.  His one skill is driving a car.

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Harlan Grasso saw his alcoholic father when he was four and a second time at nine when he got a beating that left his right elbow numb.  Petrified from that point on about physical confrontation, he finds that carrying a gun gives him with the strength he lacks internally.  Occasionally working as a day laborer, he soon finds it easier to rob remote stores, restaurants and gas stations.  He has no compunction about using his gun.  The ease with which he performed these robberies gives rise to the conclusion that he is destined to make a bigger score.

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Ralph Ruts (Reporter, Valley Herald) - David Barth

Ralph Ruts never finished the eighth grade because he had to work to support his struggling family.  Ruts started as a printer’s devil at the fledgling Valley Standard.  From the time he first set eyes on Albion Munson, Ruts sought to model himself after him.  From printer’s devil, Ruts became a type-setter where he learned to both read and write.  Some years later, he left a story he wrote on Albion’s desk.  Albion, impressed by the fact that Ruts generated passable, if not uneven copy, made him first a cub reporter on his own time, and after a few years, a regular reporter who, with equal superficiality, wrote stories about fashion, debutant balls, harvesting, advances in the food processing industry, local politics, and crime.  Ruts sees himself as someone who earned respected station in life solely on his own merits.  Ruts becomes and remains spitting mad when Jack Daumier, the college graduate, is hired at the same salary.  He is determined to do everything he can to undermine the “college boy’s” unearned status as an equal with a self-described hard-nosed, hard-knocked, bare-knuckled Valley of the Heart’s Delight reporter.

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After working at his father’s car dealership for five years following high school while also serving as a stringer for Fresno’s major newspaper, Stan Dieffenbach was hired as a reporter.  While having his burning goal of being a reporter met, to his utter dismay, he was almost instantly bored with being paid to report what the population of a farming community found important or interesting.  His father contacted a fellow car dealer in San Francisco who advertised heavily in the Clarion-Voice newspaper, and within a few months Dieffenbach was frozen, rather than scalded, in the summer as he walked to work from his North Beach San Francisco apartment to his new reporter’s job.

Following a few years of journeyman-like, but unspectacular reporting at the Clarion-Voice, Dieffenbach became the crime editor, then a few years later, city editor, then years later the editorial page editor.  Just after he turned fifty, he was made editor.  Whenever anyone new is hired he always tells them the same joke.

Dieffenbach’s innate sense of fun and mischief is manifested in the hiring of reporters with a knack for finding and writing about provocative and very often eye-brow raising private behavior of public people. This distinct editorial slant helped build the Clarion-Voice into a competitor with the other major San Francisco newspapers.  There is nothing Stan Dieffenbach loves more than getting a call or letter from some apoplectic pillar of the community incensed by his skewering of a sacred cow, a personal friend, or themselves.  Despite his dancing along the edge of libel, only one suit was ever filed.  It was dropped when even more lurid facts were uncovered about a certain assemblyman’s liaison with an under-aged girl.

The Clarion-Voice is synonymous with the guilty pleasure of reading accounts of everyday life that are always entertaining, if not embarrassing.  It is not uncommon for staid citizens to purchase a Clarion-Voice on the sly, and keep it hidden it until they can read it in the delicious safety of their own homes.

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Bill Vente is a college graduate separated from his wife and two children as the result of an affair with the wife of a friend.  A family man at heart, Vente deeply realizes the grave error of his ways, and is trying to repair the relationship so he can move back home where he belongs.  Because of the emotional turmoil brought about by his selfishness and thoughtlessness, he lost his salesman’s job at a fruit wholesaler.  He has recently spent days wandering the streets of San Jose, where he came into contact with Jeffrey Hillard, a hapless soul who he befriended, and once-in-a-while buys a meal.  Vente’s kindness to a dim-witted stranger changes his life forever.

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Jeffery Hillard is the youngest son of a hardware store clerk who, when, eight years old, fell out of an oak tree and cracked his skull.  The impact sentenced him to a lifetime with the mind of a pre-pubescent.  Following his arrest, his family complained to anyone who would listen that the police were making her brother look like a criminal because they wouldn’t allow him to shave or change his clothes.  Hillard still believes in Santa Claus at age 31, and can be heard badly humming what might possibly be “Jingle Bells” every season of the year.  Hillard avidly follows the exploits of John Dillinger, Baby-Face Nelson, and Bonnie and Clyde, and watches gangster movies any time he can cadge money from his mother.  He sidles around as if he packs gun; always at-the-ready for a shoot-out with G-Men.  He has spent a lifetime in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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Sylvia Daumier, Jack’s father’s only sister, arrived in San Jose from Los Angeles in 1909 to seek employment as a domestic.  A fervent Catholic, she attended mass every morning and soon became friends with the pastor of the church.  Through him, she met and was hired by Natalie Walsh who had just given birth to a beautiful young daughter, Helen.

With a heart as big as the sky, and an endless capacity for love, Sylvia raised Blake and Helen as her own.  Sylvia is a rock that Natalie Walsh can always count on regardless of the crisis.

Her brother’s wife moved to San Jose with her four-year-old son, Jack, and a few years later, Sylvia asked Natalie Walsh if her only nephew Jack could visit her on occasion when she was not needed on the week-end.  Jack only did this once.  Angry that Jack had accidentally splattered mud on her new white dress while they were playing house, Helen told her mother that Jack kissed her.  Natalie informed Sylvia that Jack was forbidden to visit the Walsh home ever again.

Sylvia is extremely loyal to the Walsh family, but idolizes Jack.  She trusts Jack absolutely, and when he and Helen joined forces to determine what happened to Blake, she eagerly and happily assists. The thought of Jack and Helen in love literally makes her faint.

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Clement May is a failed musician who became a reporter.  High-strung and opinionated, Clement May smokes and drinks to excess, which contributes significantly to copy slanted in the most negative, salacious manner possible.  As someone who grew up in the Valley of the Heart’s Delight, but has lived and worked in San Francisco for his entire adult life, May gets particular pleasure in denigrating and ridiculing the valley ‘fruit-pickers’ who never made it to the big city.

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Harold Berg is Clement May’s San Francisco-born callow partner-in-print. He refused to enter his father’s jewelry business, choosing instead to become a reporter, in part because it allows him to engage in his real passion, handicapping horses.  A mathematical genius, Berg produces and sells a handicapping newsletter.  Berg’s risk-taking when betting follows him into his reporter’s career, and imbues his stories with wild exaggeration.  He and Clement May cheered at the news of the kidnapping of some snot-nosed rich kid in the fruit-picker capital of the world.

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Helen Walsh’s alter-ego, Bunny is a fun-loving, larger-than-life sensualist who loves nothing more than getting drunk for very often literally a roll-in-the-hay, with what proves to be scores of eager college boys.  Afterwards, the Catholic college boys won’t leave her alone, while the teachers-in-training are never heard from again.  Never having been in love, Bunny views her wild flings as pure entertainment which, at some future point, will lose its allure.  When that time arrives, she knows that her instinctual understanding of the male psyche will allow her to capture whomever she wants as a husband.  Until then, all bets are off.

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Robert Tucker earned a law degree in North Carolina.  His first job out of law school was at the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI), which was then under the Department of Justice in the Office of the Attorney General of the United States.  Tucker, like his boss Hoover, makes it his personal goal to establish the Bureau as a stand-alone entity in the executive branch of the federal government whose director would report directly to the President of the United States, rather than an appointee Attorney General.  The formalization of such a structure will allow the personal information the Bureau collects during the course of its investigations to be used for political leverage with whoever occupies the oval office.  Tucker realizes that the Bureau has to solve high profile crimes if they are ever going to get from under the thumb of the Attorney General.  Tucker, together with his partner, Able Callaway, came to San Francisco and opened a bureau office that can move quickly to take the lead in the solution of crimes with the potential for transformation into dashing exploits.  When Horace Walsh called late one night to inform Tucker that his son had been kidnapped, Tucker and Callaway called J. Edgar Hoover, who instantly approved their involvement.  Because kidnapping had not yet been made a federal crime, the only thing the FBI could charge the suspected kidnappers and murderers of Blake Walsh is with violation of the mail laws.  The FBI’s eagerness to take over the case gave rise to the lynching of the two men accused of the kidnapping the leaders and citizens of the Valley of the Heart’s Delight believed that two men absolutely guilty of kidnapping and murder would be freed after serving light sentences for mail fraud.

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Able Callaway was born in Utah, the first-born of one of the five wives of a Mormon Elder.  Sober-sided with almost no sense of humor, Able earned college degree in Accountancy.  He met Agent Tucker when Tucker came to his college to recruit for the then Bureau of Investigation.  With a wife and two children at the time he was about to graduate from college, Callaway quickly took the government job.  Two years later he and Tucker opened a Bureau office in San Francisco.  He works in San Francisco, but refuses to raise a family in such a sin-ridden city, and bought a house in San Mateo.  He is one of the first commuters to the city from the San Francisco Peninsula.

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Sixty-three-old Aloysius Brodie is the former mayor of a large California city, and acquired considerable assets through his political support of the elimination of Southern California’s extensive public transportation system at the behest of automobile and oil interests.  Brodie makes political decisions fast, and never once felt a pang of conscience.  Because almost all major corporate headquarters, including the powerful railroads, are located in his city, when he tired of being mayor, he had all the political and financial support necessary to run for governor.  He knows as long as he doesn’t do anything to interfere with these powerful businesses, he will be left alone to exercise his political and social biases.  Brodie does so with unrestrained relish and panache.

Aloysius Brodie and Albion Munson became friends because Albion always printed stories about the governor that portrays him as a principled, strong leader who champions individual rights.  When land next to Albion Munson’s spread came up for sale during the first year of Brodie’s governorship, Albion arranged financing, and Brodie became his next-door-neighbor.  Brodie and Munson like punishing those who challenge the status quo.

Brodie, a hard drinker and womanizer, has a heart made of tissue paper.  Five months after the lynching, it exploded.

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J.C. Sullivan processes over 100,000 tons of tomatoes a year in his cannery.  An engineer by training, Sullivan designs machines capable of canning hundreds of cans a minute, and sells his inventions to food processors and manufacturers.  A hard-nosed businessman, Sullivan never engages directly in practices to frighten and intimidate the workers in the Valley of the Heart’s Delight large food processing industry.  He conveniently refuses to admit to himself that he benefits from such clearly illegal actions when taken by his friends and colleagues.

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Tom Stanton (Cannery Owner; Political Compatriot of Albion Munson) - Ralph Miller

Tom Stanton is a frustrated stained glass artist who got into the canning business through his father-in-law, and found that his hard-edged management style worked particularly well in establishing the discipline necessary to optimize production.  As a man of action rather than thought and reflection, Stanton developed a symbiotic relationship with his philosophical partner, Albion Munson.  Stanton does the dirty work, and Munson colorfully describes it in ways that leave the public convinced that it was the only honorable thing to do.

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Ernest Maloney was a union dock organizer when he met Jack Daumier in a bar on the Oakland wharf.  Maloney found it pretentious that a college student posed as a blue collar worker, and secretly felt that Jack might be a mole for the shipping companies.  After a few drinks, Maloney’s instinctual disdain could not be controlled.  In the time that it took for Maloney to toss the beer in Jack’s face, he found himself with a broken nose lying in peanut shells on the floor of the bar.  While he understood by hard example that Jack was no poseur, deep down, he resented that a smart-ass college student was taking a job from an honest working man.  He renewed acquaintances with Jack when he came to San Jose to organize cannery workers, and is amused that a reporter who works for Mad Dog Munson at the Valley Mirror has a balanced and fair view of the labor movement.

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Phil Cobb is a man of habit who gets up early seven days a week; rarely drinks, attends church with his wife and son, and treats all criminals guilty until proven innocent. Cobb has always been member-in-good-standing of the status quo, never once taking a position that might possibly conflict with conventional wisdom.  Never one to take chances, Cobb refuses to arraign Hillard and Vente for the murder of Blake Walsh because uncorroborated confessions in which each suspect blames the other solely for the crime, is inadmissible in court.  When Ackle informs him that Albion Munson will announce the arraignment of the Walsh kidnapping suspects in the newspaper, he wisely agrees to schedule an arraignment.  He knows it will never happen.

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Douglas Park’s grandfather had been a Texas Ranger, and with dreams of chasing the bad guys, he joined the Valley of the Heart’s Delight Sheriff’s Department.  Never did he ever imagine that he would have to fight his friends and neighbors to protect the accused (during the San Jose lynching, this responsibility was suspended).

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Convinced that by investing a small inheritance from his grandmother in a shoe repair next to the largest and most prestigious department store in the Valley of the Heart’s Delight would guarantee riches, Mr. Brewster is bewildered by his lack of business.  He dully and endlessly contemplates the reasons for his failure.  The simple reason is that most of the customers buy new shoes when the old ones wear out, and those that have them repaired do so at the shoe repair stores close to their own neighborhoods.  Blake Walsh is always exceedingly friendly to Mr. Brewster, even bringing in his own shoes which rarely are worn to the point where repair is required.  When Mr. Brewster’s son is born healthy, Mr. Brewster effectively concocts a story about the boy’s life-threatening bronchial asthma that requires special humidifiers and medicines that he cannot afford.  Blake, ever generous, regularly slips Mr. Brewster money.

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Passionate Man sells vacuum cleaners as if they were firearms.  A Walter Mitty of manly, decisive action, Passionate Man is hen-pecked husband whose children are out of control.

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Raymond Laurence, who wanted to be a policeman his whole life, was hired by an east bay police department.  Following the third incident where he had left his gun on the table or seat of a restaurant where he had been showing it to either a tittering waitress or a grinning bus boy, he is removed from duty.  After a short tenure as a guard at the county jail where he met a local bootlegger, he resigned to open a speakeasy on a mud flat in the San Francisco Bay near the town of Fremont.  Where at one time a stickler for the law, he now regards it with contempt. Illegal drinking, gambling, prostitution, and aberrant behavior bring him no pause.  He is going to make as much money as he can before Prohibition is repealed, then open a legitimate bar and restaurant.  Until then, his customers can do whatever they want.  His weekly payment to the sheriff’s deputy responsible for the no-man’s-land in the bay guarantees that he and his customers can live life as they find it.

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