Airplane-themed playground honoring Berkeley pilot could land in Thousand Oaks

Air Force pilot Michael Seltzer poses with a jet that malfunctioned at the end of a mission he flew over Iraq in 2006. Credit: U.S. Air Force/Senior Airman Kerry Solan-Johnson

A small plot of land at Thousand Oaks Tot Park could one day be the site of an airplane-themed play structure dedicated to Col. Michael “Mike” Seltzer, a Berkeley-reared Air Force fighter pilot and father of three children, who died of cancer last year at age 43. 

Peter Kaes, who is leading the effort, is hoping to commemorate his childhood friend by adding a new section to the park, where they spent many afternoons as kids and later watched their own children play. He has set a fundraising goal of $75,000 and has the support of Berkeley council member Shoshana O’Keefe, whose district includes the park — but the effort still faces an uphill climb. 

Seltzer grew up attending Berkeley schools and in 2002 graduated from UC Berkeley, where he enrolled in the Air Force ROTC program and earned a bachelor’s degree in physical sciences. 

He later deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, rose in ranks to become a colonel, and trained dozens of F-16 and F-35 pilots. 

He died in October of lung and brain cancer. In 2022, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi highlighted Seltzer’s struggles with cancer in her speech at the signing of the PACT Act, which expanded VA health care and benefits for veterans that had been exposed to toxic substances in service. Pelosi and some of Seltzer’s family members believe his death was related to exposure to toxic burn pits — open trenches in which the military burned trash and other hazardous materials — while deployed. As he headed into chemotherapy last year, then-President Joe Biden, who has often attributed his eldest son Beau’s death to burn pits, video-called him to wish him well.

Seltzer’s connection to Thousand Oaks Elementary and the adjacent park runs deep. Two of his three children currently attend the school. His kids are now 6, 10 and 12. While he didn’t attend Thousand Oaks himself, he often met up with friends at the school to play basketball and other sports, according to Kaes. 

Screenshot of the GoFundMe fundraising campaign for a playground honoring Michael Seltzer on March 31, 2025.

The proposal is still in its early stages. An architect, Brennan Cox, has been hired to design the playground. Early renderings depict a climbable wooden twin-engine propeller plane numbered 1980 (Seltzer’s birth year) that’s surrounded by the park’s redwoods. 

“Mikey was a really special soul,” Kaes said. “My hope is that in a park like this, with a feature like this, it gives his and my and other children in Berkeley an opportunity to imagine themselves flying and soaring above the redwoods.”

Berkeley Parks Director Scott Ferris said any public funding would need to be greenlit by the City Council. Any proposal would have to go through a community engagement process and CEQA review and be approved by Berkeley school district’s head of facilities. The tot park, while maintained and operated as a city park, is on land owned by the school district. 

Only then could the city begin to solicit bids from contractors and start construction, Ferris said. Even if all goes smoothly, it would likely take more than three years to complete such a project, he said.

So far, the effort has raised $13,000 of its $75,000 goal, which won’t be enough to cover the full cost of enlarging the tot park. Kaes said he is in discussions with the city of a potential private-public partnership, in which the city may contribute a “significant sum” if he’s able to meet the goal. 

Both Kaes and Ferris declined to share cost estimates for the proposed project. Ferris said expenses vary widely depending on the playground’s size, play equipment cost, and final location — details that he said will be decided by the community.  

O’Keefe, whose district includes North Berkeley and the Berkeley Hills, said she thought the memorial was a “beautiful idea” and has submitted an $80,000 budget referral, to be allocated once the $75,000 private fundraising goal is met. The item may be up for discussion by the city council on April 15.

“I love the airplane concept, and any opportunity we have to leverage a private donation to create better infrastructure for the city is wonderful,” O’Keefe said. “It maximizes our dollars.” 

A lifelong love for flight, family

The first full sentence Michael Seltzer uttered as a toddler was “Plane takes off,” according to his father, Gene. They had been plane-spotting in the parking lot of the Oakland Airport. 

“From then on, you could just see that all he wanted to do was fly,” his father said. 

Seltzer began taking flight lessons at the Oakland Flyers as a teen and quickly picked up air show maneuvers. He and his father would sometimes fly over the Bay and play a game: His father would toss a roll of toilet paper out the window, letting it unfurl in a straight line. He would then maneuver the plane, using the wings to slice the white ribbon as many times as he could before it hit the water. He could get to five. 

In a 2002 UC Berkeley press release, the then-recent Cal graduate was quoted as saying his decision to enter the military was met by a frosty reception both at school and at home — both his parents went to UC Berkeley during the student radicalism of the 1960s. He wasn’t excited about going into combat — he thought war was a “terrible thing” and wished for world peace. 

When he joined the Air Force, he was given the callsign “Rags,” a nickname that stemmed from a time at a Nevada casino when he hit a hot streak but refused to walk away while still ahead as his friends had instructed him to. He ended up losing it all, going from riches back to rags. 

Seltzer was a talented teacher and was repeatedly recognized by his U.S. Air Force Weapons School students as the elite school’s top instructor pilot. He left the Air Force in 2014 to pursue a master’s degree in business management at Stanford, spent a year working for a private equity firm, and in 2016 returned to teach pilots how to fly, support and maintain F-35s, the U.S. military’s most advanced fighter aircraft. He was the Air Force’s 2018 Instructor Pilot of the Year. 

Michael and Katherine Seltzer photographed upon his return from Iraq. Courtesy of Gene Seltzer

At some point, Seltzer had an opportunity to work toward becoming a general, according to his father, but turned it down as it would require frequent moves. He wanted to settle down in one place so that his kids could have a stable childhood. 

“He never was particularly interested in the glory or grandeur of Air Force rank and hierarchy,” Gene Seltzer said. “He was very, very modest and hated it. If he heard me bragging to anyone about what Mike had just done … he would give me a serious frown look.”

In 2020, Seltzer, his wife, Katherine, and his three children moved to North Berkeley — just down the street from his childhood home. He took a job at the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, a venture fund for the U.S. military, in Mountain View.

Michael and Katherine Seltzer pose for a family portrait with their three children, Evie, Oliver and Penny (left to right). Courtesy of Gene Seltzer

Shortly thereafter, he was diagnosed with cancer, which his brother attributes to his exposure to burn pits. Burn pits were commonly used at and near U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan until about 2010, when the U.S. began phasing them out. About 3.5 million members of the U.S. military have been exposed to smoke from burn pits since the 1991 Gulf War, with researchers linking exposure to a wide range of health problems. 

Seltzer also had a deep passion for music. He played the saxophone while at Berkeley High and often played guitar in bands in the Air Force. He was also a self-taught pianist, learning how to play the chords to Olivia Rodrigo songs so his daughters could sing along. 

“It was like having the sun in your life and all of a sudden there’s no sun, in both meanings of the word,” Gene Seltzer said.