THE NEW GUYS

THE NEW GUYS

One night a bunch of sailors, mostly first and second class Petty Officers came back to the ship after a night of beer drinking in Olongapo which is the town outside the main gate of Naval Station Subic Bay Philippine Islands. San Miguel Beer in an Olongapo bar was one Philippine Peso per bottle. If my memory serves me right, one Yankee Dollar would buy seven pesos.  That’s about fifteen cents a bottle and San Magoo was pretty good beer. We staggered aboard our little tin can, destroyer, and headed down the ladder, steps, to where we bunked.

When we got to the bottom of the ladder, we started to step on and trip over a larger number of drunks sleeping on the deck than normal. SOP, Standing Operating Procedure, was when you stepped on a drunken sailor, a not uncommon occurrence, you kicked, gently of course, the drunken sot to wake him up and tell him to hit his rack, bed. Suddenly all of these sleeping dumb asses jumped to their feet and started saluting us and calling us sir.

Now this wasn’t the usual reaction of a newly kicked drunk let alone a whole gaggle of drunken sailors. One of us turned on the lights in the berthing compartment which did get a typical reaction from a newly awakened sailor. Something like turn the fucking lights of you assholes.  I knew at least this wasn’t a dream.

When quired, who the hell are you ass holes and what the hell are you doing sleeping on the deck, one of the quivering young men, and I do mean young, replied that they woke up in Illinois and graduated from boot camp at Great lakes Naval Training Center, were herded on to a jet airplane and flown half way around the world to the Philippines, herded onto a cattle truck  and  deposited on to this ship in the middle of the night. The whole group was scared shitless because on this very morning, they could only address senior petty officers as sir and had to salute them.

We then allowed the poor clueless bastards to go back to nighty nighty night. We found out the next morning that the Navy, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to step up the crew manning levels of ships operating in the Western Pacific, read Vietnam, but hadn’t bothered to tell said ships in the Western Pacific. Further more, Because of our ignorance  we hadn’t prepared a suitable welcome or installed bunks for them to sleep on.

It took a few days to get things sorted out and we still all felt a little bad for these new boots and cringed a bit on being saluted. A few nights of liberty in Olongapo and the newbies became old salts over night.

SCHOONER OR LATER

Back in the late 1970’s when I was selling apartment buildings, we used to have our Tuesday  office sales meetings at The Little Ships Galley in Alamitos Bay Marina. We liked the LSG because it was ran by this old timer named Schultzy. Schultzy was pretty old to us kids back then and ran a pretty slack ship. All there was ever there was Schultzy and his buddies.

As a consequence, the place was always deserted. Schultzy lived aboard an older gaff rigged ketch named Aegean Sea and enjoyed our patronage and we could meet away without upsetting him. One day, the place was closed up and we came to find out that he had a severe heart attack which he survived. The place was closed for a few months so naturally we didn’t and couldn’t go there any more.

A guy named Dennis bought The Galley. I am told that he was and still is maybe a Newport Beach fireman. Denny cleaned the place the place up and renamed it Schooner or Later. He also hired a waitress who wore a short skirt. Before you could say Bob’s your uncle, the place was a roaring success. Lots more short skirted waitresses and a full kitchen staff. He even set up tables outside and had outdoor seating. It is forty years later now and Denny has lost, as we all have,  most of his boyish good looks but his little enterprise is still flourishing. It gets rave reviews on Yelp and local magazines. There was a segment on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives on the Food Network.

The reason I am taking this little stroll down memory lane is because of the interesting times, as the Chinese would say, they are still in business. Of course like all other eateries in our fair land, they are hanging on by their finger nails.

Besides selling their food, for take out only, they are operating a pop-up store. We can stroll over to S or L and buy eggs. Dairy, luncheon meats, cheeses and produce. All at very attractive prices. A flat of thirty eggs for instance is $15 witch is less than the supermarkets were charging before the hoarding and price gouging began.

They are also selling family dinners like fried chicken, meatloaf, enchiladas and tritip. Friday is tritip night so we bought the tritip dinner for “4 to 5” for $35.

Denny’s sister Denise runs the day to day operation and I applaud her for working so hard towards this symbiosis.

Bravo Zulu Denise

Life while restricted to the ship.

I spent the first eight years of my adult life in the Navy after graduating from high school. I also have lived aboard a boat for the last forty five years. Because of this I guess some people would say I’ve developed a few peculiarities about certain things along the way. 

I am most comfortable living in a small space. I have no interest in living in a large home. I did live in a large home way back when. It even had a ballroom in it. It wasn’t for me.

I like to have a sizable quantity of food stowed away in my boat. Canned meat and vegetables and lotsa pasta. I like to keep water and fuel in my tanks in the event I have to get away from some catastrophe either man made or natural. I’ve always figured that I could just sail away and anchor out somewhere until it was safe to return to civilization.

It is because of the above that when this corona virus panic took hold and people, read morons, started clearing the shelves at the market, I hardly took notice. It was like the gasoline shortage of the mid nineteen seventies. I had a Porsche 914 at the time. These little mid-engined jems had large gas tanks and small engines. Porsche used to advertise that you could drive it from San Diego to San Francisco without stopping for gas. It had a 500 mile range. After over a month after the gas shortage started I finally had to get gas. I didn’t know the protocol of lining up  and when I asked people were yelling at me “Where the hell have you been? In a cave or something.”

About 500 feet where we live is Schooner Or Later, a café that serves breakfast and lunches. They are trying to stay afloat by offering take out food and operating a pop up store. They are selling Dairy Products, Cheese, Eggs, Lunch Meat, Produce and Bread. Every other day, we walk over to S or L and get an omelet or a sammich and get two loves of bread. So far it, the quarantine,  has been only an inconvenience. I must admit however my better half scurries of to the store(s) occasionally and returns with her treasures. I believe that she rather enjoys scoring her finds from the barren shelves.  She says it’s like what it must have been like living in the Soviet Union. We could hold out for quite a while living on our dry stores but I think she likes getting away from me from time to time. I know I would but I can’t. I’m trapped.

I have faith in the American economy and truly believe that when there is no room left in the houses of the herd, which I believe will be soon, the stores will return to somewhat normal.

I’m thinking, and hoping, that his will end up like Y2K. What a fiasco that was.

KEEP THE FAITH.

VICTOREEN

In 1968, after eight years in Uncle Sam's Canoe Club, I was a civilian again, back in Cleveland  and I needed a job. 

A head hunter sent me to a job interview at a company called Victereen Instruments in Cleveland. At the interview, I was screened by by a man named Andy the vice president of engineering.  Andy said that they were getting a flood of Vietnam veterans looking for work and they were obliged to interview them all but not to get my hopes up  too much. He had a simple practical test for me. He had a Techtronix oscilloscope hooked up to a circuit and asked me what the time delay was on a pulse. What he didn't know and what I didn't think of putting on my resume was that I was sent to a three course at the Techtronix factory in Beaverton Oregon. For three weeks, eight hours a day, we learned all about the workings of a Techtronix scope. We toured the production floor and even saw how the scopes were reconditioned. Andy wanted me to tell him what the time delay was on the pulse. 

I told Andy that he thought that the time delay was 4 microseconds but the scope's triggering was set up wrong. That the time delay was more like 3.5 microseconds. He asked me what was wrong and I told him that he didn't account for the delay line on the vertical deflection plates. "What delay line?" he asked. I explained that the good folks at Techtronix put a 0.5 microsecond delay on the vertical plates in order to view the leading edge on the pulses being viewed. 

I asked him if he wanted me to adjust the pulse width to 4 useconds and he said yes. He showed me which potentiometer adjusted the pulse width and I set up the scope to trigger properly. I adjusted the pot to 4 useconds and immediately the Teletype machine started chattering away. Teletype TT33s were about the only digital printers available back in the Stone Age. Andy about crapped his pants. He said it took his guys four or five hours to set up the printers at the plant. 

I was hired on the spot into the engineering department. Victoreen made radiation analyzing equipment and the work was interesting but Andy was, dare I say, an asshole. After about fifteen months at Victoreen some technician lit a cigarette in the lab. Yes everyone smoked everywhere back then and tossed his match into a pan with solvent in it. Woosh, the pan turned into Vesuvius. Without a second thought, I grabbed a small fire extinguisher off of the wall and put out the fire. The next thing I knew, Andy was screaming in my face that I "Expended a perfectly good fire extinguisher". 

"Would you rather have had the plant burned to the ground?" I countered.  

A half an hour without any fanfare, Andy handed me a severance check and I was free. This was on a Thursday and we drove up to Dearborn Heights in Michigan to visit with my in laws. On Monday, I was back in Cleveland and interviewed at API instruments. I found out at the interview that the chief engineer at Victoreen and the chief engineer at API were good friends and the had talked about me. I got up to leave and was asked where I was going. I thought that after their talk that I was not going to be hired. Steve my soon to be my new boss told  me he was told that I could be a pain in the ass at times but was worth hiring. He added that his friend also told him that Andy was an asshole and was hired.