CBS SUNDAY MORNING

CBS SUNDAY MORNING

CBS SUNDAY MORNING has been, or should I say had been, part of my Sunday morning routine practically since it’s inception in 1979. I have been an enemy of routine all of my life but my Sunday morning routine had been an exception.  I always equated routine with falling in a rut and becoming stale but I truly liked this routine. 

Get up, get the Sunday paper, drink my dark roast coffee, watch CBS Sunday Morning and then do the Sunday LA Times crossword puzzle. I stopped getting the Sunday LA Times when the paper got smaller and smaller and it’s price kept getting bigger and bigger. I pride myself on adaptation. Whenever a roadblock appears in front of me, I either go around it, over it or under it. My answer to the skyrocketing price of printed newspapers was to get a digital edition of the paper. I got both the LA Times and the London Times. After about a year I cancelled the LA Times. It really didn’t have anything of interest to me. The London Times has it all. Balanced news, a good crossword and interesting human interest stories.

The television news situation is a totally different arena. I am, and always have been, a news junkie and we don’t have cable TV or a dish. This leaves us with over the air or internet news. As Abraham Lincoln said, you can’t believe the news on the internet, so live TV it is.

When I watch the news, I want to hear, news, not opinion. If I wanted to hear some talking head’s opinion I would have turned on to CBS Sunday Morning Opinions. CBS, Communist Broadcasting System is the worst. I stopped watching their local news over thirty years ago because I couldn’t stand Linda Alverez. I don’t watch the Late Show, to me, it is intolerable with that buffoon Stephen Colbert. At least on 60 Minutes there was a segment called Point/Counterpoint. That provided some balance. I don’t watch Fox News either. Once again I don’t think that it is balanced either from the other extreme.

For the record, I am neither a Democrat, no shit? Or a Republican. I am, and have been, a registered Libertarian. I consider myself as somewhat right of center. I like the way Jessie Ventura described himself. He described himself as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” a straightforward expression of his libertarian philosophy. On Sunday Morning at least we had Charles Kuralt who was a folksy guy who roamed the back roads of the USA looking for quirky stories. Speaking of quirky, Bill Geist kept things light and amusing. After Kuralt retired we had Charles Osgood who was no Kutralt but wasn’t that bad either. Kuralt was a tough act to follow. Ben Stein helped keep some semblance of balance but he is now gone. These days, Martha Teichner is the worst. She is a non-stop unabashed Trump basher. Does Mr. Trump deserve some bashing? Of coarse he does, don’t we all? Should she be allowed to run amok? According to the very first  amendment of the US Constitution, she does. Am I required to watch her rantings? Hell no.

So it’s AMF, Aloha My Friend to CBS Sunday Morning.

You will be missed but not watched anymore by little old me. 

OK, I'm done. You can have your soapbox back now. 

Guided Missileman Schools

Albian B the Third was in my Guided Missileman A School class at Dam Neck VA. Dam Neck was pleasantly nestled between Virginia Beach and The Great Dismal Swamp. The GDS was rife with poisonous snakes and other friendly critters.

Al was from a well to do family in Pennsylvania and was way more streetwise than this young straight out of high school kid. When we all went into town on Wednesday nights and weekends, he always wore what I considered to be very fashionable clothes. He was a bit on the swishy side but was a lot of fun. One evening at the EM Club someone challenged him to a chugalug contest.  Al had said that nobody could chug beer faster them him. He sounded a bit like a blowhard so naturally someone called him on it. They both had a full pitcher of beer in their hands. Just before the start Al started hyperventilating. We all started feeling sorry for Al as they started. He picked up the pitcher and just poured it down his throat without gulping. It was a straight pour as if he was pouring the  beer down a sink.

Joe C was what we would now call a redneck from Old Town Florida. Old Town is on the shore of the Sewanee River. His father was the sheriff  of Dixie County. You can’t be more of a son of the South than that. We all called him Gator. One weekend, Gator asked me if I wanted to go snake hunting out on the big pond in the swamp. Stupid me, did I say stupid, said OK. All we had to do is go to the local hardware store in town and buy some frog gigs heads. The we put the heads on some swab handles. We checked out a rowboat from Special Services and off we went. There were trees that came out over the water and we were rowing under them. We stopped and Gator said in his slow Florida drawl “Why don’t you spear that snake right over your head?” I looked up and didn’t see any snake. I told Gator that wasn’t what I considered funny so he picked up his gig and speared a snake right over my head. Have you ever been in a small rowboat with a really pissed off venomous snake? It isn’t exactly like zoning out at a yoga camp in Big Sur. Gator calmly, calm is the best way to describe gator, picked up a big burlap bag that he brought along and flipped it into the bag. We had about six or eight slithering madder than hell poisonous snakes in the bag when Gator dropped the bag and they all tumbled looking for revenge. I jumped on a seat so as to allow our fellow voyagers their own space in the bottom of the boat. I didn’t crap my pants and I didn’t scream like a little six year old little girl but beyond that I was at a total loss as what to do next. Gator calmly snagged the monsters up and one by one flipped them back into their bag and tied a knot in the top. With the calmness of  Los Vegas professional gambler holding four jacks I said that maybe we should go back to the barracks and so we did. When we came in the back door, there was the group of New York City guys playing pinochle at a table. They asked “Where have you two been?” Gator replied that we had been snake hunting in the swamp and they asked if we had caught any. Gator replied that we had caught a few and “Do you want to see them?” These self-proclaimed big city guys said “Sure”. With that Gator dumped the whole bag of short tempered wounded poisonous snakes on their card table. I felt real proud of myself for putting my very life in Gator’s hands and keeping my cool as the whole table of big city boys screamed like six year old little girls and ran for their very lives. After the screams died down in the distance as the ran away old Cool Hand Gator calmly flipped the load of snakes as he had done an hour earlier in the rowboat. Right then and there, I decided that I was living a charmed life and that it would take more than a bag of angry vipers to kill me.

In our Guided Missileman A School we were the creme de la crème of the Navy. I arrived two weeks before our class started and the week before our class met we were informed the we would be reviewing trigonometry. About half of our class were guys straight out of boot camp the other half for one reason or another were “coming out of the fleet”. Coming out of the fleet is one of those navy things who’s words belie the real meaning. For a few guys one, or two, actually came out of the fleet. One came back from a Naval Air Station in Argentia Newfoundland.

Another was at the Naval Academy and was booted out. He ended up our class leader. After sixty years I don’t remember has name. I confided to Mr. Dropout that a review of trig sounded OK but I didn’t have the foggiest notion what trig was. He took me under his wing and told me he would “horse me up”. Which meant, at least in the Navy, coach me. I think his name was Paul and we found out why he was bounced out of the academy. He was attending Guided Missileman A School when he was accepted into the academy. After getting booted out of the academy it was “Back to the fleet”. Which in his case back to GS A School. Paul had a little drinking problem. He took the expression “drink like a sailor” to a new higher level. He missed a lot of school for being in the county jail for repeated DUIs and we never heard what happened after being booted out of A school.

On the first day of class the instructor(s) started talking about Ohm’s Law. I had thought that being a Guided Missileman meant being a highly trained mechanic. I turned to the guy sitting beside me and said “Who gives a shit about this electrical stuff?” He replied that I better start giving a shit about the electrical stuff because that’s what we’re going to be doing.

I had jumped through a lot of hoops to get there so I knuckled down. The school was six months long and before long I realized that I had a knack for this electrical stuff. By the time we graduated I was second in our class. About ten weeks into the school, we were all handed a book titled radar special circuits. We were told that this radar stuff was grueling so we should start boning up before we got into the radar phase. I started reading the book and I understood every single concept that was offered. It was like reading for pleasure.

During A School

In February 1961, we flew to LAX and attended Terrier BT3 C School at the General Dynamics plant where they were built. I graduated first in that class and I was on my way.

1971

After we moved back to SoCal after two years in Cleveland we rented a house in Glendora. We ended up buying the house across the street. I was looking for a house to buy instead of renting. I found a small tract of new houses partway up the foothills but they were too rich for me. I told the neighbors across the street about the houses and they ended up buying one. The builder of the tract took the neighbor’s house as a trade in. The sale of their house was taken over by a neighborhood realtor and they were bound by contract to sell it for the FHA appraisal. We played bridge and had cocktails at the neighbor’s house at least once a week and while over one evening Ken my neighbor told me that the appraisal came in at $24,000. This was in 1971 before the real estate market went crazy. I called the listing agent at the realtor’s and told her I wanted to buy the house. She told me that it wasn’t on the market yet. I asked her what that meant and she told me it hadn’t been on the agent’s tour yet. I told her that I had been in the house probably over one hundred times and I knew the FHA appraised value, which I thought was fair, and to bring the papers over for me to sign.

She said she had to wait until it was “on the market”. I said OK and hung up. I counted to ten and called the realtor’s office back and asked for the sales manager. I told the guy that I wanted to buy the house and Helen wouldn’t sell it to me. He asked why not and I told him because “it wasn’t on the market yet. He asked me to hold on a minute and I heard a lot of hollering in the background. He got back on the phone and told me that she’ll be right over with the paperwork. And so we bought a house in California. It was a nice house in a good neighborhood. It had three bedrooms and a bath and a half.

Back in the day, when I was selling real estate there was this witticism that if you were showing a house in an expensive  neighborhood, people would ask “Where is the pool?”  If  the neighborhood was a step down, people would ask “Does it have a pool?” If it was in a seedy neighborhood, people would say “It has a pool?” Well our house was in a nice neighborhood and it did indeed have a pool. Life was good there. We not only had a pool, we also has a 22 foot trailerable sailboat,  a German Shepard and I had a motorcycle. A fast as hell Kawasaki Mach 3. It was advertised as the fastest thing with wheels to come out of a factory.

One nice balmy day, we were sitting around the pool when we heard a huge boom. It was very large and we could tell it was the sound of something very bad. We looked all around but didn’t see any smoke or any thing so we didn’t give it any more thought.

That evening we heard what the loud boom was. A Marine Corps Phantom jet had collided with a Air West DC-9 over the nearby mountains. Everyone one the DC-9 died and one of the two  Marines  in the Phantom survived. He ejected and floated down to earth without a scratch.

Also in the same timeframe, I was talking to a friend of mine who lived nearby one evening. All of a sudden, this whit disc in the sky  went streaking by. This was after I was out of the Navy for about three years. Being I spent ten hours a day sitting in the gun director radar tracking airplanes and became pretty accomplished at estimating their range and speed. This disc was distinctly round and did not leave a fiery streak  behind it as a meteorite would. I estimated it to be less than five miles away and going faster than sound without any sonic boom. It streaked into the foot hills and made no crashing sound(s). No bangs or booms, nothing.

I still believe to this day hat I saw a UFO. I became an immediate believer in UFOs. The problem is the nearest habitable planet to earth is about forty light years away. If the “aliens” were moving at the speed of light which is 186,000 miles per second, which is hard for me to believe, it take a minimum of eighty years to make a round trip. I don’t think any being of superior intelligence would care to be locked up with a few copies of Playboy to read and take an eighty year trip. Possible, I suppose. Probable, I don’t think so. One Sunday while reading Brunhilda on the comic’s page, I read that Gaylord Buzzard is telling Irwin Troll as they are walking along that “Some people don’t think that the aliens are from another planet. They think that they are from Earth but another time.”  This I could buy. There have been many reports of “alien” abductions and practically all of the abductees describe the same things. The creatures have two arms and two legs. They also have two eyes in their heads with two ears and a nose with two nostrils. They look too much like humans who no longer do any heavy lifting.

THINK ABOUT IT.