RMS QUEEN MARY

Over fifty years ago when I was a young twenty six year old short time sailor with a one month old new  baby RMS Queen Mary pulled into our lives. By our our, I mean both myself and the City of Long  Beach. The old regal gal has sit inside of her little breakwater across the bay from downtown Long Beach all of this time.

During this time, I have been aboard the ship over a dozen times. Usually on tours and once to meet and greet QM2 to Long Beach but I never got around to spending a night on board. It's like the time I took my sister to Disneyland years ago. She said that i probably got tired of going to Disneyland and I told her that the only time that I went was when someone from back east came out and wanted to go there. Which wasn't that often.

Well we took a page out of the tourist's guide book today and went to RMS QM. The Sunday brunch is said to be, according to a traveler's magazine, the best in the world. I don't know about "the best in the world", but I would rank it in the top five. The best I've ever been to is at the Saint Francis Hotel in San Fran. But good eats in San Fran is no big surprise. 

Spending an overnighter on a ship is not a real big deal. I've lived on an aircraft carrier, a destroyer, I lived on my schooner for thirty five years and on the trawler now for four years.  The Queen however is a whole new experiance. She is the stuff of legends. She is the one and only Gray Ghost. 

USS Constellation, the carrier that I was on was big, one could put both  Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth on the flight deck at the same time and neither would hang over the edge but the true measure of the size of a ship is it's displacement. The Queens both top out by over ten thousand tons over Connie and you can feel the magnitude of this ship while walking around aboard. 

The view of downtown Long Beach from our porthole is also incredible. This is the stuff that my dreams are made of.

AMERICAN FOOTBALL

AMERICAN FOOTBALL

I was born in Cleveland in 1942. Near the end of the forties, Cleveland had two teams. The Browns and the Rams. The NFL deemed that Cleveland didn’t need two teams so the Rams were moved to LA. A few years back on a PBS series called The Greatest Moments in Sports, I saw a film of the 1950 NFL playoff game. The Browns verses the Rams. The Rams had a bone to pick. They wanted to show the world that the wrong team was moved to LA. Right before the end of the game, the Rams were leading by five points. With about five seconds to go Otto Graham threw a hail Mary pass to a receiver in the end zone. While the ball was in the air, the gun was sounded to indicate that all the time on the clock had elapsed. Back then, I don’t know about now, the game wasn’t over until the play finished. The ball was caught in the end zone and the Browns remained the NFL champs. I truly believe the the Pro Football Hall of Fame is in Canton which is close to Cleveland because of the Browns. Players like Otto Graham. Lou Groza and Dante "Glurfingers" Lavvle were heros back in the day.

For many years, I was an ardent Browns fan, even after I moved to SoCal. I remember watching the NFL playoff game on the messdeck on my destroyer in 1967 when the Browns beat the Colts. I was on the ship because I had the duty on that day. The AFL joined into the NFL and the Superbowl became the paramount sporting event. Alas the only times the Browns attended the Superbowl was as spectators. That didn’t lessen my enthusiasm one damned bit. From about 1977 to 1982 I had season tickets for the Rams but they were only the Rams not the Browns. For that reason and for certain economic reasons, that era had run it’s course and I eschewed the tickets.

What really hurt was when Art Model, that son-of-a-bitch, moved my blessed Browns to Baltimore.  The Raiders moved back to Oakland and the Rams were moved to Saint Louis. My mantra was a sailor version of screw football, who needs it.

My attitude improved when a new Browns emerged into Cleveland. I used to say that this new Browns team was a facade, the real Browns were hiding in Baltimore hiding as the Ravens To add insult to injury, the damned Ravens not only went to the Superbowl the next year. They WON the damned thing. By about 2010 my patience with these loser new Browns had run it’s course. I simply quit being a football fan.

Along comes 2017 and not only do the Rams move back to LA after a 23 year hiatus and the Chargers move back to LA also. It’s an embarrassment of riches and to sweeten things, they both do very well. The Rams actually won the NFC game and are going to the Superbowl.

Back in 1982, when I was a season ticket holder, I got a letter in the mail stating that if I were to send $600 in the mail, if the Rams made it through the playoffs, I would be the proud possessor of Superbowel tickets. The Superbowl that year was to be held at The Rosebowl which was less than a hour’s drive up the freeway. Not only was I was certain the Rams Wouldn’t make it through the playoffs, and as I said above  I wasn’t actually rolling around in loose cash, so I passed. You guessed it. I missed going to a Superbowel game.

Well now our/my Rams are going to the Superbowel again and I don’t have four of five thousand dollars in my retirement funds to blow on a football game. If the Rams win, the odds makers in Los Vegas have them pegged as a one point favorite and they are playing the Patriots, maybe my enthusiasm will be restored. We’re in wait and see mode right now. 

TAKE THE BULLET TRAIN

TAKE THE BULLET TRAIN

Yesterday, over a “few” beers I told my friend Dennis about one of my stays in Japan.

In the mid seventies, I was working at Kawasaki Steel in Kobe Japan. I was installing a Zenzamer rolling mill that would be making transformer steel. The mill itself was built by Waterbury Ferrel in Waterbury Connecticut. A zenzamer mill is a complicated machine that rolls extremely precise cold roll steel. I worked for LFE Corp who built the control system. It was a non-contact gauge that used a radioactive Americium isotope gamma source that could penetrate steel. The gauge also automatically controlled the gauge, thickness, of the steel in real time.

Working in Japan was a real adventure. I stayed at the Hotel Newport, what would be called a boutique hotel nowadays. It was a real Japanese hotel, not at all like a Holiday Inn, with tatami mats and in the evening after dinner your little Japanese bed was laid out on the floor with a hot rock to help keep me warm..

I and the guy from Waterbury worked all day in the extremely clean mill. Japanese factories are much different than most other plants. Not only are they clean but if a Japanese foreman tells a worker to pick up a hose, or something, the worker doesn’t say not my job, he bows and then runs over to the hose, or whatever and coils it and hangs it up.

My Waterbury cohort was actually a pilot in the Luftwaffe in WWII. He was drafted near the very end of WW2 at the tender age of sixteen. He had about four hours of flight training and then was shoved into a Messerschmidt. He was happy to have survived his three of four missions before the war ended. One evening, after work hans and I went to a local bar and had a few Kirins. Hans made a benjo call. When Hans was out of ear shot two round eyed guy s at the next table wanted to know if Hans had been in the Air Force. He said to me that he had been a pilot in the Air Force and he had never heard of any of the airplanes that Hans was talking about. I said the question should be who’s Air Force. He asked who’s and I replied Hitler’s.  

When the job was done, I tried called our trading company’s office in Tokyo. I had no idea on how to use a pay phone to make a long distance in Japan. Besides, my Japanese language skills weren’t up to the task. I ended up standing in front of a bank of green payphones looking very pitiful with my hand extended a handful of Yen saying Kudasai dingwa.

A Japanese guy with short beard walked up to me and said in English “Don’t you know how to use a pay phone in Japan? No, I did not. 

 

 

Back then, at least, while you were talking, when you heard a tone in your earpiece, you had to feed the beast more coins. I talked to someone in the Tokyo who instructed me to buy a ticket on the Shinkansen, the Bullet Train, and then call back and tell them what train and what carriage I’d be riding  in and someone would be waiting for me on the platform. Right now I should explain two things. The first is if the ticket says that the arrival time is 2:32, the train will arrive at 2:32. No sooner and no later. When you board, or get off of, the train there will be a big colored square painted  on the platform precisely where the door to your carriage will be. The second thing is should you get lost in the Tokyo train station, you are screwed. You’re a goner. It is below street level and is massive. I did get turned around one time and I had to go up stairs to get my bearings and then go back down again.

As for the guy who came to my rescue, I said that I was very lucky that he came along when he did and asked him where he was from. He replied “Chicago”. I asked if he was here in Tokyo on a vacation or on business. He replied a little of both. He explained to me that he had a Japanese restaurant in Chicago and the price of the wooden one use chopsticks that you break apart was getting very pricy. The chopsticks were made in Japan but there was no real timber so the wood had to be imported from another country. Manufactured and then re-shipped to the USA and elsewhere. He knew there were a few manufactures in the Kobe area and his family was from Kobe so he thought he’d come over and visit his long lost distant family and do some business. He went to a manufacturing plant and looked at their machines. He told them these were beautiful machines but they only make bamboo chopsticks. He wanted to buy a machine that made wooden chopsticks. He told me the guy looked at him and said “They make those in Chicago”.