Christmas In The Old Country

 

I watched a Christmas Eve church service the other night from an Orthodox church somewhere, I believe to be, in Russia. It brought back memories of my misspent youth in Cleveland. Art, my best friend since the second grade, was called a mad Russian. He wasn’t Russian, His grandparents came over on “the boat” from Latvia which, back then was one of the Republics of  The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR. He and his whole family are very proud Latvians not Russians but they do however worship in a Russian Orthodox church namely the St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral.

 

I used to occasionally go to church with Art and his family just to see the inside of this great building. When riding on the bus from downtown Cleveland back to Garfield Heights, you could see this grand onion domed structure across the Cuyahoga River valley sitting on the near West Side. It was so different that I had to see more of it.

To quote Wikipedia “Because the Russian Orthodox Church still observes the Julian calendar. Dec. 25 on the Julian calendar corresponds to Jan. 7 on the Gregorian calendar, which America and most of the rest of the world uses. Currently, each day of the Julian calendar occurs 13 days after its corresponding day on the Gregorian calendar.” Now I remember their calendar being one week behind. I first went to church with Art and his family on Easter Sunday. Up to that point I, the good Baptist choir singing lad that I was, hadn’t even been into a Roman Catholic church. They were handing out branches of pussy willows in the church. I asked Art what was up with the pussy willows and he whispered back something about there are no palm trees in Russia. OK, what does that have to do with anything. He explained that on his Church’s Julian calendar this was Palm Sunday and being there are no palm trees in Russia, the Russians traditionally pass out pussy willow branches and so I went back to church the next week to see what other surprises were in store.

Things really heated on Russian Easter. There were several huge Russian priests with long black beards ranting in Russian and swinging very large incense burners slightly over our heads. They were dousing all of the people with holy water, this was a show I would have paid hard earned cash to see and it was all for free. One of the priests, at one point, sat down in a chair holding up a portrait of some saint in his lap. Then people started to line up to kiss the person in the picture. Plus the view, I couldn’t get enough. I was a fixture there in that church for high holy days for the next few years. Without warning, people would drop to their knees onto some kneeling bar so I would follow suit not to piss off the Russian congregation. Then without any apparent warning as I was down on my knees, they would all rise up and sit down in the pews.  Nothing in my Baptist background had prepared me for this.

As I sit here in front of my keyboard I start musing about why I ever left Northern Ohio but then I remember. I remember the cold and the blizzards. I remember the miserable Cleveland Indians and the Browns who when I was still there were the dominant force in football and now are such losers that the only way they can go to the Super Bowl is if they buy a block of tickets and charter a Greyhound Bus. I remember the steel mills closing one after another and I remember White Flight making the downtown of Cleveland, the place where I went to play hookey and spend hours in the huge Cleveland Public Library. 

The only time I now go back is for a wedding, or more so these days, a funereal or to see my sister and then visit with Art and drink more beer than we used to. Cleveland, to me, is now like New York. It’s a great place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there, ever again.

The first day of  snow is very special. It has always had a wonderland effect on me. The second day is still kind of nice but not so much. On the third day, I am starting to get fed up with the, not so, inconvenience. By the fourth day, I am climbing the walls. I want to go home! Home where when it gets down to 55 deg. F everybody, including me, starts bitching about how cold it is. After a few minutes, I start my weather mantra. I start humming while saying Cleveland. Suddenly, I smile, and say to myself  “I could be back in Cleveland.” And all is again right with the world. 

 

 

MISSING MOVEMENT

 

 

MISSING MOVEMENT is the Navy term for not being aboard ship when the ship gets underway. This, as you may have guessed is considered to be a major NO NO.

In 1983 I was stationed aboard USS Constellation CVA-64 the largest, at the time, ship in the Navy. We were getting under way and I was standing out on the port missile launcher sponson watching the intricacies of  getting an eighty thousand ton ship under way. As we eased away from the dock one of my Missile Techs came running up to the ship as we were twenty feet or so away from North Island. We could hear him hollering “Oh shit, I’m screwed”.

After the special sea detail was secured we all went to our berthing compartment to shift into dungarees.  My wayward guy was already there dressed in his working uniform. We all naturally inquired as to how he got to the ship while it was steaming away from Coronado Island.

He told us he was standing on the dock panting and while he was catching his breath a helicopter started spooling up. On the side of the chopper painted in big white letters was the words USS Constellation. He asked the pilot if he was going out o the ship and the pilot told him that indeed he was. Can I catch a ride out the MT asked and the pilot said he could, off they went.

I never much cared for life on a “Bird Farm” but occasionally there were a few benefits to be had.

Eight months later I ended up driving from San Diego to Seattle for New Construction to be part of the pre-commissioning crew of USS Waddell at Todd Shipyard . This was the beginning of the absolute best part of my eight years in the Navy. I was now a Tin Can Sailor and in the Real Navy.

 

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.

I think therefore I yam

Occasionally I remember the 1980s. Life was much more relaxed back then. Actually 1981 was the worst year of my life. I was diagnosed with cancer. It wasn’t, but it did scare the crap out of me. I was selling apartment buildings in Long Beach and the prime hit 23%. You couldn’t sell ladders in a burning building if the cost of money was 23%. My dad died at age 69 and, oh yah, my marriage failed and it ended in a divorce.

But I got beyond it. I moved aboard my schooner and I started seeing a beautiful girl. By seeing I really mean we were together for over fifteen years. That is longer than I was married to any of my ex-wives. She was gorgeous and had a body to match. Above all, she was one of the nicest persons that I ever met. I had sold my Porsche and bought a new Cadillac.  

It, the Caddie, was like driving the Taj Mahal. Very comfy and spacious and it was a diesel. I almost bought a diesel Mercedes which cost $39,000 back then. I hesitated because I thought to myself  I can afford it but why would I want to throw away that much money? A friend of mine bought a Cadillac Coupe DeVille diesel for $13,000 and I thought, hell I can buy three Caddies for the price of one MB. So I took the KoolAid and for the first 30,000 miles it was wonderful. Then the warranty expired at 30,000 miles and the troubles began but that is for another story and another day.

Back to the girl. We were driving along one day when she offhandly mentioned something about how her Playboy pictures had been stolen a few years back. “Playboy pictures?” I asked. What Playboy pictures? She said “Didn’t you know that I used to be a Playboy Bunny?”  I felt like I had just won the lottery and in fact, I did. She was a bunny at the Playboy Club in Phoenix not a Playmate in the magazine but I thought, close enough for me. As I said, we were together for over fifteen years and rarely was a bad word exchanged between us. After the fifteen years, our love affair had run it’s course. I was a reader, she wasn’t. I was a news junkie, she wasn’t. She wanted to live in a white house with white carpeting and white furniture. We both knew that I would get dirt and grease stains on all of that white.

By now, I had started building and rebuilding plastics machinery and the very nature of my work was an ongoing source of dirt and grease. Both of my boys were  now living with me on the schooner which reduced our privacy to almost nonexistent. Pretty soon Miss D got an apartment at the Lafayette in downtown Long Beach and we saw each other mostly on weekends after that. Ever so slowly we eventually drifted apart. She married some other guy who I didn't much care for and then I found out she didn't warm up to the role of punching bag and left the guy. I resumed my hobby of carving notches on my bedpost for a few years and eventually married a TWA flight attendant. That is also another story.

A few years ago Dos Equis beer had a search for a new Most Interesting Man in the World and I thought that if I wasn’t the most interesting man in the whole, I must be pretty close, so I submitted my name. I was sent a questionnaire with about one hundred questions on it. All but maybe two of their questions were not at all germane to being anything but dull.

Sometimes when I have a buzz on, I think about what it would have been like to be recognized as The Most Interesting Man in the World. I then think I probably am in the top 1%.

Step right up sailor, do I have a car for you

We had two 96 hour weekends while attending Guidedmissileman A School in Virginia Beach. The first time I hitchhiked from VB to Cleveland a grand distance of  582 miles traveling by thumb. As I recall, that trip was over Thanksgiving weekend and standing beside a road at two in the morning got pretty damned cold. The leg between VB through the Smoky Mountains from Richmond to the Pennsylvania Turnpike was cold and dreary but there was no competition for a ride.

That all changed when I got to the turnpike the place was rife with other servicemen wanting rides. I turned the dial on my charm and cunning control up to a setting of ten and was on my merry way in short order. The last ten miles were probably the hardest because most people in Northern Ohio weren’t going six hundred miles in their cars. I remember walking the last five, or so, miles.

I was surely not going to rely on my thumb to return and risk becoming AOL. I took my first long distance bus ride back. As bad as thumbing up from Virginia was, riding a Greyhound bus for six hundred miles back was almost as bad.

Christmas time offered another 96 hour liberty and I had no desire to hitchhike six hundred miles back to Northern Ohio in the dead of winter. I located a sailor who was being transferred via MATS, Military  Air Transport Service, to Holy Loch Scotland and had to sell his 1953 Ford Convertible. I ended up buying this classic auto for $35. Of course in 1960 a 1953 Ford hadn’t made it to the classic car list quite yet.

There were two guys that I knew who offered me $50 each for a ride to Pittsburg and another from Akron who ponied up another $50. Me and the Ford limped into Northern Ohio one evening and I was able to nurse the car to the local junk yard and got $50 for the little beauty. Let’s see. I made $165 minus gas money and made it home for the holidays.

In February, we flew to LAX for Terrier BT3 C School at the General Dynamics factory in Pomona where I bought a 41 Ford Business Coupe for $50 and sold for $75 in May when I was posted to Southern Indiana.

Maybe I should have gotten out and sold used cars but I had bigger fish to fry.

Angus

In 1971 I met an Englishman named Angus. He was a real ambitious go-getter. He said being I knew a lot of tailors in Hong Kong we should contact them and start importing their suits. I love it when people say “we should”, what they really mean is why don’t you, meaning me. Angus was above that type of person however and when I told him that I didn’t save their addresses and phone numbers, he just shrugged. When I saw him on the very next day, he produced a Hong Kong Yellow Pages, truth be told, in Hong Kong the business phone directory is the Pink Pages. When I asked him where he got the book, he told me that he had gone to the Hong Kong consulate And asked for one and he was simply handed a copy.

I had remembered the names of the tailor shops that I had used in Hong Kong and so I wrote them and told them that we wanted to represent them in SoCal. I received via airmail a few days later style books and material swatches.

We could buy suits from Hong Kong for $30 USD. We could get 3 custom made shirts for $10 and custom made shoes also for $10. We had to measure the customer like real tailors and tell the tailors what material was desired and also what style number out of the style book. Our sell price was $100 which was a tidy profit for us and a deal for the customers. FYI the Chinese tailors pride themselves as being the best in the world and their clothes are simply beautiful. We sold the three shirts for $45 and the shoes for $50. We would have the customer stand on a piece of light cardboard and trace their foot and then trace their other foot on the flip side of the cardboard. We would tell the tailors what kind of leather, or suede, the customer wanted and include a picture of the style of shoe by including a photo clipped out of a magazine such as Playboy or Esquire. Shipping costs were extra and could be shipped by mail or air express.

We then branched out into other endeavors. The next was addressing machines. Angus’ day job was selling addressing machines. His cheapest machine was about $200 and the top of the line machine was about $650. The $200 machine was a hand cranked model that had to be plugged in to kick the address cards through. The $650 number looked just like the cheapy but was all electric. When I took the side cover off of the two machines they were almost identical inside. For about $75 I could mount a motor to the pre-drilled holes and put on two sprockets and a ladder chain and we had a $650 machine to sell. We got a cease and desist letter  in the mail which we ignored. A few weeks later two guys showed up at our office and asked if Angus was around. I told them he wasn’t and didn’t know where he was or when he would be back. After they left, I called Angus up and told him two cops came in and were looking for him. He asked me if they showed me their badges and I said no. He wanted to know why I thought that they were cops and I told him that I knew a cop when I saw one. About an hour later the two gents came back and showed me their FBI credentials. The ID was signed by J Edger Hoover and I asked if their IDs were valid. They asked me what was I talking about and blew a fuse when I asked “Isn’t he dead”. They then asked me if I would try to contact Angus. I said I’d try and so I called Angus back and told him they were back. He asked me to put one of the guys on the phone and I told one of them to pick up an extension phone. I stayed on the listen and heard Angus ask them if they had a warrant. They said no they didn’t have one and Angus then yelled into the phone “Then get out of my fu#@ing store. We never heard from the Feds again. Things were going well and before long we got into the direct mail business. We bought a Phillipsburg envelope inserter machine. This mechanical monster could insert four different pieces of mail into an envelope at about 3500 pieces per hour. Our largest customer was an educational film company that was a division of  Columbia Pictures. We had the names and addresses of every middle and high school teacher in the USA. The list was separated by subject. One list for math teachers another for English teachers another for science teachers. The lists were very complete and comprehensive. Each teacher’s subject utilized different inserts according to the subject.

One day we had an emergency meeting with the educational company. The type setter missed a very important feature of their first class postage return cards. “Junk mail” goes out postage paid third class mail. We would bundle all of the mail going to a certain zip code with rubber bands. The bundle wouldn’t be opened until it arrived at it’s post office.  This saved the post office a lot of the handling and also saved the mailer, us, a ton of money. When the prospective was finally opened, the mail carriers would then deliver the advertisements. The return path is somewhat different. A customer checks off his interests and puts the bingo card back into the mail. The postage return cards come back to the advertiser as first class mail. The post office bundles up the reply cards and if there are 100 reply cards in the bundle and if first class postage is 47 cents there is $47 postage due. The office pays the postage due and the mailman gives them the bundle. The reason for this lengthy dissertation is this. The way the sorters at the US Mail know a card is first class postage return is there are eight bars printed under the permit. The cards come whizzing by at a speed faster then they can be read but the bars can still be discerned.

There were one million cards with no bars and it would take weeks to send them back to the printers, get them corrected and get them back. We did the only honorable thing and offered to buy a used printing press and print bars. At a profit of course. We located a used ATF Chief offset press. I learned how to print bars and kept ahead of the mailings and we were heroes. In addition to all of the other tasks we had we were now in the printing business.

Not that we didn’t have enough on our plates we also went into the mail order vitamin business. We ran an ad in the classified ads in the back of the   LA Times Sunday Magazine. The orders came rolling in. We had a private label vitamin company  in Texas and had to put on more people to fill the orders.

As it is said, all good things must come to an end. I walked into the office one fine morning and EVERYTHING was GONE. The inserting machine, the printing press, the type setting gear, the desks. EVERYTHING. The phones were sitting on the floor and the unmailed stock was in the storeroom. It took me a few weeks to find out that Angus had sold EVERYTHING in the middle of the night and have it hauled away. I found out from his estranged wife that he also had grabbed his two kids and blew town with them.

It will be a cold day in hell before I get involved in a business partnership again.

The Delights of Mexico City

Lunchtime in Mexico isn’t a sandwich at your desk affair, at least to the managers. Every day for about two hours they would go to “The Club”. The first day, after we were seated at our big table they, my hosts the managers, being very gracious, told me I should order first. I felt like a big shot so I ordered a steak. They all looked at me and said with  incredulous voices and said “And before?” I asked before what. They said before the steak. I found out quickly that lunch to the managers of Mexican industry is a two hour event. It is like dining in Italy or France. Lunch is at least four or five courses. I was afraid of getting sick by eating too much in Mexico and one of the managers suspected so. I forget his name now but I remember his English was limited but his Spanish accent was nothing short of beautiful. I asked him why that was so and he told me he studied at the University of Lyon at Guadalajara Mexico and acquired a slight French accent. He told me that his company sent him up to Canada on business about twice a year. He told me that at first he would get sick as a dog in Canada. Not unlike Montezuma’s revenge. The Canadians explained to him that all fresh uncooked produce has bacteria on it. If you eat a salad or something else with raw veggies in it, the local bacteria on it will dual it out with the resident bacteria already in your gut. He told me to wait a few days to give your innards time to acclimate to the new germs in town and I would be fine. So I did and so I was.

I became pretty close to Ulrich down there. Ulrich was the corporate process engineer for Celanese Mexicana. When he first introduced himself to me I asked him “Ulrich?” He replied “Si”. And you’r Mexican and again he replied si.  Of course he was screwing with me. He explained that his father had emigrated to Mexico but never mastered the Spanish language so his family spoke German at home. He had an Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Texas so he spoke English like a college graduate and of course he spoke Spanish where he lived. I asked Ulrich what language he thought in because I read that without language there is no thought. He chuckled and said “Let me think about that”. He told me that being a Mexican living in Mexico his everyday thinking was in Spanish. He said however that German was a far better langue for science and engineering and English was the best language for business thinking. Sometimes when working, we would switch from Spanish to English to German. We did it to mainly to keep the locals a bit off balance.

On my first trip I flew down on Western Airlines. The good folks said it was too bad, that I should have taken a Mexican airline. On my second trip I took their advice and flew down on Mexicana. I would go down on Sundays so I would be sharp and not jet lagged. When I boarded, I was greeted by a gorgeous, smiling flight attendant. After I was seated a girl came by and asked whether I  wanted a Mexico City newspaper or a Sunday LA Times. As an aside, being Mexico is a “very democratic country” the airplane is a classless configuration. The whole plane has a first class feeling to it. After I was handed my paper, I was asked if I wanted a complimentary beer or wine. After the plane took off we were served a very nice dinner with more beer or wine. Included with the meal was a four pack of Marlboro cigarettes. Being I was still a smoker back then I felt that this was  a very nice touch. After the meal a gong was heard and the Fasten Seatbelts sign came on. I thought oh shit this damned Mexican plane is going down. It was, however it was supposed to as we were landing already. I could have enjoyed a few more hours up there. I was put up at a hotel in the Zona Rosa, The Pink Zone, across from The Palice of Fine Arts the home of the Ballet Folklórico de México. After that, it was adios Western Air.

On weekends Ulrich showed me the sights of Mexico City of which he was very proud of. Mexican architects back then were some of the most creative in the world. In his Celanese office building for instance the elevators only stopped at every fourth floor. This was because when you walked to a corner of the floor you were on there was either a few steps that went up or down depending which way you were walking. This continued all of the way up the building. If you were on a north facing floor you had to go up four times before you were facing north again. Hence the four floor skipping of the elevator(s).

The Mexicans were the best hosts ever. Every night they would take me out on the town, either alone or in mass. One night it was an indoor Mexican rodeo with an intermission of two piano players playing black and white grand pianos on tall pedestals. The guy playing the black piano had on a white tuxedo and the guy in the black tuxedo played the white piano.

Each evening they would endeavor to out do last night’s outing. I had some of the best times of my life in Mexico City. One day I went to lunch with one guy who wanted me to taste the pork knee at this German restaurant. When the waiter brought the menus there was a card printed in Spanish paperclipped to the menu.  My host looked at the card and smiled and told me he knew what he was having. It was what was on the card. I asked him what it was and he told me I wouldn’t be interested. When the food came out, his dish looked like it had Rice Krispies on it. He put some Rice Krispies on a tortilla put some raw onion and hot sauce on it and devoured it with great obvious pleasure. OK, I asked, “What is that?” He explained that very occasionally when harvesting  agave they find worms in a plant.

Condor Airlines and Eurail Passes

In 1975 I bought two round trip tickets on Condor Airlines to Frankfort through the German/American Club. A round trip ticket through the club only cost $379 back then. I told Brigetta, my German girlfriend, that I was somewhat leery of flying on some airline that I never heard of. She said if they can afford 747s they can't be that bad. I also bought two Eurail Passes. I received the passes in the mail and there was a little window cut out of the lamination where they would write in the date that we started using the passes which were only good for five weeks.

Brigetta flied to Frankfort a week before me and so I went to the Imperial Terminal at LAX at 2 o'clock in the morning. There out on the tarmac sat this 747 which had the same type fonts as Lufthansa on it's side and the bird on it's tail had it's wings extended up as opposed to Lufthansa's bird with downward wings. It turned out that Condor was Lufthansa's charter subsidiary. Most everyone on the flight were German nationals and spoke little English which was OK with me because I got to practice my newly learned German. Actually my German was actually Swabish a dialect from the Schwarzwald, Black Forest. The flight was very nice considering the airplane was tourist class  configured.

When the plane touched down in Frankfort, practically everyone on the plane applauded and broke out singing German songs. I got goosebumps on my arms. It was so moving being on the soil of my fatherland. I picked up my bags at the carousel and went through a set of double doors and was outside. No customs or immigration. I really wasn't used to that. 

Brigetta and Helmut her brother-in-law picked met me outside and we climbed into his BMW and got on the Autobahn. We drove about an hour and a half and ended up at Bad Wimpfen, Brigetta's home town. Bad Wimpfen is a picture postcard kind of town with a very old wall running through the town separating the five hundred year old section from the two hundred year old "new section". Brigita's mother had a three story house that was broken up into four, apartments. We ended up sleeping on the second floor. 

The next morning I woke up to some clanking outside our window. When I looked out I saw some guy unloading a plastic crate off of a flat bed truck. I asked Brigetta what was going on. She told me that she had told her mother that I was fond of my beer so while we were staying there she was having "the beer man" making deliveries. "Beer man? " I asked. You mean like a milk man? I was starting to really like this place. I would go to the bakery and pickup fresh bread and try out my German speaking skills. I didn't speak high school German like the typical tourist. I actually spoke Swabish like they did only I got looks like maybe I was a bit retarded. I really liked it there.

Finally after a week, or so, we went down to the train station and boarded a train to Koln, Cologne in English. The train conductor filled in the date in the little cut out window and we were on our way. For the next three weeks we roamed all around Europe. After a day's sight seeing, we'd go down to the train station and scan the big board and say things like "If we take the train to Venice we can get a full night's sleep on the train and not have to pay for a hotel room and be ready to play tourist the next day". Which we did most of the time. In the next three weeks we only stayed overnight in Rome, Paris, Barcelona and Amsterdam. These were places that merited more than a superficial stay. All in all we were in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Monaco, Spain, France, Belgium, Holland and maybe a few more countries that I forget right now.

We ended up back in Bad Wimpfen and spending more than a few nights drinking bier with Helmut at the local gasthauses, or taverns. Germany will ruin a poor boy from Cleveland. The good news is it's delicious. The bad news is you can't get it in the USA. The Becks and Lowenbraus you get here aren't even close to the real things.  I think it's due to the alcohol level. The bier in Germany is 14% alcohol which must rum some Sunday School teachers the wrong way. 

When we were to return to the USA, we didn't have contiguous seats on the airplane. Brigetta told the flight attendant, in German, that we wanted to set together on the flight home. The flight attendant took both of our tickets and said "stand over there". As people boarded the  airplane she scanned tickets for where they were sitting. All of a sudden she snatched a ticket out of this guy's hand and said "sit here" and handed him one of our tickets. The guy said OK and went back too his new seat. She handed us our tickets and we flew back to LAX up in the dome of the 747.

But wait, there's more.

Yesterday I posted on Facebook:

Not all, not the majority, not even most but too many cops are out and out bullies. I don't buy this obvious overreaction of the day but I do endorse the reshaping the mindset of police departments to stop throwing their weight around and thinking that cops are above the law.
Of course black lives matter but so do brown lives and red lives and even Asian lives and dare I say it? So do white lives. The problem, as I see it, is too many cops let their powers of authority go their heads and act like demigods.
Let us not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I do speak the truth.

Last night, while watching the 11 PM  news which I mainly do as a matter of habit. I am breaking that habit because I am sickened of watching what is going on in the world. Last night there was video of  cops trying to keep the peace. There must have been thirty officers in the frame with 18 inch clubs pushing back at the unruly crowd. There was one, and only one,  cop hitting the people. He  didn’t take a swing at some particularly quarrelsome  guy, he was swinging away like some old time wheat harvester with a scythe. He continued nonstop beating folks the whole time he was on camera.

These are the guys that need and I say need, to be removed from the ranks. It is not a question of reducing police powers. It is a method of preserving the honor of the police.

This cop who probably murdered Mr. Floyd had been brought up on charges  of brutality seventeen times. Seventeen times !!! And each and every time he received , at worst, a slap on the hand. He, no doubt, had developed a mindset that he could literally get away with murder and you know what, he almost did.

As a veteran, I understand the code of silence, but there are limits.

The captain of my ship when ordered by an admiral to fire white phosphorus into a Vietnamese orphanage because the Viet Cong were using the place as a safety zone, faced extreme pressure from the powers above for refusing to follow orders but was ultimately exonerated because it was the right thing to do.

Right is right and wrong is wrong it is pretty much a binary situation. There is very little gray area between the two. An organization who spends a great amount of time, money and effort to cover cop’s asses to matter what the situation needs a complete overhaul from top to bottom and back to top again.

In the final analysis, there isn’t much difference between the police and a street gang. Except the cops get more and better guns.

I’ll probably get a bomb tossed through my front window for saying all of this and I won’t even  know which side threw it.

But

STREETCARS & COAL FURNACES

In the stone age, IE pre-1950. Life was a bit different. There was much less automobile traffic because there was much more public transportation. There was a streetcar line a half block from our house. Because of their electric propulsion, they were nonpolluting. You didn’t have to find a parking place for your streetcar and there were no gasoline, insurance and maintenance costs. It’s a damned shame that all of  that went away.

In the winter in Cleveland, after a snowfall, there were even streetcars equipped with snow plows. During those cold cold Cleveland winters, our houses needed to be heated. Back then, the primary source of heat was from coal. Every so often, the house had to be replenished with coal, which was bought by the ton. A truck would back up to the house , put out a chute and deposit the coal in your coal bin. When it got cold and in Cleveland, it got very cold, the man of the house would have to shovel some coal into the furnace. This was called “man’s work”. It was very rigorous physical labor. I am told that my grandfather died of a heart attack while shoveling coal into the furnace. At night, the fire had to be banked to ensure the presence of hot coals the next morning. Coal furnaces stunk up the entire neighborhood and caused severe air pollution. Coal smoke even caused many deaths in London after WW2 and because it is foggy in England that is where the term Smog was coined. By the early 1950s most houses’ furnaces were converted to gas heat.

In the late 1940s we had an ice box, not a refrigerator. Every few days the iceman would cometh and come right into our house through the back door and load a fresh block of ice into the box. We also had milkmen back then. Every few days a milkman would come up the driveway and put our order into the milk chute. Telephones only had seven digit phone numbers. If you wanted to make an expensive long distance call, you had to dial zero for a telephone operator and tell her where you wanted to call. She would then connect you to a long distance operator who would connect you to a local operator who would then connect you to your “party”. Speaking of parties, if you wanted to save money on the telephone, you could get a party line. A party line meant that there would be several other “parties” or subscribers on your line. You would have a distinctive ring to know that an incoming call was for you. The other party(s) could also snoop and listen in to your calls. The telephones had dials until the early sixties when “Touch tone” was introduced. My aunt actually had a phone without a dial. You would pick up the “receiver” and wait for an operator to come on the line and then tell her what number you wanted to call. When referring to operators, I keep saying her because, back then, they were all females.

All cars had stick shifts and none were air-conditioned. Half of the cars didn’t have radios in them and all of the radios in the cars were AM. The heaters in most cars really sucked and barely kept you from freezing to death. By the early fifties, a lot of the new cars had “two tone” paint jobs. You were really cool if your car had whitewall tires.

People didn’t stray too far from home back then. A vacation usually consisted of a less than two hundred mile trip in the family car to some crappy campground. Any trip of over twohundred miles was usually taken on a train and hardly anyone except the very rich flew on an airplane.

No TV until about 1948 when the neighbors bought a set with a six inch screen and there was nothing being broadcasted most of the time but test patterns. No TV dinners to heat in non-existing microwave ovens. We went to the movies a lot. There was a theater, The Rex, half a block away down at the corner. There was also a market down at the corner. Not a supermarket but a market which sold mostly canned food and had bulk Oreo and Fig Newton cookies out of bins. To buy meat, you went to a butcher’s market which were everywhere.

My dad worked at Republic Steel as a maintenance electrician and was paid on Fridays. We would go to the corner bar around the corner and across the street from my grandma’s house to cash his check. Friday evenings were fish fry night in Ohio and I still love the taste of fresh water perch which I rarely get on the West Coast. Bars back then could sell 3.2% alcohol beer to eighteen year olds and when I turned 18, it was a big thrill for me to have a few beers at a bar with my dad. Being I had been a regular customer, or my dad had, the bar tenders would slip me 6% beers sometimes.

When I was fourteen most of the boys in the hood had Whizzer moterbikes  or a motor scooter and when I got my Cushman a law was passed in Ohio that fourteen year olds could  get a restricted motor-driven cycle license which was limited to five horsepower. A round yellow decal had to be affixed to the rear fender to notify the cops that you were legal. Of course somehow a lot of cycles over five HP started sprouting the stickers.

Cleveland, to me, is like New York. It’s a nice place to visit but I’m glad I don’t live there anymore. Cleveland and ex-wives are wonderful fodder for jokes. All I have to say is it’s just like Cleveland or just like an ex-wife and I get some chuckles.

The Lake Erie & Pittsburgh Railroad

When I was a kid we used to play on the train tracks. The tracks were about a half mile away across the “field”. I could watch the trains from my bedroom window and trains and airplanes stirred up the juices inside me to travel and see the world. When I was eleven years old most of the trains which were all freight trains had steam locomotives. By the time that we moved five years later they were practically all diesel powered.

All of the locomotives said New York Central Railroad on their sides so quite naturally I thought that it was the NYCRR that was over there. Sixty years later, while cruising through Google during this Covid 19 virus quarantine, I discovered a map that showed that the line was called The Lake Erie & Pittsburgh Railroad not to be confused by the Erie & Pittsburgh RR or the equally confusing Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad.  

The Lake Erie & Pittsburgh Railroad was a “paper” railroad which means it didn’t have any rolling stock of it’s own and was basically owned by NY Central.

When we were little snotnoses, we could put an ear to the rail and hear the chugging of a steam locomotive. Later on, when they started using steam turbine and diesels, things got a bit dicier.  The newer locos didn’t have the pounding sound that carried through the rails and a few times as we were listening we nearly got run over by a damned old train.

I still love trains to this day and would be happy to jump on one without reservation. As I’ve said time and time again, I love all forms of transportation trains, planes, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, ships and boats.

It is much harder to hit a moving target.

COLLISION AT SEA

We refueled every other night while up north in the Gulf of Tonkin off of the coast of North Vietnam. We got pretty proficient at nighttime underway refueling after awhile as practice makes perfect. 

In February of 1966 we came along side of USS Navasota, a fleet oiler, to refuel. We came alongside at about 2330, 11:30 PM, to refuel. I was on my condition three watch station up in the gun director the highest manned point on the ship as Gun Director Officer. Being we were refueling there was a zero probability of  any firing of our guns and it gets really cold way up there in the gun director, even in Vietnam, I elected to climb down off of my perch and try to keep warm inside of the director. I had the 8 to 12 watch and was due to be relieved at 2345 as is standard Navy custom but watches are not changed in the middle of underway evolutions so I made myself as comfortable as possible. About 0030, half past midnight, I felt the ship speed up as she broke away from the port side of the oiler.

Almost immediately, I felt the ship shudder and lean over to port as she would in a high speed turn. Up in the gun director, there is a gyrocompass repeater. The compass didn’t show any change in course. I asked myself  how can we be in a high speed turn and not change course? The answer is obviously it is an impossibility. I slid open my little hatch and stuck my head outside. By then, we were laying dead in the water. I looked around and saw much white light and what looked like a partial cutaway profile of a ship.

During all of this time I hadn’t heard one word on the primary battle circuit which the gun director is on. I asked “Did the Bass hit us?” The Bass was what we called USS Brinkley Bass our running mate who was refueling off of the starboard side of the oiler, Tanker. The telephone circuit went crazy with things like “Where the hell have you been?” and other excited remarks.

I obviously had been up in the director the whole time but there were a few things that happened, and didn’t happen. As we broke away from the tanker most everyone noticed a 2250 ton destroyer heading right for us at twenty, or so, knots. The Officer of the Deck told the helmsman to make a hard left turn and told the Boatswain's Mate of the Watch to sound the collision alarm and pass the word to “standby for a collision to starboard” over the 1MC, the ships public address system. The 1MC has several switches on it. There is a below deck switch, a topside switch, an officer’s country switch and an engineering switch foor the snipes down in the boiler rooms. In his anxiety, the BMOTW only turned on the below decks switch. To half of the crew the event was a completely unexpected surprise.

The guys going on the midwatch were down in the mess deck getting a bite of midrats, midnight watch evening snack. When they heard the word to standby for a starboard collision all heads swiveled to the right and they watched the bow of a destroyer come through the bulkhead, wall. Everyone else was dazed and confused. The CPO quarters were on the starboard side of the ship and all of the chiefs headed to port. They ran into the officer’s country which was on the port side and opened the first door to go out on the port deck. Trouble was the first door was a stateroom and the officer who was not on watch was on his bunk reading a book. His door burst open and a half dozen CPOs ran into his room, looked around, swore like sailors and ran out. The poor lieutenant had no clue at that point of time of what the hell was going on. The snipes down in the hole didn’t also know anything until the shit hit the fan. Fortunately our ship was very new and made of  better steel than the WW2 era Bass. The bass just bounced off of our hull.

The Captain was in his sea cabin when he realized something was amiss before the collision. He ran onto the bridge and hollered “I have the con” and ordered a hard turn to starboard to deflect the imminent blow of the other ship and then we went to General Quarters, battle stations. We were pretty uneasy about whether we would sink in the middle of the night.   

The next morning I was back on my 0800 to 1200 condition three watch in the gun director. A few damagecontrolmen from Navasota the oiler had been heloed to Bass in the middle of the night to lend a hand with keeping the ship afloat. In the morning, they were being heloed back to Navasota. They went right over Waddell and about five miles ahead the helicopter went into the drink. The OOD on watch ordered flank, wartime full, speed ahead. The captain had been up all night assessing the condition of his ship and had just hit his rack when the ship speeded up. He ran out on the bridge and asked “What the hell is going on”? The OOD told him that a helo went down ahead of us and we were going into recovery mode. Once again the captain hollered “I have the con” and ordered all engines stopped. The OOD was confused and asked why. The captain replied that we had just experienced a collision and we had no real idea of the extent of our damage. If we were to scream up to the crash sight and back the engines down hard, it could shake the ship apart. So we coasted right through the crash site and watched 12 wet sailors  swim for their lives to get away from our moving ship.

Being I was up in the director, I could see most everything clearly and helped direct the rescue by another helicopter. Twelve went down and only nine were saved. They were flown over to the nearest aircraft carrier and checked out in sick bay, given a few shots of medicinal brandy and put on another chopper to go home.

For the second time that day, I watched them fly over us to get back to their ship. For the second time that day, I watched the chopper go down. We were much closer to this crash site and a got a good view of the whole FUBARed mess. The bird settled into the water but then it rolled to port. The blades were still slowly turning and when they hit the water the blades ripped the top of the bird off. I couldn’t actually tell how many got out of this second crash of the day but when a third chopper hovered over them and dropped a sling down, they gave the helo the finger. There was an ocean going tug out in the gulf to screw with the Russian trawler who used to try to screw with us and the guys in the drink pointed to the tug. That was the last helicopter ride that they were going to take that day.

After all of this excitement with the collision and the helo crashes several times somebody would say “What else can go wrong?” and everybody would holler, “Don’t ask, we don’t want to know?

Ballet

During this Covid quarantine I have been falling asleep later and later. In the good old days, I usually drift off between 2330 and midnight but now I find myself lying awake after 0200. I sleep with the TV on all night so I switch to KCET at 0200 to put on Classic Arts Showcase. I find the classical music that is on it soothing and calming. The music helps me put my brain in standby.

A portion of what they air is ballet and even though I thoroughly enjoy the music, I find the, so called, dancing downright silly. All of that prancing and jumping around make me ask myself what I’m missing. Myself always answers that I am asking the wrong person that he doesn’t get it either.

 My first wife loved ballet and I felt that I was obliged to occasionally take her to performances. This was OK with me but, as I explained to her, I’ll just sit here with my eyes closed and enjoy the music, which I did. I know that I am treading on thin ice when I mention this but I find synchronized swimming even sillier. The worst part is there is no music to distract you.

I know that the Russian people absolutely love Ballet which I find paradoxical due to the perceived brutishishness of their  nature. They also love poetry which also makes me ponder this apparent absurdity. I must also go on record as a self professed intellectual. That I am not a fan of poetry. When I am reading something and the author inserts what he, or she, perceives to be some relevant bit of poetry, the passage is always indented somewhat and my eyes automatically jump down past the indention. I have tried to at least read some even though I don’t really get poetry and it just isn’t in me. It’s not residing in my DNA.

Maybe as a child I was frightened or bit by a rabid poet.

As Popeye was fond of saying “I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam”.

Maybe it’s a sailor thing?