HERE WE GO AGAIN

I watched the Democrat's debate and I have to admit that I really like to police chases on TV. It's live TV and you just don't know how things are really going to end up. Will the perpetrator get apprehended,  75% of the time he, or she, will. Will the perp crash and burn, 20% they do. Or will the bad guy vacate the vehicle and tryout for the LA County track team. Another 7% or will I just nod off. I like to watch UFC fighting. These knuckle heads just stand there and beat the crap out of each other. I'm a peaceable man like some movie cowboy used to say but I will watch some other guy take a lickin'. Being I don't have cable TV out here in this quiet little fishing village, I don't get to see it too often. I also like to watch live comedy on TV. Back in the day Saturday Night Live was the bomb.  

The reason I bring these factors up is the debates have all of the above and more. The socialists, Bernie and Elisabeth Warren, started out bashing the millionaire in the White House. Then they realized they had a billionaire right on the same stage with them. That's when the dam burst. It was like watching an Italian family brouhaha. There was  blood everywhere. Bloomberg became the local pinata.  I'll admit I did empathize with Joe Biden. The poor guy was also getting it from all sides. 

My in house political maven maintains that although Bernie is building up a cozy lead but he is scaring the crap out of the DNC. The machine knows beating Trump in November is going to be an impossibility and if the Socialist gets the nomination, they won't stand a chance.

She figures that although Bloomberg  won't get enough votes to secure the nomination, neither will  Bernie. This will throw the Democratic convention into a street fight. I remember the last time that the convention had a big fight for the nomination was 1952. I was a wee laddie of ten years old so I sort of remember it on TV. We didn't have a TV then, but we didn't need one. The neighbors on both sides had their sound turned up full blast. It was a three, or four, day endeavor. It was kind of the same situation. The smart money was betting on Eisenhower beating whoever  became the Dem's nominee. More deals were made in those few days then in the last two years in congress. The winner, or loser depending on your point of view, was Adlai Stevenson. It was like watching Mohamed Ali taking on Helen Keller in the ring. As, I' sure you already know, Ike handily won and became president. 

The French like to say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. So 1956 was like a rerun of Ike verses Adlai and Ike, once again, beat the poor schlumpf.      

If history repeats itself,  we're going to see four more years of The Donald.

Angus the Englishman

In 1971 I met this 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.

Hutterites

Hutterites

According to Wikipedia “are an ethnoreligious group that is a communal branch of  Anabaptists who, like the Amish and Mennonites, trace their roots to the Radical Reformation of the early 16th century.”

I had never heard of Hutterites until I did a job for them a few years ago. They had bought a used three station rotary thermoformer form a company in Syracuse NY. They had me go to Syracuse to take it apart and load it on a flat bed truck. They had paid me $1500 plus travel expenses to disassemble the machine and load it. I told them I would charge them another $1500, plus expenses, to go up to Alberta Canada about thirty miles east of Calgary where their colony was to reassemble it. They said that they would be able to reassemble the machine without any help from me. I said OK but once you touch the machine the $1500 is void.   I can’t be responsible for whatever any other party does to the machine.

Sure enough, two months later they called me and asked me how fast I could get up there. I ended up driving my little motor home up through the Canadian Rockies in the dead of winter with Sadie my faithful  Golden Retriever. We spent about ten days at their colony putting in a new PLC, Programmable Logic Controller, and making other necessary fixes. The Colony was, as I find myself saying often, like being on another planet.

Hutterites unlike their Amish and Mennonite brethren do not own anything but the clothes on their backs. They live in communal apartments, one to a family, and eat in a communal dining hall. All of the men eat first. They are served by the women who also clean up the tables for them. Next the women eat all together and are served by the children who clean up after them and lastly all of the children eat together.

Everyone at the colony dress like the Amish. The men with the all black outfits and beards without mustaches. The boys dress the same as the men except without the beards. The women wear somewhat colorful dresses but like Amish women their dresses are old fashioned with long skirts and they also wear those little bonnets. I lived and slept in my motorhome but dined in one of the apartments with my host family. The apartments didn’t have a kitchen, per se, but they had a sink for cleaning up. Needless to say, they are very neat and clean folks.

While I was there, I was a novelty. It was like the circus had come to town. Id be working and have a feeling that I was being watched. The reason I felt like I was feeling like I was being watched was I was being watched. I’d turn around and there would be a gallery of women and children watching me work. I would be walking my dog and I’d have a gang of kids watching my every move. There wasn’t a single dog in the colony.

The colonies are very profitable due to low overhead and no direct labor costs but all seem to have an auxiliary business endeavor to  help boost up the bottom line. My, our, colony was plastics. There was no televisions in the colony. I had my TV on one evening and the only thing I could receive was a hockey game. I was, after all, in Canada. Once again, I had that feeling that I was being watched and when I looked out the window, I saw a half dozen bearded Hutterite men also watching the game.

There is one telephone in the colony’s office along with the one computer. They do have a few pickup trucks for getting supplies and the few staples that they don’t grow themselves. The young, single men also use the trucks to visit a neighboring colony to go a courtin’.

When a colony gets to too big they go to the local bank and withdraw about twenty million dollars out of their account and buy some more land maybe forty miles away for a new colony. Some of the men  and boys go TAD and   go to the new land and build all of the barns, apartments and other communal buildings. When they are finished, they come back and two lists are made up. An A list and a B list. The night before the big move a slip of paper id drawn out of a hat to see who stays and who goes. If you are on the A list and A was drawn, you’re moving and the B people will stay. Just like that with eight hours notice you learn your fate.

BTW, they speak German on the colonies. I too speak German but what they speak is archaic German. I not only speak modern German, I speak Swabish a dialect. We had some difficulty conversing in German but we could eventually figure it out. Also like all good Germans, they loved their beer. I brought a case of Coors with me which didn’t stand a snowballs chance in hell there. They loved it and it went fast.

Apart from the weird clothes and lack of all of the spiffy things that all of us modern folks consider essential, they are very happy people. They have a provincial teacher come in once a week to teach English and Canadian history which is mostly ignored but they don’t worry about The Bomb or their 401K or what is being worn in Paris. They just plod along feeding their animals and plowing their fields and making the plastic parts that they build.

All in all, it’s not a bad way to live.

LIFE IN THE FAST LANE

After working as an engineer for eight years, I dated and later married my second wife. She was a realtor and she talked me into getting a real estate license and selling apartment buildings. 
I attended Lumbleau Real Estate School at the traffic circle and signed to take the exam at the Ambassador Hotel in LA. The "school" consisted of sitting and listening to some guy read selected passages from the text book. The school knew what questions would be on the test and if you highlighted whatever he read and committed them to memory, you would pass the test. But more on this later.
The now defunct Ambassador Hotel was an older large hotel in LA. It's signature venue there was The Coconut Grove Nightclub. The tests were given in one of the large ballrooms. On the day I took the test there were 3500 people also taking theirs. The allotted time for the test was four hours. After a little over two hours I was finished. I looked around and everyone else was slaving away over their tests. I was all done and was thinking to myself what the hell am I missing. Finally I pushed my chair away from my table and it made a screeching sound. I was the first one finished and everyone else was giving me the eye.
I took my test up to one of the proctors and as I handed it to him he commented to me "Pretty hard, eh?" I said not really and he then asked why did I give up. I said that I didn't give up, that I was finished. He asked if I didn't want to check my answers and I said "No". It took about two weeks to get your exam results back. I was told that if I got a large envelope back that I passed. A number 10 meant that I didn't pass. 
After the test, I was invited to go up to the hospitality suite. At the hospitality suite, I was handed a drink and asked if I remembered any of the questions on the test which I did. By this process the school could basically reconstruct the test for the next batch of up and comers.  
Sure enough my large envelope came in the mail along with a fingerprint card and voila I was now a real estate agent. Not a Realtor mind you but an agent. It was sort of like a fresh newbie out of boot camp as I didn't anything at all about selling real estate.
On my first day at the office I was assigned to the "up desk". This is where most newbies start out. The idea is to answer the phone and if it is a potential buyer to get his, or her, name and phone number. This isn't near as easy as it sounds. 
No sooner than I sat down at the desk  Jessica, a title rep, came in and set up a table with food and champagne. Being I was "at work" some kind hearted soul handed me a glass of bubbly and a sandwich. I thought to myself that I could get used to this gig.
One of the other things that a good apartment house agent does is read the classified ads for apartment for sale by a FISBO, for sale by owner. If you ask intelligent questions the seller will most likely give you answers. You then go out and look at the property. This would become my daily ritual. 
While driving around Long Beach one morning I spotted a 16 unit building that didn't have a sign on it or anything but it spoke to me. I found out who the owner was and called her. She was a nice older lady who had owned the building for over twenty years. I asked her if she would sell it if I brought her a fair offer. She gave me the stock answer that everything was for sale at the right price. She gave me the breakdown of the units and the rents she was collecting and she said that she had no idea what it was worth. I talked to a guy who I knew who was always "looking for a deal" and wrote up an offer. The lady said the building "wasn't worth that much money". It was. She accepted the offer and I had both ends of a sixteen unit building after only four days in the business. All real estate offices, at least in California, have a "board". The board is where you write down a sale that you made or a listing that you had was sold. I had both ends. Suddenly everybody was asking "Who is that guy?"
Not only was I an instant legend but the non-producers in the office would start bringing me deals. Over half of all real estate salespeople in SoCal never really sell anything. But most of them do have an uncle or cousin who wants to buy, or sell, something.  They have a client but have no clue as to what to do. They don't want to admit to any of the old pros in the office that they don't know but the seem to always trust the new guy. I was hitting on all twelve cylinders. 
After a few weeks I located another building that was available for a darned good price but I didn't have enough cash yet to go it alone so I talked to the office manager and showed it to him. It was a deal and he took me to his bank and he borrowed enough for the down payment from the bank for us to buy the building. We not only bought it but the day after escrow closed we put it back into escrow with a new buyer. This was fun. It was also the good old days. About two years later the banks had to stop loaning down payments to buy property. But it was good while it lasted. 
All of my life people were telling me I should get into sales, that I would be good at it. There is sales and then there is professional sales. In the Southern California market, you have to be a professional. Which means you have to get some formal training in your craft. Take closing a sale. Everybody knows what that means but they really don't actually have a clue. Closing isn't really a talent that you are born with. You have to be taught it. It is a defined process. Some are better than others at closing but virtually no one is born with that talent. It's like music. Most all professional musicians have had lessons. Lots and lots of lessons if they want to be any good. I went to classes taught by Tommy Hopkins and Zig Zigler and others. Some were great some wore bad but everyone of them brought something  to the table. 
I paid more in taxes in my first year in real estate then I had earned the previous year. I was driving a Porsche and the wife had a Mercedes. We had bought a duplex with a small house behind it on the very apex of the hill in Belmont Heights. It was huge with a formal dining room, three bedrooms and nine foot ceilings. It also had a big avocado tree in the side yard and I had a small vegetable garden in the back yard.   
Life was a dream until 1981. The worst year of my life. The economy was in a recession and the prime lending rate hit 23%. Try selling income property when the prime is at 23%. Also that year my dad had died and I was diagnosed with cancer. It turned out after waiting weeks for blood tests to be returned I only had Cat Scratch Fever. My marriage fell apart and I found myself a bachelor once again. 
I ended up moving aboard my schooner in downtown Long Beach and peddling second trust mortgages for awhile. The pendulum really does swing back and forth.  I was buoyed up by good friends and fixed up with their cousins, sisters and friends for dates. I was at Avalon one day a year later when I was told that a company called Instrument Laboratory  wanted to talk to me.  But that is another story.

THE FIRST EUROPIAN HOLIDAY

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 doord 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 three, or 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.

 

AFTER EIGHT YEARS IN THE NAVY SUDDENLY I WAS A CIVILIAN

The Navy was fun and exiting but now I had to get serious about things. In the summer of 1967, I took one course at Long Beach City College. I said to myself if I can pass College English, I can make it through college. I had been overseas for the last year and didn't really know how much the world had changed. I had a Navy haircut and donned one of the suits that I had just tailored for me and went to the campus. Was I in for a surprise. Most all of the kids there had longish hair and were wearing tattered blue jeans and shirts. There were a few of us "straight" kids but most of the kids looked like hippies. 

I took the evening summer session course and got an A. Buoyed up by my recent success, I took two more evening courses for the autumn session, College Algebra and Psychology. The ship's navigator was in the Algebra class and I got to thinking about maybe I knew why we went aground at Midway Island. 

Again, I got two more As and ended up on the dean's list. The ship had been in the Long Beach Naval Shipyard for six months so I had a relatively light schedule.  We were scheduled for sea trials and other fun tasks right after Christmas so I had to put my studies on the back burner. I was due to be discharged in March and was planning to go back to Cleveland, please hold your guffawing, so I didn't plan on any more college studying until the spring term.

We drove across the USA with our newborn baby who was born in November. We ended up renting an apartment in this huge four story  complex. I hated it right away. 

I got a job in Cleveland designing nuclear instrumentation at Victoreen Instruments. We bought a house and moved to Cleveland Heights. After unquestionably taking orders in the military for eight years, I kidded that I planned to get fired from my first civilian job. After a year, or so, I came home mid-day and surprised my wife. She asked what I was doing home so early and I told her that I got fired. I had gotten into a verbal altercation with the vice-president of engineering and guess who won and who had lost. 

Two days later, I had a new job at API Instruments in Chesterland. I really liked the job and the people and they seemed to like me. I worked in the laboratory for a year, or so, and then had to go out "into the field" and "put out fires". I really liked being out "in the field" and was placed as a field engineer. One morning in May, I went out to my car to drive to work. It was buried in snow. I had to shovel snow for an hour just to get on slippery snow covered streets to go to work. After eight years of California living, I didn't want to cope with the snow and weather in Ohio. 

In early 1970, I went out to California to assess some problems we were having out there. API come out of nowhere to become the forth largest builder of industrial instrumentation in four short years and some mistakes and learning were made along the way. I did a fine job out in Temple City, Ca and they liked me.They had a so called field engineer at the office but the poor guy was in over his head. He hadn't received the on the job training at the factory that I had and was kind of a bad tempered cuss to boot. Out he went and in I came and the company moved me and my family to California. About the time I came out West, API merged with a Massachusetts based company who had a line of Beta Gauges. Betta Gauges were a non-contact measuring device that used a radioactive isotope to penetrate paper, plastic or metal. The metal gauges actually used a gamma source to penetrate the metals. These gauges measured the materials as they were being manufactured. They also controlled the process to maintain a target thickness. Not only did I take care of these beasts in the eleven western states, I was dispatched to Mexico City, Melbourne Australia, steel mills in Japan and tire plants in Korea. Somewhere along the way, my wife left me because I was gone so much but I was having the time of my life.

 I worked out of my house and traveled all over the world. Win some, lose some. In the summer of 1975, I told the home office that I wanted to take a month off and go to Europe with my German girlfriend. They told me I only had two weeks paid vacation coming so I said that the other two weeks could be unpaid vacation. I was told that I couldn't do that. So I said OK, I quit. They backed down and wished me a safe trip. I bought us 30 day Eurail Passes and we traveled all over Europe.

After I got back, the folks in Massachusetts wanted me to move back to Waltham and I said no. They told me it would pay much better and I told them that the mint hadn't printed enough money yet to induce me to move back to the snow. About the same time, I got a call from Larry my old boss in Ohio. He had moved to Barber-Coleman Co. in Rockford Illinois. He said they would like me to come to the Monterrey Park office and have a talk with them. 

The BC folks were offering me a job as their service manager. I told them that I was relatively happy with my LFE job but I wouldn't mind having the Application Engineer's job. They told me the guy had been with them for twenty six years so don't hold your breath. I went winging off to somewhere and when I got back I had a message from Barber-Coleman on my answering machine. They said that their Application Engineer had upped and quit and moved to Colorado and now they were really in a bind would I still be interested. 

So after six years at API/LFE I moved on down the road. I really liked the job but the people at the office kind of considered me to be a little  too wild and crazy for them. They weren't used to one of their managers commuting to and from work on a motorcycle. 

I then met my second wife and she talked me into selling apartment buildings. 

But that's another story.

 

 

WHAT DID YOU DO FOR A LIVING DADDY?

For the longest time my life took on an eight year cycle.

I was in the US Navy for eight years.

I was an application engineer for eight years.

I sold apartment buildings for eight years and then

I sold industrial controls for eight years.

I then hit my stride and went into business designing 

and building plastics forming machines. I must have liked building machines,  i did that for the next twenty five years. I would probably still be building and selling machines if I didn't have those damned stokes. The first was a real shocker. The second one five years later was very mild by comparison.   

The Navy was my second birth. I took a train to Philadelphia and stayed at the receiving station there for three weeks.

Then it was off to Guided Missileman A School at Dam Neck VA. Dam Neck is a lovely spot  outside of Virginia Beach situated next to The Dismal Swamp and Dismal it is. Eight months later, I flew to Los Angeles to attend Terrier C School at the General Dynamics plant in Pomona. I took to California like a duck to water. I knew that I would eventually settle in California. After 12 weeks in Pomona I got orders to my very first real Navy duty station at Crane Indiana. I joined the Navy to see the world and I was stuck in Southern Indiana. Armed  with all of this knowledge of guided missilery, I made the best of it and after three years in the Navy, I reenlisted for six years. This wasn't as dumb as it sounds. I reenlisted to go to Missile Technician B School. Around 1962, the Navy changed the rate's name from Guided Missileman to Missile Technician. MT B School was, at the time, the most comprehensive school in the Navy. Nuclear Power School was next door to our school at Mare Island in Vallejo and we were detailed to help those guys with their home work. MT B School was essentially a forty hour a week electrical engineering course without the humanities. After nine months of B School, I took the examination foe NESEP. The Navy's Enlisted Scientific Educational Program. This was one hell of an opportunity. When accepted, one had to reenlist for six years and off you went to UCLA or MIT or Northwestern to study engineering. If, after two years, you were still in school, you had to extend for two years. This meant, if you do the math, that in order to get a four year education at a first rate university, you were obliged to serve for four years. A one year to one year trade off. Not bad at all to my way of thinking. 

Being all prepped up at B School, I passed the exam with flying colors. I sat before a board of four Navy Captains for a thorough interview, which I also passed. All I had to do now was go to my first ship and await my orders to to university. Off I went to USS Constellation the biggest aircraft carrier in the fleet at the time. By now, I was a slick arm second, which means that I was a Second Class Petty Officer and didn't even have a hashmark on my arm meaning less than four years of service. After waiting four months to get my results, they came in and I was informed that I wasn't selected. No reason or explanation and I still had five years remaining on my enlistment. I figured, what the hell, I will consider that I am on a lengthy pleasure and just enjoy myself. I made a MidPac cruise, a trip to Hawaii, on the birdfarm, aircraft carrier and when we got back to North Island in Coronado across the bay from San Diego  I received orders to go to Seattle for new construction of USS Waddell. I hated life on the carrier and now I was going to be on a destroyer, a tin can, things were looking up.

I had taken the first class exam on Constellation and a few weeks after arriving in Seattle I was informed that I was now a first class petty officer. A first class Missile Technician on a missile destroyer meant that I was now indeed a big fish in a small pond. This pleasure cruise was turning out to be fun. 

Long story short, we made two WestPac cruises to Vietnam with many stops in Hong Kong, Sasabo and Yokosuka Japan and Subic Bay in the Philippines. We shot over five thousand rounds of five inch gun ammunition and fired a dozen, or so, missiles. 

Late in 1967, after returning from or second WestPac and due to turn around again for a third tour, I thought it out and decided that I would go to college on the GI Bill. While talking to the XO, the Executive Officer, the second in command after the captain I mentioned something about after I get out. Being I was a First Class Petty Officer, it was a given that I was a lifer and was well on my way to my twenty year retirement. The XO almost swallowed his tongue and sputtered "What do you mean getting out? You can't do that." I told him that the Navy had it's chance when, as you can see by looking in my service record, when I applied for NESEP and turned down. I told him I was going to further my education and that is that. 

On 14 March 1968 Waddell shot a Tartar missile at the Pacific Missile Range which I and my guys telemetered and steamed into NAND Seal Beach the next day. I picked up my discharge papers at the personnel office and was piped over the side "Plank owner departing" and I never looked back

Next, adapting to life as a civilian.