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?

Hesitant Pirate

I always have fancied myself as a latter day pirate.  One of my favorite songs is Jimmy Buffett’s  A Pirate Looks At Forty.

Yes I am a pirate, two hundred years too late
The cannons don't thunder, there's nothin' to plunder
I'm an over-forty victim of fate
Arriving too late, arriving too late

After my eight plus years in the Navy, I like going to sea and I like being at sea. Sailing into port after a long voyage is bItter sweet. You’re back to where you live, but you’re not back home. Home, to me, is at sea. Some swab somewhere said that  the sea is a cruel mistress. But I don’t feel that way at all. She is a mistress of that you can make book on, but I don’t find her cruel. Like any woman that I’ve ever been around, she is demanding and unforgiving, but cruel, I don’t think so.

Anyway to help propagate my swashbuckling image, I drink rum. Mostly wine or beer but when there witnesses, it has to be rum.  I used to drink that cheap ass rotgut $10 a half gallon stuff but now my palate has grown up and I like a better quality quaff. I buy, or should I say stock up on Bacardi when it is on sale being the parsimonious old bastard that I am. My son David brings me Nicaraguan or Cuban rum  back from his Central American surfing safaris. That and eight year old rums are great for sipping. My friend Scott favors me with a bottle of Pyrate Rum every now and then and then I am really in my element.

The one thing that has been the missing link is my cigars. I buy them online by the bundle or box. Now don’t get the idea that I am a rum soaked cigar smelling old pervert. Maybe I am sort of but not totally. I smoke maybe two cigars a month and a bottle of the good rum lasts me for about nine months. I have made the greatest discovery of the twenty first century, ranking up there with a cure for cancer and where the other sock goes after coming out of a dryer.

Hesitant Pirate cigars. Big deal you may think, who cares you may say. I do. I can sit up on my fly bridge with a glass of rum and a Pirate cigar and survey my whole world during this Covad 19 horse crap. I don’t care if it rains or freezes as long as I have my plastic Jesus riding on the dashboard of my boat. 

 

 

Ultra-large crude carriers (ULCC)

Lots of people talk about the super tankers in Long Beach harbor. The fact of the matter is very few people have ever seen a super tanker. Certainly not in Long Beach or LA harbors. The reason is that the really big boys, the Ultra Large Crude Carriers, ULCC, draw 82 feet of water and the channels into the harbors are dredged to maintain 53 feet.

Most all of the so called super tankers ply between The Middle East and Europe or Asia. Back in the late 1970’s because of the oil shortage here in the USA some ULCC’s came to SoCal. Because of their enormous drafts, they would anchor near where the undersea shelf drops off. This is about ten miles off shore which is where the oil platforms  Edith, Elly, Ellen and Eureka are. This is a good anchorage for a big ship. The depth to the bottom is about 50 to 60 fathoms, about 300 to 350 feet.

While at anchor out there the tankers that can fit into the LB, LA channels come out and the oil is pumped from the big guy to the smaller ship. This is called lightering in our world.

The size of a ship is generally determined by it’s displacement. A ULCC displaces 500.000 tons. The “smaller” tankers are in the 80 to 100,000 ton category.

As a comparison, the aircraft carrier that I was stationed on in 1963-64 USS Constellation was a super carrier and was then the largest ship in the world. You could place both the Queen Mary and the Queen Elisabeth on her flight deck and nothing would hang over and Connie displaced a mere 83,000 tons or 166 million pounds.

We used to see those big ships out there transferring massive tons of crude oil on our way to Catalina back in the late 1970’s but like a lot of other interesting things, those days are over.

UFOs

It was 1974 and I was living the LA suburban dream. I had a house with a pool near the foothills of Glendora. I had a 22 foot trailerable sailboat in the drive and a Norton Commando in the attached garage. There was a few notable things missing however namely my wife of twelve years who had moved out with literally without any warning with our five year old son. But I was, as they say, moving on with my life.

My friend Denny Moore had come over one evening to sample some of the wine I had just made. We were standing at my front door saying our good byes when it flashed by. It was a distinct round disk of light. It was not blurry and did not leave a trail like an incoming meteorite would do. I was six years out of the Navy and had spent many many hours tracking aircraft as the gun director officer at condition three off of the coast of Vietnam. Condition three on a ship is relaxed General Quarters. It is three sections of four hour watches which means I spent usually ten hours a day tracking targets. I had radar range and bearing indicators up in the director so I had sharpened my aircraft sighting skills. I determined that the disk of light was no more than three miles away and was moving well over the speed of sound and made no engine sounds. It went into the foothills and there was no report, no bang or boom. It just disappeared. I said to Denny something like holy crap, did you see that? Of course he hadn’t he had his back to the thing.

I am convinced to this day that I actually saw a UFO. OK now that I am a believer, I need some answers. Particularly like where in the hell did it come from? Assuming that Albert Einstein is correct, a very safe conclusion, and the speed of light  which is 186,000 miles per second and the nearest star system is forty light years away, things just didn’t add up. I couldn’t  fathom some intelligent being sitting in his spacecraft for forty years just to come us on Earth staying around for a few months and spending another forty years traveling back again even assuming that the little green man could actually travel at 186,000 miles per second. Which is debatable.

I kicked around this notion for a few years until the answer came to me from the most unlikely source. From the comic strip Brenhilda in The Sunday LA Times. In the strip the owl, naturally he is the smart one, says to another character as they are strolling along “You know some people believe that these aliens are not from another planet. They believe that they are from Earth but from another time.”  Eureka! That was the answer.  That I could buy.

If you hear enough tales of UFO encounters, all of the sighters describe the same thing. Two arms and two legs. A head with twp eyes a nose below the eyes and a mouth under the nose. The are human beings. The likelihood of such similarities of beings from another planet are too far fetched. They don’t have three eyes or four nostrils. They all have two. It is all too much coincidental. This gives me hope that we probably won’t blow us all up in some nuclear mushroom cloud.

The next probable event is contact. Are you ready to meet these folks? I’m not so sure I am ready for that. Besides which, what if they are Democrats or here to sell us some Amway?         

CAB CALLOWAY

My dad who was a five foot eight afraid of nothing, except maybe my mother, outdoors, athletic guy. He actually enjoyed brawling. I can recall as a wee lad watching my dad duking it out with my six foot two ince Uncle Dan, or some other contestant. They would carry on for about ten minutes and then laugh like hell and saunter down to the corner bar for a beer.

When we were in church, during the singing of the hymns, he was the most off key, tone deaf person I have ever met. He seemed to have no inclination, or interest, in music. He did, however have a soft spot for Cab Calloway.

If you don’t know who Cab Calloway is and you probably don’t, I’ll splain. Mr. Calloway was in the words of Wikipedia “Calloway was the first African-American musician to sell a million records from a single song and to have a nationally syndicated radio show. Calloway was a master of energetic scat singing and led one of the United States' most popular big bands from the early 1930s to the late 1940s.”

At the mere thought of Mr. Calloway, dad’s face would light up and he would tell of the antics of Cab. If Rock and Roll was the burr under my parent’s saddles Cab was the equal to my grand parents. There are many films, if you’re interested, on Youtube of Cab struttin’ and being as negro as can be. I say negro because back in that era, black was akin to the N word, a huge insult.

I’m sure that my dad is now ensconced in heaven and is watching Cab Calloway on his laptop or iPad and the Indians. His other loves were hunting, fishing, sports in general and baseball.