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