MEXICO CITY

 In 1972 when I was the 11 Western States Field Technical Representative for the company I then worked for LFE/API I was asked if I would go down to Mexico City to do a startup of a plastics compounding line. This was the beginning of a very rewarding period of my life as I was to end up doing similar startups in Australia,  Japan, Korea and multiple more in Mexico city.

On my first trip to the DF or District Federal as Mexico City is known as in Mexico. I was put up in a very nice hotel in The Zona Rosa, Pink Zone in English, which is in the center of The DF. On my first trip I flew down on a Sunday morning on Western Airlines. The flight down was nothing special just a typical run of the mill flight. I was picked up at the airport by Sergio the plant manager who was a very nice chap but didn't speak fluent English. His Spanish had an odd, to me, tinge to it. It was Spanish but seemed to have a light edge to it. He told me it was probably because he had attended The University of Lyon (France) at Guadalajara.  We stopped at a Spanish cantina and had a few beers and I learned about Tapas. There were two white enamel gas ranges with pots simmering on every burner. 

Later on he dropped me off at my hotel and told me that Urich Sander the Superintendent of Instrumentation for Celanese Mexicana would be coming by at six PM to take me around the city to show me around town. I had a hard time understanding the name of the guy through Sergio's accent and asked him to write down the guy's name because it sounded more like a German name then Spanish. Sure enough, he wrote down Ulrich Sander. 

At six sharp the was a knock on my door and I opened it up to Ulrich who quickly became a very good friend. Are you Ulrich? I asked. And your Mexican? I asked. Si, he replied. It turned out that Ulrich's father had immigrated from Germany and could never get a handle on Spanish so German was spoken at home. Being Ulrich was a Mexican he spoke Spanish outside of home. He also got a BS in Electrical Engineering for The University of Texas at Austin so he spoke English like an American university graduate, which he was. This was an ongoing source of fun for the both of because I was conversant in German and could muddle through Spanish  like any good Californian back then. Often he and I would start talking  in Spanish in the factory and then switch to German midsentence and then finish up in English. We had endless fun confusing any, and all, eavesdroppers. One time, I said to Ulrich that I had read that without language there is no thought. I then asked him what language he actually thought in. He replied that being a Mexican his daily thoughts were in Spanish but he would switch to German for technical teaching. He went on to say that English was his preferred language for business. I soon tried thinking in German when I was doing technical work to tune out all background talk. It worked and I still do to this very day. 

 The Mexicans, being the very nice and thoughtful people who they are, had this policy of someone, or some group of them, would take their out of country guests out to various places to show of some of the various cultural treasures of their culture. We went to fancy, and not so fancy, restaurants evening indoor horse shows and other places. On evening one of  the managers took me to a restaurant called La Hacienda as I recall. It was an old, circa 1700s, rancho building. The next day, Urich asked me where I was taken out last night and I told him La Hacienda. "What did you have to eat?" he asked. Mole I replied. He said that La Hacienda had "crappy mole". At lunch, Ulrich piled me into his VW Beetle and we bounced over some Mexican roads and ended up at a huge cathedral. Ulrich explained that this place had a very good restaurant that was run to support the upkeep of the church. We were seated and handed menus. I could sort of read a Spanish menu by now and ordered chicken enchiladas Suisse. IE enchiladas with a creamy cheese sauce. When the food arrived, my Suisse sauce was very dark brown. I told Ulrich that my enchiladas weren't what I ordered. He said "Go ahead and try it". I tried them and they were delicious. The chicken enchiladas had Mole Sauce, very good Mole Sauce. 

I remarked that these were better than La Hacienda's like he said. He asked me if I wanted to meet the chef. The next thing I knew, we were back in the kitchen  and  we were all, me, Ulrich and the waiters were applauding and hollering "Bravo". The chef had a huge shit eating smile on his face and he was bowing. I guess I said to Ulrich that I would like to take a small amount of mole back to Cali. Ulrich had this habit of telling people that I was the son of the German ambassador to make me sound very important and to get me special pricing or favors. He told the chef that I would like to take some mole back to Germany. The chef was only too happy to oblige and filled a large ceramic bowel up with mole sauce. As we bounced back to work down the bumpy road in Ulie's VW the sauce was slopping out of the filled ceramic bowel over me and Ulrich and the car. We stopped at a Mexican version of KMart and purchased a plastic bowel with a snap on lid.

On my return trip to the USA, as I was going through US Customs the agent asked me "What's in that bowel?" I told him it was mole. He asked what mole was and I said "It is the national dish of Mexico". He turned to the customs agent in the adjacent line and asked "Hey Sanchez, do you know what mole is?" Mr Sanchez replied "It is only the national dish of Mexico dumb ass".  My guy was rightfully suspicious and asked me if I minded if Mr Sanchez could taste it to verify that it was indeed Mole. I popped the lid off and Senior Sanchez stuck his finger in and tasted it and replied "This not only mole, it is the very best I ever tasted. It better than my grandmother's mole. Where did you get this?" I told him in Mexico City and he replied. Where else.

 

 

  

AFTER STEERING

 Back in what I call my time in the US Navy the good old days we spent almost two years in the Western Pacific known in the Navy as WestPac. We visited Hong Kong several times as well as Sasebo and Yokosuka Japen but we spent the lion's share in Subic Bay in the Philippines. The town outside of  the main gate at Subic was Olongapo. In Olongapo there was every delight that was available for a few, damned few, Philippine Pesos. The town of Olongapo was like the wild West except instead of horney cowboys who had been on the trail for the last three months it was populated by horney sailors who had been at sea for months and like the cowboys of old, they weren't afraid of getting in trouble or spending the balance of the evening in some warm, dry cozy drunk tank. 

In fact if you had never spent a few nights in some waterfront drunk tank. You were considered to be no better than a lowly Coast guardsman or an Air Force lady having a bad hair day.

We rode out two very large typhoons in WestPac. In case you didn’t know in the Atlantic the big storms are called hurricanes in the Pacific, the big storms go by their Chineese name typhoon.

During one of the typhoons, for some stupid reason I was assigned to break in some E3 in After steering. Stupid because I had never even been in after steering or knew where it was let alone give instruction. After steering on a DDG is about the size of a large phone booth. At one point the E3 let loose and puked into a shitcan and the smell of his puke plus all of the rockin' and rollin' back in the fantale and I joined in the party. An hour later the bridge shifted control to us and I showed him what an old Gunnersmate told me what to do and then I was free to leave. Which I did.

 

UFOs

 Back in the day, IE 1964-67 we would launch balloons while at sea. The first ones were made of red rubber that had an aluminum ball about 8" in diameter. The later balloons were made of metalized mylar and were about three feet in diameter. The purpose of these balloons was for us to track the balloons with our two missile tracking radars and also the gun fire control radar all at the same time. Ideally all three radars would show the same bearing, elevation and range to the target. This was our way to verify that all three radars were calibrated properly. If not we would know that we had some serious troubleshooting to do. The winds would normally send the balloons farther out to sea. Where they ended up was not really anything that anyone concerned themselves with.  We knew that the balloons would eventually come back down to mother Earth but didn't have a clue how long they would stay up or how far that they would travel.

Someone, I won't give any names, came up with the bright idea of writing with a magic marker on the balloons where the things came from to see where they ended up. Sort of message in a bottle type thing. We would write the name of the ship on it an an address where the lucky finder could tell us where they ended up. We dis this about every month, or so. Later on, some genius, I still won't mention any names, we switched to Russian writing. One of the guys was really good at writing in fake Cyrillic. It was all bogus and didn't have any meaning but it sure looked like the real McCoy. He was a real artist, a real abstract artist. 

As you may, or may not, know sailors at sea get real bored and are always thinking up what kind of mischief they can create. The same guy, still nameless, came up up with yet another brilliant idea. Why don't we try writing things on these unidentified objects flying through the air that could be written in a language from another planet. Once again, our in house resident artist gave it a mighty try and he hit it right out of the park. The script he wrote looked believably UFOish. 

We never heard from anybody about our little art projects and no NCIF storm troopers ever invaded our little tin can but we had a lot of chuckles about the shock and awe of our worthy recipients when, or if,  they received one of our balloons.  

ART JOINS THE NAVY

 

In 1959, I joined the Navy to see the world. Truth be known, I didn’t really join the Navy, I joined the Navy Reserve. The Navy Reserve was only a two year enlistment with a four year inactive reserve component.

I went to NAVY bootcamp in the summer of 1959 between my junior and senior years of highschool. It was later in 1962 that I reupped for six more years but that’s another sea story for another time. Needless to say, I wasn’t at all intimidated by any fat slob gym teacher or any other self taught bad ass teachers. 

I went on active duty to Philadelphia in July of 1960 fresh out of high school. I took an overnight train and had a roomette which was living high at that time. After about three weeks in Phily at the receiving station I got my orders to Guided Missile A School in Virginia Beach. The school was actually in Dam Neck, VA abutting the aptly named Great Dismal Swamp which was crawling with poisonous Water Moccasin snakes and other critters. I had to extend my two year enlistment for an additional year in order to become a Guided Missileman.

In February of 1961 I flew on a DC-3, a Vickers Vicount turboprop, a DC-7 and a DC-8 jet from Norfolk to Los Angeles with stops along the way. All in one day. When we got to LAX, this was before jetways were used, on a February evening we deplaned. It was colder that a witches tit in Virginia so I had on my woolen Navy dress blues, a wool Navy turtleneck sweater and my woolen peacoat. It was about 77 degrees outside at eight in the evening and I knew right there and then that this was going to what I will be calling home. I was to attend Terrier Missile BT-3 C school at the General Dynamics plant in Pomona where the missiles were built. After almost a year of missile schools, I was now ready to join the fleet and finally see the world.

Was I going to stay in California and be in the Pacific Fleet and visit exotic ports of call. Or was I going back to Norfolk to join the Atlantic Fleet? FIGMO, F It Got My Orders. It wasn’t to be Pacific or Atlantic fleets. It was Southern Indiana. What the hell was in not just Indiana but Southern Indiana I wondered. NAD Crane was the answer. Deep in the heart of Southern Indiana away from any bad guys is the Navy’s central ammunition depot. This was farm country 110 square miles of rolling hills with over 10,000 earthen covered ammunition magazines.

Never the less, being sailors we learned many many ways to amuse ourselves deep in farm country. The only local radio station we could receive signed off at sunset.

But, once again, as usual, I digress.

Back to Art. Crane Indiana is a bit over 400 miles from Cleveland so I used to drive up and back on long weekends. It was about an eight hour drive. During Christmas of 1961 I was back in Cleveland hanging with my buds and after six days I had to go back for one day for “duty”. Duty in the Navy means that one has to stand a watch of some sort even though everything is closed for the holidays. My watch consisted driving about 10 miles in a Navy pickup truck to make the rounds of the Guided Missile Service Unit where I worked and make sure that the place was  “secure”. Secure in navy talk means that the doors were all closed and locked. That the place hadn’t burned down and maybe no Cubans hadn’t swum up the Wabash River and penetrated the security.

I asked Art who is my oldest friend that I’ve known since the third grade if he wanted to go down to Indiana for a day. He asked where he could stay and I told him in the barracks which was an old Navy hospital that had been repurposed as a barracks. There was only about a dozen single sailors who lived there and most of them would either be at home on leave or in jail. He said he didn’t have any Navy uniform to wear and I explained that we wore civvies except during actual work.   Where could he eat? He asked. Right in the chow hall with who ever actually there and the cook would be passed out on one of the tables. Which he was. Art had a great time. Nobody asked who he was. He was the new guy. Nobody gave a shit where he was assigned to and didn’t ask and at 1600 when I went off of my watch, we all went out for beers.

To this day, Art likes to tell people about the day he spent in the Navy. People would ask “You were in the Navy for one day?” Where? Southern Indiana, at that point most people think he is either lying or hallucinating.

I spent another six years in the Canoe Club but that, as we say, is another story, or more.

   

            Mensa

Back at the dawn of time, IE the 1970’s, I had a friend named Russ. Russ started out as a real estate client but Russ and I became good friends. I’m guessing that most folks thought of Russ as an odd ball and by some parameters he was. The truth of the matter was Russ was smart, very smart. A member of Mensa smart. Russ wanted me to join Mensa so he could be with someone that he actually knew at the meetings. I declined to join. I thought that I probably had a decent chance of passing the entrance exam. Test passing is one of the few talents that I was born with. I just wanted to observe Graucho Marx’s philosophy of “I wouldn’t want to join any group that would have me as a member”. Also as an old professional sailor, I thought that I wouldn’t really fit in with all of those egg heads.

Russ and I were talking on the phone one day and the topic of Trivial Pursuit came up. Russ said that nobody would play the game with him anymore  because he has won every game he has ever played. Every single game, I asked? Yes, every game. I told him that nobody would play the game with me either for the very same reason. You’ve also won every game you’ve plated, he asked? Every, I replied. One of us said that if we were to play against each other, one of us could not make that claim anymore. That sounded like a challenge if there ever was one so it was game on. Russ was so confidant that he was going to kick my sorry ass that he would have me over to his home, and have his wife make us lobster to cushion the blow when he beat me. The evening I came over we dined on lobster, drank some really good whiskey and went to battle. I won game #1. I was still unbeaten. You know who wasn’t anymore. Russ wanted a rematch. Long story short, I beat him again. One more game Russ? We played a third game. Half way through game #3, It was clear that I was way ahead and with a flurry of swearing, Russ threw in the towel and conceded the game. As anyone who knows me at all will tell you, I have a really crappy memory. So I didn’t have all of the answers committed to memory as some people have claimed.  I just seem to have a real knack for test taking. My son Dave has the gift also although he probably is smarter.

I had talked to Russ a few times on the phone as a potential customer but  I never met him face to face until I had an offer of his to sign for a sixteen unit apartment building that I had sold him. The building was relatively pricy and there was an equally pricy second trust that we wanted the seller to “carry back” to make up the balance of the down payment as was the custom back then.

As I was leaving Russ’ home I commented that I needed to get some background info about Russ to help the comfort level of the seller who was now also to be the secondary lender. I asked where he worked. He said Mattel. What do you do at Mattel? He was the head of the data processing department. Very good. How long? He answered 23 years but was leaving Mattel in two weeks. Whoops, not so good. Where are you going? He told me he was going to Drake Engineering.

Drake Engineering, that name had a slightly familiar ring to it. What do they do? He said that they made racing engines. I said Drake? As in Myer-Drake? Yes. As in Offenhauser, the engines used at Indy?   Yes again. What will you be doing at Drake, I asked? He replied that he was going to be the new president. Well that’s pretty good news.

Over the next few years Russ would call me and ask me down to Drake in Costa Mesa to see “What were putting on our dynamometer”.  Drake was doing, at that point in time, what any prudent executive would be doing with their company on the ropes to pay the bills. Being one of the premiere names in auto racing, Drakes dyno results were like Moses’ stone tablets or Caesar’s wife, beyond question.

I remember one time they had a VW engine with twin turbochargers on the stand. This was about 1979 and nobody ever hears of putting TWO turbos on the same engine. I was shocked. Russ told me that VW hired engineers like housewives buy eggs. They get them by the dozen.

As an aside about test taking, about twenty years ago my son Dave and I were returning back to Long Beach from the schooner races in San Diego. As we were leaving Harbor Island we went over to the fuel dock for some diesel fuel. The place was packed and there was over an hours wait to fuel up. I said that we had enough fuel to motor back to LB and besides we should be able to sail back. Off  we went and when we had Oceanside off of our starboard beam the motor shut down. We had run out of fuel and there was no wind to sail on. We settled down to wait for the wind to come up. We sat dead still for over 24 hours. The GPS showed us that we had moved less than a mile all night. Dave told me that an empty Styrofoam cooler had passed us a few hours ago and here we still sat. To amuse ourselves we asked each other question from a Mensa book that Dave had on how to pass their entrance test. I chuckled after awhile and commented on how screwed up we were acing the Mensa test questions but didn’t have enough common sense to not run out of fuel. Finally I had had enough and called Boat US and they dispatched a boat out of God knows where with a five gallon can of fuel. The 5 gallons of fuel cost me $100 FOB literally freight on BOARD   but it was money well spent as we had consumed all of the food, and most of our beer and booze on board. No sooner than I restarted the engine, the wind piped up, really hard and we sailed from Oceanside to LB in no time at all. I suppose any responsible Mensa would have done the same damned thing.

747s and VC 10s

Many years ago I flew to Melbourne to do a start up job at a Goodyear plant in Thomastown. I flew from Lax to Honolulu where we refueled in a QANTAS 747 for eight hours. We then flew another eight hours over the Pacific to Fiji where we refueled  a second time. There was three cabins on this particular airplane and in my cabin there was about forty screaming brats being transported to Fiji.  After sixteen hours trapped in that cabin I was about crazy from all of the carrying on. Fortunately the kids got off of the airplane at Fiji and the rest of the trip was a lot quieter. The last eight hour leg was tolerable. 

We finally landed in Sydney and then I transferred to a Trans Australia Airline 727 for the last leg to Melbourne.We arrived on a Sunday so I had a day to kill before jumping in to the job. I watched a cricket match on the telly and never, ever, figured what the purpose of the game was with all of the running back and forth between the two poles driven into the ground.

I wasn't particularly impressed with Australia while I was there. The prevailing attitude there was let the government take care of everything. It was a labor paradise and way too leftist to me. At the Goodyear plant, the workers received a raffle ticket in the morning when they clocked in. The raffle was for a new color TV and you had to be present to win. This was to keep the chaps from wandering off during the workday. Drinking beer with the Aussies however was a lot of fun.

I worked with an Arab engineer who learned to speak English in Australia from a Scotsman.  I had one hell of a time understanding what he was saying most of the time. In Australia some on the equipment was made in the USA and used SAE wrenches and screws. Some equipment was from England and used Whitworth hardware sizes. The rest was from Japan and used metric wrenches and screws. Making an adjustment on a plastic blown film extruder was a barrel of laughs. 

I was there in 1973-74 and Nixon was bombing Cambodia so Americans weren't particularly popular. 

The best part of the trip was the return flight. After the madness on the QANTAS I was ripe for a change. I called BOAC  and asked if they would accept my QANTAS return ticket. They said that they would. 

I flew back on a BOAC VC-10. I have flown all over the world on literally hundreds of airplanes and that flight back from Sydney was far and away the best ever. All four engines are back on the tail and the cabin is quiet. The service was top notch. The food was English which means it was OK and the coffee was British which means it was pretty miserable. Alas the Brits no longer fly the VC-10 for passenger service so we can no longer experience the pleasures of commercial flight but I'll always have Melbourne.

I really don't like to fly anymore. There are no more VC-10s in service and I am no longer married to that cute TWA flight attendant so I no longer fly first class for free. I just have to figure out how to get back to Italy or Germany or the UK without flying.

 

 

 

KOBE   JAPAN

 

In 1973 I flew to Tokyo and took the high speed bullet train to Kobe to do a startup at a Kawasaki Steel rolling mill. The actual mill was built by Mitsubishi under license to Waterberry-Farrel. This is how back in the day the Japanese would acquire American technology. Some Japanese company would build an American or European doo dad under license. After the first few they would copy the design and change a few screws or bolts here and there and they would have another market to invade. We, the company that I worked for, built online non-contact gauges the would emit Beta rays from a radioactive source and sense how strong the radiation was on the other side of a sheet of rubber, paper or plastic right before the sheet was rolled up. The steel guys needed, like a bartender would say, something a little stronger  then a Beta ray to penetrate steel. On steel we used a Gamma source which is much stronger.

Once the gauge of the product was measured, our stuff would then automatically tweak the  producing machine to provide the proper thickness of the product. I started up machines all over “the eleven states” plus Mexico City, Melbourne Australia, Korea and Japan. When you do a six week startup, it is a short enough amount that you just get a vacation visa instead of a business visa. Which is a real pain in the butt. I went through customs at LAX so often that after a while they suspected that I was smuggling something into the country and pull me off to the side and peer into everything that I was carrying. After the first year or so, they got to know me and I was just another tourist again. When I came back from Mexico City the second or third, I was carrying a medium sized sealed up Tupperware container. The customs agent asked what was in the container. I told him it was mole sauce. “What the hell is mole” he asked. I politely explained  that mole was the national dish of Mexico and I inquired with the US Embassy if I could carry some back on the airplane and they said it would be OK. The agent squiggled up his face and asked the agent working the adjacent line “Hey Sanchez, do you know what mole is”? Sanchez replied that “mole is the national dish of Mexico dumb ass”. Sanchez then asked me if I would pop the lid off for closer inspection. After I popped the lid off, he sniffed it and said to me with our faces practically touching ”Hey that smells like some damned good mole”. It was really good and then he asked if he could stick his finger in it for a little taste. “Sure” I said. After tasting it he said to me again with our faces almost touching “That is damned good mole”. But I digress.

I had a great stay while in Kobe and stayed at The Newport Inn, a little charming place that had the bed made on the tatami floor mat and a large hot rock stuffed under the covers so I would me cozy when I came in. I was recently divorced and carried on in Kobe in the evenings and would get back at about midnight. Part of Japanese culture is that the managers go out on the town two, or three nights a week. When the bill is presented, the senior manager signs it and the bill goes to the company’s accounting office and the company pays the bill. These guys drink like sailors and come crawling home back to mamma san way after midnight. I asked them how the wives deal with this they all shrugged their shoulders and said the same thing. “She greets me at the front door with tea and a snack”. What a country. Japan is quite a country. On one of my trips I was at our trading companies offices in Tokyo and they made me a job offer to work for them. I was real tempted but I was newly divorced and I didn’t want to be living half way around the world away from my son.    

I met a girl in Kobe who was from Kyoto. Kyoto is one of my “magical places”. Incredibly beautiful. Cherry San and I would on the weekends take the bullet train north through a big mountain and get off at the first stop, Osaka. We would then either take a cab or a tram to Kyoto. We were walking past this big auditorium and there was a big poster out front advertising who was playing. I asked who it was and Cherry san said Blue Mood. I said “Do mean Moody Blues” and she said “I guess that’s what it says”. I asked her where we could buy tickets and she said that it was sold out. She then explained how she used to work there and that she would speak to the mamma san. We went in the lobby and there was good old  momma san. They chatted for a few minutes and then momma san reached into her apron’s pocket and gave Cherry san two tickets.