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.