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.

 

 

Gung Hay Fat Choy

 

Gung Hay Fat Choy

 

In the Gregorian year 2020 Chinese New Year was on January 29^th. This year, 2021 it will fall on February 12^th. It is actually like most things Chinese a little more complicated than that but let’s just leave things here for a while.

I just remembered when I was in Hong Kong one year at Chinese New Year. I do believe that Hong Kong was my favorite liberty port. For a full week you heard the constant sound of fire crackers. I and a few of my mates had dinner at the China Fleet Club. The China Fleet Club was a place where English sailors and soldiers could go and get a very nice meal at a very reasonable price. It was run by some British service club for the benefit of sailors and soldiers British and American.

While having dinner, at the next table over was an English looking fellow who seemed very drunk and would throw lit fire crackers under the feet of the Chinese waiters as they walked by. He seemed to not be at all concerned about his bad behavior and started to wonder how and why he would be so brazen in a British establishment. My curiosity got the best of me and being I had enough fine English ale under my belt, I enquired.

He told me he was a member of the Queens Own Buffs and he had just returned from Borneo. FYI, The Queens Own Buffs. He told me, were the personal bodyguards of The Queen. Half of the regiment at any given time was in London watching out for Her Majesty. The other half was posted to shit holes like Borneo to keep them toughened up by killing insurgents.

I got to meet and later hang out while in Hong Kong with the rest of these crazy bastards. They introduced me to the wrecks which they called the Woman’s Royal Army Corps. When we all got really stinko I was persuaded to go into a bar frequented by Royal Navy sailors and yell out “rude” things about the Queen. I was to run back out the door while being chased by the English squids and the Buffs would be waiting for the sailors and they all would get into a “donnybrook”.

I was in a bar one evening when a NBC film crew came in with their camera running for a story about what the troops really do when on R&R in Hong Kong. The camera running was a terrible idea because a lot of the guys in the bar, both American and English, were married and they didn’t the little woman back on the home front to get wind of what they were up to. The cameras were immediately requisitioned and tossed into the street as a tram went by rendering them harmless.

I’ve been all over the world since then but never got back to my beloved Hong Kong. Maybe sometime soon, eh?

 

Christmas In The Old Country

 

I watched a Christmas Eve church service the other night from an Orthodox church somewhere, I believe to be, in Russia. It brought back memories of my misspent youth in Cleveland. Art, my best friend since the second grade, was called a mad Russian. He wasn’t Russian, His grandparents came over on “the boat” from Latvia which, back then was one of the Republics of  The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR. He and his whole family are very proud Latvians not Russians but they do however worship in a Russian Orthodox church namely the St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral.

 

I used to occasionally go to church with Art and his family just to see the inside of this great building. When riding on the bus from downtown Cleveland back to Garfield Heights, you could see this grand onion domed structure across the Cuyahoga River valley sitting on the near West Side. It was so different that I had to see more of it.

To quote Wikipedia “Because the Russian Orthodox Church still observes the Julian calendar. Dec. 25 on the Julian calendar corresponds to Jan. 7 on the Gregorian calendar, which America and most of the rest of the world uses. Currently, each day of the Julian calendar occurs 13 days after its corresponding day on the Gregorian calendar.” Now I remember their calendar being one week behind. I first went to church with Art and his family on Easter Sunday. Up to that point I, the good Baptist choir singing lad that I was, hadn’t even been into a Roman Catholic church. They were handing out branches of pussy willows in the church. I asked Art what was up with the pussy willows and he whispered back something about there are no palm trees in Russia. OK, what does that have to do with anything. He explained that on his Church’s Julian calendar this was Palm Sunday and being there are no palm trees in Russia, the Russians traditionally pass out pussy willow branches and so I went back to church the next week to see what other surprises were in store.

Things really heated on Russian Easter. There were several huge Russian priests with long black beards ranting in Russian and swinging very large incense burners slightly over our heads. They were dousing all of the people with holy water, this was a show I would have paid hard earned cash to see and it was all for free. One of the priests, at one point, sat down in a chair holding up a portrait of some saint in his lap. Then people started to line up to kiss the person in the picture. Plus the view, I couldn’t get enough. I was a fixture there in that church for high holy days for the next few years. Without warning, people would drop to their knees onto some kneeling bar so I would follow suit not to piss off the Russian congregation. Then without any apparent warning as I was down on my knees, they would all rise up and sit down in the pews.  Nothing in my Baptist background had prepared me for this.

As I sit here in front of my keyboard I start musing about why I ever left Northern Ohio but then I remember. I remember the cold and the blizzards. I remember the miserable Cleveland Indians and the Browns who when I was still there were the dominant force in football and now are such losers that the only way they can go to the Super Bowl is if they buy a block of tickets and charter a Greyhound Bus. I remember the steel mills closing one after another and I remember White Flight making the downtown of Cleveland, the place where I went to play hookey and spend hours in the huge Cleveland Public Library. 

The only time I now go back is for a wedding, or more so these days, a funereal or to see my sister and then visit with Art and drink more beer than we used to. Cleveland, to me, is now like New York. It’s a great place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there, ever again.

The first day of  snow is very special. It has always had a wonderland effect on me. The second day is still kind of nice but not so much. On the third day, I am starting to get fed up with the, not so, inconvenience. By the fourth day, I am climbing the walls. I want to go home! Home where when it gets down to 55 deg. F everybody, including me, starts bitching about how cold it is. After a few minutes, I start my weather mantra. I start humming while saying Cleveland. Suddenly, I smile, and say to myself  “I could be back in Cleveland.” And all is again right with the world. 

 

 

MISSING MOVEMENT

 

 

MISSING MOVEMENT is the Navy term for not being aboard ship when the ship gets underway. This, as you may have guessed is considered to be a major NO NO.

In 1983 I was stationed aboard USS Constellation CVA-64 the largest, at the time, ship in the Navy. We were getting under way and I was standing out on the port missile launcher sponson watching the intricacies of  getting an eighty thousand ton ship under way. As we eased away from the dock one of my Missile Techs came running up to the ship as we were twenty feet or so away from North Island. We could hear him hollering “Oh shit, I’m screwed”.

After the special sea detail was secured we all went to our berthing compartment to shift into dungarees.  My wayward guy was already there dressed in his working uniform. We all naturally inquired as to how he got to the ship while it was steaming away from Coronado Island.

He told us he was standing on the dock panting and while he was catching his breath a helicopter started spooling up. On the side of the chopper painted in big white letters was the words USS Constellation. He asked the pilot if he was going out o the ship and the pilot told him that indeed he was. Can I catch a ride out the MT asked and the pilot said he could, off they went.

I never much cared for life on a “Bird Farm” but occasionally there were a few benefits to be had.

Eight months later I ended up driving from San Diego to Seattle for New Construction to be part of the pre-commissioning crew of USS Waddell at Todd Shipyard . This was the beginning of the absolute best part of my eight years in the Navy. I was now a Tin Can Sailor and in the Real Navy.

 

CBS SUNDAY MORNING

CBS SUNDAY MORNING

CBS SUNDAY MORNING has been, or should I say had been, part of my Sunday morning routine practically since it’s inception in 1979. I have been an enemy of routine all of my life but my Sunday morning routine had been an exception.  I always equated routine with falling in a rut and becoming stale but I truly liked this routine. 

Get up, get the Sunday paper, drink my dark roast coffee, watch CBS Sunday Morning and then do the Sunday LA Times crossword puzzle. I stopped getting the Sunday LA Times when the paper got smaller and smaller and it’s price kept getting bigger and bigger. I pride myself on adaptation. Whenever a roadblock appears in front of me, I either go around it, over it or under it. My answer to the skyrocketing price of printed newspapers was to get a digital edition of the paper. I got both the LA Times and the London Times. After about a year I cancelled the LA Times. It really didn’t have anything of interest to me. The London Times has it all. Balanced news, a good crossword and interesting human interest stories.

The television news situation is a totally different arena. I am, and always have been, a news junkie and we don’t have cable TV or a dish. This leaves us with over the air or internet news. As Abraham Lincoln said, you can’t believe the news on the internet, so live TV it is.

When I watch the news, I want to hear, news, not opinion. If I wanted to hear some talking head’s opinion I would have turned on to CBS Sunday Morning Opinions. CBS, Communist Broadcasting System is the worst. I stopped watching their local news over thirty years ago because I couldn’t stand Linda Alverez. I don’t watch the Late Show, to me, it is intolerable with that buffoon Stephen Colbert. At least on 60 Minutes there was a segment called Point/Counterpoint. That provided some balance. I don’t watch Fox News either. Once again I don’t think that it is balanced either from the other extreme.

For the record, I am neither a Democrat, no shit? Or a Republican. I am, and have been, a registered Libertarian. I consider myself as somewhat right of center. I like the way Jessie Ventura described himself. He described himself as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” a straightforward expression of his libertarian philosophy. On Sunday Morning at least we had Charles Kuralt who was a folksy guy who roamed the back roads of the USA looking for quirky stories. Speaking of quirky, Bill Geist kept things light and amusing. After Kuralt retired we had Charles Osgood who was no Kutralt but wasn’t that bad either. Kuralt was a tough act to follow. Ben Stein helped keep some semblance of balance but he is now gone. These days, Martha Teichner is the worst. She is a non-stop unabashed Trump basher. Does Mr. Trump deserve some bashing? Of coarse he does, don’t we all? Should she be allowed to run amok? According to the very first  amendment of the US Constitution, she does. Am I required to watch her rantings? Hell no.

So it’s AMF, Aloha My Friend to CBS Sunday Morning.

You will be missed but not watched anymore by little old me. 

OK, I'm done. You can have your soapbox back now. 

Guided Missileman Schools

Albian B the Third was in my Guided Missileman A School class at Dam Neck VA. Dam Neck was pleasantly nestled between Virginia Beach and The Great Dismal Swamp. The GDS was rife with poisonous snakes and other friendly critters.

Al was from a well to do family in Pennsylvania and was way more streetwise than this young straight out of high school kid. When we all went into town on Wednesday nights and weekends, he always wore what I considered to be very fashionable clothes. He was a bit on the swishy side but was a lot of fun. One evening at the EM Club someone challenged him to a chugalug contest.  Al had said that nobody could chug beer faster them him. He sounded a bit like a blowhard so naturally someone called him on it. They both had a full pitcher of beer in their hands. Just before the start Al started hyperventilating. We all started feeling sorry for Al as they started. He picked up the pitcher and just poured it down his throat without gulping. It was a straight pour as if he was pouring the  beer down a sink.

Joe C was what we would now call a redneck from Old Town Florida. Old Town is on the shore of the Sewanee River. His father was the sheriff  of Dixie County. You can’t be more of a son of the South than that. We all called him Gator. One weekend, Gator asked me if I wanted to go snake hunting out on the big pond in the swamp. Stupid me, did I say stupid, said OK. All we had to do is go to the local hardware store in town and buy some frog gigs heads. The we put the heads on some swab handles. We checked out a rowboat from Special Services and off we went. There were trees that came out over the water and we were rowing under them. We stopped and Gator said in his slow Florida drawl “Why don’t you spear that snake right over your head?” I looked up and didn’t see any snake. I told Gator that wasn’t what I considered funny so he picked up his gig and speared a snake right over my head. Have you ever been in a small rowboat with a really pissed off venomous snake? It isn’t exactly like zoning out at a yoga camp in Big Sur. Gator calmly, calm is the best way to describe gator, picked up a big burlap bag that he brought along and flipped it into the bag. We had about six or eight slithering madder than hell poisonous snakes in the bag when Gator dropped the bag and they all tumbled looking for revenge. I jumped on a seat so as to allow our fellow voyagers their own space in the bottom of the boat. I didn’t crap my pants and I didn’t scream like a little six year old little girl but beyond that I was at a total loss as what to do next. Gator calmly snagged the monsters up and one by one flipped them back into their bag and tied a knot in the top. With the calmness of  Los Vegas professional gambler holding four jacks I said that maybe we should go back to the barracks and so we did. When we came in the back door, there was the group of New York City guys playing pinochle at a table. They asked “Where have you two been?” Gator replied that we had been snake hunting in the swamp and they asked if we had caught any. Gator replied that we had caught a few and “Do you want to see them?” These self-proclaimed big city guys said “Sure”. With that Gator dumped the whole bag of short tempered wounded poisonous snakes on their card table. I felt real proud of myself for putting my very life in Gator’s hands and keeping my cool as the whole table of big city boys screamed like six year old little girls and ran for their very lives. After the screams died down in the distance as the ran away old Cool Hand Gator calmly flipped the load of snakes as he had done an hour earlier in the rowboat. Right then and there, I decided that I was living a charmed life and that it would take more than a bag of angry vipers to kill me.

In our Guided Missileman A School we were the creme de la crème of the Navy. I arrived two weeks before our class started and the week before our class met we were informed the we would be reviewing trigonometry. About half of our class were guys straight out of boot camp the other half for one reason or another were “coming out of the fleet”. Coming out of the fleet is one of those navy things who’s words belie the real meaning. For a few guys one, or two, actually came out of the fleet. One came back from a Naval Air Station in Argentia Newfoundland.

Another was at the Naval Academy and was booted out. He ended up our class leader. After sixty years I don’t remember has name. I confided to Mr. Dropout that a review of trig sounded OK but I didn’t have the foggiest notion what trig was. He took me under his wing and told me he would “horse me up”. Which meant, at least in the Navy, coach me. I think his name was Paul and we found out why he was bounced out of the academy. He was attending Guided Missileman A School when he was accepted into the academy. After getting booted out of the academy it was “Back to the fleet”. Which in his case back to GS A School. Paul had a little drinking problem. He took the expression “drink like a sailor” to a new higher level. He missed a lot of school for being in the county jail for repeated DUIs and we never heard what happened after being booted out of A school.

On the first day of class the instructor(s) started talking about Ohm’s Law. I had thought that being a Guided Missileman meant being a highly trained mechanic. I turned to the guy sitting beside me and said “Who gives a shit about this electrical stuff?” He replied that I better start giving a shit about the electrical stuff because that’s what we’re going to be doing.

I had jumped through a lot of hoops to get there so I knuckled down. The school was six months long and before long I realized that I had a knack for this electrical stuff. By the time we graduated I was second in our class. About ten weeks into the school, we were all handed a book titled radar special circuits. We were told that this radar stuff was grueling so we should start boning up before we got into the radar phase. I started reading the book and I understood every single concept that was offered. It was like reading for pleasure.

During A School

In February 1961, we flew to LAX and attended Terrier BT3 C School at the General Dynamics plant where they were built. I graduated first in that class and I was on my way.