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.

1971

After we moved back to SoCal after two years in Cleveland we rented a house in Glendora. We ended up buying the house across the street. I was looking for a house to buy instead of renting. I found a small tract of new houses partway up the foothills but they were too rich for me. I told the neighbors across the street about the houses and they ended up buying one. The builder of the tract took the neighbor’s house as a trade in. The sale of their house was taken over by a neighborhood realtor and they were bound by contract to sell it for the FHA appraisal. We played bridge and had cocktails at the neighbor’s house at least once a week and while over one evening Ken my neighbor told me that the appraisal came in at $24,000. This was in 1971 before the real estate market went crazy. I called the listing agent at the realtor’s and told her I wanted to buy the house. She told me that it wasn’t on the market yet. I asked her what that meant and she told me it hadn’t been on the agent’s tour yet. I told her that I had been in the house probably over one hundred times and I knew the FHA appraised value, which I thought was fair, and to bring the papers over for me to sign.

She said she had to wait until it was “on the market”. I said OK and hung up. I counted to ten and called the realtor’s office back and asked for the sales manager. I told the guy that I wanted to buy the house and Helen wouldn’t sell it to me. He asked why not and I told him because “it wasn’t on the market yet. He asked me to hold on a minute and I heard a lot of hollering in the background. He got back on the phone and told me that she’ll be right over with the paperwork. And so we bought a house in California. It was a nice house in a good neighborhood. It had three bedrooms and a bath and a half.

Back in the day, when I was selling real estate there was this witticism that if you were showing a house in an expensive  neighborhood, people would ask “Where is the pool?”  If  the neighborhood was a step down, people would ask “Does it have a pool?” If it was in a seedy neighborhood, people would say “It has a pool?” Well our house was in a nice neighborhood and it did indeed have a pool. Life was good there. We not only had a pool, we also has a 22 foot trailerable sailboat,  a German Shepard and I had a motorcycle. A fast as hell Kawasaki Mach 3. It was advertised as the fastest thing with wheels to come out of a factory.

One nice balmy day, we were sitting around the pool when we heard a huge boom. It was very large and we could tell it was the sound of something very bad. We looked all around but didn’t see any smoke or any thing so we didn’t give it any more thought.

That evening we heard what the loud boom was. A Marine Corps Phantom jet had collided with a Air West DC-9 over the nearby mountains. Everyone one the DC-9 died and one of the two  Marines  in the Phantom survived. He ejected and floated down to earth without a scratch.

Also in the same timeframe, I was talking to a friend of mine who lived nearby one evening. All of a sudden, this whit disc in the sky  went streaking by. This was after I was out of the Navy for about three years. Being I spent ten hours a day sitting in the gun director radar tracking airplanes and became pretty accomplished at estimating their range and speed. This disc was distinctly round and did not leave a fiery streak  behind it as a meteorite would. I estimated it to be less than five miles away and going faster than sound without any sonic boom. It streaked into the foot hills and made no crashing sound(s). No bangs or booms, nothing.

I still believe to this day hat I saw a UFO. I became an immediate believer in UFOs. The problem is the nearest habitable planet to earth is about forty light years away. If the “aliens” were moving at the speed of light which is 186,000 miles per second, which is hard for me to believe, it take a minimum of eighty years to make a round trip. I don’t think any being of superior intelligence would care to be locked up with a few copies of Playboy to read and take an eighty year trip. Possible, I suppose. Probable, I don’t think so. One Sunday while reading Brunhilda on the comic’s page, I read that Gaylord Buzzard is telling Irwin Troll as they are walking along that “Some people don’t think that the aliens are from another planet. They think that they are from Earth but another time.”  This I could buy. There have been many reports of “alien” abductions and practically all of the abductees describe the same things. The creatures have two arms and two legs. They also have two eyes in their heads with two ears and a nose with two nostrils. They look too much like humans who no longer do any heavy lifting.

THINK ABOUT IT.

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.