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.

 

 

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.