The Beemer

 In 2013 after I had a stroke and retired, I decided to fulfill an oath that I made to myself more than fifty years ago to someday own a Corvette. But I one problem, Sadie my Golden Retriever probably wouldn't like it. She has ridden many miles with me including several cross-country trips. She rides with me in the front seat for a few hours but than she will hop in the back and take a nap. She has told me that she really enjoys taking those naps in the back seat and yes, we really talk to one another. She is a very good listener and rarely interrupts when I am talking. She knows how I really hate being interrupted while talking. She was not going to cotton to some two seated toy car. So the Vette got kicked under the bus.

A close runner up was a BMW convertible. The little princess surely couldn't find fault with that Teutonic jewel. I settled on a silver 2001 328ci convertible. It had a Bose sound system, heated leather seats which every southern Californian needs and lots of other trinkets that make it the "Ultimate Driving Machine". It was love at first sight and I bought it. I didn't have my Little Red Corvette but I loved the car and named her Loretta.

About five years later the six speed transmission went south. To either fix or replace the tranny would have cost more than I paid for it. After driving a Kraut car you eventually succumb to the German logic so I did the logical thing and bought another silver BMW  328ci convertible. The only slight differences was this car was a 2002 and didn't have all of the bells and whistles. It wasn't the same but it wasn't all that big of a sacrifice. The only difference in apperance was so slight only I could really tell the difference.

Fast forward another five years and "my better half" upon returning from a shopping spree announced that some fool in a Hertz rental truck hit Loretta II and scratched  it. It was barely noticeable so I breathed a sigh of relief. Due to some dumb shit corporate logic,  Hertz's insurance company decided to "total" my little Loretta II. "Total" meant to take Loretta II off our hands and reimburse us enough money to replace it. So off we went a hunting for a replacement. This time I settled on a guess what? A silver 2001 BMW 328ci convertable.

We now possess Loretta III. She is the identical twin of Loretta I, Bose stereo and heated leather seats etc. except she has the wheels that Loretta II had.

Now, it appears that, the third time truely is a charm. I have come to the conclusion that I have found my automotive soulmate.

Getting older

 There was a time not long ago when I was considered a young stud. Or so I thought sometimes. I tried to not be some kind of pretty boy but I noticed every now and then some female seemed to be giving me the eye.  Life was good and I liked being married. When out drinking and shooting shit with "the boys" When I was on the road I was always requested to get some ladies sitting at another table to come and join us. Later in the evening I would go to the men's room and then back to my room. I have no idea how my mates did and I wasn't really interested. I was either already married or had a steady girlfriend and I didn't really care for trolling for companionship.

One day a few years ago when I was looking in a mirror I started to wonder who the hell was that old guy looking back at me. Youth is truly wasted on the young. I now have two sons and one godson and the boys seemed to handle themselves pretty well. 

These days I go to bed too damned early and wake up to damned early. I used to  scoff at the old farts who ingested a dozen pills every day. Now I six pills before I have my morning coffee and go out to slay the dragons. Before I go to sleep I take two more and then put on my CPAP. If you don't know what a CPAP is thank God you don't. CPAP stands for Constant Positive Air Pressure which is a torture device that seems to be made popular in the middle ages. You put a mask attached to a hose that is part of a machine over your face. The first time I tried it was about 12 years ago at the VA sleep lab. After about ten minutes I ripped it off of my face. I said to myself I really don't care to live like this. Five, or so, to placate upper management, my wife, I agreed to  take another try at the sleep lab. This time I kept it on all night and in the morning when I was brushing my teeth I noticed that the black rings under my eyes had disappeared. I slid fartherdown the hill to old fogyville. 

If all of this seems to be the muttering of an old fart well here I am. I guess all of this inconvenience beats the alternative.  

UFO & Extraterrestrials

 There is a lot of talk these days of UFOs and extraterrestrials. I would like to mount my soapbox for a few minutes.

I have personally witnessed one and am a believer. This is no shit as we would have said in the Navy. 

About 1973 I lived in Glendora, California about two miles from the foothills. My friend Denny had come over to my house and we, as my dad used to say, Chewed the rag and had a few beers together. Around midnight Denny was going to head to his home in Covina. He was standing at my doorstep facing west and all of a sudden I saw this bright light go by. My condition 3 station off of the coast of Vietnam on the ship was gun director officer. I had tracked many aircraft and had developed a pretty accurate eye as to range, bearing altitude and speed. It was a clear night so my vision wasn't diminished.

By my somewhat expert reckoning I judged this "light" to be less than three miles away and making a speed well over 500 knots. The light had a very distinct round shape. It wasn't leaving any trail of sparks so I was pretty sure it wasn't a meteor. It went straight into hills without making any noise or crashing sounds. The whole thing swept across the sky in less than five seconds and it was gone. The hairs on my arm raised and I asked Denny "Did you see that?" Of course he was standing with his back to it so he asked. See what?

For the next few years I gave a lot of thought about what it was that I actually saw. According to Albert Einstein, and who am I to question him, the speed of light is the absolute  limit of velocity. I happen to know that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. That's way faster than my mother driving a VW van. If people were actually able to attain the speed of light and the nearest planet is 40 light years away, give or take, that means that who ever is driving these cosmic hot rods would have to make an eighty year round trip. What kind of intelligent being is going to volunteer for that gig?  So I poo pooed that theory. Still looking, I found a rational explanation in of all places the Sunday comics, Broom Hilda. Some little creature in the comic is strolling along with the Owl. The Owl says "Some people believe that so called extraterrestrials aren't from some far away planet. That they are from Earth but from a different time. 

Time travel is, to me, a lot more acceptable than travel that takes a hundred, or more, years. So there you have it. Out of the mouths of babes, or owls in this case, come the gems of my knowledge.

If you have a better scenario. I'd like to hear your thoughts.

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.