My mom, Betty Lou, and I had an unusually close relationship. She was married at 16, I came along at 17, and she was divorced by 20. She used to say that we raised each other. It wasn't always easy for either of us. I remember one hot Sunday when we were getting ready for church, she dressed me up and went to get ready herself. My shirt was starched and scratchy on my neck and it was hot and I was sweaty. So I filled the utility sink in the garage ...
Thomas R. Fuge, MC's father, the senior living vet in our family, a man who served in WWII in the China/ Burma/India Theater. Served his country with honor, returned to start a family and a new career in the fledgling TV industry, became an electronics engineer, finished his career as the manager of quality control at Honeywell's Black Canyon computer manufacturing plant in Phoenix, AZ. He had a successful insurance business for several years after leaving Honeywell. &n...
An asphalt plant is a fairly complicated arrangement of ducts, drums, silos, conveyor belts, and one BIG burner. In one drum, the sand, rocks, and molten oil are heated and churned together to make the hot mix that is then held in a silo until it is shipped to the job. The silos are insulated and will hold the temperature for several hours. In many of the largest plants, there is a system of hoppers and conveyors that move the sand and rocks to the burner; in sm...
I've been trying to avoid too much post-election palaver about who shoulda and what they coulda. I am depressed enough already. After the fact, everyone is an expert on what happened. One phrase comes to my mind over and over: Train Wreck. And while I was having that phrase pop through my vacuous mind, two separate stories about trains piqued my interest: 1. In Gabon, a West African country, the unloading of a new, huge, American-made locomotive didn...
I had two Uncle Jimmys growing up. One was my Mom's brother, I am named after him but never knew him. Well, that isn't exactly true; I remember when he died that everyone in the house was so upset. When they told me my Uncle Jimmy had died I got upset too, because I had just seen him drinking coffee in the kitchen. They convinced me it wasn't my coffee drinking uncle who had died, but the other Uncle Jimmy. I remembered that I knew w...
Fletcher Parkway comes out of Fletcher Hills down a grade into the northwest section of El Cajon. Back in the day, the big rigs used to run with little or no muffling and they would ride their Jake Brakes (a Jacobs Engine Brake that basically turns the fuel off to a diesel engine's cylinders and turns it into an air compressor to aid in slowing the truck ) all the way to the bottom of the grade. Late in the evening, when the traffic had thinned out, the trucks would rat...
I begged and whined and bugged my mom for weeks before she finally relented. She had me cut off the boxtop; she filled out the order and I taped a quarter to the cardboard order. We put it in the envelope, sealed it, stamped it, and sent it on its way. From that point time seemed to stop. I was at the mailbox the very next day looking for my treasure. I was disappointed that it wasn't there. Every day I waited for the mail; every day I was n...
He started his military career as an aircraft mechanic. He went to flight school and became a pilot. He flew P-51s in Europe. He was shot down over France and spent some time evading the Germans while helping the French Underground. He was able to get back to England and convince Eisenhower to let him fly over France again (policy was that escape-and-evaders could not fly over the areas where they had been captured). He returned to combat over France...
I remember Alex Karras as a fierce defensive lineman on the Detroit Lions. But I remember him better as a naturally funny guy who never took himself too seriously. In an interview on an afternoon talk show in the seventies (probably Mike Douglas but I'm not sure) he talked about needlepointing his friends names on their jockstraps for them and when asked if he missed the NFL he responded by saying that he missed the comraderie and nowdays hung around in the showers at t...
In the years I worked at Headquarters, U S European Command(HQ USEUCOM), I met a lot of folks who had been or would be famous for one reason or another. Some of the people I worked with should have been famous; there were some real heroes in the mix there. I even had the chance to spend some time with ADM Ruge, a well known figure in German military history. Another figure from US military history that I met was General Ira Eaker. Although I only had one a...
We met in April of '67. It was a blind date arranged by the girlfriend of one of my buddies. I have written about all that before. If I remember, I'll link that story at the end. I went back to San Diego when my enlistment was up in July, with no intention of ever seeing Arizona again. I had some strange idea about "getting on with my life". I didn't want to talk about Vietnam anymore; I didn't even feel much like sharing stories about Ge...
They say a camel is a horse designed by a committee. You should see some of the things that can be designed when the committee is made up of Army lieutenants! This memory was jogged during a little back-and-forth with Pontogubb this morning. He mentioned having a trailer hitch cover that looks like a claymore. In the process of imagining what that would look like, another frightful memory crowded in and I thought I should share it with you. When we got to the desert in '...
Every Saturday afternoon the Sixties on Six channel on Sirius XM features one specific year and plays the top forty songs from that year along with news clips, ads, movie ratings and other stuff about the year. Today the feature year was 1969. They played a couple of tunes I just didn't remember at all, but they sounded like '69...kinda bubble-gummy, a shade hippie-ish, and like that. Then they played the one song that always takes me down the time tunnel a pl...
Several years ago we were in Phoenix to celebrate MC's parents special February: Their fiftieth anniversary and his birthday. We had a little free time and were driving east on Bell Road, marvelling at all the growth and how busy everything was. Even in February we had all the windows up and the AC blowing full blast (although we once survived there with two cars that had no AC, we are no longer "acclimated"). Even with all the windows up, the AC on full, and o...
Stuttgart, Germany was heavily damaged during WWII. Most of the downtown area was screwed up pretty badly. When the war ended, the troubles didn't. People lived in bombed-out basements, drew water from puddles in bomb craters, and don't even ask where the bathroom facilities were; they weren't. People begged, scavenged, sold and traded, and did whatever they had to do in order to survive. The main source of food was the American GIs who occupied...