Kathy thought she could fly. She couldn't. She was apparently very happy to be going to college at the prestigious Bay Area school. She hadn't been exceptionally popular in high school but she wasn't an outcast, either. Not a raving California Blonde bombshell, but not a mousy wallflower. Just a nice girl who happened to date my best friend for a while. That happened after I was off to keep the world safe for democracy (in the Army in Ger...
MamaCharlie told me the other night, "You haven't written anything about your guitars and music". I agreed, I haven't. Other than an aside now and then. So I thought I would. Here goes: One day a few years ago, Toothache's wife asked to borrow all of our home videos. She wanted to copy them or something. I said "Sure!" and never gave it another thought. A few months later we stopped at Humbordt's (my number two son) house...
Looking at the map today, the distance was about three miles following the roads, but at the time it seemed like five miles. It was the distance from El Capitan High School in Lakeside, CA, to my aunt's house on Marilla Drive. I had to walk it a bunch of times. Marilla Drive was the dividing line for bus service to the high school. If you lived on the east side of Marilla you walked, if you lived across the street, you could ride the bus. We had co...
All my life I have had dreams that I can't explain. Some of them are very detailed and precise. And at the time that I have them, they usually don't make any sense to me. But sometimes I will find myself in a situation and it will dawn on me that this is something that I had dreamed about at some time before. Usually they are not significant to anything (although one time I think I may have avoided a serious accident by going a different direction, but sin...
Me and Hazel's Buddies... 16,000 acres burned and 94,000 acres in the evacuation zone? Can that be true? 360 homes...so far...still no containment. We don't know how it started, we don't know where it will go, we don't know when it will be contained...hot, dry, and windy out. After the Waldo Canyon fire last year, we kinda thought we wouldn't have this to contend with so soon. I don't know why; conditions are ripe and smaller fires h...
Running Screaming Naked Through the Streets... Added: Friday, June 14th 2013 at 12:55pm by bigfatdaddy In the middle 1970s we were stationed at Fort Ord, California (one of my favorite places on the whole earth) getting resettled into Army life after a three-year break in service. After I spent a couple of years as an instructor at the truck driving school there, they closed the school all the instructors were sent to support units in the 7th Infantry Division. I ri...
In the fall of 1954, just about the time that Hurricane Hazel was making history on the eastern seaboard, my dad, the Chief, decided he was tired of the old black '53 Chevy and wanted to trade it in on a brand new '55. We went down to Colonial Chevrolet in Norfolk and proudly picked up our new Forest Green Chevy 210, with the brand new 265 cubic-inch V-8 engine and a three-speed stick. It was a two-door with doorposts (who knew that ten years later it would be one of t...
There is a scene in the movie "The Great Santini" where Bull Meechum is sitting on the front porch reading the morning papers and getting upset at something Castro had said and Bull was yelling that he would fly his Phantom down the streets of Havana chasing that bearded...well, you get the idea. So much about that movie reminded me of life with the Chief (my dad). The Chief used to watch the evening news and read the morning papers; he would ask me if I understoo...
The Associated Grocers driver was killed in the wreck. Speculation was that he had had a heart attack or passed out. Whatever happened in the cab, what happened outside the cab is that his semi drifted to the right, broke through the guard rail, and then went off the road at high speed. Unfortunately, the point at which he left the freeway was the 19th Avenue overpass. He flew off the overpass and landed on a United Metro dump truck that was sitting at the...
One evening in the middle sixties, (I was in high school at the time) my dad, The Chief, told me we were going to see a special movie about "The War". The Chief had spent the last two years of WWII on a destroyer in the South Pacific. DD 486, the USS Lansdowne, was a ship that saw a lot of action and was involved in many key battles at the end of the war. Whenever a new movie about the war was released , he would round me up, and we would go to the El Cajon Thea...
A Soldier's Story Edit This Post He was about five-feet-ten inches tall, and he weighed about one- hundred-eighty pounds. He looked like an athlete; had the smooth, graceful, gliding walk of a man who was confident and sure. He was friendly and not the least threatening, which is often the case with serious students of the martial arts. His skin was so dark it almost looked blue, a very African-looking kind of dark. He was a soldier so he ...
Germany has a lot of forests. Some parts of Germany have been under a forestation program for literally hundreds of years. They are very fond of their trees. There are some wild areas; not many, but I spent some time in a rain forest near Wurzburg...it had ferns and everything, it was very cool. By far, though, most of Germany's forests look like parks. They keep the ground clear of brush and limbs. One way they do that is kinda cool: they let the ...
More than half of Fort Ord in on the coastal side of the hills. The weather is mild almost year round. I have seen temperatures in the high thirties one winter, and sometimes the summer temps will climb into the low eighties. But most of the time, it is a very comfortable place to live. When we left on convoys or other missions, it almost always meant driving east to catch one of the major arteries to go north or south, or one of the state highways that went east. F...
There was a split in our platoon: the Support Platoon of the 2nd Squadron, 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment (or "Fuel and Lube", as everyone referred to it), stationed in the little spa town of Bad Kissingen so far north in Bavaria it was almost in Franconia. The split was one of age. I got there early in December of 1964 when I was still 17. At the time, the Selective Service was drafting young men at age 21 years, six months. Plus any older men who ha...
We arrived on the scene just moments after the wreck. Rookie and I were riding together because his jeep was in the shop. Our convoy was running behind another instructor team's group on a stretch in the hills on the eastern edge of Fort Ord where two of the Drivers' Training Routes shared a few miles of the road. The convoy ahead of us stopped. We were already ahead of our group, doing our "outrider" chore, sort of being advance scouts looking for problems ahead....