A JOHN KULLER HISTORY

I have been fortunate, or lucky enough, to lead a pretty interesting and eventful life, wandering through 60 countries, and 49 states (Missed RI somehow) while holding a series of interesting and improbable jobs. Often when relating one of my “War Stories” people would urge me to write it all

down. So, after years of procrastinating, here goes.

A BIT OF BACKGROUND

In order to give you fascinated readers some perspective, we need to start this tale, several years before I showed up on the scene.

My dad was an itinerant Methodist minister, although he called himself a preacher, who landed in Montana right after the First World War. In those days, Montana was a wild and wonderful place. Miners and cowboys running around with six shooters. Drinking, gambling, whoring and everything else imaginable going on in the saloons. And just to make things more interesting, renegade Indians from Canada raiding the farms and driving off livestock. The real last frontier. If you have seen the movie “A River Runs Through it”, you might have some idea of what things were like in those days.

Dad with sleigh, Montana, 1923

You may also have heard of the Methodist “Circuit Riders”. These were some hardy preachers who roamed the West, utilizing whatever conveyance was available. Armed with not much but a Bible, they ministered to all those poor lost souls. Sometimes the meetinghouse was a Church, but more often a school, or even a saloon was called into service.

Anyhow, my dad was a true Westerner, and the last of this circuit rider breed. He really loved the country and the people,  Utilizing a car in the summer, a horse and sleigh in the winter, and riding a horse in spring and fall (The gumbo in those seasons was so thick that nothing else could get through), he made the rounds of cow towns and mining camps, spreading the word of God throughout his territory. He had a string of churches, because one could not provide a living wage. And if the occasion demanded, he would stride into a Saloon, announce that the bar was closed, set up shop and preach to the sinners. (The piano player, if there was one, sometimes even knew a hymn or two,)

Incidentally, while traveling through Montana about eighty years later, on a rainy spring day, we hit one of those gumbo back roads, and could barely get through it, even though our SUV had mud and snow tires, and was in four wheel drive, low range.

My dads 1923 Dodge

After about a dozen years, things were getting slightly more civilized, but

there was still a shortage of eligible women. So my dad took the bull by the horns, shopped mail order, found a Southern Belle, and began

a lengthily long distance courtship. Nobody is sure what negotiations were actually involved, but we do know there were several trips  over a considerable time period, and that they finally did get married in Billings, Montana, in 1930.

Jenny Lind, the blushing bride, was born in Missouri, in 1893, and always fancied herself a Southern Belle. Her name, Jenny, was the same as the word jenny, which in the Missouri vernacular was a female mule. So she went by the name of Jenne, pronounced Jean.

She was a highly educated woman for her time, having earned a masters degree at Columbia University in New York. She then had an uneventful series of jobs teaching school and doing social work in the mid western United States. She was moderately successful in her work, but apparently frustrated in her love life, witness the magazine ad at age 35.

Anyway, after the nuptials, incidentally performed outdoors, they settled down in a small tank town called Drummond. Quite a change for the  Southern Belle.

The term settled, as used here, is also relative. My dad would get itchy feet after two to three years in one place, and would move on to save a church somewhere else.

But let’s move along with the story. In 1932, while they were still in

Drummond, I was born in Deer Lodge Montana, 0n June 20,

In 1935, I was joined by twin sisters, one who died shortly after birth, and the other, Mary Kathryn, who also had health problems, and was later diagnosed with cerebral palsy.

During these years the country was deep in the Depression, with Montana (and our family) seeming to be particularly hard hit. Nine hundred dollars in salary was all that came in during some of those years. Farmers who could not sell livestock or crops at a profit certainly could not pay the minister money they did not have, but they could and did give him beef, pork or chickens, all of which were welcome. (But to this day, I cannot stand the sight of chicken.)

.

It turned out to be a good thing that my dad was really a frustrated farmer. When we moved to a new town the first two orders of business were to borrow a cow from some parishioner, and a couple of acres of land for a garden from another. That way, we at least had vegetables and milk. My dad also raised rabbits (to eat, not for pets), and we sometimes swapped a rabbit with a neighbor for one of their chickens. This relieved the monotony, which comes if either rabbits or chickens are the sole meat supply. My mother also made all of our own bread, everything from scratch. My dad sometimes supplemented our food supply by fishing through the ice on the river for whitefish in winter, and fly fishing the many streams for trout in the summer. Also during this period my mom made all of us children's clothes, and continued doing so until I was about eight years old.

Speaking of clothes, my mother seemed to have unusual tastes. One time when I was in first grade, she sent me to school in knickers. Can you imagine that, in the Wild West? I assure you that this never happened again.

One sign of the times was out-of-work men, including some college graduates, riding the freight trains through town, with many of them seeming to stop at our house. We had a woodpile, so when the men (they were called hobos or 'bos) came looking for a handout, my mother would ask them to cut some wood. They would work at it, usually in a desultory manner, but when the next freight train whistle sounded, they would come to the door and say, "I gotta go." My mom would then give them a sandwich, and they would be on their way. This got to be an everyday occurrence, perhaps due to the (unsubstantiated) rumor that these hobos would put an inconspicuous mark somewhere near the front of a house whose occupants would give them food. I always believed that our house must have had such a mark.

Aside from all this, Montana was a neat place for a young boy. There were cowboys, prospectors, and other interesting folk. There was lots of open space, one could go barefoot all summer, there were gophers to trap, kites to fly, fish to catch, lots of dirt to dig in, always a dog for a companion, and even a .22 to shoot once in awhile. When I was about five, though, there were a series of real bad earthquakes, which made quite an impression.

Speaking of impressions, one of my first recollections was sticking my finger in a light socket to see what would happen. Needless to say, that also made a great impression. I guess it also got me an early start on electrical engineering. Another early impression was in 1937 or 1938, when Orson Wells put on this really scary radio show, called War of the Worlds. This was a simulated newscast, which had Martians invading the earth. It panicked adults, so no wonder it scared a little kid. Speaking of radio, I clearly remember sitting around the one radio set in the house, listening to the election returns as Roosevelt beat Wilkie,

Life was really much less complicated in those days. Canadian border crossing, for instance, was pretty informal. If you wanted to go to Canada, you drove across the prairie, up to the border, cut the barbed wire fence, if there was one, and drove through. And then repeated this drill on the way back. Most places, though, there were only concrete pylons marking the border, every half mile or so, so no need for wire cutters. And there were certainly no Border Patrol, TSA or Customs and Immigration guys to complicate one’s life.

When I was six years old, my dad’s “circuit” was six churches, so we moved to a centrally located small town called Chester. The house we moved into was considered “modern” because it had a light bulb on a cord dangling in the middle of each room. There was also a real sink in the kitchen, with a cold water tap. The water though was undrinkable, with potable water being delivered periodically in ten gallon milk cans. Hot water was provided by a reservoir in the wood stove. I can’t recall what we did for hot water when we retired the stove, but I think that it was a contraption called a sidearm heater. There was a kerosene heater in the living room, which, sort of, provided heat for the whole house. (This was an improvement over our previous home, where the heat was so inadequate that in winter, up to two inches of ice would form on the inside of the outside walls.) For baths, there was a tin tub hauled into the kitchen on Saturday nights, where everyone took his or her turn. An outhouse handled sanitation requirements. This was a twin hole affair stocked with last years Sears catalog. This book served a dual purpose as both reading and wiping material. In the winter, a lifeline was rigged from the house to the outhouse, so one would not get lost in the blizzards. At 40 below, you better believe that one did their “business” quickly. It was one mile to school, but after 40 below zero, they closed the school, so one did not have to walk the mile in that cold.

The Chester Parsonage

Sister Kathy in foreground

I remember the time my father brought home a wind up phonograph and a big box of records that he had obtained for five dollars. Another five dollar purchase, which pleased my mother, was a used electric range. This banished the old wood range to the garage, where it was used in the winter to heat the garage up to zero so the car would start. This sure beat the previous system of draining the oil out of the engine in the evening, and keeping it (the oil) warm in a container behind the stove all night. One other purchase, however, didn’t work out so well. One day my dad brought home a small heating stove which he had bought somewhere for a couple of dollars. He hooked it up in the kitchen, and since it was full of paper and miscellaneous trash, he just lit that stuff off rather than cleaning it out. About two minutes later there came a string of explosions louder than firecrackers, and everyone ducked for cover. Seems that along with the trash in the stove was a box of 30.30 shells, which were set off by the fire. Fortunately no one was hurt, but my mother’s nerves were shot for several days.

My dad was great for building kites, which we then flew together. The string ball in the kitchen, however, did not yield enough material to get our creations very high, and there was no other suitable string to be found in the town. We solved the problem, though, by getting a giant ball of carpet twine by mail order from Monkey Wards in Spokane. It seemed like it took forever, but one day the package containing the string arrived. A whole 4000 feet, almost a mile of string. We had already built a giant kite, and lost no time hooking up the string and getting the leviathan in the air.

As the string paid out, bystanders and neighbors gathered, and soon we had quite a crowd. Then disaster struck. I had to stop to tie my shoe, so I handed the string to a lady standing nearby, telling her to hold it for a moment. You guessed it, she let go. Kite and string, including what was left on the ball, departed into the wild blue yonder, and was never seen again. Probably ended up In Iowa.

My folk’s idea of a vacation when I was a little guy was to load the kids in the old car, (a 1932 Chevrolet) and either go camping, visit relatives, or both. My mother also insisted on an obligatory visit to any state capital on or close to the projected route. As I said, we usually camped or stayed with relatives, but when we did utilize the occasional fifty cents per night “tourist cabin”, my mother required that everyone sit in the car, until she had washed the whole place down with Lysol. These trips were generally extremely boring, but one stands out in my memory as having had some interesting action.

My first camping trip

This was the summer of 1939, and we headed to the Pacific Northwest for camping, relatives, and some kind of religious seminar at the College of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Incidentally, instead of staying in a hotel or one of the college dorms like normal people, my dad insisted on camping out in the woods behind the college, using one of the dorm’s facilities for showers, calls of nature, etc. We also had pulled along with us a large utility trailer, loaded to the gunnels with camping equipment and about 1000 Mason jars. So while my dad got educated, or whatever they do at seminars, my mother scoured the surrounding countryside for produce, then canned it up, in the Mason jars, using a Coleman stove on the tailgate of the trailer.

Somehow, in Tacoma, my dad got mixed up with a car salesman, and we became the proud owners of a brand new 1939 Chevrolet. The price was $835, and I believe my dad borrowed on his life insurance to raise the money. Anyway, the next Saturday we went to the beach, and not being familiar with beach driving, my dad managed to get the car irretrievably stuck. With the tide coming in. A panic call for a wrecker retrieved the situation, and the car, in the nick of time, and nothing was too badly damaged except my mother’s nerves.

The new 1939 Chevrolet    That’s the camp bed tied to the front bumper

A couple of days later we were headed up a winding one lane dirt road to a logging camp in the Oregon Coast Range. This camp was named Valsetz, and my Uncle Metz was a meat cutter there. My dad was no stranger to mountain dirt roads, as we had many of them in Montana, and in driving them he only had two speeds, wide open and stopped. When he came to a blind corner, rather than slow down, he would lean on the horn and press on. Apparently there was a bit more traffic in Oregon than in Montana, and the new Chevy had more power (and more speed) than the old ’32, so you can imagine what happened. He wheeled around a blind corner and head on into another car. So the new car finished the trip behind a wrecker, and my mother really freaked out.

As a sidelight, many years later when I was running a construction job in the West Indies, I signed on a drifter who said that he was from Valsetz. He was really surprised when he found that I knew where the place was.

But my mother, the Southern Belle from Missouri, was getting more and more frustrated and unhappy. She didn’t understand, or try to understand the people, and the generally rough and ready nature of the frontier really got to her. Of course, moving from one tank town to another every two to three years really didn’t help. Not to mention the occasional gun fight in a saloon.

(Bet you didn't know that Last Chance Gulch, the main street of the state capitol, Helena, was laid out with a jog every block or so, in order that stray bullets from the gunfights wouldn't travel the length of town.)

Needless to say, her generally poor attitude was beginning to affect my father’s work. But let me give you an example. In the Methodist Church, the local preacher reports to a District Superintendent, popularly called the DS, who reports to the Bishop.

 Once a quarter, the DS showed up in town, listened to the preacher preach, conferred with the church elders, and thus judged the minister’s performance. For years, incidentally, I thought that this meeting with the elders was called the Quarrely Conference, based on the conversations I overheard. I finally found out that it was the Quarterly Conference, but I thought the former name to be more appropriate. But back to the story. Since there were no decent hotel accommodations in these towns, it was the custom for the DS to stay with the preacher during these visits. My mother, however, took a strong dislike to one DS named Rev. Wampler. She refused to have him in the house, and told him he could take a room in the establishment over the saloon. Certainly a great way to make points with the boss. She also endeared herself to the females in the church by making it known that anyone who didn’t belong to the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution), or the AAUW (American Association of University Women) was not really civilized.

Anyway, back to my mother. The Montana situation was deteriorating and something eventually had to give. My father tried to get a transfer, but as you could imagine, Montana was easy to transfer into, but almost impossible to transfer out of. Things finally got to the point where he quit the ministry, put the two kids in the car, loaded all our belongings in an old truck, (Driven by a parishioner he had conned into the job) and headed west into the sunset.

THE WAR YEARS

We landed on a small farm near St. Helens Oregon, just up the Columbia River from Astoria. My dad tried to make a living peddling Fuller Brush stuff and Watkins patent medicines to the farm ladies in the region, while my mother, and sometimes us kids, helped farmers harvest produce in season. (Until recently, we still had one of these Fuller brooms up at our summer cabin, so they must have been good) We somehow scraped up the money to buy a cow (whom I promptly named Betty), so we had milk, and I believe that we accepted a bit of charity from the local Masonic lodge.

My sister and I were promptly enrolled in the nearby one room grade school. She in the first grade, and me in the fourth. Of course I had to fight every boy in the school, a pattern that repeated itself every time we moved, but after that, things went reasonably well.

I learned a lot in that school, most of it non academic. Things that particularly stick in my mind are the times the teacher would lock herself in the girls outhouse to avoid the advances of the eighth grade boys, and how we used to hide for hours in a hollowed out woodpile while the teacher frantically searched for us.

Then came December 7, 1941, and the world turned inside out. For some time after Pearl Harbor, Japanese I class submarines roamed freely up and down the Pacific coast, torpedoing ships at the mouth of the Columbia, taking on the coast defense fort at Fort Stevens near Astoria, and generally raising havoc. Some of them even carried and flew off airplanes, which certainly added to the confusion. Everyone was sure that the Japanese would be landing on the beaches any day, and reacted accordingly.

Note:

If you think that the foregoing is an exaggeration, your attention is directed to any definitive history of the Pacific War, or a book such as “Thousand Mile War” which spells this stuff out in some detail. Incidentally, almost forty years later, I had the pleasure of a long lunch in Tokyo with two Japanese naval officers who had been Captains of these I class subs. They had been engaged in this activity off the US Pacific coast, and related their experiences in some detail.

Imagine the impact of all this on a nine year old boy. Soldiers with machine guns guarding road junctions and major installations. Aircraft spotters on most every hillside, and Coast Watchers peering intently out to sea. Airplanes zooming overhead, Navy ships on the Columbia, and military traffic on the major roads. Not to mention air raid drills, blackouts, food rationing, and other such civil defense measures.

It was really more exciting than scary, with the older folks being considerably more worried than the kids.

Eventually the panic wore off somewhat, and everyone settled down to a wartime existence. Those of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and packed off to concentration camps, and all the men under forty were either drafted or joined the military. Everything from gasoline to food was rationed, and it was impossible to procure anything made of rubber or metal. The general population was continually reminded that there was a war on, by Bond drives, scrap metal drives, patriotic rallies and an unremitting stream of propaganda over the radio and in print media. Thankfully, television was still in the future.

There was though, a bright side.

Due to the shortage of manpower, my dad (who had already been in one war) landed a laborers job at the local paperboard mill, at a very decent wage, and my mother got in an occasional few days of substitute teaching.

I think my dad really liked this job. He was a bit older, and a bit better educated than the other guys at work, but he seemed to fit right in. They called him “Deacon” and somehow he got the less strenuous work.

He also continually kept feelers out for a permanent ministerial job with the Methodist Church. This spadework finally paid off, and he landed a decent appointment at Prosser, in the Yakima River valley, in Washington State. So again we loaded our belongings in an old truck and headed for a new adventure, a couple of hundred miles east.

PROSSER

Prosser main street. Circa 1945

Prosser turned out to be quite a place. A metropolis of about 2000 souls, and County Seat as well. Also my dad experienced quite a change in social status, from an itinerant peddler and day laborer to a respected member of the establishment.

We stayed in that town five years, an eternity it seemed, and after the obligatory fight with every kid in my grade, I settled down to a pretty interesting life. The Superintendent of School’s kid, Billy , (who later turned out to be gay), the prosecuting attorney’s kid and myself, who were all the same age, formed an alliance and really started to beat up the town. What one didn’t think of, the others did, and we were all ready to try anything.

Meantime, my mother found a full time job as a caseworker with the county welfare department, so my sister and I were left in the care of a nice old lady who came in every day. This lady and I quickly came to an unspoken understanding. She would let me do pretty much as I pleased, in return for me not ratting her out to my mother. Also, at this time, my folks were becoming almost totally preoccupied with my sister’s health and her health care. I think that they visited every quack doctor in the West, she had several sojourns to the Shriner's hospital in Portland, and there was a never ending regimen of different appliances and exercises. Needless to say, I was pretty much left to fend for myself.

And fend, I did. Actually, I have chronicled a number of the adventures, and misadventures, I had in that town, in the next few pages.

My first real independent travel was with my good buddy and best friend Billy, when we were twelve years old. But let me tell you the whole tale.

As I said, Billy and I were twelve, and we really wanted to go to the Portland Rose Festival. Now Portland was 200 miles away, but as far as accessibility for 12 year olds, it might as well have been on the other side of the moon. We considered, tested, and discarded several proposed means of transportation, including bicycling, and riding the rails. (Also known as hopping a freight) While exploring this latter mode of transportation, we happened upon some bums in the local hobo jungle, and they talked us out of it. We finally settled on hitchhiking, and after a couple of test runs around the valley verified that this was a cheap and relatively reliable form of transportation. As for lodging in Portland, I knew of a city park relatively close to downtown, which had some undeveloped acreage, and we figured we could camp there.

So we each told our folks that we were going camping in some hills about five miles from town and would buy our food at a nearby store. This set up the cover story and got us a few bucks for a grubstake. Finally the big day arrived, and we packed our essential camping gear in a big box, stashed the balance of the stuff in my basement darkroom, (Where adults never went), put the box on a bus for Portland, and hopped the same bus to the next town. We then started hitch hiking and made our way to Portland in record time, and without incident. Upon inquiring at the Portland bus station, however, we found that our box would not arrive till the next day. We worked this problem handily though, by spending the first night in an all night theatre. Next day, we took in the Rose Festival parade, retrieved our box from the bus depot, and hopped a streetcar for the park. At the park, we found an almost impenetrable thicket, hacked out a space for our camp, and set up. Actually snug as two bugs in a rug.

After three days of seeing the sights of Portland, we broke camp, put our box on the bus, and hitch hiked back home. We did get stuck though in the little town of Goldendale, and had to sleep in a building entryway all night. Anyway, we arrived in our hometown the next day, retrieved our box, dug out our camping stuff, and made our appearance, with no one the wiser. Our buddies were really impressed, as we had taken the precaution of obtaining dated sales slips from stores in Portland, so that we could prove that we had actually been there.

It’s hard to believe, two twelve year old kids wandering around a big city, at all hours of the day and night, but we pulled it off. Sure couldn’t happen in this day and age.

Anyway, that jaunt was so much fun that 13 or so, we graduated to hitchhiking adventures around the Western United States, which might take a week or so.

Sometimes we would have a destination, other times we went where the road took us. I particularly remember once in Townsend Montana, where I hitched on one side of the highway, and Billy the other, catching a ride with the first guy who came along.  Another time, a traveling salesman driving a hopped up Ford, picked us up, but got sleepy in the middle of the night, and let Billy drive for awile. This was kind of interesting, as Billy, who at 14, didn’t have a license, and really couldn’t drive very well, attempted to get us across the old Pendelton Grade, in the middle of the night.

And once, I remember, as a change of pace, , Billy and I upgraded, taking a train (as a passenger) to Portland and staying in a real hotel.

Again, we documented our travels, and when we finally ‘fessed up, years later, my mother absolutely refused to believe.

A kid has to have some money, so Billy and I, after a couple of abortive get rich schemes, managed to wangle the franchise for the Spokane newspaper, for the whole town, including newsstand sales. In this operation we acted as independent contractors, buying the papers from the company and selling them to the townsfolk. We recruited kids to help with the actual delivery, with ourselves generally concentrating on sales and collections, and the money just rolled in. We were clearing $60 to 70 per month each. I kept this up till I was 14, when I graduated into a job at the local Hudson car dealer, learning the automobile business from the ground up.

One interesting item about the Hudson dealer. This was 1946, and new cars were in short supply. Also Hudson did not offer a convertible in 1946. The boss wanted a convertible, so we took a brand new 1946 Hudson Commodore Eight, removed the body (from the firewall back,) and bolted on a 1942 Hudson convertible body. We then transferred all the 1946 stuff, like seats, dash etc, to the 1942 body, and presto, a 1946 Hudson convertible. The boss was really proud of this machine, and drove it all over Eastern Washington.

Another of our get rich schemes didn’t do too badly. Construction was to begin on McNary dam on the Columbia, about 35 miles from our house, and there was to be a great ground breaking ceremony. Billy and I were reasonably competent photographers, for 13 year olds, so we decided to attend the ceremony, shoot pictures, quickly process them, and then peddle them to the onlookers. A kind of early day one hour photo. Some experiments in my darkroom actually proved the technical feasibility of this approach. We could develop the film and make prints in a little over an hour, but what would we do for a lab? We solved that problem by enlisting a 14 year old friend, Les, who knew how to drive, sort of, and although Les didn’t have a driver’s license, he did have a relative with a Model A pickup We borrowed the pickup, scrounged two old refrigerator cartons, which we built into a darkroom on the back of the truck, and then modified all our equipment to run on six volts. Further testing proved that we could actually process pictures with this improbable setup, so we were set to go. Early morning on the big day, after giving our parents some story about going camping, we took off in the truck, parked in a good location, and wormed our way in with the press photogs. I think that they gave us a break because we were kids, and they thought that we were harmless. Janis Page, the movie star, was the prime attraction and we had front row seats. She arrived in a helicopter, the first one that we had ever seen. Anyhow, we got some great pictures of Miss Page, the helicopter, and the officials turning over the first spade full of dirt. We then repaired to the darkroom, developed the film, whipped out the prints, and peddled them to the crowd for 25 cents each. I don’t recall how much we cleared, but it was definitely worth our while.

Ms. Page and handler

Incidentally, while cleaning out some files in the summer of 2004, I actually found the old black and white negatives with Miss Page’s image. The pics accompanying this story, are photoshopped images from those old negs.

This photography stuff actually proved useful in many ways. For example, at summer church camp we would run around snapping pics, set up a darkroom and invite the girls in to see what would develop. The same line also sometimes worked in Junior Hi. And photography also stood me in good stead when I joined the Air Force, but that is getting ahead of the story.

My first venture in electrical engineering (after the finger in socket gig), was designing and building a homemade electric bicycle. I found a junk bicycle, scrounged a Studebaker starter and an old battery, and then assembled the whole shebang. I got it out on the sidewalk, mounted up, hit the throttle, and away I zoomed. BACKWARD!!! Oh well, can’t win ‘em all. Lucky there was no audience for that one.

Another experiment, which didn’t go much better, was a primitive two way radio between my house and Billy’s. This consisted of the same car battery hooked to a telegraph key and thence to a Model T coil. The high tension output from the coil was routed to a spark gap on an antenna about 20 feet above the house roof.

So, you hooked up the battery and tapped out the message in Morse with the telegraph key. The only problem was that the thing was wide band, and I mean really wide band. When we were transmitting, it knocked out radio reception in the whole town.

Twenty five years later I guess my skills had improved somewhat. I ran a small organization, which developed the first computer installation in a police car. We called it a Mobile Digital Terminal or MDT, a name that remains in use to this day. I designed the computer/police radio interface myself, (similar to today’s modems) and it worked.

We then tried our hand at Chemical Engineering, making gunpowder, no less. Somehow we figured out the recipe, without benefit of Internet, I might add, and proceeded to scrounge up the ingredients. We liberated sulfur from a stock my dad used for drying apricots, but had to buy the other two ingredients. There were two drugstores in town, so Billy went to one, asking the pharmacist for saltpeter for the dog, I hit the other one with a request for charcoal for some unremembered purpose.  We then repaired to my back yard, where mixed the ingredients with water, then set it out to dry.  To set the stuff off, I believe we used an electric spark igniter, but the exact process is kind of hazy. Anyway we usually got a satisfying bang, which at that point was good enough for us, and we never did try to fashion a homemade firearm.  And, as usual, nobody paid any attention to what we were doing.

 

Ready to head to “The Hill” for an overnight.

Immediately south of town was a range of small mountains, about 2000 feet high, which were colloquially referred to as “the hill”. When not up to something else, and particularly in the summer, we would range the "hill" with dog and gun, hunting rabbits and generally enjoying ourselves. (Inexplicably, my mother had given me a .22 for my twelfth birthday.) At one time we built a “camp” in a secluded valley about two miles from town, and spent many enjoyable afternoons and nights in this hideaway. Only problem was, after it got dark the coyotes started their eerie howl, which invariably got the dog’s attention. The dogs were smart enough not to get mixed up with coyotes, and deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, they would head back for town on a dead run. Often upon investigating in the morning, we would find the place full of coyote tracks. Those curious animals had been checking us out as we slept.

As a kid, two things we always looked forward to in summer were Boy Scout camp and Church Camp. Scout Camp was in a small community in the Cascade Mountains, where Supreme Court Justice William Douglas actually lived. It was two weeks of sheer fun. Hiking, woodcraft, hijinks of every sort, and getting to know other boys from all over Eastern Washington.

Starting the day right

With a rousing “To the colors”

(This was before the high cost of liability insurance made it necessary for Scouts to go to camp with their own troop, with their own Scoutmaster being responsible.)

Church Camp was a bit different, although in a facility similar to, and only a few miles from the Scout Camp. First off, it was coed, and the discipline was substantially more relaxed. Also, my dad was the Camp Manager, so we could be in residence there for the entire time that the camp operated, not just a week. My friend Billy and I were also the official camp photographers, and were always running around snapping pictures, half the time with no film in the camera.

In our spare time we wired our tent for electricity, making a surreptitious tap off the wheezing old camp generator. Between those activities, other hi jinks, and hiking around the nearby mountains, we would always manage to spend an enjoyable month. (Between Scout and church camps, in those years, I managed to climb every 9000 to 10,000 foot mountain in the vicinity of Chinook Pass.)

NOTE: The images accompanying this story are 60 to 80 years old, and were dug out of various archives, so the quality may leave something to be desired. A good number of these were taken, developed, and printed by me when I was 12-14 years old, so the quality may not be professional. Some prints were not available so the images were Photoshoped from the original, and somewhat deteriorated negatives.

During my time in Prosser, the “Manhattan Project” was building its Hanford Works, on the other side of Rattlesnake Mountain, about thirty miles away, to produce plutonium for the Atom Bomb. This provided a large number of well paying jobs, fueled a lot of rumors, and seemed to be the source of a few unexplained illnesses, which may or may not have been radiation sickness. The consensus around town was that it was some kind of test facility for a new wonder weapon, a guess that was not far off.

Approximately thirty years later, BCS, where I worked, won a contract to provide all the computing for the Hanford Works, and I did visit the place a couple of times.

HIGH SCHOOL

I could go on and on about Prosser, but you get the idea. Anyway, after five years, my dad moved on to greener pastures, literally. A dairy farming hamlet called Allen, in the Skagit Valley, in northwest Washington state. 

This was a very interesting community, and had been settled by many different nationalities. Scandinavians (collectively called Swedes) were predominant, however, and they were a clannish lot. They stuck together socially, and others who were not Scandinavian had a tough time fitting in. Usually, if there was part time work to be had they made sure that a “Swede” boy got the job, making it difficult for someone who was not Scandinavian to get work. Despite this, I finally found work in a newspaper office after school hours, but it wasn’t very challenging or interesting.

Soon, to beat the boredom, I started getting interested in cars. My first car was a 1922 Dodge Brothers touring car, which had kind of been converted to a pickup. (Dodge Brothers was the name of the company, before it became part of Chrysler.) I bought it for $2.50, then had to dig it out of a mass of raspberry bushes, where it had resided for at least ten years. (Interestingly enough, my dad’s first car had been a 1923 Dodge coupe, one year newer than mine). Getting that car to run, though, was a real challenge. My dad had mentioned many times in his sermons how he had fixed his Dodge with ingenuity and baling wire, but he turned out not to be too much help in the real world. I finally found an old blacksmith who remembered these cars, and between us we coaxed it back to life. Those of you who are car buffs might be interested in some of this car’s unique features. Like a twelve volt electrical system, a combination starter/generator that was chain drive to the engine, a backward pattern on the gearshift, a multiple disc clutch, and external band brakes, on the rear wheels only.

My first car (The one on the right)

A 1923 Dodge Brothers pickup conversion from a Touring Car

Over the next couple of years I traded up to 1929 through 1932 Chevy’s, and a 1932 Rockne. (A kind of a Studebaker). With these cars, reliability was not a strong suite. They would get us the four miles to school on most days, saving the humiliation of riding the bus. And sometimes they would even make it as far as the next town, but the girls there were usually not impressed. And once in a great while, they might even be good for a camping trip to the nearby mountains.

It finally got to the point where there were so many dead cars out back that the place looked like a wrecking yard, and the Church Board of Directors told my dad in no uncertain terms to clean it up. So I got rid of all the iron and became the proud owner of a slightly modified 1936 Ford. This was my first (but not my last) experience with a hot car, and this one would actually outrun the ancient paddy wagons driven by the State Patrol. The County Mounties though, had Hudson straight eights, which would really go, and the State cops finally got smart and switched to Olds 88 V8s, and supercharged Frazier Manhattans.

Another interesting sidelight. Over 50 years later, it turned out that a golfing buddy of mine in Palm Desert, CA, had a best friend named Charles, who turned out to be the son of one of our good parishioners at Allen, and whom as a kid I had known well.

As you have probably figured out by now, compared to Prosser, and despite the cars, this Allen place really sucked. After a year of high school there, I figured out that because of different scholastic requirements in Prosser and my current school, I could finish high school in one more year, for a total of three years, if I took some correspondence work.

I decided to do this, taking courses in automobile engine theory to get the required number of credits, and graduated from high school in 1949 at the ripe old age of 16.

AND OUT INTO THE WORLD

At this point I took good long look at my options and made a couple of decisions. I had a reasonably steady girl friend in a nearby town, and I thought that she was probably a keeper. As a preachers kid, I also had a scholarship offer at the then College of Puget Sound in Tacoma, so I decided to take them up on that. The final decision was to leave home. This wasn’t as tough a call as it sounds. As mentioned previously, I had been pretty much on my own since twelve anyway. Besides, my folks were now even more preoccupied with my sister’s health problem, so my departure was kind of by mutual agreement. Anyway, I stowed my excess gear here and there, upgraded my transport from the 1936 Ford to a 1938 Pontiac, enrolled at College of Puget Sound for the fall term, headed to Eastern Washington to earn some money as an itinerant farm worker, and never looked back.

I didn’t make much money that summer, but had some interesting experiences, and met some really weird characters. The best job was contract apple thinning for a farmer in Peshastin, where I made $12 to 15 dollars a day, plus a free cabin. (The cabin, incidentally, is still there, but now has electricity and running water.) Weekends I would sometimes head for my Mount Vernon girlfriend, to get a decent meal and the laundry done. This was quite a trip in those days, as Stevens Pass was still a gravel road.

The ’36 Ford I was driving, was just not up to that commute, having a couple of interesting problems. First, the brakes had mechanical rather than hydraulic linkage, and were so bad as to be practically nonexistent. This led to lots of fun when coming down mountain passes. The other problem was oil consumption. Those old V8s would burn about a quart of oil to a gallon of gas, which got kind of expensive, not to mention the smoke trail stretching out behind. Kind of looked like an old East German Trabant on the Autobahn. We solved the oil problem by scrounging used oil from filling stations, but never found a solution to the bad brakes.

Casting about, I found what looked like an interesting 1938 Pontiac, in good shape, for a reasonable price, so I bought it. This rig was a big car, rode nice, and had lots of power from a big straight six engine. Turned out though, that the only thing on it that was 1938 Pontiac was the grill, the body shell, and the Title. The rest being a conglomeration of GM parts from 1932 to 1941. My car, I found out, was a car that had been built up during WW II, out of miscellaneous parts. You see, during the war, new cars, and even new replacement parts were non-existent, so mechanics built up cars out of junk parts, and then sold them for fantastic prices. The thing was impossible to keep running and even harder to repair, and I gave up on it when I found a front suspension rod that was Buick on one end and Pontiac on the other, having been fabricated of these two rods welded together, to fit the screwed up front suspension.

Come fall, and I headed for Tacoma and my college adventure. In those days, the colleges were full of World War II ex GIs, who had seen the world, and were as much interested in hi jinks as in getting an education. This, of course, appealed to a teen age kid, and together we had some interesting adventures. Panty raids on the girls dorm, burning our college initials in the cross town rivals front lawn, chasing the Dean of Men across the Quadrangle with a car, and fire hose fights in the dorm halls, are some of the things which come to mind. But let me tell you of one interesting but harmless prank I particularly remember. It seemed the dorm rooms had the room number on the wall beside the door rather than on the door. So, the night of the big game, when everyone was absent, we purloined a passkey, and switched all the room doors. Later, when everyone arrived home half smashed, they found that their room key would not fit, and it took a couple of hours to settle down the confusion.

Washing rats in the Bendix automatic washer, and getting free pop from the dorm vending machines were other relatively harmless pastimes. Truth is, the only thing which kept me from getting kicked out, was my dad’s personal friendship with the college president, Dr. R. Franklin Thompson. During this time I supported myself by being the night man in a dog hospital, (plenty of time to study) working in a Dairy Queen, (Lots of free food) and running the cafeteria dishwasher for an hour in the morning. (Free breakfast)

Next summer there was still no decent work to be found, (Boeing, for example, was down to about 4,000 people, and you could shoot a cannon down the shop aisles without hitting anybody.) so it was back to the “fruit tramp” circuit. The start of the Korean War coincided with my eighteenth birthday, so I registered for the draft and was promptly classified 1-A. (The most eligible category.) Nothing immediately happened, so in the fall I traded up to a 1940 Plymouth coupe, with a 1948 Dodge Police Special engine, (That car would do almost100 MPH) and headed back to school.

School didn’t seem so interesting that year, and I really couldn’t hook up with a decent job. To top it off, about a month into the term I got into a horrendous car wreck. The accident was clearly not my fault, but the other driver was the son of the mayor of Gig Harbor, a nearby town, and after some political pressure, the cops tried to pin it on me. Ultimately I had to hire a lawyer and take the other guy to court. This resulted in all charges against me being thrown out, my car being fixed for free, and a nice cash settlement, even after I paid the lawyer. This was my first, but not my last, experience with the legal profession, and I was impressed.

All this trauma really raised havoc with school, so I decided to sit it out for a while and get a real job. Besides, by this time the Korean War was in full swing and I would probably get drafted any day anyway.

So, I jumped into the ol’ Plymouth, and headed for Seattle. Highway 99 was the road, the freeway being still in the future, and Boeing was the first business after entering Seattle, so I decided to try my luck there first. And yes, they had a job for me, a production worker on the KC-97 assembly line, and the pay was a fantastic $1.05 an hour. What could be better? They did say that I had to go to school for a couple of weeks, and they would also pay me for that. So on October 17, 1950, I reported in for school, and started an association with Boeing, which off and on, (mostly on) would span almost the next fifty years.

School was mostly drilling and riveting, and at the end we took a test. And guess what, my grade was high enough to get me into another school, this time for a month. When this was over, there was another test and, would you believe it, this time I got sent to a real school. And got a five cent an hour raise. So started six months at Broadway Edison Technical School’s aircraft branch, where I was supposed to learn how to be a Sheet Metal Bench Mechanic. This school was really fun, and I did learn a little.

Eight months, and one raise, after starting at Boeing I finally got assigned to a real job. I was going to be a Helper General, in the Experimental Shop, in the old Experimental Division. These guys made one off airplane parts and assemblies, and many times worked with the engineers to test or otherwise check them out.

The shop was in the old seaplane hanger at Boeing Plant 1, where the Boeing Clipper airplane was built. I reported to a snoose chewing Assistant Foreman, who directed me to a large pile of cables, gave me some rags and can of ketone, and told me to clean the grease off them. After a couple of days he showed back up, and seemed surprised that I was still there.

I then graduated to sweeping the floor for a week or so. At least on that job, I could look around and see what was going on. Ultimately, they attached me to an old sheet metal mechanic named Rascke, and I actually began doing some useful work.

This place turned out to be great for a young guy just starting out. It was staffed by real craftsmen who could do almost anything with metal. In those days there was no retirement at Boeing, so you worked till you dropped. There were a number of guys in their seventies, and even eighties, and, believe me, they really knew their stuff. Max Stockinger, an ancient German who could do anything with sheet metal. Ivanoff, an old Russian who could beat out an aircraft cowling with a hammer, and Mallet, a first rate machinist. (Actually, in later years I was privileged to visit most of the aircraft factories in the free world, and never again saw all those capabilities and skills in one shop.)

Almost all of these guys, also, were willing to share their knowledge with a young kid who was willing to learn, and I soaked up a lot. Steve, the shift Foreman, kind of took a liking to me, and kept giving me more complex work, and more importantly, raises. Boeing’s hourly grades went from 10 to 1, with one being the highest, and eventually I became a grade 2, making $2.75 an hour, all in a little over a year and a half. In fact, I became kind of an informal supervisor, being responsible for the work of six other mechanics. Although we put out almost as much work as the rest of the shop combined, it got so that I seldom opened my tool box, unless it was to loan a tool to one of my guys. In the course of business I also figured out how to offload jobs to other shops, and still get credit for the work done, and that really helped our production.

Along the way on this job, something happened which made a lifelong impression. One day a guy wearing a tie showed up, said that he was a Union business agent, and started asking questions. At that time, incidentally, Boeing was an open shop. This meant that whether or not you joined the Union was pretty much up to you, and I had elected not to join. After we talked for a while, he told me that I was doing an “A” man’s work (An “A” man was kind of a journeyman, and I was, at that time, a B or C man, kind of an assistant or a helper.) He then explained that if we put in a formal grievance, there was a good chance that I could get paid for the “A” man work I had been doing, and maybe even get promoted. When I discussed this with the other shop guys, they really urged me not to do this, saying this would surely put me on the Boss’s s*** list. Besides I didn’t belong to the union. When I told the Business Agent that I wasn’t a union man, he said that it didn’t matter, so I finally told him to go ahead with the grievance. Well, there were papers to fill out, then a big investigation. The final result was that I kept doing “A” man’s work, got retroactive “A” man pay and got promoted to “A” man in the bargain. This really made me a believer, and I joined the union forthwith.

The point of this long and rather rambling story is that this gave me a pro union, rather than an anti union slant on life. Unions certainly have their problems, but I have always found the majority of Union members and Union officials to be honest, hard working people just like anyone else. Over the years, I had the opportunity to work with and supervise hundreds of union members belonging to dozens of different unions, and I can honestly say that I never had a union grievance, or any other significant problem. All you have to do is know the rules and stick to them. I was even once tagged to serve on a grievance committee, hearing and ruling on union grievances. Sometimes we found for the union and sometimes for the company, but the decisions were always unanimous.

Meanwhile, all was not work. I was still going with the girl from Mount Vernon, but her folks were strongly hinting of marriage, and this made me a bit nervous. Anyway in February of 1951, I was invited on a ski trip with a guy I worked with, whose name was Art, along with his girl friend Mary. Afterwards, the girl friend invited me in to meet her roommate and lifelong friend, a young lady named Pat Whalen.

Turned out that Mary and Pat grew up in Grand Forks ND, worked for the Great Northern Railroad, and at age 21, set out into the big world to seek fame and fortune. Both fame and fortune eluded them, and they ended up in Seattle, eking out a living working for the same old Great Northern.

So, I said goodbye to the Mount Vernon girl, and the four of us started hanging out together.

At this point in time, I was living in an old hunting lodge, practically under Snoqualmie Falls, on the side of the river away from the road. A real idyllic and isolated spot. It was 35 miles to work, but there was little traffic, and I could easily make it in 45 minutes. (Even though Highway 10, now Interstate 90, was two lanes, all the way to Lake Sammamish.) To save money, I was burning tractor gas (no tax), which was delivered in bulk to my place, for something like twenty cents a gallon.

After a bit of this hanging out with the guys and gals, it was becoming a real chore to drive out to the lodge, catch a few hours sleep, and then drive back to work, in town. So I said good bye to the hunting lodge, and along with a couple of my working buddies, rented a big old house, just off fraternity row in Seattle’s University District. This cut down on the commute, but led to more parties, so I suppose things were about a tossup.

About the same time I said goodbye to the Plymouth, and upgraded to a 1948 Nash Ambassador. This Ambassador was kind of a sleeper. It looked almost exactly like a Nash 600, which had an anemic flat six, and could not get out of its own way, but the Ambassador was heavier, had better suspension and a big overhead valve six cylinder engine. It was one of the three 1948 cars, which, stock, would do an honest 100 MPH, clock. (I eventually put a built up stock car engine in it, and then I really had a bomb, but that is a story for another time.)

As I said, Mary and Art, and Pat and I, were hanging with each other quite a bit, but soon Mary and Art got married. This seemed like a reasonable thing to do, so we followed suit, and were married on June 20, 1951,  by a JP in an idyllic garden setting.  Later on, we did it up right, in a full scale Catholic ceremony.

We then moved into a basement apartment on Roosevelt Way, were both working, and were enjoying a pretty good life.

As I said, we were both working, but we did experiment with a couple of small businesses. The first was "Digger's Delivery", Named after "Digger" O'Dell on a then popular radio show.

In this improbable venture, we bought low grade coal from a local mine for around six dollars per ton, then sacked it at about ninety five pounds to the sack, and delivered it residents of a local housing project for one dollar per bag.

Problem was, neither my partner or I wanted to do the manual labor involved, so the venture collapsed from inertia. All was not lost, however, as I sold the truck for enough to buy Pat a brand new top of the line Singer sewing machine. Which we still have, by the way.

Our next venture was Kuller Metal Products, producing cast metal toys. The metal casting died a quick death, but we secured a patent for a kid's pounding toy made of wood, called the Young Pound-Around.

Pat's dad stood us for $500, I recall, and with this infusion of capital, we leased a shop building under the University Bridge in Seattle, and bought the necessary woodworking and painting equipment. Our sales and marketing could not keep up with our production, and we soon had considerable inventory. We were just learning how to peddle the stuff when, as explained below, I had to put the business in the capable hands of my partner, who destroyed it in about six months. But again, the machinery served me well as a home workshop for years and years. Matter of fact, son Mark still has some of it in his shop.

AIR FORCE ADVENTURES

By early 1952, the Korean War was in full swing, and the draft board was breathing down my neck. But I got some immediate relief when my company wangled me a deferment as an essential worker in a critical industry. There were, however, three problems with this arrangement. It was uncertain how long the deferment would last, it made me really beholden to the company, and somehow I felt that I was not doing my part for the war effort. There was also another consideration. Since the Revolutionary War, every generation in my family had someone in the military, and it didn’t seem right to break that tradition.

Anyway, I talked to some recruiters, and also took the Armed Forces Qualification Test. I scored 100 out of a possible 100 on the test, and then I was really deluged with recruiters. Some of these recruiters were really creative, but I wouldn't have bought a used Buick from them, let alone rely on their promises.

I finally decided on the US Air Force, I took a leave of absence from Boeing, left the toy business to my partner,  and joined up for 8 years. Four on active duty, and four more in the reserves.

The brand new, starry eyed recruit

(At the time, I couldn’t figure out why my company got so upset when I enlisted. Later, I found out just how much work it was to get a deferment for an employee, and I couldn’t blame them)

So, I was off on a train with a bunch of other recruits, to a brand new basic training base near Oakland CA, named Parks AFB. We arrived about midnight, were fed, and then issued bedding and herded into a barracks. I suppose it was about 2:00 AM when we finally settled down. Anyway, at 4:00 AM whistles blew, the lights came on, and a big burly Sergeant came through yelling “Drop your c***s and grab your socks. What an introduction to military life.

About two years later, this same thing happened to me when I had crashed in an Infantry barracks in Germany. Being older and wiser by then, I merely told the Sergeant to perform an unnatural act, and turned over and went back to sleep. The poor guy was so shocked by this outburst that he left me alone thereafter! And I was a real hero with the doggies in that squad room

I will digress here for a moment to give you, the reader, some insights into the military as I saw it. This, of course, is a grunt's view. Exalted personages like senior NCOs and particularly officers, probably see things differently, I am sure. But anyway, here goes.

Basically, the military is very conservative, it operates by tried and true methods, which have worked for eons, in many cases since Caesars Legions, and nobody is about to change them. Individuality and initiative are out, conformity is in. You can’t beat the system, and there is no use to try. You will just make things miserable for yourself and others. But, once you have figured the system out, and make it work for you, the military can be a really comfortable place, and a great life.

It usually takes about six months to figure out how to work the system, and some never do. I mastered it in about two weeks, and in fact I worked it so well that I never put in a day of KP, an hour of guard duty, or had any other really disagreeable task, as long as I was in the military. And had a lot of fun as well, as I am sure that the following stories about my military career will illustrate.

Anyway, basic training was about as difficult as Boy Scout camp. Some rudimentary physical conditioning, combined with considerable classroom work on military subjects, and of course, the usual military make work BS. The rifle range though, was fun. There I became proficient enough on the M2 carbine, (a kind of World War II sub machine gun) to earn a sharpshooters rating. Knowing how to shoot this thing stood me in good stead later on, but I am getting ahead of myself again.

About halfway through, Pat came down to visit, and a friendly cousin in Oakland lent us their house and car for the weekend. Very considerate of them.

The normal drill in the Air Force at that time was to spend eight to twelve weeks in basic training, then go on to a service school for up to a year, where hopefully you learned a useful skill, and finally on to a productive assignment. This seemed to me like a non productive waste of manpower, and there were rumors that these schools were boring, as well as brimming with chickenshit discipline dispensed by frustrated World War II retread sergeants. But there was a war on and since the Air Force, in their wartime buildup, was really hard up for skilled manpower, there was a program called By Pass Specialist. The gist of this was, that if you could convince the powers that be that you had a critical skill, by passing a rather tough test, you could bypass the service school and go directly from basic training to a duty assignment.

I also had the option of becoming an Officer. I was offered a slot at Officers Candidate School, or OCS, as it was called, and would graduate as a “Ninety Day Wonder” second lieutenant. This didn’t seem like a great deal, trading three months of chickenshit training, to become an officer at the bottom of the totem pole. In those days, also, if you weren’t a pilot, you were going nowhere in the Air Force officer corps.

But this by pass specialist business looked good to me, and having been an experimental aircraft mechanic in civilian life, I was sure that I could pass that test standing on my head. But wait, hadn’t I joined the Air Force for adventure, and to have a little fun. But doing rudimentary maintenance on beat up WW II surplus airplanes (which is mostly what the Air Force had in those days) on the flight line in all kinds of weather, didn’t sound like either fun or adventure, so that was out. Casting about, I found that photographers were in demand, and I had dabbled in that field a bit. So in all my spare time for a week, I camped in the Base Library, soaking up everything I could on the subject of photography. I then took the Photo By Pass Test, cooled it, and was awarded an Air Force Specialty Code (AFSC) of Still Photographer. I then got orders assigning me as permanent party in the Base Photo organization at the same base. Talk about breaks.

I found that my new assignment was basically working for the Base Public Information Office, as a PIO Photographer, a job not unlike a civilian press photographer. In those days, as you probably remember from the movies, all press photographers primarily used those big Speed Graphic press cameras.

Now, I knew damn little about photography, and had never even seen a Speed Graphic, but I had better learn pretty quick, so this is how I did it.

Pat had joined me, and I asked for and was granted a week or so off to find living quarters. Almost as an afterthought, so it seemed to the boss, I asked to check out a Speed Graphic camera, some film, and the Speed Graphic tech manuals. This request was granted without comment, and away I went. We found quarters in short order, and while Pat worked on fixing the place up, I tackled the Speed Graphic. Although I had assured everyone that I was intimately familiar with this machine, as I mentioned earlier, I had never even seen one up close. It was a really complicated piece of apparatus, a far cry from today’s point and shoot cameras. It had two completely separate shutter systems, three different flash systems, three viewfinders, to be used in different circumstances, and three different film systems, (Sheet, roll, and film pack) .

I studied that camera from all angles, took it apart and put it together again, and shot a few sheets of film, which I snuck into the photo lab and developed myself. Miraculously, most of these came out, and by the time I reported back for duty, I had a reasonable acquaintance with the camera. It was several weeks, though, before I would let anyone else develop my film, because when I developed it, I could discard all the bad shots, with no one being the wiser.

And so I started my Air Force career. Although the pay was lousy, I believe a total of $114.60 per month, which was difficult for two people to live on, the work was interesting. And for the next year, the ol’ Speed Graphic and I had a lot of fun, both on the base and around the Bay Area, documenting all sorts of exciting and sometimes mundane happenings, and generally keeping out of trouble.

But I did get in, my first airplane ride. This ride, (and several subsequent rides,) was with the General commanding Parks Air Force Base, where I was a PIO (Public Information Office) photographer. This, however, was not the cushy assignment that it would seem. But let me explain.

This Base Commander was a crusty old Brigadier General also named Parks. We figured that he must have really screwed up somehow, as commanding a training base was not a choice assignment for one of his exalted rank. Anyway, he was really an egomaniac, and he insisted on his every move being documented by a PIO Photographer. Moreover he would send his driver over to the photo lab at precisely 9:00 AM every morning to pick up yesterday’s prints, which were always done up in 8X10 size.

This general, being a base commander, was entitled to his own private airplane, so what do you think that he had? Actually it was an ancient worn out WW II C-47, (the military counterpart to the civilian Douglas DC-3) which had been originally used to haul paratroops, and had never had the troop seats, static lines, etc taken out. But it was his airplane, by God, and he was proud of it. The point of this story is that most of the time, one of us photographers had to accompany him in this piece of s***, to document for posterity whatever he happened to be doing on that trip. And that is how I got my first airplane ride.

But once in awile, I did get into a little trouble, as told in this next anecdote

In the course of our duties, we covered every sporting event on the Base, and most of the ones in the neighboring towns as well. These weren’t considered bad assignments, as the work was easy, the events were usually interesting to watch, and it was hard to screw up. I did, however manage to screw up once, big time, and that is the point of this story.

Seems I was covering a boxing match, I think that it was trainees vs. instructors, or some such thing. I was at ringside with the trusty Speed Graphic, and of course the General commanding the base was in the front row. Those days we used old fashioned flash bulbs for night work, and in this case I had a supply of Press 40s, a bulb that was about the size of a 150 watt light bulb, and filled with a wad of magnesium wool, about the size of a Brillo pad. The theory was that you pushed a button, which completed an electrical circuit to the bulb, which 20 milliseconds later would flash, just as a solenoid tripped the shutter open. Occasionally during this process, the bulb would explode, rather than flash, releasing a shower of burning magnesium. For this reason one was supposed to put a safety shield over the bulb, but nobody ever did. Anyway, this night we were just getting into the main event, the General was enjoying himself, and I was snapping away. Predictably, a bulb exploded and a large blob of burning magnesium barely missed the General and deposited itself in mid ring, at the feet of the boxers. Remember, this magnesium is the same stuff they used to fire bomb Japan, and it certainly did its work on the canvas in the ring.

 Eventually the excitement died down, and the firemen departed, but the match never did resume, and I didn’t get to document the excitement for the General’s album. Miraculously, I kept my job, but I always suspected that this incident might have had something to do with me getting transferred to Travis Air Force Base, in the Sacramento Delta, near Vallejo CA, a few weeks later.

The general watching the fight, just before the fun began

I landed in the Fifth Reconnaissance Technical Squadron in the Fifth Bomb Wing of the Strategic Air Command. This was an elite combat outfit at the height of the Korean War, and I was in the thick of the action. At that time General Curtis LeMay commanded the Strategic Air Command. Le May, by the way, was a genuine WW II war hero who had won his stars by developing and carrying out the B-29 campaign which fire bombed the Japanese into surrender. He was tough but fair. He always expected the most out of his troops, but in return, always treated them like professionals. For example, all KP and other menial tasks were performed by civilian contractors, and the living accommodations and other amenities were a cut above those prevalent elsewhere in the Air Force.

 

These are interesting pics of the reconnaissance version, the RB-36, which is the version we flew. The top one I pulled out of an airplane book. The bottom one I found in my archives. I know that the bottom one was taken by guys in our outfit, the 5th Strat Recon Wing. The top pic has to have been taken by our guys too, at the same time, because the tail numbers all match, and the RB-36 almost always flew alone, so a formation of three is very unusual.

The outfit was also equipped with the Convair B-36. This was a brand new first line bomber, and an awesome machine. About the size of a 747, it

weighed 410,000 lbs fully loaded. It had 6 Pratt and Whitney R4360, 28 cylinder radial engines, developing a total of 22,800 horsepower, plus 4 General Electric J-47 jets with another 21,000 pounds of thrust. It could carry a 43 ton bomb load, (which was more than an entire loaded WW II B-17 weighed) would fly 420 MPH, and had a service ceiling of 45,600 feet, although it could, on occasion, reach 60,000. It carried two crews for a total of 18 people and could remain airborne for 52 hours without refueling. Our guys would routinely fly from Travis to northern Norway, fly down the iron curtain to Turkey, taking pictures all the way, and then back across the Atlantic, to stop at a base in Maine for refueling, before returning to Travis.

The B-36 being such a heavy airplane, with high wheel loadings, and requiring a very long runway, there were only a few airports in the world where it could land. Also although it could carry a lot of weight, it could not haul a lot of bombs at extreme range, because most of the allowed weight was devoted to the fuel required to get the airplane to the target and back. So a doctrine was developed that in the event of trouble, the airplanes would be staged, along with support staff, including a complete working photo lab, to a suitable forward airbase, and the combat missions would be flown from there.

What this boiled down to for us photo guys, was that we had a complete photo lab, with all supplies, prepacked and ready to load into airplanes. Additionally, all key personnel, including me, were theoretically on 2 hour alert. This meant that when the alarm went off you headed for the base, with clothes packed, then loaded all the stuff on airplanes, and within 8 hours were in the air, flying to some godforsaken place like Okinawa or Greenland, for an indeterminate stay. Or more often, you went through all this drill, then they said it was only practice, and you did the whole bit in reverse, and went home.

Also, since we didn't know where were going to land, or when we would go, for that matter, the medics decreed that we must have current shots for every dread disease which might occur anywhere in the world. Needless to say, our arms looked like we were junkies, and were perpetually hurting from all the shots.

But let me tell you about one of these journeys, a notable trip from Travis AFB In CA to Kadena AB on Okinawa, and return.

The airplanes that were available were beat up, worn out WW II transports, and I Was unlucky enough to draw an ancient R5D, which was the Navy equivalent of the civilian Douglas DC-4. Unpressurized, cold, drafty and noisy. To complicate matters, I had an impacted wisdom tooth, which hurt like Hell, and the gas tank for the APU (Auxiliary Power Unit) which we carried was leaking, so one couldn't even smoke. After what seemed to be two days of this, and much island hopping, (the Pacific’s a big place at 180 MPH), we ended up on Wake Island. There I transferred to more commodious transport, a C-118, the Air Force equivalent of a DC-6, which had been fitted out as a flying ambulance, but was pressed into service as a troop carrier. We flew to our final destination on Okinawa in style on this airplane, except when we hit an air pocket, dropped a couple of thousand feet, and I bounced off the ceiling and fetched up on the floor. We did get to play tourist a bit though, during a rest and refueling stop at Iwo Jima. One sight, which I will never forget, was the American flag flying atop Mount Surabachi, and the mountains of scrap equipment of every description laying about everywhere. (It’s certainly a shame though, that in later years, we decided to give that island back to the Japanese.)

On Okinawa we faced the task of unpacking and setting up the lab, then running it on a 24 hour basis.  This seemed like a lot of work to me, so I convinced the big shots that they should document this operation for posterity, (a thought which apparently had never occurred to them,) and I, being the only qualified press photographer around, should take the pictures.  

So I scrounged a Speed Graphic, took a couple of test shots to assure that the camera worked, and started shooting pictures. This turned out to be a spectacularly easy assignment, and while the flyboys flew their missions, and the other guys did their thing, I ended up spending most of my time at the NCO club, or in the native village just outside the base. This was the first (but not the last) time I had been in the mysterious Orient, and the sights, sounds, and smells were fascinating. The mosquitoes were also memorable. The biggest and meanest I have seen anywhere, before or since.

The trip back to Travis AFB was not quite so bad as the one going out. Except that the C-97 we were flying had a defective rudder boost, so the plane kind of wandered all over the sky. We did have some fun at Wake Island though, when the magnetos went bad on two of the big Pratt and Whitney R4360 engines. The runway was only 6000 feet long and hung out over the ocean on both ends, and it was midnight. The flight engineer would mess with the mags, and the pilot would try a full military power take off. Then a mag would act up, he would throw everything into reverse pitch and stand on the brakes, bringing us to a shuddering stop just inches from the end of the runway. Anyway, after three tries, the mags held and we finally got the machine off the ground.

Amazingly, almost all of the pictures turned out, and I got a commendation and even a magazine cover. Additionally, since this was a war zone in wartime, and I was supposedly flying on airplanes some of the time, I got two campaign ribbons, a large mustering out bonus from Washington State as a combat veteran, along with eligibility to join the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Not a bad return for taking a few pictures, huh.

This picture was the magazine cover.

Since it was a Navy airplane and an Air Force magazine, they had to airbrush the Navy logo out

I didn't notice it was a Navy plane when I took the picture.

But back now, to the job at the base. Despite all the supposed glamour, it turned out to be a routine production photo lab operation, but again, as I explain below, I was able to figure out and beat the system.

Since General LeMay thought that continuing education was a good thing, and because he was also an inveterate sport car racer, both racing and college were legitimate excused from duty activities. After I figured this out I immediately enrolled full time at the local college, which incidentally was free for active duty military personnel, and became a sometime member of a local civilian stock car racing team. Then, in my spare time, I had a job at the local Shell station. This incidentally, was one of the most informal jobs I ever had. I could close the station when I felt like it, and take whatever I figured the boss owed me out of the till. All this activity, though, kept me so busy, that I rarely made it to the Base, except to pick up my paycheck.

In fact, when I did struggle out to the base, to work my evening shift, I would feel really put upon if I could not get back home in time to watch

Dragnet, a popular TV cop show, which played at 7:30.

I also managed to pretty much duck most of the college mid terms and finals, by pleading, usually successfully, that the exam coincided with a secret Air Force mission with which I was involved. Usually this worked, and I would get an A or B on the test, by default.

But let’s talk about the stock cars for a moment. 

Our stock car, which incidentally was a Nash Lafayette, with a big modified Nash Ambassador engine, also did pretty well. We came in seventh in the Bay Cities Racing Association, out of about 250 cars.

Of course, in order to do this, we had to race five days a week, rain or shine, and regardless of mechanical problems. This became quite a problem if we wrecked a car, or blew an engine, and had to be ready to go the next night.

We solved this logistics issue to a large extent, by having a string of iron backing us up and ready to go.  First, we had another, essentially complete, car in the wings , ready to do the honors. Backing this up, we had a couple more cars, in various stages of completion, but without engines. On the engine side, we had a similar situation, a couple of engines almost ready to go with others backing this up.

This worked out OK, because we were a semi pro team, getting paid to race, and our sponsors stood most of the tab for all the back up iron. But despite all this, and coming in seventh, we hardly broke even. And it was a Hell of a lot of work.

And while we are on the subject, let  me spin another tale about stock cars.

My personal ride, in those days was a Nash Ambassador, which had essentially the same engine as our stock cars. Now the ’48 Ambassador was one of the few stock sedans that would do an honest 100MPH in those days, but that was not good enough for me, so I installed one of the stock car engines in hopes of wringing out a few more MPH. And I hired a “shade tree mechanic” named Harry Grapes, from the nearby town of Benicia to do the work. Well, Harry screwed the job up, and I ended up suing him for nonperformance. He then cross sued me for breach of contract, the two suits were lumped into one case, and we went to court.

You may not have known, (or cared) but Benicia was at one time the

Territorial capital of CA before it was moved to Sacramento, The old State House, had been converted into Solano County government buildings, and the trial was held there. In the old territorial legislative chambers, to be exact.

Well Harry and I had waived counsel, and elected to state our own case to the judge. I had taken the precaution, though, of showing up in uniform, along with about a dozen of my buddies from the base, also in uniform. And had even provided each of them with a preprinted script, explaining his role and suggesting his testimony.

Old Harry didn’t have a chance. He would barely get started with his testimony, when one of my buddies would jump up shouting, “That’s a lie, I was there and this is what really happened, reading from my preprinted script. Well the judge would immediately gavel us down, gave us a lecture on what happened to people who committed perjury, and tried to get the trial back on track,. But only to go through the whole charade again.

Finally the judge got so exasperated that he gave us a speech approximately as follows, and threw the whole thing out.

“”As you may know, this building is an old and hallowed structure, first housing the Territorial Assembly, and later, various courts of law. But I would venture to say that this room has witnessed more perjury today, than in its long and hallowed history. And with that, he threw the entire case out. I believe that the only reason we were not arrested on the spot, was the judge did not relish a potential confrontation with the military, because jurisdiction in such a situation was kind of unclear.

Anyway I believe I won, because I got my engine (almost) installed, for free.

Life was good in California. A new baby, LaRene, had come along, my Corporal’s pay was now $156 per month and I had figured out how to escape the boring photo lab routine, (Remember what I said about working the system) LaRene, incidentally was the only member of our family born outside Washington State, and the only true Californian. Our family at that point consisted of John, Pat, and daughter LaRene. Also there was a small cat named Tonto (Stupid in Spanish), and a Labrador dog named Otnot. (Tonto spelled backward.) We lived in a tiny apartment in a public housing project which was about eighty percent occupied by GIs. And, we had a lot of fun with these pets, as the following tales will illustrate.

The dog was a smart fellow, but like most dogs, didn’t particularly like cats (Our own cat being the exception, since she had raised him from a two week old baby.) So, we got out a tape recorder, and recorded the bawlings of a female cat in heat. On a summer evening we would set the recorder on the front porch, and turn the volume up full. Meanwhile, just inside the door, we would goad the dog into an anti cat frenzy. Then, after all the Toms within a one mile radius had gathered around to get a piece of the action, we would throw open the door, sick the dog on the cats, and watch the fun. Imagine the poor Tom, who just when he thought that he would get a little, running headlong into a cat hating dog, intent on mayhem.

We successfully kept our apartment block 100% servicemen by the simple strategy of staking the dog out front whenever there was a vacancy. For some reason he didn’t like civilians, and when one of them came around, he would growl and show his teeth. Of course he loved GIs, and when one of them showed up he could somehow sense it, and would be instant buddies.

The dog was pretty smart, but the cat was smarter, and one trick, of which she never tired, and the dog never caught on to, went something like this. Our place was a very small apartment with polished concrete floors, something like terrazzo. Anyway, come evening, it would be time for the dog’s dinner, so a pan of dog food was set on the kitchen floor, and the dog would chow down. Enter the cat. She would sneak up and clamp her teeth down hard on the dog’s tail. This distracted and irritated the dog, and a merry chase around the apartment would ensue. The cat would then duck under a piece of furniture with legs about three inches high, with the dog in hot pursuit. Too late, the dog saw where the cat had gone, and put on the brakes. Which were totally ineffective on the polished floor, and resulted in the dog hitting the piece of furniture with a resounding crash. Picking himself up, the dog would shake his head, and wander off to lay down, completely forgetting his dinner. This, of course, the cat had anticipated, and she immediately headed for the kitchen and finished off the food.

One final anecdote to wind up this sordid tale. It seems that the bathrooms, which faced the street side, had floor to ceiling one way glass windows. That is, you could see out fairly well, but no one could see in. Well, the next door neighbor’s wife was quite a dish, and somehow the glass in their bathroom window got reversed. So, when the water started running in that apartment, the call went out and everyone gathered on the lawn in front. Somehow the husband, who was somewhat dense, never caught on, but the fun stopped abruptly when Pat told the poor lady that the boys could see what was going on. Or coming off, as it were.

So, life went on. I had graduated from the college, with an AA in Political Science, no less, so that reason to goof off was no longer valid. It was also beginning to look like I was going to spend my entire service time in California, without a Hell of a lot of excitement. And most importantly, the war was finally over.

So wasn’t the war being over a good thing? Not necessarily, but let me explain. In wartime, the military is totally focused on winning the war, and everything else is secondary. Comes peacetime and things change drastically, and not always for the better. The officer corps collectively draws a deep breath, looks around to see what is really happening, and comes to the conclusion that while engaged in winning the war, military discipline has gotten pretty lax. Usually, unfortunately, they are perilously close to being right. This being the case, and the officers having nothing better to do, they direct most of their time and effort toward shaping up the troops. This may be good for discipline, but is usually hell on morale, and in my case, spit and polish, along with chickenshit regulations, was not what I had signed on for.

 Maybe I was seen to be dissatisfied, because one day, like a bolt out of the blue, orders came down assigning me to Germany.

So, I took a thirty day leave, packed wife daughter, dog and cat into the car and took off for North Dakota, where Pat had decided to stay with her folks for the duration. After getting them settled in, I headed for New York, where after the usual processing, I boarded a troopship bound for Bremerhaven Germany.

Now this ship was an old WW II Liberty ship. The kind that Henry Kaiser used to put out in five days, but converted to carry troops. Its ancient reciprocating steam engine was capable of a bare 9 knots, and it pitched, yawed, and rolled all at once in any kind of a sea. Sailing on it through North Atlantic storms in the dead of winter, like we did, was kind of like riding a mechanical bull in a Texas saloon. In the troop quarters, the bunks were four high, troops were packed in like sardines, and most of the guys were seasick. So this was definitely not a place where you wanted to spend much time. Everyone, of course, was assigned some kind of a stupid make work job, mostly, I think, to take their mind off their physical troubles. Checking things out, I decided that the two best jobs were probably Chaplain’s assistant, or KP pusher. Chaplain’s assistant was out, as I had already spent too much time in that environment, but KP pusher did have possibilities. First off, nobody in his right mind wanted anything to do with KP, so there was no competition for the job, and second, it wasn’t really KP at all. Basically it consisted of checking on the poor troops assigned to KP, and keeping an eye out to see that they didn’t screw off too much. Since I was an Air Force Corporal, and the KPs were for the most part doggie privates, the job was a natural. Another important consideration was that the galley was at the exact center of the ship, thus minimizing the pitch, roll and yaw problem. Also the place was warm, there were lots of cozy storerooms in which to sack out, and the food, particularly that cooked in the kitchen serving the officers, was great. So I got through the sea voyage without too much physical or mental discomfort. That incidentally was my last troopship ride. By the time I came back from Germany this mode of transport had been phased out completely, and I flew home in style.

INTELLEGENCE EXPERIENCES

Anyway, upon my arrival in Germany, I literally fell into the most interesting and exciting job that I have had anytime in my life. (And I have had more than my share of interesting and exciting jobs.) I ended up becoming a field intelligence agent, a real life spy at the height of the cold war.

This was during the four power’s occupation of Germany, and needless to say, intelligence activity at that time was really confused, with a whole alphabet soup of agencies, civil and military, running their own agents, investigators, police and whatever. If there was any coordination of any of this activity, it was not obvious to the everyday working agents, particularly in our outfit.

So, for the next two years, I was a real life Intelligence Agent. It’s really tough, however, to write about this activity for a couple of reasons. First, most of the really good stuff comes under the “Truth is Stranger than Fiction” category, and nobody would believe it anyway. Also most of the activity was classified, and some of it still is. Besides, whose imagination would be fertile enough to make up improbable yarns like these?

I have, however, written my own book, describing some of the zanier aspects of the intelligence business, but without giving away any state secrets. It is broadly based on my own experiences, so in reading it, you get an idea of what things were like.

John, hard at work in the field

So I thought, perhaps, that just inserting one of the more interesting anecdotes here would give you a feel for that life.  If you are interested in reading further, the entire book is included as an Appendix to this book.

“This puts me in mind of another situation where John and the Russian actually played James Bond, with comic effects. Seems they were checking out the East German frontier one slow afternoon, with nothing particular going on, when they saw what looked like weather balloons periodically sailing up over a hill and off to the east. (In the direction of East Germany). Parking the car and crawling over the top of the hill, they confirmed, by looking through binoculars, that there was a group of people near some parked vehicles engaging in some very suspicious activity. It looked like they were attaching small packages to balloons, then filling the balloons with gas from a cylinder, and then turning them loose to float away. The guys were vaguely aware of intelligence activity on both sides involving balloons, so surmised that these guys were probably East German or Soviet agents who were up to no good. Our intrepid agents also could imagine the commendations which would be heaped on them for capturing this bunch of spies. Seeing no weapons laying around or within reach of the balloonists, they decided on a frontal assault. So, back to the car, and with all guns blazing roared down upon the unsuspecting group. “Hande hoch”, (loosely translated as hands up) they ordered, jumping out of the car with guns drawn. Our agents literally scared the bejesus out of those poor guys, and two women, and they complied at once, probably peeing their pants in the process. Anyway, it turned out that they were missionaries trying to convert the heathen Soviets by sending bibles, written in Russian, over their country. John’s Russian partner, who of course could read Russian, verified that this was all true, so with profuse apologies, our guys left them to their business. I’ll bet those folks had some war stories to tell when they got back to their home base.”

All was not work, we managed to get some play in as well. I attended the Winter Olympics in Italy, and Pat and I traveled extensively for pleasure, both on the Continent, and in Britain. And believe it or not, Pat and I traveled on $10 to $20 dollars per day

Speaking of money, let me spin a tale of a money disaster that almost befell us.

Seems Pat, myself, and daughter were headed to England, in Pat’s American Ford, to meet a friend and relax for a few days, away from the hectic Agent routine. But on the way, somewhere in Belgium, Pat, while changing the baby, misplaced her purse, containing almost all our money and her ID, but luckily not our passports. As we had just used them to get across a border. So no biggie, we’ll just go back home, get some more money from the Finance Office, and start over. Remember, this is long before the days of credit cards and ATMs, and our checking account was with a Canadian bank back in Germany. So, we start to retrace our steps, when BANG those awful Belgian roads knock out a tire. So we put on the spare and head out again. And after a few kilometers, BANG, that tire blows. So now we are in kind of a bind. Only three good tires, a hungry baby, no money, and very few Flemish language skills.

But fortunately, as we are trying to decide what to do next, along comes the Auto Club Strassenwacht guy on a three wheeler. We explain our plight, empty our pockets of ALL our small notes and change, in various currencies, give him one flat tire and wheel, (We had scraped up barely enough money for one used tire, let alone two), and off he goes, probably never to be heard from again. Anyhow, in a couple of hours he is back with a bald but serviceable tire, which he helps us mount, and refusing any pay, (which didn’t matter since we had no money) waved good by and Godspeed as we disappeared into the sunset.

About three AM, we finally get home, having driven slow to save the tire, but guess what, the house keys are in the lost purse. So I have to pick the lock on the entry door, as well as the apartment door in order to get in. Anyway, next morning we head for the Finance office, draw a few hundred, get a new set of tires and some temp ID for Pat, and by noon we are off again. This time we make it with no problem, and eventually Pat’s purse even found it’s way back to our place. But that is a story for another time.

As for the guys in the Intelligence world, Gene, who is a Russian, and was my real life partner for almost two years, went on to a long and interesting career in another agency, finally marrying a Russian national who he met in a hard currency bar in Moscow. He is now retired and lives in New York City. I still see Gene when I am in New York, and we talk on the phone every couple of months. I did have some official contact with him when he was working, but that is a story for another time. Two other ex agents, with whom I remain in contact are Alfonso, who lives in northern new Mexico, and William Toussaint, an Indonesian Dutchman, William now lives in Tennessee, and we maintain an e mail correspondence.

In the summer of 2002, while escorting a bike hike through the South, I met William for dinner and drinks in Columbia, South Carolina. My son Whalen and son in law Hugh joined us for part of the evening, and got an earful of spy stories, and tales of other assorted high jinks. One interesting story related how we somehow got William’s American 1949 Ford convertible at the head of a parade honoring the then German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. The punch line was when the car hit something, and William in his somewhat stilted English, exclaimed, “I believe that we have just driven over someone”. William had entered the intelligence business from the US Air Force, and since he was not 21, we convinced him that he was an Air Boy, not an Airman. The story we told about him reporting to the Station Chief as Airboy Toussaint, got a lot of laughs from my boys.

William also visited us in Edmonds in the summer of 2007. I remember this visit particularly, because, one morning he was repeating a particularly hair raising tale in the railroad station waiting room. After he had caught his train, a bystander wandered over and asked me what that was all about. I told him to ignore the whole thing, as my friend was under the influence. At 8:30 in the morning!!!

I tried, without success, to get a fiftieth anniversary reunion going at the old location in Germany. But it seems that everyone is either broke, dead, or not interested.

Another thing which I havn’t yet mentioned, was an interesting byproduct of the Occupation, the Oberbayern bars. Which loosely translates as “The Best of Bavaria”. These were really “meat markets”, and they did a land office business facilitating meetings between German refugee women and America GIs. Thus offering a chance for a down and out refugee, or even some everyday German women, to meet a “rich” American GI, and get treated royally, at least by the standards of those days. One could even dream of conning the guy into marriage, which was a free ticket to the United States, the Land of the Big PX. Many of these women though, were really predators, preying on the social misfits who had few friends, were inexperienced with women, had never had a date in high school, etc., etc.

These bars were also frequented by a few every day Germans, and were generally good cheap entertainment. A loud Bavarian um-pah band, dressed in Lederhosen and Jaeger hats was ensconced on a stage, belting out the old Bavarian drinking songs. Periodically during the evening, the band would form a conga line, and snake through the audience, blaring their instruments at full volume. The bandleader, at the head of this procession, would spot a likely male in the audience, and place his green hat on the guy’s head, making him an honorary band leader. The poor guy who got tapped was then required to mount the stage and lead the band in a rousing song, after first buying them a round of drinks. Needless to say, as the evening wore on, the band got drunker and drunker, as well as louder and louder. The patrons would even get into the act as well. Dancing on the tables, and sometimes even swinging down from the balconies. One of my favorite memories, incidentally, was listening to a drunk Bavarian band in one of these joints, led by a drunk US Army Staff Sergeant, try to play the Stars and Stripes Forever.

Since the Doggies all had to be back in the barracks by midnight, these bars pretty much emptied out by about 10:30 PM, leaving only the girls, some hard core foreigners and perhaps the aforementioned Germans. These girls would get pretty desperate around midnight, as many of them literally had no place to sleep. So, if you were experienced like we were, you would get out of the bar about 10:00 PM, and not come back till 1:00AM or so. Otherwise, you would probably end up finding one or more of these women a place to sleep for the night, before you could go back to serious drinking.

Our excuse for frequenting these places was intelligence gathering, and occasionally we would, more by accident than anything else, pick up some minor tidbit from a refugee. And yes, we did usually charge off the drinks on our expense account. Pat, incidentally, would sometimes hang with me in one of these bars, which was right down the street from our home in Frankfurt, but generally she avoided them. Too depressing, I guess.

By the way, this music has now all but died out. Even in the venerable Hofbrauhaus in Munich, the last time I was there, the place was full of Japanese tourists, and the band was playing New York, New York. I really believe that at present, there is more of this old Bavarian music to be found in the German bars in the US, than in Germany.

Incidentally, during my time in the military, we made several lifelong friends, but let me tell you about some of them.

The first was George Banschbach, a single sergeant who lived on the base in California, but came by our house from time to time for some of the good beer. And maybe some home cooking. Anyway, I met up with him again in Seattle, right after I got out of the military, and we, and also his new wife, Joanne, became lifelong friends. Even today, when we summer in Edmonds, we frequently meet them for dinner, and George and I play golf every week or so.

The other good buddy was Don Treder, a sergeant in our outfit at Travis, who with his wife Eileen, also lived in our housing project. Don was a lifer, or long term career man, having transferred to the Air Force from the Navy right after WW II. Even after I left the military Don and my paths crossed fairly often, as he was assigned to Minuteman, and we would get together from time to time. When he finally retired, I got him a good tech job at Boeing, which unfortunately he was unable to hold, having been too long in the military. I would hear from him, from time to time though, when he needed a loan, and he finally settled in Spokane. We then saw each other every six months or so, until just a few years ago, when due to deteriorating health, and lack of money, he was forced to move in with a daughter back east somewhere,

SEATTLE, BOEING AND MINUTEMAN

But to go on with the life history. I got discharged from the Air Force, collected the family from North Dakota, and moved back to Seattle. We settled in a big old house close to the University District, with Mary and Art living upstairs, and us down. I returned to Boeing, and since I had been on Leave of Absence, I went back into the same work at the then current pay rate, with four years more seniority. With all this accumulated seniority, I soon got a promotion to the highest hourly labor grade in Experimental, an Experimental Aircraft Mechanic. This was a different shop than I had been in, but was doing essentially the same work, and the fellows couldn’t figure out why this new hire comes in at a high pay grade, and gets the next available promotion. I didn’t really enlighten them. In this shop also, I became friends with Bob Kennedy, a fellow mechanic, and we have remained so for over 50 years.

My ride, during this time, was a Rover 300. This was a 1951 model, and was quite a piece of machinery. It was a real luxury car. A small Rolls Royce really. It even had a scaled down Rolls Royce F head six engine. And the English coachwork was something to behold. It had a mostly aluminum body with red leather interior with real walnut trim. And would corner like a pool table on castors. But unfortunately it was a real dog, Badly underpowered, it would barely get out of it’s own way, the dual SU carbs were impossible to keep in sync, and something broke about once a week. And, of course, it was impossible to get parts. One time I had to crank it by hand for two weeks while starter parts came from Canada. At that time I belonged to the Puget Sound Sport Car Club, and I really got the looks when I entered that two ton hunk in a rally. Anyhow, it never seemed to run for Pat, and since I was traveling a lot, and it was impossible to sell, I junked it.

Of course, I still had my four years obligation in the Reserves, but the Air Force didn’t seem too interested, and after about a year  they sent me a real Honorable Discharge, relieving me of all my military duties and obligations.

During this time I was working nights and pursuing engineering studies at the University of Washington, full time during the day. I also found time to apply for, and pass the US State Department Foreign Service Officers test.

The State Department people were incredulous, because hardly anyone without an Ivy League school degree ever passes, and me, with three years of Political Science and engineering credits, aced it. Anyway, after several interviews and considerable research, I decided that being a diplomat was not the job for me, so I closed the book on that one, and continued with Boeing. At that time, incidentally, I could have gone to work for the CIA, but I had had enough of that business as well.

Boeing was at this time experimenting with a management training program to train potential shop foremen, and eventually I was asked to become a trainee. I accepted, and even though l I would be making $5.00 per week less to start, I thought that the long range potential was worth it. So I closed my toolbox for the last time and started another new career.

After some rudimentary classroom work, my first management job was being a kind of intern, shadowing a shop General Foreman while he performed his duties. My title was Junior Staff Assistant. Not very impressive, I thought, so I lost no time in getting the “Junior” deleted from my badge.

This intern stuff proved to be a colossal waste of time, and I almost immediately moved to the position of Assistant to the Staff Assistant who was Assistant to the Department Superintendent. Don’t even try to figure all that out. What it amounted to was that I was in charge of several lady personnel clerks, and doing the hiring and firing for the Department.

Turnover was high, and we were always short of people. The drill then for getting a new person into the shop was to write a requisition, give it to the personnel clerk, who processed it through the system to the employment office, who eventually hired someone, who eventually showed up, and often proved so incompetent that you would have to let him or her go and start over. The whole process never took less than two weeks. Pretty soon I had 50 open requisitions in the system, but no new hires, and as the Superintendent was tearing out what was left of his hair, drastic action was called for. So, I signed a stack of twenty new requisitions, went down to the employment office, picked up twenty blank applications, went out in the employment office bull pen (waiting room) and passed the apps out to the twenty most promising looking guys. When my twenty guys had filled out their applications, I gave the completed apps and the requisitions to the employment office weenie, breathed down his neck while he processed the paper, then told the guys they were hired, and to report to me the next morning.

This instant solution to his personnel problem so impressed the Superintendent that he promoted me to Assistant Foreman, and gave me a crew, until he could get rid of the Staff Assistant who was Assistant to the Superintendent, and give me that job instead. This sounds convoluted, but I the point is that I was now working for a guy who was a fourth level manager, responsible for several thousand people.

This Superintendent, Red Owens , was really a good guy, and one of the few who had some sense. I learned a lot from him about how to run an organization, but after about a year it was time to move on.

By then, we were just starting production on the 707 Airplane. As always happens with a new commercial Airplane program at Boeing, production was totally screwed up, costs were out of control, schedules were slipping, and delivery dates were in jeopardy. The standard Boeing factory response to a problem like this was to throw more people and money at the problem, and then yell a lot, so this is what they did. After all, this is how they got B–17 production up to 16 a day a decade earlier, and these, buy and large, were the same guys who had managed that program. Needless to say, they obviously hadn’t learned a thing in the meantime.

Things finally got so bad, that in desperation they brought in a hot dog big shot named Otis Smith, from Boeing Wichita, to take over the Production Control organization and try to get things straightened out. Boeing Wichita, incidentally, had built thousands of B-52s and B-47s so they kind of knew what they were doing.

Production Control, by the way, is the logistics organization responsible for getting the right quantities of the right parts to the right place at the right time, to keep the assembly line running smoothly.

This guy turned out to be really good, and was starting to get things sorted out. I liked his style, and thought that working for him would be interesting, so one afternoon I dropped into his office, unannounced, for a chat. I figured I had a maximum of five minutes before he threw me out, so proceeded to give him a quick pitch on why he needed my help. He looked at me like “Where the Hell did this guy come from”, asked me a few questions and told me to drop back at the same time the next day. I did, and he put me to work tracking engineering changes.

But let me digress a moment to explain. In the course of building an airplane, there are things that do not go together properly, and also there are product improvements to be made. Engineering figures out how to fix the problem or incorporate the improvement, then throws the solution (called a fix) over the wall, metaphorically speaking, for the shop guys to implement.

Incredibly, on the 707 program, nobody was checking to see if the shop guys actually implemented the fix, at the right time and on the proper airplane. Otis had intuitively figured that there might be a problem here, and a little investigation proved him right. So I set up an organization to monitor this activity and make sure that things actually got done at the right time and on the proper airplane, etc. My guys got this situation under control in fairly short order and I went on to a series of other similar production control tasks.

By this time, a number of 707s had been delivered and were in service. It turned out, though, that the rudder boost system (a kind of power steering) was inadequate, and that the extensive use of magnesium in the vertical stabilizer itself (The triangular doohickey which sticks up in back.) was proving unsatisfactory. The upshot of this all was that it was decided to replace, in the field, the vertical stabilizers on the first thirty 707 airplanes which had been delivered.

After helping plan this total activity, I became responsible for logistics at the locations where the airplanes were being modified. What this amounted to was making sure that the right parts in the right quantities were in the right place at the right time. If everything worked out as planned the Boeing and airline mechanics doing the work were not delayed, and the airplane was out of service for the shortest time possible. This latter was particularly important, because an airplane out of service continues to generate costs without bringing in any revenue. Besides, this was the dawn of the jet age, and jet airliners were in high demand and short supply. Since Boeing had never done anything remotely like this field service activity before, we kind of wrote the book as we went along. Hopefully learning from our mistakes.

The airlines I was responsible for were Pan American in Miami, American in Tulsa, TWA in Kansas City, Continental in Los Angeles, and improbably enough, President Eisenhower’s personal planes, three converted KC-135s, which were based at what is now JFK in New York. A guy named Phil Jones was actually responsible for the Boeing mechanics on this overall project, and he did a hell of a job. Also since we were the only Boeing guys around, we also offered the airlines other technical assistance as required.

An interesting sidelight on these Eisenhower airplanes was that Lockheed had underbid Boeing for the maintenance job, but was running into trouble. But the Boeing guy brought in to help, which was me, did not have the proper clearances to work on the President’s airplane, so my role was limited to furnishing parts and giving technical advice to Lockheed. A prime example of government inefficiency.

Anyway, in the course of this assignment, which lasted about two years, I ended up living in both Miami and Kansas City for several months, and in Los Angeles, with my family for about six more months. During this time I also was more or less continually traveling to all the above mentioned locations, and between these locations and Seattle. Also, at this time, we were blessed with another child, a daughter named Michelle.

Speaking of housing arrangements, some of my most unusual were when I was living in Kansas City, while a  Service Representative for the old Trans World Airlines (TWA), and American airlines.

TWA in those days was headquartered at Mid Continent International Airport at Kansas City, and our office was close by, in a suite of rooms, which served both as office and living accommodations. These rooms were in a motel, which incidentally was owned by two TWA pilots, and aside from our office, was completely occupied by the TWA stewardess school and associated housing. This was when TWA was pushing the Glamour Girl image for their stews, so one can imagine the good looking babes hanging around.

Particularly when I was serving my American Airlines client in Tulsa, these ladies would liberate a key, get into the place, and party up on the free booze. Oft times, when I would get back from Tulsa in the wee hours, I would have to kick a bevy of these beauties out of the quarters, in order to have a place to sleep.

Oh well, the sacrifices one makes for the company.

Since Boeing was starting to sell its 707s to foreign airlines, it was only a matter of time till this activity of mine would also involve overseas assignments. And this didn’t particularly appeal to the young family man. Besides, I was beginning to get a little fed up with the Boeing Commercial Airplane Division management style. It was an autocratic hierarchy, with many levels of management, and patterned after the military. The senior management had made their way up from the working level in whatever job they were doing, and although they knew everything there was to know about how to do their particular job, or more accurately, how Boeing had always done that particular job, they knew very little about anything else. They had developed triple redundant fail safe systems, where it was impossible to screw up, but equally impossible to accomplish anything above mediocrity. They were not interested in new ideas, or new methods, because they were absolutely convinced that they already ran the best manufacturing operation in the business, and maybe the world, and didn’t need any help from anybody. This attitude, which was prevalent up to the mid nineties, I believe to be the primary reason why Airbus has managed to bring their market share from zero to about sixty percent in less than twenty years.

Along with this, the place was rife with bureaucracy. But let me illustrate with one particularly ludicrous example.

Someone in the Facilities Department, with apparently nothing better to do, had drawn up a detailed table of precisely how managers of each rank must furnish their offices. Desks, tables and chairs, and on down to wastebaskets. Since there were, at that time, six levels of managers, and four grades within each level, that made 24 different office plans. And I am not exaggerating.

A slow witted facilities manager, who we will call Joe, was put in charge of implementing and policing this absurdity. He had a file card for every table desk and chair in the facility, as well as lists of precisely what furniture was authorized for each office holder. Depending on his or her place in the pecking order, of course.

Eventually, my office got furnished with a serviceable desk, along with chairs, bookcases, etc. My desk was a plain steel affair, as I was exactly one level below those authorized a more spacious “conference top” desk. My crew decided that this was an affront to their boss, and decided to set things right. Midnight requisitioning was out of the question, because Joe knew the exact location of each conferences top desk in the facility. But my boys were resourceful, and one Monday morning, as if by magic, my regular desk had been replaced with the conference top model. Eventually Joe showed up, checking his office plans, found my conference top desk and demanded to know where it came from. He was particularly puzzled because he found no such desks missing elsewhere. So he confiscated the new desk, replacing it with a standard model. But two weeks later, the same thing happened again, a conference top desk appearing in my office, as if by magic. And, of course, was confiscated by Joe. After this happened 4 or 5 times Joe was becoming visibly disturbed. Not only was I violating the rules, but was also fouling up his books of account, as a steady stream of conference top desks was coming into his domain.

Finally Joe told me that he had a particularly nice desk in his warehouse. A potential furniture supplier had given it to his as a sample and it did not fit any of his office schemes. He offered to give me this desk for my office, if I would stop making conference top desks appear, and I agreed.

So how did we do it? It was really simple. There were many library tables, of various sizes, around the facility, and Joe had noted all of them as just library tables. What my boys did was simple. They located a library table, which was the same brand as my desk, and with a top the size of a conference top desktop. They would then get busy with screwdrivers, switch tops, and presto, a new conference top desk. Poor Joe never did catch on.

Another similar absurdity was the struggle one had to go through to get replacement batteries for wall clocks. Requisitions in triplicate, and an inspector visiting to assure that the batteries were really dead, were only part of the procedure.

Anyway, at about this time, the newly reorganized Aerospace Division, which was handling all military and space activity was looking for people, so I moved to a Production Control job over there.

The big project at that time was the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile, which was being rushed into production to fill a supposed “Missile Gap”. This missile gap, incidentally, later turned out to be about as illusionary as Bush’s weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Anyway it was pedal to the metal, balls to the wall, and get out of the way if you couldn’t keep up.

So where did I end up? Patrick Air Force Base, at Cape Kennedy, (now Cape Canaveral, in Florida

When I arrived they were just receiving the first missile for testing and checkout prior to its first launch.. After being there about three days, I concluded that this was going to be a long term effort, so I sent for Pat, LaRene, and Michelle to join me. (At that point, we didn’t have a dog or cat) We found a neat little house right on the beach in Cocoa Beach, I bought a three year old Mercury, which looked about ten, (sand and salt air, your know) and we settled in for the duration. There was a downside though. Across the street from the house was an undeveloped patch of palmetto scrub, a real jungle. At all hours of the day or night one could hear thrashing around and bloodcurdling screams emanating from that place, as someone tried to eat someone else. And oh yes, there were alligators waddling down the streets. All in all, not a real good place for kids to play outdoors. It also got real cold in the winter. The primitive heat pump in the house struggled mightily but could not keep up with the cold air blowing in through the jalousie windows. As for coats, we had not brought any, and one could not buy one because “It never gets cold in Florida”.

As for the Mercury, the heater had long since been disconnected and the fresh air vents were rusted open, so one got a 35 degree gale into the car while driving the twenty miles to the base. Without a coat, I might add. Eventually though, I convinced my employers that I needed a company car, which turned out to be a big improvement. It also had holes rusted in the floor, but at least, the heater worked.

Out at the base, (All this activity was taking place on the Patrick Air Force Base facility at Cape Canaveral, so it was almost like being back in the Air Force.) testing the first Minuteman missile prior to firing was going full bore. My piece of this action was a supervisory job called Night Production Engineering Manager. This basically involved running all logistics on the site from 4:00 PM until the day’s problems all got resolved. Usually someplace between 12:00 and 6:00 AM.

Normally, each piece of ground support electronics is tested, then the subsystems are tested and finally the total ground support electronic system is tested as a whole. Likewise with the missile. Minuteman was a three stage missile, so normally all three stages would be tested and fired separately, before a test firing of the complete missile,

But we had to close the “missile gap” and there wasn’t time for detail testing. So the whole ground support installation was to be hooked up and tested at one time, and when this had been done, the entire missile would be trundled out and lit off.

In practice, this didn’t work out too well. When a new piece of electronics arrived, it was immediately plugged in for what was called the “smoke test”. If it didn’t immediately catch fire, which happened a good share of the time, it was hooked up with the other components and turned on. Usually, this caused some component, somewhere in the system to burn out. So, day after day, using brute force and awkwardness, we plodded on, with the day for the complete missile test getting closer and closer. My part in all this was theoretically pretty simple, but in practice not so easy. When we came to work at 4:00 PM, we would get a list of what the engineers had screwed up, burnt out, or otherwise destroyed during the day. Our job then was to repair the damage, replace the bad parts, and order any new stuff specified by the engineers. Then the next day we would go through it all again.

Eventually the big day came. The support equipment was all hooked up and working, and the missile assembled on the pad. At about 10:00AM, somebody pushed the button and the missile roared off the pad in a symphony of flame, noise, and smoke. Miraculously it performed perfectly. All three stages fired at the proper times, as they were supposed to, and 20 minutes later the missile landed right on target in the impact area near the Ascension Islands. So, we shut the place down and partied for two days.

Getting the missile to work right the first time was something of a miracle in those days. Lockheed, right next door, was perfecting the submarine launched Polaris, and some of their tests turned out to be rather spectacular. Missiles firing from both ends after launch. Missiles running amuck and heading for town, and so forth. During this period, we also saw the launch of Ham, the chimp who was the first live space traveler.

It was not all work and no play however. Everyone worked hard and played hard, and everyone was in it together. The Space Program was getting a start at the “Cape” during that time, as well, so we had real life astronauts around the place. These early astronauts were really just hotshot fighter pilots, and they hung in the bars with everyone else. This, of course, was before NASA Public Relations got their act together and turned the Astronauts into gods. Speaking of bars, I had the telephone numbers of all 17 Cocoa Beach bars on my desk, and when I needed a guy at night, I would start down the list, and eventually I would find him. For more on the Cape and the early astronauts during that period, I refer you to the book Gift of Life, by Henri Landwirth.

Also, the money was pretty good. I was actually putting in so much overtime that I couldn’t spend all the pay, and was forced to bank it. Upon our return to Seattle then, I bought a house down the street and used it as a rental unit. This was the second and last time in my career when I was making more money than I could spend, the first being when I was an Intelligence Agent.

Well, they really didn’t need me any more at the Cape, so we headed back to Seattle using a real interesting form of transportation. We found a little 14 foot travel in reasonably good shape, which we bought for $400. We got it so cheap, because at that time, on the East Coast, there were no travel trailers, and the guy didn’t really know what it was, or what to do with it.

And as I said before, we had this pretty good running, but totally trashed looking Mercury. The paint was rust streaked, it had large holes rusted in the sides and floor, and the upholstery was in tatters. We hooked up anyway, and started out, looking like Okies leaving the dust bowl in the 1930s. For the first 500 miles, people just shook their heads when we told them we were headed for Seattle. After that, they just marveled that we had gotten that far. On the bright side, people felt so sorry for us that they let us stay in their parking lots and hook up to their electricity for free, and when the generator gave out in San Bernardino, the guy fixed us up with a new used one, for practically nothing. We took two weeks to make the trip, taking the southern route from Florida to Palm Springs CA, then up the west coast to Seattle.

This was the first time we had seen the Palm Springs area, where we eventually had a second home, almost 40 years later.

So we settled down in Seattle, and I settled down into a mundane Production Control assignment.

In early 1957 we had bought a house on Ravenna Blvd. in Seattle. It was a great location on a tree lined Boulevard, next to a real nice city park, with a shopping district just a couple of blocks away. The house, though, was built in 1907, and had had very little tender loving care since. By now, we felt that we would be staying in that house for a while, so spent some time and money fixing it up. We modernized the Kitchen and bath, fixed up the two upstairs bedrooms, built a rec room in the basement, did some other improvements, and painted the place inside and out. When the boys came along we converted the basement rec room to a bedroom, and put in a basement shower, which later came in very handy as a dog bath. The back yard was postage stamp size, and eventually we put in a swimming pool, which took up the whole yard, except a ten foot square area we used as a patio. And we were right about staying there awhile. We lived in that place for 32 years.

On the job, I was getting bored, was ready to get out of manufacturing and in casting about for something interesting I found out about Materiel, which was the organization that bought everything Boeing used. This was a lot of stuff, because at that time, over half the value of anything Boeing produced was component parts and materials, which were purchased by Materiel. Moreover Materiel and Finance jointly operated an organization called Receiving. That was where the parts came in and were processed before going to the warehouse or to the users. Receiving was a stepchild of both organizations and was not being run very well. And I knew Receiving. Again, I paid an unannounced visit to the right guy, a Materiel Section Manager named John Gronsky. And just like that, I was transferred to Materiel, in Receiving, of course.

About that time though, some supposed genius decided to computerize Receiving and I got on his team. So instantly, I was a System Analyst in the computing organization. This was a real good place to be in 1961, at the dawn of the computer age. Predictably, the project went nowhere, but I learned a lot about computing, and got a good grounding in computer basics. Incidentally, in later years, I seemed to gravitate into computing situations a lot, and this early knowledge paid off big time. Anyway, after returning to Materiel, I proceeded to consolidate my position, and before long I was running a big part of John’s organization.

Also, about this time, our first son, Mark, came along, making us a family of five. The old house on Ravenna was beginning to fill up.

At work, myself, and a couple of other guys were making John look so good, that when the guy who was running the whole Materiel Division got promoted, John got the job on a temporary basis, and he took me with him. Instantly, I was Chief of Staff to a Division General Manager who had 2000 people working for him at 14 geographic locations in North America.

I quickly consolidated my position by taking over all internal audit, budgeting, personnel, and employee compensation functions for the Division, including assignment and compensation for all management people. So now my staff and I essentially decided who worked where, how much they got paid and how many people they could have, then audited their work in the bargain. I was running the place, and nobody knew it.

But eventually they figured this out, dumped John, and a guy named Gene Aiken came in. Gene was smart enough to see who was really running things so he kept me on. This was unheard of in those days, because new division general managers generally brought in their own staffs. Gene lasted until he got into an argument over a whore in the French Quarter of New Orleans, got beat up, and unwisely checked into Boeing medical to get patched up.

If I had been with him it wouldn’t have happened. I had got him out of worse scrapes before, and he owed me big time.

So back came John Gronsky, and for four more years I ran the place, made him look good, and picked up a couple of promotions in the process.

I did a lot of traveling on that job. As I mentioned before there were Material offices in fourteen locations scattered throughout North America, and I tried to visit each one about once per quarter. This way I kept up with what was going on in the Materiel offices, but more importantly I got a very good feel for how the entire Aerospace Group was doing. I also make contacts in those travels, which did me a world of good later on. I managed to hit the factory in New Orleans for Mardigras, (For some reason there were never hotel rooms available out by the factory, so I was forced to stay in some expensive place on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter) and got to Florida and Southern California in the winter. There were also Minuteman missile tests to witness, seminars to attend, and other general goofing off.

Early in this period, Whalen, our second boy and final child, made his appearance. It was touch and go with him for about six months, but he then grew up to be a strong and healthy boy.

Later in this period we obtained our summer place on the Stillaguamish River east of Arlington, and spent a lot of time up there. It was a really great place for kids, especially boys, to grow up. We will talk more about that place later.

Our hideout.  A 400 square foot park model RV with living room and bedroom“tipouts”

Solar 12 volt electricity. Propane hot water, lights and refrigerator.

Flush toilets and all the other comforts of  home.

The utility room. A second shower, and toilet, refrigerator for drinks, workshop, and lots of storage

It wasn’t all work either. During this period I was active with the Boy Scouts, starting as Scoutmaster for the troop at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, graduating to UW District camping chairman. For years ran the best Camp-O-Rees in the Chief Seattle Council.  And I really need to tell you about one, in particular.

You see, I figured that a kid only was in the Boy Scouts about three years, so I wanted to give them lifetime memories of three different camping experiences. One a  pretty easy gig in a city park, or something. Another, a bit more difficult, at a military reservation or someplace like that. It was camping, but you could drive in with some luxuries.  The third was a full blown wilderness camp, hike in, packing all your stuff, etc.

It seemed that the Chief Seattle council had this property in the Cascades, with a fully developed camp, right next to a square mile of wilderness.

So one year we decided to set up a Camporee in this wilderness, but only about a quarter mile from the fully developed Scout camp. In fact there was a pioneer road running from our site to the camp.

Anyway we hacked out an entrance on the other side of the property, and marked out a trail, about two miles long, where the boys could hike in, testing their wilderness skills on the way.  Just difficult enough to be challenging.

Now all of you who are familiar with Scouting, know that there are a bunch of adult hangers on, called Commissioners. They wore red jackets and strutted about, with their only attribute being that they liked to boss little kids around.

Anyway, on the first morning, about 20 of these Commissioners showed up at the trailhead. I explained to them that they had their choice of using the trail the Scouts used, or going in on an easier trail we had developed just for them.  Well you guessed it, they all opted for the easy trail. But this trail we had developed for those exalted folk, while only two miles long was a nightmare. Creek fordings climbing over rock faces, and then through impenetrable blackberries. You get the idea.

Anyway, after the Commissioners had cleared the area, we walked over to the campsite on another relatively easy trail, and awaited developments.

The boys got well scattered out, and were straggling in all afternoon.  The Commissioners, the same, only considerably the worse for wear.

Anyway, after two days of practicing our wilderness skills, we formed up the Scouts and marched them to breakfast, in the main lodge of the Scout Camp, down the road, a quarter mile away.

Of course, the Commissioners then knew that they had been had, but really couldn’t do anything about it. And pretty much left me alone after that.

As a result of this Scouting  and similar activity I was asked to serve on the Executive Board of the Chief Seattle Council of the Boy Scouts of America, and also on the Candidates Investigating Committee of the Municipal League. Incredibly, Boeing, while giving lip service to these civic endeavors, actually discouraged this type of activity, and did nothing to help. I guess these assignments were supposed to be reserved for the staff weenies at Headquarters. Due to the press of business and travel I got to doing less and less of this kind of activity and finally gave it up altogether. Pat though, got interested in United Cerebral Palsy, and served that organization for over thirty years, being, among other things. President of the woman’s committee, and serving for years on the King/Snohomish County Board of Directors.

Two examples of Pat’s presence on the Seattle scene come readily to mind. Once, while hanging out in the Eastern Airlines First Class lounge in St. Louis, I ran into the then mayor of Seattle, Wes Uhlman. When I introduced myself to hizzhonor he remarked, “Why, you must be Pat Kuller’s husband.” Another time at a cocktail party downtown, we ran into the guy who ran the entire Boeing Aerospace Group. This guy had known Pat for years in her charity activity, and was my big boss, but that night, he finally figured out for the first time that we were related.

Also, I was still plugging along in school. I had transferred to Seattle University. (Where one of the Dominican professors became my lifelong friend) I was taking Mechanical Engineering, had gone through four years and was within a few hours of a degree. I was also taking some graduate MBA business courses. At that time, you may remember, MBAs were all the rage, and a few of those courses looked good on the resume’.

The Dominican Professor’s name was Fr. John Fearon. Among other things, he became the Assistant Scoutmaster of my scout troop, was a frequent attendee at our parties, and we shared many interesting experiences together, including joint tenancy in a houseboat which was illegally moored in Seattle’s Lake Union. Even after leaving Seattle, his paths and mine often crossed, and we had many more interesting times. He even returned to Seattle from time to time to participate in our families major life events, but unfortunately, he drank himself to an untimely death.

I could, in fact, write a whole separate book about my adventures with Fr, John, but some bizarre examples do come to mind. Like the night we found the guardhouse at Benicia Arsenal (CA) where General Grant was imprisoned for drunkenness when he was a young Lieutenant. Or the great dinners we had with the Christian Brothers at their lodge in Moraga (CA). Not to mention the sailboat races from our houseboat to the Elks club, when we were all three sheets to the wind.

Finally, and maybe most importantly during this period, I learned to fish. I got started by an old Canadian friend of a friend named Horst Decker. Horst got me up to some neat trout lakes in the British Columbia interior, and taught me the basics, after which I learned considerably more on my own. From then to this day, I have made the British Columbia fishing scene at least twice each summer, sharing my experiences with kids and grandkids as they came along.

Appendix A in this book, chronicles all this fishing stuff, but I need to spin one outrageous tale, here and now.

The lake is HiHium and I first discovered it with my boys, in the late ’60s. This tale explains how we rediscovered it. The place, though, had been caught in a time warp, and was very little different, those many years later.

A MYSTERY LAKE

You wouldn’t believe this, but Western Outdoor magazine turned this tale down for publication because they thought it was fiction, which they don’t accept. So maybe truth is stranger than fiction, after all. And with that introduction, here goes.

After a long rambling argument over beer and cigars one night, my old fishing buddy Sam convinced me that I should spin a tale, for all you rabid trout fishermen out there, about the joys of our previously secret fishing hideaway. So, here goes a “true” fish story about one of my favorite spots, which Sam has since fallen in love with as well.

This rather rustic place (to say the least) is about 25 miles up a four wheel drive road off the Trans Canada highway, in central British Columbia.

The camp is really interesting, as is the owner, an old guy who we will call Dick. Dick really doesn't care for guests, and only tolerates them because they bring in (barely) enough money to support his drinking habit. Accordingly, he does everything possible to discourage them. To start with, he only has an obsolescent radiophone with no assigned phone number. Because almost every one of these phones was phased out about 10 years ago, no one, including the telephone operators, has a clue as to how to contact him, even if you have broken the code and obtained the channel name and number. So you spend 10 minutes arguing with an operator, and maybe after the third try you get Dick on the phone. Then you have to convince him to rent you a cabin. If it is early in the morning, you have a chance, if after noon, forget it, as he probably won't even answer the phone.

It's also a good idea to call him back (going through the same hassle discussed above) about a week before your planned arrival date to make sure he hasn't forgotten. Not that he is overrun with business, but he just might have decided to shut the place down and take off for parts unknown, at the time of your planned stay.

Then there is the problem of getting there. As I mentioned, it is 25 miles up a four wheel drive road. I didn't mention that along the way there are innumerable road branches and cross roads going in all directions, and Dick, of course, does not believe in signs. If you had the foresight to get directions when booking, it still doesn't do much good as his verbal instructions are incomprehensible. And to top things off, for the last mile the road becomes downright impassable. Once a young friend of mine stuck his truck here so bad that we had to get two four wheel drives to pull it out.

What a sight awaits when you finally get there. The facilities are about 35 years old, and have had zero maintenance for the last 30. I have heard tales that there is a well somewhere, but otherwise there is no water except the lake, and no indoor plumbing. Some of the outhouses, however, do have doors. The cabins sag in all directions, with the floors being so uneven you get dizzy just walking across the floor, even without one of Sam's strong cigars. They also have wood stoves, which are totally burnt out, and smoke so bad they will drive you outside. Sometimes, if one is lucky, Dick even provides wood. Sam anticipated this, and brought along presto logs, which burnt so hot they almost melted the stove, and got the cabin up to about 120 degrees. Of course there is no electricity, but Dick does furnish one old time gas lantern, which you can sometimes get going without an explosion. The beds all sag, and in some cabins are partitioned off like the cribs in an old time whorehouse. (Or so the big boys tell me.) Bedding is non existent. There are some dishes, but if you use them, Dick charges you an additional twenty dollars.

Speaking of the cabins, the guests sometimes must share them with strange forest creatures. But let me explain. One night I am wakened from a sound sleep by Sam yelling and banging around. I ask him what is the problem, and he says that there is a rat in the cabin. I tell him that if it bothers him that much to get up, open the door and let it out, but not to wake me up with his problems. Sam replies that he (the rat) is eating our apples. So what's wrong with sharing, I ask, and try to go back to sleep over the sound of crunch, crunch, crunch. I don't know why Sam got so upset, as we trimmed off the parts which the rat had gnawed on, and there was no real harm done.

Anyway, Sam now brings a BIG box of Decon, and gets real satisfaction from listening to the rats slurping this up.

Sam really appreciates the informality and the absence of women, who generally have enough sense to stay home. The informality, however, sometimes goes a bit far, as when Dick takes a pee out the front door of the office. Dick though, is really an OK guy after he has his second cup of coffee about 9:00 AM, and before he has had his fourth beer, at about 11:30. After Noon, if you want Dick, forget it, its every man for himself. Dick, incidentally, is the only guy I know who buys his beer by the pallet load.

So why do we go to this place. Simply because the fishing is fantastic. Rainbow up to 4 pounds, and we never fail to get our limit. Two days, though, is usually enough, before one has to retreat to the nearest town to get a hot shower and some decent food.

PS. We asked the Editors to run a contest to see if any of you fishermen out there could identify this camp, but on the advice of their attorneys, they declined.

CANEEL BAY

Meanwhile, back on the job, times were changing. The space program was winding down, airplanes were not selling, and Boeing’s business really hit the skids. There were massive layoffs in both the Commercial Airplane and the Space divisions, and the famous billboard about would the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights, appeared. John Gronsky, my boss, left again, and the guy who took over from him didn’t look like my type.

John, incidentally, after retirement had lived for years in an RV park in Indio CA, about five miles from our home in Palm Desert.

In order to stay alive, Boeing was heading pell mell into diversification. In fact they were so hung up on diversifying, that they would give anybody with a good, or even a harebrained idea a pot of money, and tell him to have at it. Things which were seriously considered during these times included a gambling casino in the West Indies, A dam and power plant in Chad, turning chicken manure into hog feed, (Can you believe shit fed hogs) and shipping coal slurry to Japan in converted oil tankers. There were many more, as well, I just can’t think of them all now. Anyway, this diversification rush seemed to me like a good place to hang out till the storm blew over, and incidentally have a lot of fun. So I hooked my wagon to this star, and got a real wild ride for the next ten years.

The first place I landed was an outfit, which was improbably named Resources Conservation Co, with no period behind the Co, and commonly called RCC. It was a joint venture set up by Reading and Bates Offshore Drilling Company, El Paso Natural Gas Company, and Boeing, and was staffed by people from all three organizations. This operation was doomed to failure from the start, if for no other reason than the difference in culture between the companies. El Paso was an extremely conservative and hidebound highly regulated public utility. Reading and Bates was a bunch of go go oil well wildcatters, used to taking immense risks in the hope of a tidy return, and Boeing was a rather stogy manufacturing operation. They had teamed together to develop and market a machine called a Henderson Evaporator, which could extract fresh water from salt water, clean up cooling tower water, and even rub your back, or so it was said. Interestingly enough, this machine had been invented by a Boeing guy, named Henderson, several years previously, and then sold to Reading and Bates, because Boeing at the time was not really interested. Reading and Bates had got Boeing back into the act because they found that they didn’t have the engineering expertise to make the thing work. El Paso was just along for the ride, and soon bailed out.

This RCC company had decided to go after the salt water desalination business, and I signed on as a salesman. Although they had never built a full size plant, our engineers calculated that their baby could operate about three times as efficiently as any other desalt system then in operation, and that selling them would be a slam dunk. So the market research guys picked three target opportunities, and the salesmen went to work. The targets were, incidentally, Key West FL, Coupeville WA, and a resort on St. John Island in the US Virgin Islands, called Caneel Bay Plantation, which was owned by the New York Rockefellers. One salesman was assigned to each opportunity, with me drawing Caneel Bay. The plan was for us to go balls out to make the first sale, then drop the other two prospects and concentrate on building a demonstration plant at the location first sold.

Caneel Bay Plantation, Virgin Islands National Park, St. John, US Virgin Islands.

My quarters were usually in one of the barely visible buildings at the top end of the white sand beach

So we all went to work. After a cursory investigation of my prospect, I found that Laurance Rockefeller ran their operation, they owned several luxury hotels all over the world under the RockResorts brand, and an engineering firm in New York handled most of their technical activity.

My strategy was simplicity itself.

First, and most important, I figured that the Boeing brand was so well known and respected that it could be used to sell refrigerators to Eskimos, as it were. (That supposition proved to be right, and I based a lot of successful sales activity on it later on, as you will see.), Next, I thought that the novel approach we were taking to desalinate salt water would appeal to the engineering firm they were using, and I was right there as well. Lastly, to prove to the Rockefellers that we were really operating in their league, I had the use of a deHavilland 125 Business Jet. That is, if I could convince the powers that be that I really needed it. Reading and Bates Offshore Drilling Company, one of our partners, owned this airplane, and they would let us use it for only the direct operating costs.

Anyway, I sold the concept to the engineering firm, and they pretty much convinced the Rockefellers. Then, by liberal use of the Boeing name, and by judicious use of the DH 125 jet, we convinced both the Rockefellers and the Engineering firm of our credibility. Despite the fact that we had nothing tangible other than a stack of concept sketches, some slick brochures, and a lab model, I managed to ink a contract with the Rockefellers to build and operate a desal plant for their resort, and we were in business.

At this point I would like to share one interesting sidelight, which I think greatly influenced the Rockefellers. It seems that on our first trip on the private jet from New York to the Virgin Islands, we had a planeload of Rockefellers and their senior staffers. And, I found out early in the flight that, improbably, every one of them had either been an intelligence agent or an FBI agent. And, of course, I had also belonged to this fraternity.

Anyway, there was not much selling on that flight, only spy stories. And that evening, after a sumptuous feast in the hotel dining room, the chairs were pushed back, everybody relaxed over cigars and drinks, and the spy stories really got going. The anecdotes got more and more interesting as the drinks flowed and everybody tried to top the previous yarn. Things finally settled down about three AM when everybody ran out of steam.

Incidentally, ex agents are notoriously closed mouth, such a gabfest is totally out of character, and I have never witnessed anything like it before or since. Incidentally, the guy with me, who was the only civilian in the party, asked me the next morning if the stories were all true. My reply was that the best thing he could do, was forget that the whole thing ever happened.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I really believe that this did more to cement my credibility with the Rockefellers than anything I had done before or did since

Anyway, I managed to sell everybody on the concept, and inked a contract to build and operate a sweater sesalizination pant at their Caneel Bay Plantation resort.

At our victory party in a New York hotel room, the General Manager of our little RCC company asked me if I really thought we could deliver what we had promised. I told him that I doubted it, but anyway it was not my worry, as my only job had been to sell it, I and I had done that. The told me that I was wrong about that, and on the spot appointed me as Project Manager, with responsibility to build and run the plant.

I didn’t have a clue as to what I was doing, or how to go about it, so I said OK. The plan which I then developed, was to get Boeing to build the plant, and then get a big engineering and construction firm like Bechtel to do the installation. Turned out that neither company was interested. We finally got moving on building the plant, using a mixture of Boeing and Alaska Copper and Brass Corp people, working in an abandoned Boeing facility in Seattle. The installation at St. John though, proved a bit more difficult. We could just not get any legitimate construction company interested, for a reasonable price.

Finally, after spending several frustrating weeks running around the West Indies and the US east coast, without tangible results, I decided that we would do the job ourselves. To do this, I put together a consortium, consisting of the RockResorts maintenance organization, their New York engineers, an outfit out of Seattle called Turbo Energy Systems, and our own RCC. We called this unlikely outfit RCC Virgin Islands Inc. and incorporated it in the USVI, with myself as President. We then got moving on the site work, and surprisingly enough, things worked out very well.

Alex, my Superintendent, and I laying out the plant foundation.

Our transit is in the background.

As mentioned above, the plant itself was being designed and built in Seattle. But there was associated work scattered over North America like a dog’s breakfast. The site engineering staff was in New York, joint venture headquarters was in Tulsa, some testing was being done in El Paso, and I was staging all the stuff for shipment to the Virgin Islands, at West Palm Beach FL. Along with this, I was trying to get the site work done at Caneel Bay, to be ready for arrival of the plant.

Alex and I checking out a concrete form for the foundation.

We poured that foundation in a 40 cubic yard continuous pour, using a one quarter yard mixer. Took us almost two days

All this kept me pretty busy traveling between these places, and I figured that I put in about five hundred thousand miles of travel in one hectic year. But let me give you an example of a typical trip. I would leave Seattle about midnight for New York, arriving about 5:00 AM. I would then board a 747 for San Juan, an approximately four hour flight. I then caught a commuter aircraft to St Thomas, and took a taxi ride to the ferry dock, where I boarded a native ferry for St John. Upon arrival at St John I would jump into my Jeep and drive to the job site, for a total elapsed time of over 17 hours. Pretty tiring, huh, but fortunately, all First Class.

The plant site, after the foundation was poured.

Laurence Rockefeller, who ran their resort operation, was a great conservationist, and demanded that this tree be spared. Even though this required building the plant around the tree, in kind of an "L" shape. At considerable extra expense, I might add.

But the tree eventually died anyway.

At one point, at another Rockefeller operation in the West Indies, some native revolutionaries ran amok, spraying the golf course with automatic weapons fire. When Laurence heard of this incident, he was alleged to have exclaimed, "I hope they didn't hit any trees".

Well we got the plant built, and test ran it in Seattle, then broke it down into modules and trucked it to West Palm Beach, along with associated parts, materials, and supplies. At West Palm, we loaded the whole works onto a RORO ship, and set sail for Saint John. (This was a roll on, roll off, ship, not unlike a WW II LST, and like an LST, it could disgorge its cargo onto an undeveloped beach.) We stopped in St. Thomas to pick up some heavy equipment, then hit the beach in St. John, unloaded the whole works, and trucked it to the job site on big four wheel drive oil field tractors which we had brought along. I’ll tell you, the island had never seen such a sight.

Erecting the main tower for the plant. We had a 100 foot mobile crane, which we had ferried over from St.Thomas. As rental cost was an arm and a leg, we worked 24 hours a day to get the major steel parts erected.

I had a real diverse labor force on this job. There were a couple of technical people from Tulsa who were normal Midwesterners. My Superintendent on the job though, was a young good looking Frenchman named Alex, who lived on a sailboat in the harbor. He had been a French Foreign Legion officer, but had got kicked out of France for life, because he took the wrong side in the Algerian Rebellion. Then there were some electricians form Puerto Rico, and some native laborers. The force was rounded out with several “Hippie” causal workers. These were white kids from the local commune, and were paid by the day through the “Boss Hippie”.

A fairly "normal" day on the jobsite. Note the plant modules in the background.

We got this plant built without a significant injury. One of my proudest accomplishments.

Incidentally, that’s me, in the white shirt, without a hard hat, sitting on the crate at the left side f the image.

When I was actually at Caneel Bay, and not on some airplane or other, my day might go something like this. Up in the morning, with sometimes a quick swim in the ocean, which was right out the front door. Then up to the job site to get things started. Then a change of shirt, at least, and back to the resort, for breakfast.

Depending on the situation, I might then spend the day in Puerto Rico on business, or working with officials in St Thomas, or even on the job site. There was some underwater construction work involved, and I retained direct supervision of that work for myself. After all, one did need to get in some scuba diving occasionally.

On this job, since I was on an exotic tropical island, I had more than my share of visitors. Most of these guys had no clue about life in the tropics, so I had a lot of fun with them. I remember one particular time when some distinguished guys from somewhere and I were watching my crew pour concrete. It was a hot day, and I felt in need of a drink, so I walked over to the water barrel, which was a rusty 55 gallon oil drum filled with water with a sort of green scum floating on top. I grabbed the cup, which was a rusty tin can with a baling wire handle, pushed the scum aside with my hand and scooped up a cupful of water, which I proceeded to drink. My visitors were appalled. They were afraid to come near me, sure that I would come down with the Tropical Creeping Crud, on the spot. Truth was, I had been in the tropics so long that I was immune to that stuff, and the water gave me no ill effects.

Now, we needed a water intake for the plant, and this is a story in itself. Finding nothing commercially available that would do the trick, I finally invented one, with the help of my engineering friends in NY. (Later, I even got a patent on the thing, but Boeing never followed up.) The basis of this contraption was an eight foot square concrete box, with hundreds of holes all over its surface, which was to be floated into place, filled with rocks, and sunk in the bay near the plant. A pipeline to the plant, and a pump, completed the installation.

Preparing to lay a section of pipeline.

Although we did have some girl roustabouts, this was not one of them. Just one of the guys, with long hair. And note my long hair in some of the pics.

Incidentally, this was one of the white "Hippies" on the crew. Most everyone else had the sense to wear shirts. Which were cooler.

The front end loader in the pic, and a Jeep, were the only two pieces of mechanized equipment we had. (After we sent back the crane). So everything was pretty much done by brute force and awkwardness.

So now all we had to do was build the box and get it in place, not such an easy task on that remote island. Well we built it in the village square, but one thing that stumped us was how to float this box into place, since it was to be perforated with hundreds of holes. The holes were about the same diameter as a Heineken bottle, so Alex and I came up with a novel solution. We would cast hundreds of Heineken bottles into the sides of the box, and after towing it to the proper location, would break out the bottles, and let the box sink. But how to get the empty bottles. We finally decided to let the resident natives help us, and we threw a great party, offering all the free beer they could drink. So we got the bottles, built the box, and then came the launch. An ancient front-end loader was the only piece of equipment on the island, the box was heavy, and we barely avoided launching the front-end loader, as well, in the process. According to our calculations, the box should have had plenty of buoyancy, but we must have slipped a decimal someplace, because it would barely float. Not to worry, we just lashed on a number of oil drums to improve the flotation, and the thing rode high and dry. (There are always plenty of old oil drums kicking around on a tropical island. Where else do you think that the natives get the instruments for their steel bands?)

Building the water intake box in the village square.

After the free beer party, to get the empty bottles.

So we tied it to our Bertram (boat) and started off. As we chugged along, drums started slipping off, and the contraption started riding lower and lower in the water, finally losing so much freeboard that waves started slopping in. We solved this problem handily, by putting some natives aboard the box to bail like mad. Then disaster threatened. Around the point came the mail boat, at a twenty knot clip, and throwing up a monster bow wave. It looked for all the world like a miniature tsunami coming our way. We blew the siren, fired off all the distress rockets, and madly waved our shirts, all of which seemed to be to no avail. But at the last moment the boat slowed to a stop, and we were saved. After that, the rest of the installation was more or less uneventful.

Well, after these and a lot of other interesting trials and tribulations, we got the plant set up and running. The resort was happy, and the Joint Venture had a real life demo plant.

But before leaving this exotic island, I should share with you a bit about my interesting, and sometimes bizarre, living conditions and off job activities.

My guys were quartered in various accommodations all over the island, but my own living situation topped them all. But let me explain. This RockResort we were working for was one of the most exclusive and expensive in the Rockefeller chain, or anywhere else in the world, for that matter, and catered mostly to high end businessmen and politicians.

Anyway, I convinced the Rockefellers early on that it would be simpler and more convenient for me to stay in guest quarters at their resort, and this was duly written into the contract. I think that it said something like, “RockResorts will provide Project Manager with all lodging, meals, and incidentals”. The Rockefellers really didn’t mind at all me staying at the resort, I think that they believed it provided some local color. There was usually one or more of the Rockefeller extended family hanging around the place as well. Happy, in particular was a frequent visitor.

But back to my accommodations and activities

Come five PM, after a hard day at the job site, or elsewhere, I would pick up the mail, deliver it to my technical guys at their quarters, and have a couple of rums with them. Then I would usually stop in to discuss the day’s business with Alex, my Superintendent, on his boat, having a couple of more rums there. Last stop was to settle accounts with the Boss Hippie, at the commune. There I paid him for the people he had sent today, and worked out tomorrow’s labor requirements. While having a couple of more rums, of course. But my day wasn’t over yet. I would drive back to the room, shower, change clothes, then wander over to the Resort bar to mingle with the guests, and have a couple more. The incidentals clause in my contract, I took to mean unlimited bar privileges, which I also felt should include occasionally treating the entire bar for drinks on me. I met a lot of interesting people this way, but Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court Justice, and Billy Graham, the Evangelist, stand out particularly. Then it was in to the dining room for dinner, where coats and ties were required, and back to the bar for a nightcap before turning in. By the way, the bartenders never watered my drinks, and this along with all those all these free drinks, eventually caused an alarming drop in the bar’s profits. When the Rockefellers finally figured this out, they rather forcefully suggested that I stop hosting the entire bar, but free drinking arrangements for my close friends and myself remained intact.

On the job, I did have one very interesting visitor. This was Mal Stamper, the president of Boeing, and his charming wife Mara. And although his visit did not quite go as planned, it worked out OK in the end. But let me tell you about it.

On the appointed day, I picked up Mal and wife at the airport, and taxied them to the boat landing at Red Hook. I had chartered a boat there for the trip to St. John, because I didn’t want to subject the Stampers to the native ferry. But when we got to the dock, we found the Capitan of my charter overhauling his engine. He had obviously got the dates mixed up. He said though, that he could get things back together in an hour or so, so our party repaired to the nearest bar for a couple of rums. Welcome to the Virgin Islands. (This incidentally was before Stamper quit drinking.) Anyway, the boat got fixed eventually, and we made it over to St. John without further difficulty. At this point I introduced the Stampers to our transportation, which was my beat up old jeep. A typical island car. It had holes rusted in the floor, springs sticking out of the seats, and the top in tatters. I had considered borrowing more suitable transportation for these exalted visitors, but none was readily available, so we made do. This turned to be a good move, because Mara fell in love with that jeep. The dashing young French Foreign Legion officer also proved to be a big hit with her, and the two of them spent her entire visit roaming around the island in the jeep. For accommodations, I had arranged for the Stampers to have the exclusive use, during their stay, of the Rockefeller complex, which was a private cluster of buildings, not unlike, but on a smaller scale than, the Kennedy complex at Hyannisport. This kindness was greatly appreciated by both of them.

Stamper himself turned out to be OK, and he took a real interest in our activities. As usual, there were a few Rockefellers hanging around, and he enjoyed their company, as well as meeting some the illustrious guests in the bar. Over the years, incidentally, when I would see Stamper, even after he retired, he, having forgotten the name but not the face, would greet me with, “Hello Mr. Caneel Bay,” and then go on and on about how he had enjoyed his trip.

Shortly after the Stamper visit, I retired the old Jeep in favor of a Mini Moke. It was a kind of Austin Mini, with no body, only seats bolted to the floor pan. It was produced in Australia, and was not allowed in the US, since it would not meet government safety requirements. Be that as it may, it rivaled the Citroen 2-CV as the vehicle of choice in the backwaters of the world. Inexpensive, reliable, and simple.

This vehicle is almost identical to my trusty "Moke". Only not nearly as beat up.

Pat also got down there once. And between Caneel Bay and a luxury RockResort in Puerto Rico, she had a good time. Incidentally, from that time on, when asked about camping, she says that she likes it fine, except she needs a little something between her and the ground. Like two or three floors of a luxury resort. During her visit, we had one experience in the bar at Caneel Bay, which is worth recounting, so here goes.

Occasionally, it seems, and usually on Thursday nights, a steel band from the nearby village would play in the bar. For those of you not familiar with steel bands, all the instruments are cut off oil drums, pounded on with abandon by what look like xylophone mallets. Anyway, after an evening of good entertainment, the band played a final number, and everybody stood up. When Pat asked why this was happening, I had to explain to her that the band was in fact playing The Star Spangled Banner. Which was appropriate, since the Virgin Islands was and is a US territory.

The completed plant. Only thing missing is the outside sheet metal siding.

And it actually worked.

One thing I should mention in closing, was the diverse cultures I was thrown in with on an almost daily basis. First, as I mentioned before,I was living in a guest room at the resort, and mixing freely with the guests. Who included some very heavy hitters. I also had my share of big shot visitors, and I occasionally hung with some of the Rockefellers. Outside the resort, the place was a sleepy tropical island, where one dealt with the natives to get anything done, and none of it in a hurry. I also was spending a day or so a week in Puerto Rico, which at that time was about as Spanish as one could get, so a real shifting of gears was required to function there. All this, along with supervising my diverse labor force, and spending a good part of my life on airplanes, kept me in a state of perpetual culture shock.

Other than that, I came out of this adventure relatively unscathed, except I picked up a tropical ulcer, which didn’t heal for 10 years, and a nice case of malaria. And I did learn something about the construction business.

The modular design proved to be a great success, but the plant itself, turned out to be not so successful. Although the plant produced lots of good water, and did turn out to be as efficient as planned, it was still more expensive to operate than conventional plants. This was because our system required a big electric motor running a monster blower, while conventional plants used a simple boiler. The only practical way to get electricity to run the big motor, in the backwaters of the world where we wanted to operate, was to make your own, using a diesel electric generator. This immediately negated all the savings from the efficient plant, because a diesel engine, at best, is only about thirty three percent efficient, and the boilers used in the conventional plants ran an efficiency of about ninety five percent. Oh well, live and learn.

Eventually, the engineers and marketing guys figured out that the only practical application for the machine was cleaning up cooling tower water at electric power plants, where the electricity required to run the apparatus was essentially free. Boeing eventually sold its share to Reading and Bates, and they went on to do very well in this niche application.

During this time, I did a bit of preliminary work on the Navajo coal fired power plant at Page AZ, working with the Bechtel people who were actually building the plant, and the Arizona Salt River Project electric utility, which owned it.

I did have one memorable experience, though, when I had a Cessna 185 aircraft at my disposal for a business flight from Page to Las Vegas. So I took advantage of this situation to make a low level flight THROUGH the Grand Canyon. Previously, , I had flown over the top, had hiked to the bottom and back up, and now I had flown through it.

MINUTEMAN AGAIN

With the water business disappearing I was out of a job, but not for long. I landed in the Minuteman organization, as a Program Manager on the Minuteman Vice President’s Program Management staff. I had known this guy briefly in my previous chasing around the country for Materiel, and I thought him one of the best managers in the Boeing Company. He also thought that I was OK, hence the appointment to his staff.

My new boss told me early on what he expected of me, and it was really simple.

First and foremost, give the customer exactly what he has contracted for, no more, no less. Second, use every opportunity to try to grow the account, and third, and most important, keep my troubles out of his office. These all turned out to be excellent points and served me in good stead in various subsequent assignments.

So what did he have me doing? Fixing a problem, of course. It seems that at this time, there was considerable trouble with a particular Minuteman system, and I was detailed to find the problem and fix it. Problem was, a radio link was unstable, and nobody could figure out why.

So, I assembled a team and went to work. And after a bit of investigation it became obvious that the problem was with the antennas. The gain, or ability to receive and amplify an incoming radio signal, seemed to vary for each antenna, and sometimes even varied at different times for the same antenna.

In checking further, we found that the difference in the antennas’ individual performances was caused by variations in the antenna manufacturing process itself. These antennas were being built by Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical, at an ancient brick plant, which they had just acquired, near Mexico Missouri, and their production process was totally out of control. So we started to painstakingly detail and standardize the manufacturing process, documenting every step of manufacture in excruciating detail. We then shipped each completed antenna assembly to the US Bureau of Standards antenna range near Denver, for extensive testing. Eventually, through this procedure, we figured out how to build an antenna, which performed acceptably, but we couldn’t seem to get repeatability in the manufacturing process.

Kaiser had just purchased this facility, and had staffed it with Southern California management types. It soon became obvious that part of the problem was friction between the Missouri pig farmers who were actually doing the work and these managers Kaiser had brought in to run the place. These guys didn’t understand each other at all, and that was not helping things a bit. Incidentally, although these Missourians worked in the factory, and maybe had for twenty years, they still thought of themselves as farmers, only working in town till they could amass a small stake.

It so happened that I had some Missouri pig farmer relatives, Charles and Margaret, who lived about 100 miles up the road. So I consulted with them and they suggested some things that I could do. I implemented most of their suggestions, and the situation immediately improved. First, we wrapped ourselves in the flag. This blatant appeal to patriotism would have fallen flat in cynical Southern California, but it worked here. We told them basically that what they were doing was important, and vital to the defense of the free world, and they bought it. Second we started company softball teams, giving the Missourians a chance to beat up on the So Cal guys in sports. We made a big deal of this, combining the games with picnics and other such events. Finally, my research indicated that due to shift starting and ending times, none of the boys thought that they were given adequate time at home to slop their hogs. We fixed this easily, by adjusting shift times. The upshot of all this was that the So Cal management and the Missouri farmers got to better know and feel comfortable with one another, and started working together as a team. They could then attack the manufacturing repeatability problem and eventually we got it solved

This was all really a lot harder than it sounds, and in the course of events we actually took over the plant from Kaiser and ran it for a few months, eventually building them a whole new antenna production facility. Sometimes it takes some unusual efforts to get people to work together, and this time it paid off.

This is one of the problem antennas.

I also spent considerable time at the Kaiser materials labs in Pleasanton CA, just down the road from Benicia, CA, where my old buddy Fr John (who you met earlier) was ensconced at the time. Anyway, after a few (or maybe more than a few) drinks one night, Father John and I agreed that since his priory had good food, good booze, intellectual stimulation, and was essentially free, it made eminent good sense for me to stay there, rather than a hotel.

So, “Father John” from Seattle moved into the Bishop’s room at the priory for the duration. Problem was, since I would disappear right after work, and not show again till the next morning, I couldn’t convince my traveling companions that I was not shacking up with some woman. But hey, maybe they were just jealous.

Of course, none of the other priests at Benicia were fooled for a minute by all these shenanigans, but went along with them, because I was a good friend of Father John’s.

On this assignment as a Minuteman Program manager, I was traveling almost constantly between Seattle, a Kaiser plant at Mexico Missouri, Minuteman bases in four states (Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Missouri), and Minuteman headquarters at Norton Air Force Base near San Bernardino CA. Interspersed with trips to the antenna range near Denver, various subcontractor and Air Force offices, and appropriate waypoints. For instance, a Seattle, Denver Cheyenne WY, Denver, Seattle trip in one day, was not unusual. It got to the point that on several airlines, after I had settled into my seat, the flight attendant, without being asked, would hand me a Scotch, and ask me how my day was going. In the towns near the Minutemen installations, Grand Forks, ND, Great Falls MT, or Minot ND, for instance, there was not much going on except at the local Elks clubs, so I joined the Elks. Seems though that the booked entertainment had about the same travel schedule through those towns as I did, because I would often see the same entertainers in three or four different Elks clubs in the course of a couple of weeks.

During these travels for Minuteman I also had occasion to meet a charming young lady named Jackie, who was running the Boeing office at Norton Air Force Base. I used to hang around Norton AFB a lot, not because of Jackie, but because Norton was Minuteman headquarters, and heeding my boss’ exhortation to grow the account, I spent many spare hours walking the halls, visiting offices, and successfully doing just that.

Now, many years later, I live just down the road in the Palm Springs area (Which I first got to know in my Norton AFB days), Jackie is a very successful real estate broker near Vista CA, and I play golf with her husband several times in a season.

This Minutemen program was mind boggling. Hundreds of missiles, each in its hardened silo, ready to rain death and destruction on anyone foolish enough to cross us. Even the missile itself was awesome to behold. Crouching there in its silo, emanating an odor just like cat poop (The smell was caused by the solid propellant continually boiling off), and humming softly. All this together was eerie in the extreme, and gave the impression that the thing was alive. A visit to an operational launch control center was also an awesome experience. Underground rooms full of equipment and electronics racks, the lights on the consoles glowing green, showing that the missiles were locked onto their respective Russian targets, and two Air Force Officers sitting at consoles several feet apart, ready, upon command, to simultaneously turn keys which would launch the awesome beasts. And incidentally, both each carrying a sidearm, so he could shoot the other, if he ever went berserk.

Anyway, we had the problem almost solved and things were winding down. So, with nothing much else to do, several of us thought up a really improbable scheme. We would use our construction and system integration expertise to clear the Suez Canal of ships sunk there during the recent Arab Israeli war. The more we brainstormed this, the better it sounded, and we proceeded on to detailed planning. Now Boeing is a big company, with people from everywhere with all kinds of expertise. So we started investigating, and guess what, we found a painter in the paint shop, who had been a lieutenant in the Egyptian Navy, and a Suez Canal Pilot. This guy really thought that lightning had struck when he got pulled out of his painter job and made a manager in our operation. He, needless to say, was a big help and things were proceeding smoothly until we invited the Egyptian ambassador to visit us and listen to our plan. The visit went fine until the ambassador happened to mention what we were doing during a courtesy call on the President and CEO of Boeing, a crusty old Missourian named T Wilson. Wilson, of course, when hearing of this cockamamie scheme, was not pleased at all. Particularly as Boeing Commercial was trying to sell airplanes to these same Arabs, and any misstep on our part could probably queer that deal. His subsequent discussion with us started out with “You assholes….” and went down hill from there. The only guy who emerged relatively unscathed was the Egyptian lieutenant, who retained his management title and ended up in some engineering organization. At least though, Wilson now knew my name, and with any luck, he might someday forget why he knew it.

About this time, and for several years after, my buddy George Banschbach, who you also met earlier, myself and one or two other guys, organized fishing trips to the backwoods of British Columbia for our boys and ourselves. We would literally haul truck and trailer loads of boats, outboard motors, food, boys and assorted gear up backwoods dirt roads to some out of the way lake, set up camp, and fish for several days. Everyone got on famously, we caught numerous fish, drank a lot of beer and gave the boys adventures, which they talk about to this day. One ritual which the boys particularly enjoyed, was their evening drink of Canadian Pop, which in reality was Kool Aid laced with Rye, which put them to sleep in a hurry, so the guys could get on with serious drinking. One of these camps was the “Mystery Camp”, discussed earlier. If interested, you can read about the others in the Appendix titled Fishin;’ ‘Round the World

ALASKA

Fortunately, as I was contemplating my future after the Suez fiasco, I got a call one day from a guy at Bechtel, who I had known when working with them on power plants, and this set me off on another wild adventure which lasted for several years.

It seems that Bechtel had won the contract to build the north half of the Alaska Pipeline, from Fairbanks Alaska to Prudhoe Bay, and were just getting started on this project. They were having difficulties though, figuring out how to build, transport and install the installations they required in the Arctic, and having heard of my success with modular construction in the West Indies, and my logistics expertise, (which I personally didn’t think was all that great) they asked me if I could help them out on a consulting basis. I checked with Alford, and since things in my shop were winding down, and he could sell me for big money, he agreed, and I found myself in Alaska. I had always said that I would go anywhere in the world if somebody would pay for the trip, But Prudhoe Bay Alaska in the middle of the winter was a little much.

Well, I did manage to give Bechtel some help with the camps, but more importantly, saw a lot of business opportunity for Boeing. (Remember, they were still on this diversification kick.) I couldn’t get anybody at Boeing Seattle interested, but there was a minor subsidiary, Boeing Computer Services Inc. that had a small office in Anchorage. Ed Gill was a hotshot salesman out of this office, and had already been knocking on Alyeska’s door. (Alyeska was a joint venture between six oil companies, and was the company, which actually built and operated the pipeline.)

So Ed and I teamed up, going after both Alyeska and Bechtel, and were successful beyond belief. We sold them on us running all their logistics and supply operation north of Fairbanks, as well as their MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operating) purchasing. We also snagged all their timekeeping in the camps, and other miscellaneous logistics work. Then, of course, we needed some people to manage the thing.

And guess what, almost all my old team at the “Cape” were available. They were really hotshot logistics guys and would work anywhere.

Between Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay, most of the pipeline is above ground, due to permafrost. Ed and I saw an opportunity here, and won the contract to design the supports, which actually held the pipe itself. These things were more complicated than one might suppose. Many of them actually had built in refrigeration units, for instance, to keep the steel support from getting hot in the summer and melting the permafrost. This was also my first exposure to computer aided design, and I quickly became a believer. As an interesting sidelight, the environmentalists were worried that the caribou would be afraid to cross the above ground pipe, so at considerable expense, every few miles, a section of the pipe was buried underground, thus providing a crossing place for the aforementioned beasts. Turned out that the pipeline didn’t bother the animals one bit. They would graze right alongside, and when they wanted to cross to the other side, would just duck their heads and walk under.

During the actual construction, incidentally, an Eskimo lady from the North Slope checked into the hospital in Fairbanks with a social disease. When questioned, she admitted that she had been servicing the pipeline workers, who had given her their paychecks in payment. To prove her point, she dug out a fistful of Alyeska paychecks, which on closer examination, turned out to be only the check stubs.

When this project was beginning to look like a full time proposition, I had asked my boss and mentor, Lionel Alford, what he thought of the situation. He said that a subsidiary was a good place to ride things out, and that Boeing Computer Services, or BCS as it was called, was the best of the lot. He also said that he would find me a job anytime I needed one. A lot of good that did really. Shortly thereafter he took over the Wichita Division, then he died on me.

So I transferred from Minuteman to BCS, and shortly became a Contracts Manager. That wasn’t as bad as it sounds, for a couple of reasons. First off, in BCS in those days, unlike the parent Boeing Company, Contract Managers, probably through some oversight, had unlimited authority to commit the BCS company, and had papers to that effect. Second, my immediate boss was a bumbling sort, who never really knew what was going on, and didn’t much care. He was a Harvard MBA graduate, but must have been kicked in the head by a horse after he graduated, because he was dumber than a box of rocks. Incidentally, flaunting his MBA, he married some breakfast food heiress who was supposed to be loaded. Turned out that she was broke, and he was dumb, but I suppose they deserved each other.

How I got to be a contracts Manager is also an interesting story. It seems that BCS had a resident Contracts Manager in Alaska, who we will call Dan, who was a nice enough sort, but not really a legal genius. In those days at BCS, incidentally, even though the contracts manager could commit the company, a wanna be lawyer in BCS headquarters, who had the exalted title of Vice President of Contracts, insisted in approving every major contract, as to form and language. Alyeska also had a resident Contracts Manager, a big guy (about 250 pounds) named Bill Butler. Bill had both an engineering and a law degree, along with an exceedingly short fuse. Although he was competent, he had a worse problem than we did. He had six Vice Presidents of Contracts, one for every oil company in the joint venture, who had to also approve every major contract as to form and language.

So, Dan and Bill would make a deal, it didn’t matter over what, then Butler would give it to his lawyers to draft the legal language. Then our VP of Contracts, the staff weenie, would take a look at it, and suggest changes. You know, back and forth, the way contracts are usually negotiated. The problems came when our VP, after everything was agreed upon, and ready to sign, would decide to move some wherases and hereunders around a bit more, and Dan, being a good troop, would pencil in the changes and trot off to see Bill. Bill, understandingly, got annoyed after this happened a couple of times, because each time, he would have to go to his six lawyers all over again. But what would get Bill really upset was when Dan, who knew nothing about law, would try to justify the changes. One day, predictably, when Dan was trying to sell some particularly asinine change, Bill snapped, picked Dan up bodily by the seat of the pants, and physically threw him out the front door, onto the sidewalk, with exhortations never to come back. So guess who got to be the new Contracts Manager. With some trepidation I called on Bill, found out what his problem was, and promised I would never do that to him. I didn’t, and we became good friends. As to how I handled our VP of Contracts. I ignored him. I had to put up with a lot of noise, but Alaska was a long distance, and five time zones away, and besides, it beat getting thrown out on the sidewalk.

Incidentally, some time later, after I had saved the BCS Alaska operation from certain disaster, I was selected as the BCS Manager of the year. The VP Contracts was proud to come to that award dinner, but I told the General Manager that if that guy came, I wouldn’t, so he was told to stay home. But I am getting ahead of the story.

TRAVELIN’ ‘ROUND THE WORLD

During this period in the 1980s and early ‘90s, the kids were grown up, and we had some money for a change. So Pat and I did a considerable amount of personal travel, including a couple of cruises and several trips to Europe and the West Indies.

These are pretty well chronicled In the appendices to this book, under the Travelin ‘Round the World and crusin’ ‘Round the World headings.  I will give you a ‘teaser” here, and you can explore the Appendices later, if you are so inclined

I originally wrote the story below for a newsletter. It was published there and in the local newspaper as well, so here it is in its entirety:

Having recently returned from a trip to the West Indies, we thought it might be interesting to share with you some of our air travel experiences in that part of the world.

Our travel agent and good friend Judy Bjorback, first alerted us to this great air travel bargain. Thirty days of essentially unlimited air travel throughout the West Indies on LIAT Airlines, for the small sum of Three Hundred Dollars. The only catch being that you had to buy the pass in the West Indies. Some places where LIAT didn't fly we would have to use an airline called Winair. We would have to get these tickets in the West Indies as well.

Anyway, we arrived in San Juan, Puerto Rico one day early, (a good thing, as it turned out) and went to get our pass. We then found that the pass cost $367 instead of $300, and could only be obtained from a travel agent. No problem, we thought, and we went to look up a travel agent. Three travel agents later, it became obvious that travel agents didn't really want to sell the passes, because it was too much work for the small commission. After walking the streets of San Juan for what seemed like hours we finally found an agent willing to sell us LIAT passes. We never did find anyone who claimed to know anything about, or wanted anything to do with Winair. There is an added complication in Puerto Rico, by the way. When you get away from the tourist areas, everyone speaks Spanish. And an island dialect, at that.

So, early the next morning we went out to the San Juan airport to catch the 8:00 LIAT flight for Martinique, with a plane change enroute at Barbados. We were advised that the flight would be a little late, so we spent some time looking out the window. Out there we saw these funny looking little yellow planes with wings on top, engines on the front of the wings and funny little things going around out in front of the engines. They were 37 passenger deHavillands of a vintage that the Red Baron would have been familiar with. We thought maybe they were from a museum, but they did say LIAT on the tail.

About two hours later, they called the flight and sure enough it was one of the little deHavillands. By this time, we knew we had missed our connection, but nothing could be done. Anyway, the plane finally got airborne, and 20 minutes later landed at Tortolla in the British Virgin Islands. This stop was not on the schedule, but nobody seemed to be concerned. Eventually we got going again and after four more unscheduled stops at strange islands, we finally ended up at Saint Lucia, (nowhere near Barbados) and were advised that this was the end of the flight. Several hours later, after many assurances that things would be straightened out in five minutes, an even smaller and older deHavilland landed. This one was a seventeen passenger, and had wheels that hung down permanently. Anyway, they jammed seventeen lucky? souls into this airplane and this time we made it to Martinique.

This act was repeated with minor variations every time we changed islands. Flights were invariably at least two hours late, (They should have named the airline LATE instead of LIAT), usually went to a different place than was scheduled, with lots of unscheduled sightseeing stops enroute, and many times they used the small seventeen passenger deHavillands, which could only take half the passengers who had confirmed reservations. One day we actually used two airlines, landed in three countries, and took ten hours to get to from one island to another one that was fifteen miles away.

As an interesting sidelight, which I almost forgot to mention, there was a French couple waiting with us in St. Lucia, as well, who had somehow gotten marooned there on the way to Martinique, These guys did not speak English, so could not figure out what was going on, and were becoming more distressed by the minute, But fortunately, there also was a French Canadian couple who spoke both English and French, so could translate.

The problem though, was that the gate agent was getting stressed out, so instead of speaking plain English, he launched into his native pidgin patois, which is almost incomprehensible. This didn't particularly bother me, because being an old West Indies hand I could pretty well make him out, but I was the only one. So, he would speak to me, I would translate for the Canadians, (and the other passengers) then the Canadians would translate to French for the French couple. Incidentally, I often wondered in later days, as to how much of the original information made it through this chain to the confused Frenchmen.

Winair was about the same, (Yes we finally did get tickets.) except the airplanes were even smaller and older. The reservation system, however, was unusual. You phoned in and got reservations normally, but when you got to the airport you didn't have any, so everybody flew, or tried to fly, standby. This made for some interesting discussions at the gate.

Of course there was added excitement with immigration and customs, since each island was a different country, and the visa form you filled out on the plane was for the country you were supposed to go to and not for the one where you actually landed. Not that it made any difference, the forms were all incomprehensible anyway. To top it off, usually they wouldn't let you out of the terminal until your next flight actually arrived, and sometimes they charged you five or ten dollars departure tax to get out of a country where you didn't want to be in the first place. We can assure you that being cooped up for hours in a non air conditioned tin shack in the tropics with several dozen unwashed natives, while being assailed with announcements in unknown languages, being hassled by officious officials, and drinking warm beer, is lots of fun.

It all turned out OK in the end, no airplanes crashed and we did see some beautiful islands. We would suggest though, that if you are not an experienced traveler with a taste for adventure, you might be well advised to see the West Indies from a cruise ship.

I mentioned earlier that in the nineteen sixties I was active in the Boy Scouts. Actually I was recruited into that organization by the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church scoutmaster, Dave Ertter. Dave was an Army veteran, who had spent 8 years in the military, and was just starting a job with the City of Seattle, when we first met. Dave did not last long as Scoutmaster, but he and his wife Angie, became fast friends. Angie, incidentally, had a brother Horst, who had immigrated to Vancouver B.C. soon after the war. (Horst incidentally is the guy who taught me to fish.) Angie grew up during WW II in East Prussia, which is now part of Poland. It is not widely known, but in the closing days of the war, as the Russians were overrunning everything east of the Oder River, the German Kriegsmarine, or Navy, spent considerable time and effort ferrying German civilians out of East Prussia and into what is now West Germany. Angie was one of those fortunate people who the Navy helped. And, after a number of harrowing adventures, she and her sister Lilo hooked up with their brother Horst, who had been in the Luftwaffe, been captured by the Americans, and was now working for the Americans at an ordinance depot near Darmstadt. Dave, at the time was stationed at the same depot, and eventually, through Horst, Dave and Angie met. Military circumstances, though, precluded any serious involvement, and eventually Dave returned to the states to be discharged.

Meanwhile, Lilo married a German, who had a good job, and they lived happily ever after.

Dave, now being a civilian, went back to Germany, married Angie, and brought her and her daughter Marianne back to the States. In the meantime, another daughter, Christine, had been adopted by a kind German couple named Schaefer.

Fast forward 15 years. Our youngest daughter, Michelle, then a teenager, was really interested in Germany, and wanted to go there between school terms. So we made arrangements with Lilo and off went Michelle for the summer. She soon met Lilo’s niece Christine, and although they are over 10 years apart, become fast friends. In fact, Michelle spent several more summers in Germany, both with Lilo and with Christine.

During this time as well, Christine and Angie got to know each other again and everyone became a big happy family. Who says truth is not stranger than fiction. Now, all the old folks have died off, and everyone else is engaged in new interests, but it still makes quite a story.

MORE ALASKA

After all those tales, I guess that now I had better get back to the story of how I saved the BCS Alaska operation from certain disaster.

The pipeline was winding down, but our BCS Alaska operation had been diversifying, as it were, and was growing at a good clip. We were becoming the largest computer service company in the State of Alaska, with a large part of our business being with the State itself. We gained most of this business by backing Jay Hammond in his bid to be elected governor, and working tirelessly for his election. When he did get elected, he showed his gratitude by throwing a large part of the state’s computing business our way, and before long, we were the state’s largest data processing and computer services supplier.

We were particularly favored by the state Department of Ecology, which was run by a Hammond appointee, Bill McConkey. Bill had been sent to Alaska by the Republican National Committee to help Jay in his reelection campaign, had fallen in love with the state, and had stayed on. Bill also had recently partnered in a commercial salmon fishing venture with an Aleut native. This enterprise was based in a tiny fishing village in the Aleutians, named Nelson Lagoon, where the Aleut lived. Bill was attracted to this Aleut, mostly because he (the Aleut) owned a commercial salmon fishing license. These licenses were extremely valuable, and impossible for an outsider like Bill to obtain, thus the partnership.

In the meantime, unbeknownst to us at BCS, or any one else in Boeing, it seemed, another Boeing outfit named Boeing Engineering and Construction, (BE&C) had sold another State of Alaska department on the value of windmills for electric power generation in remote Alaska villages, and had contracted with the state for a pilot program at four remote sites. At some point along the line though, McConkey got into the act and made sure that Nelson Lagoon was one of the sites.

To make a long story short, the boys at Boeing Engineering and Construction didn’t have a clue as to what they were doing, and after scattering equipment all over the Aleutians, and blowing a substantial amount of Boeing money, they abandoned the operation and disappeared. Incredibly, we at BCS Alaska still didn’t know what was going on, and though I had heard rumors, I had been too busy to follow up.

Eventually the State figured out what had happened, and were they pissed. Bill in particular, as he had promised his buddies in Nelson Lagoon free electric power, and they were now asking him what happened. The Governor, who was a buddy of the judge who was sleeping with the Nelson Lagoon village chief’s white girl friend, (did you get all of that?) also started leaning on Bill, and really putting the screws to Boeing. These State guys didn’t know or care that we in BCS had nothing to do with the problem. All they knew was that we were Boeing and that Boeing had screwed up big time. Hammond, despite being our alleged friend, was now threatening to pull our contracts, and the Alaska Attorney General was considering legal action.

Needless to say, this had the BCS Alaska management running around in circles, while BCS senior management in the lower 48 was calling for someone’s head, and Boeing Engineering and Construction was nowhere to be found.

At this time I was running a small construction operation in Alaska, under BCS auspices, and was also selling computer services to both the State and to commercial customers in Alaska. At the same time, as mentioned previously, I was a Vice President of BCS Canada, Ltd. On top of that, I was still a Contracts Manager and the closest thing BCS had to a legal expert in either Alaska or Canada.

While Boeing and BCS were locked into an argument about how we got into this mess, I started looking quietly for a way out. Eventually Boeing and the Boeing Engineering and Construction organization disclaimed all responsibility, and threw the whole mess into our laps. But by this time I had a plan. We needed to discredit wind power for electrical generation, but this was not too hard. BE&C had already done most of that work for us, and I finished the job by conducting a study as to the feasibility of wind power for remote villages. The conclusion, of course being that it was not feasible. This study resulted in a report (written by me) explaining that wind power generation would never work. I even got the state to pay for this dissertation.

But the State still had to have something to show for their involvement, so I proposed that we electrify Nelson Lagoon village, by installing a diesel power plant. I then sweetened the deal by offering to build an underground distribution system to pipe the electricity to every house. Bill jumped on this, as it would pacify his buddies in Nelson Lagoon, and incidentally save his fishing license. It would also get the Gov off his back. So Bill and the Gov said OK and now all we had to do was perform.

Since nobody else in BCS Alaska had a clue as to what to do, and since I already had the construction company, was still a Contracts Manager with authority to commit the company, and was the resident legal expert, I was drafted.

The first thing I had to do was negotiate a contract between my construction company (which was a subsidiary of BCS) and the state, agreeing to electrify Nelson Lagoon with diesel power, voiding the old contract with BE&C, and giving me $75,000 for the aforementioned paper discrediting wind power. We were having some difficulty making this a sole source contract, and not subject to competitive bid, till I got an old buddy, who was an assistant AG for the State, to legitimize the deal by using as precedent, some old fur trading cases, dating back to when Alaska was a territory.

Incidentally, over thirty years later, on a flight from Palm Springs to Seattle, my seatmate was a neat Alaskan lady, who had retired after many years with the Alaska State government. We were reminiscing over old times, and in the course of the conversation she said that she had always wondered how we pulled off that sole source contract.

I then joint ventured with Emerson GM Diesel in Seattle to furnish the equipment and an engineer, and for an Anchorage electrical contractor to do the actual work. The part with Emerson was a bit tricky, as I wanted Caterpillar diesels, but they finally agreed. (I had big problems with GM Allison Diesels on a previous Minuteman project, and was not about to take a chance on them here.) The contract clause which stated that Contractor would provide own sleeping bags, was also a bit unusual.

All this amid constant carping and second guessing by the VP Contracts, and other lower 48 naysayers. This finally got so bad that I had to retain a prestigious Seattle law firm to keep the VP Contracts under control, and borrowed a senior staff guy from the president of BCS to rein in the others. My management in Seattle was no help at all. They ran for cover at the first hint of trouble, and didn’t surface till the job was done, but then tried to take all the credit for its success.

So we chartered planes, airlifted the equipment to Nelson Lagoon, flew the crew out as well, and went to work. Later, a legend sprung up around Boeing that I had built a power plant in the Aleutians with nothing but a DC-3 load of whisky and a duffle bag full of twenty dollar bills. I did nothing to discourage this story, and actually the part about the whisky and the twenty dollar bills was mostly true, except that there was not quite an airplane load of whisky involved. As to the job, it proceeded well, as we had some really good guys who knew what they were doing and an excellent construction boss, me. Remember, I had built a desal plant in the West Indies, and compared to that, this job was a piece of cake.

The natives, aside from drinking all my whisky, were really neat people to work with, and furnished a lot of the labor. The Village Chief, incidentally, was a great help. He was a neat old guy named Gunderson, who claimed that he was half Aleut, half Swede, half Russian, and half Coast Guard. He also groused continuously that in the old days, nobody wanted to be an Aleut, but now that there was money in it, everyone wanted to be one. . There were many other interesting characters around town, like Richard, the town drunk, who I had to keep supplied with whisky, as a bribe not to work. When I gave him a bottle, he would disappear for two days, thus giving me a couple days of relative peace and quiet.

Our equipment and supplies were shipped in via a converted PBY seaplane, or a Cessna 185 landing on the village street. There was an abandoned oil company airstrip about five miles from the village, but an enterprising native had somehow gotten title to it via the Native Land Claims act and was charging landing fees. It really didn’t matter though, because there was no road from there to the village anyway. There was a satellite telephone system, but nobody had figured out how to hook it up, and radio communications were unreliable due to interference caused by the Northern Lights. The weather, while not really cold, was just genuinely awful, which limited flying to an average of one day out of three. Since everything was tundra, our two principal means of transportation in and around the village were an old airplane with wings and tail removed and large tires fitted, and an ancient army surplus weapons carrier equipped with wheels and tires salvaged from DC-3 airplanes.

The only civilization anywhere near Nelson Lagoon was a girl watchman at a deserted cannery at Port Moller, about 20 miles away. She, though, did have a radiophone, which worked most of the time. So the way to send messages was to get on the CB to her, and have her relay a message on the radiophone. Of course the whole village monitored the CB, but I finally got even with them. It was just getting dusk the day when the installation was finally complete, and I was ready to throw the switch. But before I did, I got on the CB to the lady in Port Moller, told her I was going to throw the switch, and asked her to watch the western sky for a big explosion. This really shook up the natives.

These are just some of our experiences in the course of this job, but it got done, the village had lights, the Governor was happy with BCS again, and I was a certified hero. Of course the previously mentioned story about John Kuller building a power plant in the Aleutians with no resources other than a DC-3 load of whiskey and a duffle bag full of $20 bills also helped spread my fame.

Incidentally, you can hear more improbable stories about Nelson Lagoon and some of my other Alaskan adventures, along with some real Alaska lore, in my "Nelson Lagoon" stories in the appendix "Airplanes 'Round the World, and the stories "Alaska" and "Nelson Lagoon" the appendix "Livin' 'Round the World,

I mentioned previously that I was also a Vice President of an operation called BCS Canada. This was a feeble attempt to diversify into Canada, which failed miserably, but in the meantime, what a gravy train I was privileged to ride.

The outfit’s headquarters was in on old loft in the Gastown district of Vancouver BC. We leased the place because it was cheap, but then it became a tourist hangout.  Anyway, at the time, BC required thAt a majority of the board of any foreign corporation operating within BC, be Canadian nationals. To protect the country’s interests, I suppose. So we packed the board with tame Canadians, who voted our way most of the time. But just to make sure that they maintained control, parent BCS forced the board to appoint one person, an American, as the sole authority to approve contracts and significant expenditures. And that person was, you guessed it, me.

In that gig, my life went something like this. When I had nothing better to do, on Wed or Thursday evening I would grab Pat and/or one of the kids, and either drive or fly to Vancouver, Then, after deciding which luxury hotel we would honor with our business. Finally after dinner in some expensive place, we would head for bed, and then up in the morning, bright eyed and bushy tailed, to head for the offiee, and do some work. 

Work, most days consisted of signing a couple of contracts, and maybe a few checks, and perhaps, calling on some deadbeats to collect bills. (I was also the bill collector, as the Canadians were not mean enough). Then, I was pretty much free for a day or two of sightseeing, and back to wherever home was at the time. Only to repeat this gig, a week or two later.

But let me tell you about one particular trip.  Seems that I had Pat and the two boys in tow, and were joined by another American, also with a wife and two girls. We got settled in, and the adults went off to dinner, leaving the kids with extortions to buy their dinners in the Hotel coffee shop, and made arrangements for them to charge there.  But the tykes did us one better. They found a room service menu, and figured out that all manner of delectable stuff could be delivered to the room.  And did they pile on that, amassing a several hundred dollar tab, before we staggered home. And needless to say, after that we made it clear that room service was off limits.

Another hazard, was that anytime I took one of the boys with me, he could not wait, upon returning home, to entertain his mother with tales of the exotic women I was escorting around Vancouver .

But all good things must come to an end, and eventually they pulled the plug on that one. Alaska was running pretty good without me, and since I had picked up couple of promotions, I settled down in BCS Western District headquarters in Seattle with one of the best jobs I ever had.

MY OWN LITTLE FIEFDOM

First off, I was assigned as head of all BCS telecommunications in North America. I also sat on the Bid Board, which decided which of the many opportunities brought in by the salesmen we would pursue. And, improbably, I was still a Contracts Manager, as no one had remembered to cancel that out. But most importantly, I was head of a small BCS division, with carte blanche to pursue computing and construction opportunities all over the world, the only caveat being that I had to make money.

And did we move out. We turned down a power plant in Chad, but bid a job in Cabo San Lucas, which we lost. We did, though win a computing job from the Army Corps of Engineers in Saudi Arabia. We then branched out into the Police Dispatch and Command and Control business where we invented Mobile Digital Terminals. This essentially was putting computers in cop cars and linking them by radio with a central dispatch center, as well as appropriate databases. In this product line alone, we modified a police dispatch system in Oakland, built and installed a brand new command control and dispatch system in Portland, and had work lined up in several more cities.

Technically, this setup was a fairly primitive computer coupled with a police radio in the cop car. Since the computer was digital, and the radio was analog, we needed some kind of a conversion box. This, of course was a modem, a normal part of any telecommunications computer interface. But one that worked in this type of application had not yet been invented, so one evening I sat down in a hotel room in Portland and designed one. It functioned as anticipated, and we were off and running. Incidentally, we needed a name for this entire contraption, so we called it a Mobile Digital Terminal, or MDT for short. A name, which has stuck with cop car computers to this day.

What we were doing here was nothing less than revolutionary. The cop on the street could now instantly access relevant databases, like arrest records, stolen car reports, vehicle registrations, etc, from the comfort of his car, and without cumbersome radio checks. The Sergeant supervising a shift at a precinct now knew precisely where his men were, and what they were doing. The Captain in charge of an entire shift had a real time graphic display of exactly what was happening crime wise, in the entire city, and could deploy resources as appropriate. And finally, we could spit out reams of statistics, everything from manpower utilization to crime trends, by category.

Working with cops and city officials was particularly interesting. Wending one’s way through city politics, a necessary part of the job, was sometimes more challenging than the technical aspects. As to cops, they are used to throwing their weight around, and I was not about to be intimidated, so confrontations were the norm.

I remember one particularly contentious meeting with police senior management. Now these guys usually dressed in civvies, but for this meeting, they were all in uniform, and armed to the teeth. I walked into the room, sized up the situation and remarked that it looked like I was outgunned.

I further announced that there would be no meeting till they got rid of the hardware, which of course, they were not about to do. So the meeting was cancelled. But when it was rescheduled for the next morning, all the cops showed up in civvies, with nary a gun in sight.

I also had to put up with some pretty crude cop humor. Like when I asked to be picked up at the airport, and was met by two beefy cops, who proceeded to make a big thing of “arresting” me right there in the concourse, then laughing about it later.

We also, for awhile, had our very own cop car, complete with lights and sireen. This came about because we needed a prototype to test our equipment, so the cops loaned us a car.

This car though, wasn’t as much fun to drive as one might think. If one traveled at anything over the speed limit, police dispatch would get calls saying that car so and so was speeding on such and such street. If we were good boys, and obeyed the limit, cars would pile up behind us in a massive jam. So one couldn’t really win.

There were also crude attempts at bribery, like when a Captain I was working with decided that he liked my new leather jacket. But we always seemed to get the job done, the systems worked flawlessly, and the senior commanders had better visibility and control than they had ever dreamed possible.

While all this was going on,, we were continuing our construction business in Alaska, gearing up to handle a contract we had won to provide all telecommunications for a major gas pipeline, and getting our feet wet in the ATM business, which was just getting off the ground. In this venture alone, we set up a computer system for The Exchange, in Seattle, and an ATM system for a bank in Patterson, New Jersey. We also were dabbling in computing for the Canadian oil industry, and doing some miscellaneous computing and business consulting in various places.

I ran this empire with a small technical and business staff in Seattle, and a BCS manager or two for each specific operation. The balance of our staffing, which fluctuated substantially depending on workload, was accomplished with contract programmers, systems analysts, and hardware and software engineers. This staffing method was a first for any Boeing operation, but it served us well.

My personal time was roughly split as follows: Forty percent working alone or with salesmen to corral new business. Twenty percent on administrative and personnel activity in Seattle, five percent on telecommunication problems, fifteen percent on monitoring costs and schedules for ongoing operations, including monthly or quarterly program reviews, and a final twenty percent, actually managing the day to day operations of the various projects. And I hope that adds up to one hundred percent. I was my own boss, traveling a lot, making BCS some money, and generally having a good time.

You can read more stories about these times in tales from my books "Airplanes 'Round the World" and "Livin' 'Round the World" both in appendices to this book

JAPAN

But then disaster struck. The Boeing Commercial Airplane Group was launching a new airliner called the 767, with approx fifteen percent of the structure work to be done in Japan, by Japanese companies, and approx ten percent to be done in Europe. The business arrangements for both these ventures were undefined, but were planned to be something between a conventional procurement contract and a joint venture. Costs had not been determined either, but were estimated to be in the neighborhood of three and a half billion dollars for the total first five hundred airplane contract.

Hw did I fit into all this? My work at BCS had come to the attention of some Boeing Commercial big shot. And he decided that if I cold handle hundred thousand and million dollar projects so efficiently, that I should have a chance to handle really big money. He also decided, with typical Boeing Commercial logic, that since I had lived in, and had experience with Europe, that I should be tapped to run the Japanese operation.

I was not at all interested in this opportunity for several reasons. First, I was not impressed with the Boeing Commercial management, for reasons, which I discussed earlier. And second, I liked the job I was doing, was reasonably good at it, and was managing to make a little money for BCS. So I told them no thanks. A bidding war then ensued between Boeing Commercial and BCS, which BCS won, and which gained me two more promotions. Finally though, a very senior Boeing executive,

intervened and decreed that I was going to work for Boeing Commercial. And that was that.

On the plus side though, Boeing was just getting into the business of buying big chunks of airplane structure overseas, I had substantial purchasing experience, and it looked like I might be getting in on the ground floor of something interesting.

So here I am, running an operation charged with buying two billion dollars worth of airplane structure, practically the entire body of the 767 airplane, from three companies in Japan. (Two billion was the Japanese share of the three and a half billion total.) I am working, incidentally, for a guy Named Fred Cerf, a Luxemburger with an interesting European past.

It turned out that the Japanese companies were as good or better at building aircraft structure, than the shops in Boeing Commercial, and had nothing to learn from us, so at least I didn’t have to worry about getting quality hardware, delivered on time to support the production line. Just to be sure though, Boeing senior management decreed that we would assign large teams of Boeing experts at each company to teach the Japanese how to build hardware the Boeing way. Again, in Boeing Commercial’s inimitable way, these teams were generally staffed with rejects and misfits that their parent engineering and manufacturing organizations were only too glad to get rid of. The Japanese soon figured out as well, that these teams were useless, so they put them up in fancy offices, and fed them reams of meaningless data, but otherwise pretty well ignored them. The teams themselves figured out pretty quickly that they had little value to add, and generally treated these assignments as paid vacations.

My real job then, was developing and negotiating contractual arrangements with the Japanese, then administrating the contracts. Which was basically making sure that they would build the stuff they had agreed to, for the agreed price. This was really tough to do, because the devious little bastards kept at least three sets of books, and would cheat anyone, including their own government, if they thought that they could get away with it. To make matters worse, they insisted on setting up a quasi governmental organization, CTDC, which all the business arrangements ran through, thereby further muddying the water.

But let me digress a moment to emphasize this flexible bookkeeping point. One time I was riding first class on an airplane from Seattle to Wichita with the President of one of the Japanese companies. As the scotch flowed freely, we began talking finance and labor rates. He eventually came around to telling me not to worry, that he could cook the books to give me any labor rate I wanted. A boast, which he conveniently forgot, as soon as he sobered up.

The Japanese companies were given low interest loans by their government to tool up for our work. These loans only had to be paid back, if and when the Japanese companies showed a profit, which was expected sometime in the future. Incidentally, they had hit Boeing up for a couple of hundred million for tooling, as well, and this money did not have to be paid back. Anyway, the Japanese companies consistently whined that they were losing money, would trot out figures to allegedly prove it, and would continually want to renegotiate.

They would peddle this bullshit to anyone who would listen. The Japanese government, top US government officials, senior Boeing executives, and any other big shot that they could corner. They also spread the fiction, which was eagerly swallowed by Boeing sales people, that all Asian airlines looked to Japan Airlines for guidance, and would buy any airplane, which JAL did. This was an obvious falsehood, as the rest of Asia, remembering the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, generally couldn’t stand the Japanese.

The result of all of this, of course, was that the Boeing Commercial big shots, continually told me to take it easy on the Nips, because if I pissed them (the Japanese) off, they might stop buying airplanes.

The Japanese were great for mixing business with pleasure, particularly if the pleasure part would forward their business interests. Up shot was, that when myself, or some other company official hit town, there would be a great party, with maybe 100 or so Japanese attendees. Then, if they really liked you, there would be a second, more intimate party, and perhaps even a third. We quickly found out though, that they had two teams. Next morning, the entertainment team would be sound asleep in bed, while us, in our hung over condition, faced a business team that was bright eyed and bushy tailed.

A couple of times, the second party thing got really interesting. My boss, incidentally, never got invited to them, asthe Japanese did not particularly care for him. One night, as the first party was breaking up, and bound to go to the second shindig, he physically attached himself to me, hoping to join the festivities. Anyway, there was a lot of confusion, great pushing and shoving, and when the dust cleared, my boss was in a car, bound for his hotel, while I was in a black limo, bound for the second party.

But it was not all work and no play. Pat and I got an audience with Emperor Hirohito, and I got to know a real neat Japanese movie star named Maki. (Yes, a real movie star.) I also hung in a lot of expensive Geisha houses, but my best drinking companions were friends I made in a small Tokyo bar, as I was the only foreigner who ever frequented the place. I also traveled around Japan quite a bit, climbed almost to the top of Mount Fuji, and was finally able to strike off on my own to really explore the country. I did meet some other interesting people. Hideko Tojo, a designer of the Zero fighter and son of the wartime premier, a couple of Japanese I class submarine captains, and a pilot who had flown Zeros in combat during the entire war, are guys who immediately come to mind

I also developed many Japanese “friends” but when I was no longer in a position to pass out money, most of them kind of disappeared. I must have made some impact though, because when I met a young Japanese businessman at an air show in 2004, he said that he had read about me in a Japanese history book.

My eight years of involvement with the Japanese was both interesting and frustrating. Along with most others who really worked with and understood the Japanese, the better I knew them, the less I liked them. Suffice to say that the stereotype portrayed in WW II propaganda, may not have been far from the truth.

Although I never actually lived there, I made dozens trips to Japan, had a large staff working there, traveled extensively in the country, and dealt with senior industry and government officials on a daily basis. Through all this, I believe that I became as “expert” on Japan as any non oriental could be. Many in Government, industry and academia must have agreed, because I was routinely asked to share my expertise with the CIA, the Commerce Department, and others. My visitors also included esteemed professors from various universities, including the U of W Jackson School of Far East Studies, and the MIT Sloan Institute.

One significant happening in this regard, was that I called the early 1990’s collapse of the Japanese stock and real estate markets, and the subsequent Japanese economic slide into deflation, right on the money. In the nineteen eighties, you may remember, Japan was heralded as the new economic miracle, Japanese management and industrial practices were considered the best in the world, and the experts were telling us that it would only be a matter of time before Japan assumed world leadership. I held a contrary view, basically believing that the Japanese industrial miracle was an illusion, the economy was grounded in sand, and that soon it would all collapse upon itself. Many illustrious personages beat a path to my door to hear these heretical views. Among them being CIA agents, Department of Commerce functionaries, and various consulting types. I never did convince anyone, but you know who turned out to be right. You also know that a prophet is not honored in his own country.

During this Japan period, I also expanded my activities to take in Southeast Asia, The diverse cultures, religions, and people in these countries made life really interesting and I found them more than willing to do business with an American firm. I even found the Moslems in Pakistan and Indonesia, although challenging, to be reasonably easy to work with, and willing to tolerate western ways.

For several years during this period, I was also working for another US intelligence agency as a contract field agent in East Asia, but quit that when it became too risky.  Since I had been an agent before, it seemed kind of dumb to sign on again, but I guess patriotism got the better of me.

Make no mistake though. Asians are different. Their religion, culture, environment and life experiences vary greatly from ours, as do their values, their work ethic, and their general outlook on life. That is not to say that Asian ways are bad, they are just different. For example, Americans and Europeans generally have the “hunter” mentality. They will go out and slay the savage beast, and if they do not like their surroundings, they will try to change them, or move on. Asians are more like “farmers”. They are more likely to adapt to their surroundings, and accept what life offers them.

Anyway I stayed on that job until Nov 1988. During that time I visited Japan about 75 times, and filled up two passports with visa stamps from there and other East Asian countries. South Korea, Nationalist China, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Thailand, to name those, which come immediately to mind. I even very briefly was in North Korea, but didn’t get my passport stamped for that one. I even took time out for a heart attack, about halfway through. The attack didn’t turn out to be real serious, and left no aftereffects at all, but did earn me a 90 day leave, and a respite from travel for a few months. Anyway, my experiences on that assignment, and in that part of the world would fill at least one large book, which I might write some day, if the mood strikes me.

But let me tell you now, some of the more humoristic aspects of those times. First we’ll talk about food, then some other zany stuff.

When traveling with senior Boeing executives, the junior member of the party, which was usually me, was generally stuck with the bill. I usually took this as a good sport, but an incident at a hotel in Nagoya Japan, was a bit over the top. But let me tell you about that.

Seems that four of us, including the Director of Finance, a notorious skinflint, and this very senior Vice President, were in Japan on some mission or other, and after a night of drinking and assorted debauchery, landed in our hotel about one AM. And at this point, the VP, feeling hungry, and not ready to turn in yet, decided he needed a hamburger. I suggested that there was a MacDonalds just down the street, which was always open, and could satisfy his wishes, but no, he wanted a hamburger right now, and right here.

Now, this hotel was about the most expensive in town, but unfortunately did not have an all night kitchen. But after I rousted out the night manager, and threatened him with bodily harm if my VIP’s wishes weren’t satisfied, he somehow rounded up a cook, and hamburgers, and beer all around eventually appeared.

Anyway we enjoyed the repast, and when the bill eventually arrived, I gave it a cursory glance, tendered my credit card, and we all went to bed.

Next morning at breakfast though, the finance guy innocently asked what those hamburgers had cost. I told him “A bit over US$400”, which was the truth. This of course set him off on a tirade about foolishly spending company money, in general, and overrunning my travel budget, in particular. I finally cut him off, though, by allowing that I had already resolved the situation by phoning in a stolen credit card report, so not to worry. This caused the VP to almost choke on his oatmeal, but he was not concerned, ‘cause he knew I would somehow find a way to get these excessive charges off my budget, and probably racked up against his.

One problem with dining in Japan was that one was not always sure what was really on the plate. Or worse yet, one knew what was on the plate, but to save “face”, had to choke it down anyhow.

The latter situation was brought forcefully to my attention on two consecutive evenings in Tokyo. But let me tell you about it.

Seems that I was the guest of a bunch of big shot Mitsubishi executives at a fancy seafood restaurant in Tokyo. Since in Japan it was good form to let the host order, we did so, and all ended up with the specialty of the house, a giant Red Snapper HEAD, alone on a plate, and complete with eyes.

So it took me a couple of water glasses of Sake before I could tackle that one, and two more before I could crunch down the eyes, but I finally got through the ordeal.

Then the very next evening, the scene was repeated with a bunch of Kawasaki executives at the very same restaurant. My good luck, of course, was that out of about 10,000 restaurants in Tokyo, they had to pick that one. I certainly couldn’t admit, that I had been there the previous evening with the competition, and if any of the staff recognized me, they didn’t let on.

In an attempt to salvage the situation, I grabbed a menu, which was printed in Japanese, and announced that it said ”Sorry but we have no Red Snapper heads tonight. “ But one of the Kawasaki guys, getting into the spirit but completely missing the point, said that I had misread, and that it really said. “Sorry but we ONLY have Red Snapper heads tonight.

Anyway. I end up eating another Red Snapper head, washed down with even more copious quantities of Sake, and to this day I can’t stand the sight of Red Snapper in any size shape or form, heads or not.

But those experiences were dwarfed by the time in a Nagoya restaurant, when a lobster walked off Pats’ plate, and another occasion when some of the guys, feeling no pain, were dunking live shrimp into red wine to get the creatures drunk, then biting their heads off and eating them raw.

And once, Japanese food almost saved my life. Seems like I was stuck on this Chinese riverboat, on the Yangtze, for a week, with, among others, a group of Japanese businessmen. The Chinese food aboard this tub was about three shades beyond awful, and was hardly edible. But the cook did whip up some credible Japanese food for the businessmen, so I survived on that for a week. Till I could get to Hong Kong and pig out on some real “Hong Kong Chinese” cuisine.

You can probably see by now that I seemed to have a propensity for getting into interesting situations at dinner with Vice Presidents, as the following anecdotes will show again.

One of our senior Vice Presidents, name of Bill, who had an insatiable urge to travel, also happened to have a stunning wife, who we shall call Jane, with a figure which would have put Dolly Parton to shame, and to top it off, was about thirty years younger than the guy.

She was also an ex motorcycle racer, a good sport and a Hell of a lot of fun to be around. And to top it off, she loved Japanese food, and ate like she had a hollow leg.

I knew both of them well, as I had been roped in several times as a “bag carrier” to accompany them on their excursions.

Anyway, I am hanging around Tokyo on some useless mission, when I get a call from Bill, who unbeknownst to me, was also in town. He explained that he had a big deal dinner with Japan Airlines executives that evening, and since women were not welcome, would I take Jane to dinner. Well, it took me about thirty seconds to make up my mind on that one, and I arranged to pick her up at their hotel that evening.

Well I had no sooner put down the phone, than my big boss Jim, the Vice President Division General Manager, was on the line. Turned out that he, as well, was in Tokyo, and wanted me to have dinner with him. Seems the town was rapidly getting crowded with Company big shots.

I told him that I would be pleased to accommodate him, but I had this one problem. I then explained that I already had a date with a good looking lady, and without mentioned any other particulars, asked if I could bring her along. At this point, he was sure that I had been in Japan too long, but what could he do but say OK.

Of course all the big shots knew each other and their wives socially, but when we met at the restaurant, the setting was so out of context that he did not tumble as to who Jane really was for about ten minutes, during which time he was trying to decide whether to congratulate me for my taste in ladies, or to fire me for poor judgment. Finally neither Jane or I could keep a straight face any longer and Jim finally tumbled to whom Jane really was. For a couple of moments he couldn’t decide whether to be pissed or amused, but finally accepted the situation in good form.

And to top off this phase of my life, here are more assorted remembrances from Japan and East Asia

Usually when we traveled in Japan on business, some agency or company we were working with would assign us an official guide, or guides. These guides, who were invariably junior executives or management trainees, served two purposes. The first was to keep the foreigners from getting lost, and the second, and most important, was to report back to their handlers any intelligence they could pick up. These kids really took their jobs seriously, but weren’t always real knowledgeable about the nuts and bolts of traveling in Japan. Often it seemed, we the foreigners had to take charge, to keep everyone from getting irretrievably lost.

And sometimes we deliberately lost our handlers, but let me explain. There were no mainline train tracks through Tokyo, so if one were traveling by rail from South to north via Tokyo, (or north to south) One had to detrain at Tokyo Station, then take surface streets (or transit) to Ueno (the north) station, there to entrain again for the north. Our handlers would have a limo or limos standing by for this surface run, but we would give them the slip in Tokyo station, then grab the elevated, which was three times as fast as a limo, make our way to Ueno, hide out till thirty seconds before train time, then jump aboard. Our handlers meanwhile were running around Tokyo Station, about to commit Hari Kari because they had lost their charges, and we would have a peaceful ride to our destination in the north. No matter how many times we pulled this, they never did catch on. They always thought they had lost us.

When doing business in Japan, I usually lived in the Hotel Okura in Tokyo or a three star hotel by the fish market in Nagoya, depending upon where I was working.

The Okura was the best hotel in Japan, and maybe the world, at that time, and as I was practically living in the place, the staff treated me very well. The hotel in Nagoya, was not nearly as nice, but they kept a very large three room suite available for me, and treated me like royalty, in the bargain.

And just to let you know how well I was known in those days, let me tell you a small story.

I was traveling from Tokyo to Nagoya, and on the way from the hotel to the station, I inadvertently left my briefcase in the taxi. I was not too concerned, because I knew the Japanese cab drivers had a reputation for honesty, and I could run the briefcase down when I had time.

But imagine my surprise, when upon checking into the hotel in Nagoya, the desk clerk handed me the lost briefcase.

In checking it out later, I found that the taxi driver had noticed the briefcase, and taken it back to the hotel doorman. The doorman checked with the front desk, who thought that I might be traveling to Nagoya. So they called the Nagoya hotel, and sure ‘nuff, I was due to check in that afternoon.

So the hotel bellman took the case to Tokyo station, and put it on the bullet train as, I guess, an express package. Upon the train’s arrival in Nagoya, a bellman from the hotel retrieved the case, and left it at the front desk awaiting my arrival.

Talk about service!! And since the trains ran every twelve minutes to Nagoya, which was only two hours away, the case beat me there handily.

And speaking of Tokyo Station, it was a big ol’ place, and sometimes there was quite a distance to walk to catch your train . Anyway I had this old Sampsonite suitcase, the kind which had four wheels and which a person pulled with a leash. So to have a little fun, I fashioned a dog’s head and tail out of cardboard, then affixed the head to the front of the case and the tail to the back. When I pulled that contraption thru the station, it really stopped traffic.

The porters in Tokyo Station were also an also interesting lot. About five feet tall, maybe weighing ninety pounds, and looking to be one hundred years old. Anyway, they could, with the aid of various straps and harnesses, pick up a load of six to eight suitcases, and effortlessly, or so it seemed, trot down the corridor to one’s train or taxi.

Incidentally, when I was first there, tipping the Tokyo Station porters was the only tipping done anywhere in Japan. And if someone not in the know, for example, would leave money on a restaurant table, the waitress would chase them down the street to return it.

Tokyo bars were another interesting institution. They were tiny, crowded, and there must have been 100,000 of them in town. And everyone, pretty much patronized his “own” bar.

There were several good reasons for this, which I will get around to in a moment.

First, the regulars were known and made welcome in their bar of choice by the Publican, or Mamma San, as she was known in Japan. Second, pricing was an interesting exercise. With the exception of some tourist bars, which charged an arm and a leg, how much one got charged was based on an undecipherable formula, carried in Mamma San’s head, which considered, among other things, how much you drank, how long you stayed, (space was expensive, and therefore limited, so had to be efficiently utilized) how you treated the bar girls, how well Mamma San liked you, and perhaps the phase of the moon. Then there was the business of payment. Most everyone ran a tab, which was paid twice a year on bonus day.

But let me explain. Japanese workers generally got paid by direct deposit to their bank, this giving the wife, who effectively ran the household, control of the purse strings. There was an out though. About fifteen percent of a guys pay was called a bonus, and was paid directly to him, in cash, twice a year. This money was used for drinking, carousing, and supporting a mistress, if the guy was lucky enough to have one.

Anyway my bar, appropriately named the “Come In” in English, was in downtown Tokyo not far from the Okura. And it was a “Salaryman’s” hangout. Salaryman being the Japanese name for lower or mid grade professional businessmen.

This bar was run by Toshiko, an attractive lady of forty something, with the help of her ancient mother and younger sister. Along with a semi floating population of around six barmaids, or “hostesses”, thus qualifying it as a “hostess” bar. A Japanese hostess bar, incidentally, is like nothing else in the world, and is impossible to describe, so I won’t even try.

Since the patrons, as mentioned before, were generally working stiffs, and I was the only foreigner who ever went near the place, I was kind of the tame American, and a real celebrity. Accordingly, I got some real discount rates, sometimes even paying nothing at all for an evening of drinking and entertainment. Needless to say, I knew a good thing when I saw it, and never let another American near the place.

And now for a tale, which involves both the Okura and the Come In.

About six PM one evening, I was hosting a meeting with several associates in my room, which, incidentally, was on the main floor of the Okura. I had an errand to run at the front desk, so excused myself for a few minutes. On the way back from the desk, I ran into an attractive woman, obviously of European origin, and she struck up a conversation. She said she was Swiss, this was her first time in the mysterious Orient, and she was intrigued by the proposition of being picked up by a German speaking American. I told her sorry, but it was not to be, as I was on my way to a meeting.

On returning to the room, I related this story to my colleagues, one of whom was a European, spoke German, and fancied himself to be quite a ladies man. Anyway, he immediately made a beeline for the lobby, but was back again in five minutes with an unlikely story that the lady had disappeared.

I suggested that he had run her off, and that he probably couldn’t pick up a girl if his life depended on it. He took instant offense to this, as I was sure that he would. So, at this point I threw several 10,000 yen notes on the table, (about two hundred dollars worth, as I recall) asked him to match it, after which, I suggested, we both head for town, and the first one back with a girl claims the pot.

Of course, he didn’t take me up on this, which would have been a sure win for me, since I would have headed for the Come In, and rented a girl for an hour or so.

Japanese bars were not the only institution with “flexible pricing structures, the Japanese native inns, or Ryokan, are often guilty of this practice as well. This makes it advisable to get a firm quote for the cost of the stay, before committing oneself. But let me explain.

It seems that an American associate and I plus our Japanese handler were visiting a plant on the Japanese West Coast. Comes the weekend, my associate, who was a notorious tightwad, opted for a $60 per night flea bag, while myself and our handler, looking for something a little more upscale, went for a nice Ryokan, which had been reserved through his company, Kawasaki.

We had a delightful weekend, enjoying old fashioned Japanese hospitality, but on Sunday morning the handler knocked on my door with bad news. “We have a problem”, he says. “ I don’t have enough money to pay the $600 per person per day room charge.” After telling him that this looked like his problem, not mine, I asked him what had happened. Well, it seems that nobody had tied down the price of the rooms in advance, so we were at the mercy of the Inn. Turns out that Kawasaki thought the handler had gotten a quote, and he thought that I had. I had assumed, wrongly, I might add, that Japanese efficiency had handled the situation, and hadn’t worried about it.

Attempts to negotiate a reduction on the spot, went nowhere. We were advised, among other things, that the pretty girls who had been flitting through the rooms all evening, and who, incidentally, we had not ordered, were all Vice Presidents, and thus, very expensive.

So we are in kind of a spot. The Japanese guy isn’t going to pay, first because he hasn’t got enough money on him, and second, because he will get fired if he turns in this expense.

I am in a similar situation, because my associate is going to declare about $120 for the weekend vs. my $2000 or so. And that is not going to fly, even with my known propensity for high living.

So I take the only reasonable course, pay the bill out of my pocket, and later dress down the Kawasaki travel people.

I had totally forgotten the incident, when months later I got a call from Kawasaki finance, asking how I wanted my refund, cash or check. Japanese Yen or US dollars. Seems that Kawasaki Travel had negotiated a reduction with the Roykan for almost the total amount.

And speaking of Roykan, allow me to spin yet another yarn.

It seems that I somehow got roped into showing a visiting VIP the ”real” Japan, which of course included the Roykan experience. So I picked a place in a quaint resort village about 50 miles up in the mountains. And although I had never been to the town, I had heard that everything was first class.

Anyway, all was going well till we decided to visit the bar next door, ‘cause the VIP wanted a drink. We had no sooner got in the door, than an attractive Japanese hostess, dressed as a Giesha, disentangled herself from her customer, came rushing over, threw her arms around me, and exclaimed, “John San” where have you been.

The VIP managed to keep a straight face during this exchange, but did manage to comment that maybe I did know Japan just a little too well.

The explanation for all this was that the woman was a bar girl acquaintance of mine from Nagoya, who had decided on a change of scenery, but I wisely decided not to share this information with the VIP.

When Pat came to Japan for a visit, I decided that she needed the Roykan experience as well. My Resident Manager said he knew just the place, a couple of hundred miles away, and with western toilets, no less, which I thought might be essential. (A Japanese toilet, incidentally , is more or less, a hole in the floor.)

So early Friday morning he and his wife pick Pat and me up at our hotel. When I ask him where we are going, though, he says he is not sure, hands me a map and a hotel brochure, both in Japanese, and appoints me navigator.

Well, I have navigated planes, boats, and automobiles all over the world, in some really tight spots, but this kind of took the cake.

And besides, this was all before cell phones, GPS, portable nav systems, and the like.

Anyway, after innumerable wrong turns, and several conversations with cops and bystanders, we finally found the town, but nobody knew anything about the hotel. But after another half hour of aimless wandering, and comparing buildings we passed with the picture on the brochure, we finally found a match. And guess what. It was the right hotel!!

And this was the guy who, when looking for an address in Tokyo, would hop on a subway which he hoped was going in the right direction, jump off the thing at random, then ask the first pretty girl he met on the street how to get where he wanted to go. Then he would repeat the whole drill again, as many times as necessary to eventually get where he was going.

This guy was big. About 250 pounds and over six feet tall. And there was a little guy who worked for him, who was barely 110 pounds wringing wet and maybe five feet two, if he stretched. But strong as a bull.

Anyhow, these two guy’s favorite pastime was to find a busy shopping center and chalk out a makeshift Sumo Wrestling ring on the sidewalk. A circle about twelve feet around. Then they would pose as Sumo wrestlers, glaring, circling, stamping feet, throwing salt, and so forth, just like the real thing. The act culminated though, with the little guy grabbing the big guy, throwing him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and stomping out of the ring. No wonder that the natives thought the Americans were nuts.

Finally, In one particularly wild escapade, this same guy lost his trousers, permanently, in a house of ill repute. I was inclined to be tolerant, but when word of this mishap filtered up to my bosses, I had to replace him.

Incidentally, this guy now lives about five miles from me, near Palm Desert CA. But for some reason, he never calls me.

One fine Saturday morning, Pat and I were wandering around Tokyo with nothing much to do, when I remembered that it was the Emperor's birthday. And that he was having an audience. Hirohito, at that time, was still Emperor.

So off to the palace it was, an into an endless line. But after what seemed like hours, the next 500 of us were issued Japanese flags, and ushered into a courtyard. After standing in the blazing sun for what seemed to be more hours, the great man appeared. Whereupon we were all instructed to wave the flags like mad, and holler BANZAI at the top of our lungs. At that signal, Hirohito waved, and I snapped this pic just before he disappeared.

It became a bit tense though, when a couple of Japanese army veterans, in their WWII uniforms, asked me what army I had been with.

I was entering Japan with a minor diplomatic functionary from a small European country one day, when the officials decided on a full bag check. I saw that the guy did not have a real diplomatic passport, so I cautioned him to stay cool. But no, he had to rant and rave about being a diplomat. Upshot was that, although they didn’t even look in my bag, I was held up for quite a while, while they thoroughly tore my companion’s bags apart.

Japan, used to require a visa for a business traveler, but no visa for a tourist. So one day, my traveling companion, who had neglected to get a visa, got nailed by an officious Japanese Immigration Official, and given a forty five minute hassle. At the end of which the official told my guy that “You could have avoided all this if you had told me you were on vacation” and let him go. Who can figure out the Oriental mind??

Also, when you entered Japan, you had to fill out a two page form with all one’s vital statistics. Sort of like our Form 94. Page one noted the date you entered Japan, and was given to the Immigration official. Page two was stapled into your passport and was date stamped and surrendered to another official when you left Japan.

I always had visions of some minor Japanese functionary, locked in a room with ten million page ones and page twos, and told that he would not get his pension till he matched them all up.

But I once got into North Korea without the border formalities. This is documented, somewhere in my archives, by a photo of me, clearly inside North Korea, chatting with a North Korean Border guard. When asked to tell how I pulled that off, I explained that I had a platoon of US infantry right behind me. But that is a story for another day.

I should probably wind up this East Asian section with a couple of tales from Indonesia, and Southeast Asia

SOUTHEAST ASIA

The diverse cultures, religions, and people in third world countries made my life really interesting at times. I even found the Moslems in Pakistan and Indonesia, although sometimes challenging, to be reasonably easy to work with, and willing to tolerate western ways.

For those of you who have not had the experience, the roads in the third world, even those that pass for highways, are something to behold. Camel and donkey carts abound, along with monster trucks, bicycles, stray livestock, and wandering pedestrians. Everybody drives with their horn, and they pass on the left, right, blind corners, hills and so forth.

In Moslem countries particularly, everyone puts their faith in Allah, relies on God’s will, leans on the horn, and puts the pedal to the metal. It’s bad enough during the day, but at night it’s impossible.

One time in Pakistan, for instance, the local guys insisted that I visit some kind of an army depot that was about 60 miles out of town, on the main road to Islamabad, the capital. I believe, though, that the real reason was to introduce me to Pakistani driving and to scare the Hell out of me. It was a pretty good two lane road, and traffic was heavy, particularly monster trucks. But this didn’t faze our driver. I finally got used to his propensity for passing a large truck, when another was coming from the other direction, thus causing a three vehicles abreast situation on a two lane road. What I never did get used to, though, was him passing a truck, when a car coming in the opposite direction was also passing a truck heading toward us. This effectively put us four abreast on a two lane road, which was really kind of scary. Of course there were no seat belts. Why would anyone want seat belts when Allah was looking over us?

Which reminds me of the time when the president of Indonesia loaned me his personal helicopter, and pilot, for a sightseeing jaunt around Java. When I later recounted this experience to one of my VP bosses, his only comment was, “You knew, of course, that the helicopter was make in Indonesia” a country without particularly high aircraft manufacturing standards.

To give an example of how much trouble one can get into in a third World country, let me relate this tale. Seems that one of my guys in Indonesia became infatuated with a local lady, and ended up marrying her. Unbeknownst to any of us, and all in accordance with Islamic law. And, to top it off, he had her ensconced in the best hotel in town. The fact that he already had a wife in the US seemed irrelevant to him, I guess.

Pretty soon though, one of the American wives over there became suspicious, called my boy’s American wife, and suggested that she might want to come over to investigate. Needless to say, the lady hopped on an airplane forthwith, without announcing her travel plans, and upon arrival, stormed into the hotel room, and confronted her husband and his Indonesian wife.

This put the guy in a tight spot, to say the least, and it was instant decision time. But the dual husband rose to the occasion, chose the American wife, and sent the Indonesian wife packing. I sent the guy home of course, where his wife promptly filed for divorce. But the story isn’t over yet.

His Indonesian wife, who seemed to be legit by Islamic law, did not take kindly to being left in the lurch, refused to leave the hotel, and was raising hell with everybody up to and including the US State Department, while running up horrendous telephone, room and bar bills. Anyway it was a Hell of a mess, which I had to straighten out, and we ultimately bought her off with a generous cash settlement,

After all this, I was going to fire the guy, but my boss didn’t agree, telling me that when he found out that the guy was sixty years old, he kind of admired him. So the guy stayed on, but never again so much as crossed the County line, on company business.

And speaking of Indonesia, I once had a black guy working for me in Indonesia , who literally screwed himself to death. Seems he had a bad heart, and his doc told him that if he kept up his torrid love life, it would kill him. 

Anyway, he did, and it did.

The Southeast Asian airlines are generally the best in the world, particularly when it comes to customer service. But I have had my share of “fun” on them as well. Like the first time I flew Garuda, the Indonesian flag airline. Everyone had told me to avoid this airline, but I figured it couldn’t be that bad. So I boarded the airplane, and older Airbus A300 or 310, I believe, and immediately noticed that it had no Gasper air. For those of you not familiar with the term, these are the little individual air nozzles that can be adjusted to blow cool air. Lack of these made the inside of the airplane, on the ground, hotter than Hell, but I was surviving. Then came the big shock. The cabin crew straggled aboard, and I have never seen an uglier group of Melanesian women in my life. After we were airborne, the service matched their looks, and things kinda went downhill from there.

Speaking of Garuda, let me spin another interesting tale. I was in Jakarta, out at the airport, trying to board a Garuda flight to Hong Kong. I presented myself at the counter, along with my credentials, But after a search in the computer the counter agent announced that they had no record of me, the flight was full, and I would have to rebook. I couldn’t understand this, as I had checked with Garuda a day or two before, and had been informed that everything was cool. But then I remembered that East Asians have a propensity for getting first and last names mixed up, so I enquired if they had anything under John. Oh yes Mr. John, the agent said. I have your records right here, everything is in order and you are confirmed Business Class on this flight.

Things didn’t work out that well in Hong Kong, though, where one day in a similar situation they really couldn’t find our reservations to Tokyo. The Chinese lady, however, was very solicitous, explaining that since we were not in the computer, we really didn’t exist, and since we didn’t exist, we didn't really need a flight to Tokyo, so please relax. This explanation caused my traveling companion, who was new to the ways of the Orient, to almost bust a blood vessel. But after he calmed down a little, and stopped threatening to burn the place down, we found the Station Chief, and he got us a flight to Tokyo on Swissair. The Swissair flight was fine, except when I tried to chat up the cute flight attendant. Speaking German gave me a headache in about five minutes, and I had to revert to English. This lost me much face with my traveling companion, but the flight attendant thought that it was kind of humorous.

During this East Asian period, I should mention the around the world trip which I put together once when I had nothing better to do. I thought it would be neat to fly around the world, so I found reason to do some business in Japan, Hong Kong, Pakistan, and Dubai, all at about the same time. Then I threw in Bangkok and Frankfurt Germany for good measure. Anyway, I made that trip, which lasted about three weeks, during the winter, with only two carry ons, although they were bulging by the time I got back. I actually managed to do some business in Japan and Karachi, had a lot of fun in Bangkok with a Brit solicitor I met along the way, and looked up a lady friend in Frankfurt, where I used to live. All in all, an interesting and successful trip.

Anyway, I eventually parted company with the Japanese and the assorted other East Asians, and found myself on the staff of the Vice President of Materiel, as a kind of roving ambassador without portfolio.

EUROPE

This was really an interesting job. I checked out potential suppliers, mostly in Europe, did a study on “out of production spares”, which went nowhere, and had a few other interesting experiences, some of which I will recount.

One story particularly is worth repeating. You may remember that British Aerospace, the major British aircraft and Aerospace Company, had in the mid eighties, bought Rover Motor Car Company, the major British motor car producer. After the acquisition, and in the course of their housecleaning at Rover, British Aerospace rounded up all the malcontents and misfits, transferred them to a small aircraft factory British Aerospace was running near Southampton, and then sold the whole shebang to an unwary investor, under the name of Aerostructures Hamble. The CEO of Aerostructures Hamble turned out to be an old con man, the ex President of Rover Motor cars.

So this guy decided to fill his plant with Boeing work, and proceeded with his marketing plan, which incidentally was one of the best con jobs I have ever seen. First for a retainer of 50,000 pounds a year, he signed on the Chairman of British Airways, as the Chairman of the Hamble Board. Now British Airways was and is one of Boeing’s biggest customers, and Boeing senior management would do anything to please the Chairman. My sources in England at that time though, told me that this guy was getting senile, and was losing his grip, or otherwise he never would have gotten mixed up in this wild scheme. Our Hamble friend’s next step then was to wine and dine some very senior Boeing Commercial executives, including my boss. He pulled out all the stops on this, bringing them and their wives to Britain, not once, but several times, first class on British Airways, of course, for rounds of London theatres and shopping, also riding to the hounds, shooting over the dogs, and other veddy British activities. Our friend even got the British Royal Family to join in the festivities, (This was not hard to do, as I will explain later) and this really wowed the hicks, especially the ladies. Almost none of the Boeing senior management guys, incidentally, could ever resist an expense paid boondoggle like this. We even coined a phrase for it, Industrial Tourism.

After a few months of this softening up, the Hamble guys are ready for the hard sell, and CEO and his entourage showed up at our offices looking to fill his plant with work. So there was a big meeting, which I was invited to attend, and there were introductions all around. When it came my turn, this guy, whose first name was Andy, unnecessarily explained to me that he had been the chairman of Rover. That’s interesting, I said. I once owned a Rover motorcar. “What did you think of it?” asked Andy, walking right into this one. Well I’ll tell you, I drawled. You can tell the high quality of a Rover motorcar, by the fine British workmanship on the parts which fall off. Needless to say, there was a long silence.

As you have probably figured out by now,  I was skeptical about the whole thing, but seemed, at that point to be the only one.

Partly because of this, I guess, my boss asked me, on my next trip to Europe, to take a look at this Hamble operation, which I did. And in my report. I said, essentially, that although the lads in the shop were OK, the management was universally incompetent, and some of them seemed to be crooks, who would probably loot the company and disappear. The other guy who my Boss asked to check the place out was the head of our British Operations Office. He, thinking he knew which side his bread was buttered on, took a look, and came back with a glowing report that the factory was great, the management was outstanding, and we should fill the factory with work forthwith. At this point, my boss asked if we had both looked at the same factory, and proceeded to fill it with work regardless of my report. My friend, Sam, who should have managed this activity, would have nothing to do with it after hearing my story, so first mistake, the boss assigned the project to another director who was far from the sharpest knife in the drawer.

One could write a Harvard Business School case study on what went wrong from there on out. As I figured, the management at Aerostructures Hamble had no idea what they were doing, The incompetent Boeing director who had the assignment for Boeing then put in a team of incompetent Boeing guys, and gals, to manage the factory, and things got worse. In the meantime some of the Hamble senior management, as I predicted, ran a big embezzlement scam, but fortunately got caught. Anyhow nothing got produced for years, the Boeing guy who wrote the glowing report got fired, and ended up making sausage in Seattle. His successor also got fired, along with the unfortunate director who originally took the assignment, and most of the resident team. While this was going on, British Aerospace was sitting on the sidelines, more amused than anything else.

The thing finally got fixed, kind of, when a senior executive talked Sam into running the project. By this time I was working for British Aerospace as a consultant, and I finally convinced them that it was in the best interest of both British Aerospace and Boeing to get things fixed. So Sam, myself and British Aerospace, between us, forced some serious management changes at Hamble, and at last got some production going.

GOOFING OFF IN THE US AND EUROPE

Another assignment, which was kind of interesting, was fixing the 747-400 cabin management system. The 747-400, which was just going into service, had a state of the art electronic cabin management system, which was produced by Hughes Aircraft, in Mission Viejo CA. This system turned the lights on and off, monitored the level of the water in the lavatory tanks, played the movies and the in flight announcements, and did most everything else, except scratch your back. Problem was that it didn’t work very well, and the airlines were really getting pissed. After conventional remedies, including putting a team of Boeing experts resident in the plant, had been tried and failed, my boss, getting tired of taking the heat, dispatched me to California to take a look. Well, to make a long story short, a three day fact finding trip turned into a six month project, but we did get the problem solved.

About four hours into my first visit, it became apparent that the Hughes Vice President running the place was a big part of the problem. It took another two days to get him replaced by a very senior Hughes troubleshooter type, who at least had an open mind, and we were off to a good start.

To get some of the heat off, so that we would have some time to figure out what was going wrong, I came up with this novel approach. Over Hughes objections, I ordered them to assign a Hughes tech rep at every airport where 747-400 airplanes were landing in commercial service. The rep’s qualifications were not important and his task was simple. Wearing a white jump suit with Hughes Aircraft emblazoned on the back, and carrying a flashlight and screwdriver, he was taxed with meeting every 747-400 airplane landing at his assigned airport and interviewing the Capitan and Purser or chief flight attendant. He would introduce himself, and then ask if there had been problems with the cabin management system. If the answer was in the affirmative, he would poke around in the electronics with flashlight and screwdriver, and mutter humm…. a lot. It was all stagecraft, as most of the so called experts didn’t know a transistor from a resistor, but it had the desired effect. Complaints immediately dropped to about 20 percent of the previous level, giving the Hughes guys some breathing room, and time to figure out what was going wrong. We then started some systematic trouble shooting, and quickly found that the difficulty was multiple manufacturing process problems. We identified and fixed them one at a time, and eventually developed a stable repeatable process, which produced acceptable cabin management systems.

About the second thing I did after arriving at Hughes, (First thing was firing the Vice President. Remember?) was to send the Boeing resident team experts home and replace them with a smart, and incidentally, attractive, young lady buyer by the name of Jeanie. Her assignment was general helper, maintainer of the records, and most importantly, keeping the Hughes Vice President who was now running the plant under control. I’ll tell you, I couldn’t have done the job without her.

Thinking that I might as well live comfortably, I moved into The Tennis Club, near Fashion Island, in Newport Beach. Expensive, but I figured that I was worth it. Jeanie was living in some dump hotel down the street, but since I was signing her expense reports, I told her that she might as well move into my place. (Separate rooms of course.) Which puts me in mind of the evening we were dining by candlelight in this romantic restaurant overlooking the ocean, and Jeanie wondered aloud if any of the other diners believed we were talking about airplanes. Jeanie also would often mention that she felt safe with me, since I reminded her of her dad. Anyway, we got the job done, and even managed to have some fun in the process.

Anyway, we got the job done, and managed to have some fun in the process. In the course of this project Hughes began to think that I was some kind of a genius, because I could fix problems in their supply chain before they even knew they had a problem. They were particularly impressed when I could get previously unobtainable parts from Japan to appear like magic. None of this, of course, was any big deal, as I had been doing it for almost half my life.

Hughes, in fact, was so impressed that they offered me a job as their Director of Materiel. This sounded OK to me, as I was about to retire from Boeing anyway. The base salary of $100,000 per year sounded OK, and I got them to agree to throw in an expense paid apartment, and a car. (Remember, Hughes was a division of General Motors, and had lots of cars.) The deal foundered though, when they declined to pick up the car insurance, which is expensive as hell in the L.A. area. Oh well.

Thinking of retirement, on weekends I sometimes explored Southern California, including the Palm Springs area, looking for potential get away spots. But during the latter part of this assignment, I begin an erratic schedule of travel to Seattle, sometimes as often as twice a week. When questioned, I was kind of evasive and noncommittal, but finally my boss, the VP, braced me and I had to tell him the truth. Which was… that I had been diagnosed with Prostate Cancer and was trying to decide on treatment options. Boy, did he feel like a jerk. Anyway, I finally decided on an operation, and then ended up with six weeks of radiation, which all in all made me a pretty sick boy. But everything was successful. The cancer went away, never to return, and the side effects were minimal.

It took quite a while to recover from the radiation, so the VP gave me a pretty good goof off job. The 777 program was just starting, and he put me in charge of Materiel liaison with Engineering. This mostly consisted of nosing around the engineering department seeing what was going on, and hopefully making a helpful suggestion or two

I soon got bored with this, and in fact was staying home about half the time, but I was feeling better every day. Anyway, about this time, Airbus was beginning to sell airplanes, and even though they had managed to sell a few in North America, was not perceived by Boeing management as any real threat. After all, what did a bunch of Frogs, Limeys and Krauts know about building and selling airplanes? (Quite a bit, as it turned out.) Boeing was king of the hill and would stay that way till the end of time. These guys even believed that Airbus had a considerable number of planes parked on the hardstands at Toulouse, which they had built but were unable to sell. (Which turned out to be an unfounded rumor) But I, in kicking around in the world’s aircraft factories, had seen Airbus parts being produced, and was impressed with their design. My work with 777 engineering was also starting to raise my level of concern, as they were basically designing just like they had ever since the B-17, and were not really interested in any new ideas.

I got to thinking more and more about this and finally asked my boss, the VP, if I could go to Europe, muck about the Airbus plants a bit, and see what I could sniff out. He said, OK, and that he would get me some contacts, a task at which he failed miserably. So, giving up on him, and brushing off my old intelligence skills, I headed for Airbus country. To make a long story short, in the space of six months, I managed to penetrate the shops and engineering offices of all the German, English and Spanish partners, and even visited several major subcontractors.

The more I saw, the more alarmed I became, and returned home to write a six page summary report, which basically said that the Airbus people, on the whole, were bright, dedicated and hard working young people. Also, in my opinion their engineering was better, manufacturing was more advanced, production costs were lower, they were beginning to learn how to sell, and their customer support expertise was starting to approach Boeing levels. My conclusion was that they were eating our lunch, and that if we didn’t wake up, in ten to fifteen years they would be the dominant civil aircraft producer in the world. The boss liked my report, and sent it to every Division General Manager in the Boeing Commercial Airplane organization. The result, nada. No one was interested. It didn’t change anyone’s mind one iota. I even offered to bring a couple of Airbus structure designers over to Seattle, on my own budget, to work with our engineers on the 777 design, but the Chief Engineer said that he didn’t need any of that kind of help. Even the CIA was not interested in my findings, as they were hung up on the Japanese threat. Which, as I mentioned earlier, was non existent as far as commercial airplanes were concerned.

THE PROPERTY

About this time, our family made a major change in our living arrangements. The old house in the University District of Seattle was showing it’s age, the family was scattering to the four winds, and it was time to make a move. So, we sold the place for about ten times what we had paid for it, put the money in the stock market, and moved into a real nice mobile home park just south of Everett. (About 25 miles north of Seattle) Coincidentally, at about the same time, our division general manager decided to move our organization from Renton, about 15 miles south of Seattle, and a 40 mile drive from my new home, to an industrial park only three miles away. Talk about luck. I got some flack at work about living in a “trailer park” but generally things worked out well, the stock market flourished, and we lived in that place for the next ten years.

During this time we also fell heir to a dog, “Summit”, a real laid back but smart golden retriever. He lived with us, and with our son Whalen, for several years.

Now is probably as good a time as any to talk about Cottonwood Terrace Colony, colloquially known as “The Property” or “The River”.

In the late sixties we had been looking around for a piece of recreational property, but could find nothing that really suited us. Finally we heard of a development on the Stilliguamish River near the town of Arlington, where, it was said, one could rent a campsite. We checked this out, and yes it was true. Seems a reclusive Seattle multi millionaire, named John Hauberg, who Pat just happened to know from her charitable activities, had bought much of the land north of Arlington, between I-5 and the National Forest boundary to the east, and was developing it in various ways.

The development we were interested in was on the north side of the Stilliguamish, about three miles east of Arlington. It consisted of 28 lots strung along the river for about a mile, renting for $150 per year each. So we immediately signed up for one of the upper lots and started to develop the place.

First improvements were a 16 foot trailer and a shed, but a 24 footer almost immediately replaced the 16 footer. There was no electricity, but ample piped in water, so we made do with propane lights and heaters, and later, solar electricity. Eventually, we ended up with a park model RV 40 feet long, with two tip outs. A 400 square foot mansion.

We were just starting to enjoy the place when disaster struck. The County threatened to shut the place down for numerous code violations.

It seemed that Hauberg deliberately hired incompetents to manage his holdings. Maybe he was trying to lose money, or perhaps he wanted to give the bottom quarter of the class gainful employment. In any event, anything those folks touched turned to you know what, including our project.

Well, after long soul searching we offered to take the project over and run it ourselves, and Hauberg finally agreed. So we made peace with the County, and set up what amounted to a Homeowners Association. The Association leased the entire property from Hauberg on a long term basis, and then subleased lots to individual members. This actually worked well for 34 years, and we really made good use of the place.

We were always in residence there during summer weekends, and I often commuted from there to work as well. Our kids, especially the two boys, loved the place, and along with enjoying themselves on the lot, roamed the surrounding tree farm afoot, on go karts and later, on motorcycles.

We make several lifelong friends among the other members, and there was always something going on at our lot. I, incidentally was active in management of the place, and held several offices, including president a couple of times.

After we settled in California, things changed. Originally inhabited by mostly Boeing executives, the member mix changed over the years to mostly bread truck drivers and grocery clerks. They were basically OK people, but kind of slobs in maintaining the place, and not too bright in dealing with the property owner.

Hauberg died in about 2002 and his son in law, who took over the place, had a somewhat different management philosophy. This along with some serious miscalculations, and some really stupid owner relations blunders on the part of the Board, caused us to lose the lease and have to vacate in the summer of 2005. At least by that time the kids were grown, most of our friends from the place had passed on, and we had pretty much lost interest. Anyway, a good time was had by all for 37 years.

We can’t really leave The Property without a discussion of go-karts. Seems that when Mark was about eight I built him a go kart, and this started a kart frenzy, which lasted about five years. We built better and better machines for each of the boys, and they would pack a lunch, and then disappear to the surrounding tree farm to ride the fire trails till late afternoon. If we really needed them, we rang a bell which could be heard for miles. The boys finally graduated to off road motorcycles, totally wearing out two in the process, and ultimately learned to drive our truck on these fire roads. All in all it was good clean fun, and kept everyone occupied for years.

At this point though, I need to tell you about the ultimate go kart. I built this machine from scratch in our go Kart shop at the Ravenna property, and was it a beauty. It had a 125 cc motorcycle engine, a four speed syncromesh transmission, a differential, just like a car, automobile type controls, gas, clutch, brake, and all, and to top it off, it had sliding pillar independent front suspension, just like an old Morgan sport car, and rack and pinion steering. This Kart was amazing. It would go about fifty MPH, had awesome acceleration, and handled like a racecar. I’ll tell you, going into four wheel drifts on the corners of those dirt roads was a real blast. It’s a real wonder that someone didn’t kill himself.

One activity, which was an offshoot of the Property, was a mini vacation group. Len and Ann, Bob and Roberta, and Duane and Elizabeth, who were all residents at the Property and owned travel trailers, as well as occasional others, along with us, would take five or six mini vacations per year, trailering around the Pacific Northwest, camping, fishing, or just hanging out. We bought a 1963 Aloha 16 foot travel trailer, and used it for years in this activity. Along the way, we totally restored it, and finally used it as a bunkhouse at the Property when the group broke up.

But back to the job. As I said, the 777 was starting up, I knew my way around the industry and was not very busy, so they asked me to develop sources for all the major structural items. Body panels, tail, landing gear, wing parts not built by Boeing, etc. As I was going to do most of the sourcing they also appointed me as the contact for anyone wanting to get a piece of the action on the 777. The main purpose of this appointment, incidentally, was to keep bothersome salesmen out of everyone else’s hair. Anyway, I put together a small staff, and went to work. First, we figured out everything we needed to buy, and then we sorted these items into about 40 major work packages. We next found a potential supplier for each work package, and got senior Boeing management approval. We then qualified the supplier, and turned the package over to a buyer to negotiate the actual contract. The only exception to this was with any French company, where I retained authority to complete the entire deal.

This assignment turned out, among other things, to be a free ticket to travel anywhere in the world I wanted to go, to chase down a potential supplier. I made the most of this, and managed to hit such interesting places as Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, and even Gibraltar a couple of times, along with multiple trips to most of the major European countries. I spent a lot of time in France working with potential French companies, particularly Dassault, which was located in a real nice resort area on the French Spanish border. In my wanderings along this border, incidentally, I met some interesting Spanish smugglers, and some real picturesque Basque fishermen. And yes, the Dassault guys several times provided me with a plane and pilot. No wonder that I spent so much time around Dassault.

In the course of these travels, naturally, I also found time to visit my good friends in Germany and Austria.

Speaking of friends, we have been blessed with many, over the years, some of whom I have mentioned earlier. Due to my international activities, these friends are all over the world, and we still keep in touch with many.

         But let me tell you about how one friendship, in particular, came about.

One of the packages we were sourcing was landing gear. Now there are were at that time two excellent US companies which built gear, but I was not satisfied with either one’s engineering capability. I felt that this was important because, at least in my view, Boeing was also weak in this area. Needing more information, I grabbed my credit card and suitcase, and proceeded on a whirlwind visit to every landing gear manufacturer in the world who I had not visited previously. In a couple of weeks I got quite a bit of information and even had a little fun, particularly in Liverpool.

Seems I was visiting a plant in Liverpool called AP Precision. As I remember it, and my remembrance is a little hazy; after winding up my plant visit, and partaking of a good dinner and copious quantities of drink with the President of the company and his lovely wife, the old boy bowed out, citing an early AM meeting, and left John, wife, and car to the delights of Liverpool. The rest of the evening is a haze of Beatles bars, good rock, more drinks, and the lady barreling pell mell the wrong way down one way streets in her big Austin Princess. Some of the sacrifices one has to make on the job, eh what..

Anyway, when I got home and analyzed the data, it seemed that the two US companies were as good as anyone at manufacturing, but that a French company, Messier-Hispano-Bugatti did have outstanding engineering capability. Incidentally, that was the same company, which produced the legendary Bugatti and Hispano Suiza automobiles in the twenties and thirties, and their people were amazed when I remembered those cars. In fact, I still have a large picture of a 1936 Hispano Suiza roadster, which was given me by the president of the company. The car, incidentally, was alleged to cost upwards of fifty thousand British pounds in 1936, when the exchange rate was about four dollars to the pound. But I am digressing again.

Since the French company’s engineering was so good, or at least good enough to fool me, I proposed to each US company that they join forces with the French. One company would have none of it, but Don, the sales manager of the other company, and a good engineer in his own right, thought the idea might have merit. This led to Don and I traveling to France several times, to explore this proposition further. In the end, Messier and Don’s company teamed, got the contract for ALL the 777 gear, and made Don a big hero.

But to get back to the point of this tale. Our family and Don’s family eventually became fast friends, and after I retired we accepted an invitation to visit their home in Palm Desert. We immediately fell in love with the place, and bought a similar home in the same Country Club. We are still fast friends, and see each other at least once a week. By the way, I think that the home in Palm Desert was the only major decision upon which Pat and I totally agreed in over 40 years.

But back to Boeing. Time was marching on, and speaking of forty years, it was time for my Forty Year Party. But let me explain.

At Boeing one gets service pins every five years, which are awarded at a modest award ceremony. Except for the forty year award. There they pull out all the stops. You and your family are invited to a cocktail party hosted by the president of the company. The president, amid a lot of hoopla, then presents the award. There are only two or three persons receiving awards at each party, but when you add in their families, their bosses and bosses bosses, as well as assorted horse holders, it becomes quite a crowd.

Since the president has usually never heard of the awardee, the personnel department digs up some dope on him or her, such as what shops he or she has worked in and any particular career highlights. Well, in my case, after the personnel guy had talked to me for a few minutes he knew that he was in over his head, so he sent for a public relations reporter. The reporter interviewed me about my career, and then drafted an article spelling out my employment history, which we subsequently edited and corrected.

Anyway, the big night arrived, and I showed up, along with Pat and my bosses. When my turn came, and the president read off my history, he remarked that this was the most varied, interesting, and improbable Boeing career that he had seen in his entire time with the company. But all was not over yet. The president then called Pat (who he knew slightly) up to the dais, and presented her with a special award. This award, basically, was for putting up with me for forty years. Anyway, we still have both awards, and the article spelling out my history, all bound into a nice book, at our home in Palm Desert.

By this time work on the 777 was almost done, and the VP was tiring of having me on his staff. Fortunately for me, as it turned out, the Senior Manager who was responsible for all European procurement got shipped out over some minor problem, leaving the group with no leader. But here I was, with nothing to do, and knowing a little about Europe, so I got the job.

I won’t bore you with a detailed description of the next three years, but it was basically spending most of my time in Europe, seeing my old friends and making new ones, exploring exotic cities like Rome, London, Lisbon, Seville, and Munich, and incidentally getting a little work done. I don’t know how many times I flew across the North Atlantic, but it must have been at least fifty.

We did take some time out in August 1993, for a real stellar event, my mother’s one hundredth birthday. We held an all day bash at a Park Department field house in Everett, and relatives and well wishers came from far and wide. My mom really had a ball, she partied for two days and nights. To top it off, I gave each of the guests a copy of a book I had written, “Across Two Centuries”, chronicling her first one hundred years.

I had always wanted to restore an old car, and now I finally got the chance. Son Whalen had a total beater 1972 Volkswagen. However, if was a fairly rare 1972 Super Beetle, and it had a completely rebuilt engine and front suspension. He owed me some money, but I got the car instead. Son Mark, an accomplished custom car builder, also owed me some money. So I let him work it off restoring and customizing the VW. When he got through with the frame up restoration, I had an immaculate restored and customized VW, painted Porsche Guard’s Red, no less. Incidentally, we will hear more about this Volkswagen later.

WINDING DOWN TO RETIREMENT

But back to the job. I was getting tired of traveling, and I did have substantial computing experience, so I got assigned as the Materiel lead on a project to completely revamp the entire Boeing Commercial manufacturing and engineering computing systems. Also, by this time my projections about Airbus were starting to come true, the Boeing sales staff and president were down to juggling statistics to obscure the fact that we were rapidly losing market share, and I was seriously thinking about retiring, come the right moment.

This computing project was called by the unlikely name of DECAC/MRM, and the plan was to develop a totally new system and cut over to it with one big bang. Now the difficulty of drastically changing a computing system is approximately the square of its size. Or to put it more simply for you non engineering types, if a system is twice as big, it is four times as hard to change, three times as big, it is 9 times as hard to change, but you get the idea. This system was approximately 10 times larger than anything ever tried before, anywhere, so it was obvious that the whole scheme was totally impossible. The leading business software distributor at the time, SAP, wouldn’t touch it, and several large consulting companies looked at it and ran the other way. Finally, Booze Allen, seeing a way to make an easy hundred million or so, took it on, teaming with Oracle, and a Dutch outfit called Baan, and Boeing started to spend big money. Hundreds of computing types were assigned and hundreds of millions were being spent, but progress was slow and success elusive.

At this point, I went to the Senior Vice President running this project, and told him my concerns. I even suggested that if he didn’t believe me, he should set up a task force of knowledgeable computing guys with no experience on the system, and run a complete review. He told me that this would be impossible, and that he had to proceed, since he had already promised the Boeing Company Board of Directors that the system could be implemented. Incidentally, and unbeknownst to any of the DCAC/MRM senior management, a guy on the Board named Peterson, who was a big shot at Ford, and no dummy in his own right, had planted his niece in the middle of the organization, as a spy, and was getting close to the straight scoop on a regular basis. Anyway, I ended up telling this Senior VP that my professional ethics would not let me continue on a project which I believed had little chance for success, and that he had better find someone else to integrate the Materiel portion.

So, what happened with DCAC/MRM? After spending about a billion dollars (really), they finally came up with a watered down system, which was implemented over a period of eight years, as “big bang” implementation had proven impractical. They then declared victory and moved on. The Senior Vice President who originally ran the operation, of course got fired, and the Dutch company went broke.

2008 update: In August 2008, Aviation Week announced that Boeing was replacing many legacy manufacturing and supply systems, including specifically DCAC/MRM, with a Siemens PLM system named Teamcenter, and would use Teamcenter on all future new airplane programs.

Now I was really out of a job, but was 62, ready to retire and not too worried. Anyway I put out a call to Sam, (who you will hear more about later) who was now running Outside Production. He took me on and I did some interesting stuff for him, while we jointly figured out my retirement strategy.

My big project was with the Brits. Sam felt, mostly by intuition, that we should have a good British subcontractor, and asked me to check it out. So I nosed around in Britain a bit and found out that British Aerospace, (Now known as BAE Systems but still commonly called BAe) not only wanted to be a Boeing subcontractor, but wanted to generally expand their presence in the US, as well. This looked promising for both sides, and the next step was to get an idea of BAe’s capabilities. I did this by spending two weeks visiting every BAe plant in Great Britain. And since their plants were scattered all over the British Isles, I decided to make this project kind of a working vacation. I thought that the best way to see the country in style might be by train, so I rode Britrail, first class, rather than flying. This turned out to be a neat trip and I had a lot of fun, along with finding out what I needed to know about BAe.

Often retiring Boeing executives consult for a year or so after leaving Boeing. This eases their transition to retirement, and also brings in a bit of money. I had considered doing this myself, and now saw my opportunity. I could be just the guy to help BAe get work with Boeing and also expand their presence in the US. Since I couldn’t solicit BAe directly while working for Boeing, I helped an old friend and pretty good consultant, Curtis Hamilton, to get the BAe consulting account, and further arranged to partner with him after I retired.

Meanwhile I was biding my time till retirement, and in spring of 1995 my chance came. Boeing was offering Senior Managers like myself, on a one time basis, some pretty good incentives for early retirement. And with Sam’s help I finally negotiated a pretty good package. Retirement pay based on 50 plus years of service, plus an approximately one hundred twenty five thousand dollar severance package. Of course, I also had my 401k, which by this time was approaching seven figures. Not bad, considering that I had only 44 years service on the books, and had actually worked only about forty.

Anyway, I bought a brand new Thunderbird, and on April 30, 1995, I walked out of Boeing for the last time, a free man, and prepared to start a new phase of my life. The Thunderbird, incidentally, was a V8, and would go like squat. Unfortunately, due to the lack of racing tires, it was governed at 105 MPH, which it would easily do in third gear.

MY CONSULTING BUSINESS

That first summer, I busied myself with rebuilding an old 22 foot boat which Mark and I had bought, doing some major refurbishment on our Stilliguamish River property, and developing my consulting company. I also took some time out for fishing with my old half Indian buddy, Ray Helling.

Ray was a great guy. Typical Indian. No money, a real affinity for the sauce, and not much interested in work. But, he was the best fishing partner I ever had. We made a couple of trips to British Columbia that summer in the old Explorer, with boat on top and camping gear in the back. I was looking forward to years of such activity, but unfortunately he died on me that winter.

Anyway, by September I was ready to go with the consulting, with BAe as my first client, and Curtis Hamilton as a kind of partner. And so, my consulting company, John Kuller Consulting, was born. Very quickly I picked up a couple of more international clients in addition to BAe, and formed loose alliances with two other consultants, Kevin Lynch, and Larry Harris.

And at this point, I suppose, I might as well share with you, some of the zanier aspects of my consultancy.

I started out with a couple of disadvantages, I couldn’t speak the language very well, and I wasn’t very good at driving on the wrong side of the road. And probably the worst disadvantage of all was that I was an American . 

But they were kinda in a bind, they needed someone who understood their American customers, and I was available.  So that’s how I came to be a lone American in this jungle of Britishness.

My first significant client was this big British conglomerate. I became their “tame” American, and was supposed to show them how to break into the American market. 

Anyway, I’d hang around the office for a couple of weeks, drawing my princely consulting fees, and perhaps picking up some Brit culture in the local pubs.   

And eventually I would come up with some marketing plan or other that I was sure would knock their socks off. I’d run it up the management line, usually not generating much enthusiasm, but with luck, might eventually be invited to present my scheme to the Supervisory Board.   

This was really a bunch of fogies, attired in dark suits and old school ties. Smoking stogies or smelly pipes, with maybe a Scotch or Sherry at hand.  An impressive bunch. Anyhow, I’d go into my Dog and Pony spiel, throwing in lots of Americanisms to convince them that I was the real thing. And assuring them that whatever I was pitching that day would loosen the American purse strings, and get tons of cash flowing our way.

This performance would usually elicit no questions, and when I finished, the room would lapse into stony silence.  Eventually the Managing Director (which is what they called the biggest big shot), would noisily clear his throat and allow that if they were actually paying me to concoct such drivel, I should probably be banished to the Colonies, and the Marketing Director, who had hired me, be sent packing as well.   

So I would slink off to the nearest local and commensurate with the Publican about the idiosyncrasies of Brit senior management while downing a pint or two.    

Not much would usually happen in the next few days, except for the office gossips wondering why I was still around. But then eventually, the Marketing Director would call for me and explain that the Supervisory Board had come up with this brilliant marketing scheme, and what did I think of it. Well, you guessed it, this was the same campaign plan that had got me thrown out the week before.   

After some head scratching I would allow that their plan might work, and after seemingly endless discussions, they would usually decide to give it a try. Sometimes we would be successful, and sometimes not, but overall our track record was good enough to get this company a fair foothold in the American market.

When I was working for British Aerospace, we were trying to ingratiate ourselves with a pretty senior Boeing executive. Seems this guy had close to the final say on a large work package Boeing was offloading and which we wanted badly. But we weren’t doing well at all with him till I had this great idea. I knew the guy’s wife slightly, but well enough to know that she was a true French Canadian, and a real snob in the bargain. I also knew that she pretty much wore the pants in that family. I thought that meeting some of the Royal family might impress her, and in a late night brainstorming session, we came up with the perfect plan. We would get the Queen to invite snob and hubby to share her box at Ascot. This really wasn’t as hard as it seems, as the Royals are really interested in helping British industry, and this was a really big deal.

So we flew hubby and wife to England on some pretext, and on the big day, there they sat with the Queen. From all appearances it was a huge success, and our boy was mellowing nicely. But then I got a phone call from my contact in the States, and became the bearer of really bad news. Our boy had been summarily fired. And I mean fired. Told to clear out his desk and get packing. So, all that work for nothing. We eventually, got the package anyway, so could truthfully report to the Queen that our joint efforts had been successful.

The only good that came out of this, at least with respect to me, was that upon the news that this guy was fired, Boeing stock went up three points.

I did have other clients, and when visiting one of them  in Cornwall, I spent most of the day, wandering around Southern England in a daze, by train, plane, and automobile, as they say, looking for his plant. When I finally found the place, I explained that if he wanted to sell anything to Americans, he had better have a driver pick the guys up at Heathrow, and deliver them to the plant. My man’s answer, which was perfectly logical to him was, “Well, you found us, didn’t you?”

A lot of my consulting in Britain was doing what I called “cultural translation” That is, I would sit in meetings between the Brits and Americans, and explain to each side what the other side really said. I remember one meeting in particular which was a real challenge. It was held in Dallas between my Brit guys and some genuine Texas Good ol’ Boy rednecks. My work was really cut out for me on that one, as not only was nobody on the same page, they were not even in the same book. Fortunately for me, the deal fell through.

But I had a bit of trouble myself in the language arena, as the following tale will show.

When running my consulting business, I spent much of one winter in Manchester, England. If you think that Seattle is dreary in the winter, Manchester is ten times worse. Wind, rain, and snow, all of the time

Although I knew the British words fairly well, my American accent would get me in trouble from time to time.  Like when I sat down in my local (pub) and ordered "a half of Bod".  I intended this to be a half pint of Bodington beer on tap, but guess what I got, a can of Budweiser.  When I asked the Publican what happened, he said he thought that I had said "I'll have a Bud". Who was it that said America and England are two countries separated by a common language? I finally got so that I would just tell people that I talked funny, because I was an American.

One final note. Anywhere else in the world, if one is conservatively dressed, and has minimal language skills, one can pass oneself off as a European or whatever. But not in Britain. As soon as you open your mouth, they know that you are a “Yank”. This was brought to my attention one day, when I walked into the Surgery (dispensary) at BAe, showed them my employee identification and (unnecessarily, I found out) explained that I was an American. The doctor’s immediate reply was, “I never would have guessed”.

My company did well, and before I knew it, I was spending considerable time in Europe, working and visiting with old friends. Not only was I getting paid handsomely, but was flying first class, courtesy of my clients, and to top it all off, I was charging off all my side trips to business development. What a deal!!

Since I was working for BAe, who was a twenty percent owner of Airbus, and sometimes worked on Airbus stuff, I could honestly say that I worked for Airbus. This, I believe, makes me one of the very few people in the world who have actually worked both for Boeing and for Airbus.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Working with Brits is interesting, and culturally challenging, to say the least.

COUNTRY CLUB LIVIN;, TRAVELIN’ AND FISHIN’

In the spring of 1996, as I mentioned earlier, we accepted an invitation from Don and Bobbye to use their home in Palm Desert for a couple of weeks. And since the Consulting Business was doing so well, we bought a place in the same Country Club for essentially cash. The original intent was to use this place as a vacation hideaway, but during the next three years we found ourselves staying there more and more, until we were living there about nine months out of the year. And I was even learning to play golf, although not well. For a closer look at our place, if you are interested, check the "Virtual Tour of Palm Desert" in an Appendix to this book

This Palm Desert life was really at odds with the consulting business, as I needed to spend considerable time with Boeing in Seattle, as well as with my clients overseas to take care of their interests. Besides, I was 65, and getting tired of traveling so much. Also, five years is about the limit for that kind of consulting, because after that time you are out of touch with latest industry developments, and your contacts start disappearing. I think what really did it though, was when I changed planes in Chicago on a trip back from Britain. Although I was traveling first class, I was too physically exhausted to make my way to the first class lounge at O’Hare, and spent the time between planes in the general waiting room. So, I gave my clients to my partners, liquidated the business, and retired to Palm Desert.

About this time, we also gave up the old mobile home in Everett, and bought a neat condo in Edmonds Washington, the first town north of Seattle. It is in a high rise, just a block from the waterfront, and right down town, within walking distance to everything. It even has a mini view of the ocean. Edmonds is a neat little town, with a real small town flavor, and lots of interesting stuff to do. We have been there now for several years, and like it more and more as time goes by.

Since I had some spare time now, I decided to take up fishing in earnest, but the problem was that all my old fishing partners were either dead (remember Ray), too decrepit to fish, or broke. But then along came my old friend Sam, who you met previously. Sam had retired kind of precipitously, and I asked him, mostly on a whim, if he would like to join me on a helicopter fishing trip. He said OK, we really hit it off together, and have been fishing weird spots in the word ever since. You can read more about our fishing adventures in the book Fishin’ ‘Round the world, in an Appendix to this book

Pat and I, about this time, also made a couple of major trips. One was a month long tour of China, and the other was an almost month long trip on a beat up old freighter, through the most remote regions of French Polynesia. Agin, if interested, you can read more about these trips, and other interesting travels during our retirement, in my books "Crusin' 'Round the World", Travelin' 'Round the World", and “Crossin’ Borders ‘Round the World”, in the appendices to this book. Eatin rpund  the world

Meanwhile, life was proceeding in Palm Desert. We attended jazz concerts with close friends, and started an informal little bridge club. Pat became very active in the Lady Putters Club at the Resort as well as filling in with the Country Club Bridge Club. I served on the board of the Homeowners Association, and played golf a couple of days a week with close friends.

We also managed to do a little four wheeling in the Mojave Desert, looking for ghost towns, old mines and so forth. Sometimes alone, and other times accompanied by our friends the Butlers. Butlers were from upstate NY, and the idea of driving for hours across the desert without seeing a house, a car, a person, or even a coyote, really blew their minds. One really exciting time was when we strayed onto a Navy gunnery range, and a Navy F-18 fighter took a practice strafing run at us. He was so low that he had to jink up to get over the truck. We also tried four wheeling once with our next door neighbor, but had to abort the trip when she complained of the rough tracks jiggling her boobs.

And speaking of cars, remember that Volkswagen we talked about a while back. Since we had two other cars, the VW mostly sat around rusting in the Western Washington rain, till my grandson Ryan and I drove it to our Palm Desert home. There it served well in stylishly transporting me around the Country Club, in performance of my various duties. Reluctantly, I finally sold it at a custom car auction in 2002, and replaced it with a Mustang Bullit convertible, which I will mention later. If anyone had any doubts about the progress of automotive engineering in the thirty years between 1972 and 2002, all he had to do was to drive both cars around the block, and he or she would become a believer.

Probably, at this point, a little discussion of our Palm Desert situation is in order. Our home, along with 960 others in the development, is one side of a duplex, which we actually own, along with the ground underneath it. It is not a condominium. The homeowners association, (Palm Desert Resorter Association) in which we have a one nine hundred sixtieth share, owns all the land around the house, the streets, and greenbelts, along with twenty pools, and maintains the exterior of the houses. The association also is responsible for all of the landscaping, and internal and external security, along with a number of other things. Our development coexists, on 320 acres in the heart of Palm Desert, with Palm Desert Resort Country Club, a private, for profit organization which operates a regulation eighteen hole golf course, a large clubhouse, with bar and restaurant, and several tennis courts. All homeowners are automatically members of the Country Club, and pay Country Club dues, along with the Homeowners Association assessment. If you have a hard time figuring this arrangement out, don’t feel bad, there are people who have lived there for twenty years, who don’t understand it.

If interested in seeing more of Palm Desert, and the resort where we lived, you can expoore a Virtual

Tour of Palm Desert, in an Appendix to tis book.

The place had actually started life as a hotel, in a mode similar to the Ceramar Beach Resort in Puerto Rico, but had fallen upon hard times, even before it was opened, and had been taken over by the Homeowners Association and the Country Club. It still, though, retains its resort flavor, as approximately 40 percent of the homes are rented out to visitors who come to the desert for a week, a month, or a season, to golf, swim or just lay in the sun. It is definitely not an old folks home. There are lots of young people and kids running around, and there is a fair amount of action in the restaurant and bar, particularly on weekends. Around town, the place is collectively referred to as The Resorter, or just The Resort.

The Homeowners Association itself is a big operation, working somewhat like the government of a small city. And it performs many of the same functions. We have our own police force, (Rental Cops), housing code enforcement, building permit process, and building inspectors. We also have about twenty five gardeners, nine full time guards, six maintenance people, a four person office staff and a number of specialized subcontractors. We have our own rules and regulations, supported by a quasi judicial system, which can levy fines for infractions, all backed up by a set of specific California laws, about the size of a phone book.

This whole thing amounts to about a four million dollar per year operation, managed by a full time General Manager reporting to a five person Board of Directors, chaired by a President. In addition to the association’s basic job of maintaining home exteriors and common areas, and providing security, the association represents the homeowners in dealings with the City of Palm Desert, and the Country Club. It also maintains a social program and strives to maintain property values and improve the quality of life for all the homeowners.

I went through all this boring detail as a preamble to what I am going to talk about next, and its relevance will soon become apparent. I was getting bored with golf and fishing, and thought that a little community service might be just what I needed. So I ran for the Homeowners Association Board, and got elected. I worked as Finance Chairman for a couple of years, then migrated up to President, a position I held till I stepped down to the position of Vice President, Treasurer, CFO, and Chairman of the Finance Legal and Contracts Committee. And at age 75 I abandoned this activity completely, except for an occasional special project.

As you can see from the previous description, the Homeowners Association is a big operation and the Board jobs are a handful. Almost full time. And while by law, there can be no pay, the expense account aint bad. Another thing to say for it. It certainly keeps one young.

I then did a stint working as a Docent at the Palm Springs Air Museum, specializing in leading youth tours, and giving lectures on WWII history to the other docents..

What with all the activity going on in Palm Desert, we still managed to take time out for a few trips. But let me give you an example of my travels one summer. In a six week period, we drove from Palm Desert to Edmonds, then I drove to Yellowknife NWT in the Canadian arctic, then back to Edmonds, from where I flew to Orlando, drove to Gainesville FL, then drove to Pittsburgh. From Pittsburgh I flew to Palm Springs, then, after a few days, to Seattle. Almost as bad as when I was working.

The drive from Gainesville to Pittsburgh was a really interesting experience. I was driving the support van for a 10 day bike hike on back roads through the deep South, from Gainesville FL to Pittsburgh PA. On this trip, I saw places which I never dreamed existed in the US, where the landscape looked like somewhere in the third world, and the people spoke a totally incomprehensible dialect.

Hugh and I would also go camping every spring, and a bunch of us always went to baseball spring training, either in Peoria, Arizona or Tucson. Some other times we would gather a few friends, and take off on a mini adventure. Some of the most interesting of these trips are written up in my book "Travelin' 'Round the World, also on this web site.

Oh, I almost forgot. I was going to tell you more about the Ford Mustang convertible. This was a GT V8 with Bullit modifications, which pumped out three hundred horsepower, and would do an honest 140 MPH. To tell the truth though, it scares me to death to drive it over 125. Must be getting old.

And, we should maybe talk a bit more about my work at the Palm Springs Air Museum, leading kid tours. This involved guiding groups of little kids through our local air museum one or two days a week. They are all good kids, but sometimes it got interesting. For example:

A little kid was intently walking around my Mustang the other day. When I asked him what he was doing he said that he was counting the horses, (Mustang logos). When I asked him why, he said that he wanted to see how many horsepower it was.

Then there were the two pre teen girls, who were convinced that my convertible really belonged to my grandson.

Not to mention the six year olds touring through the museum, who were convinced that I was much older than the airplanes.

Number one question from little kids looking at the airplanes. "When do we eat?" Number two question "How do the pilots go to the bathroom?"

One day I lost a four year old in the B-17. He was sitting in the pilot's seat "flying" the airplane, but was so little I couldn't see him.

Some eight year old girls gave me a pretty good show the other day. They were pretending they were show girls accompanying Bob Hope on a WW II visit to the troops.

I had a group of six year olds engaged in finger painting an airplane. I got distracted for a minute, and before I knew it, they had fists full of paint, and were painting each other and everything else in sight. After I restored order, I ran them into the rest rooms to clean up. This, of course, resulted in liberal amounts of paint being transferred from the kids to the restroom walls, fixtures, etc. Which, understandably, didn't please the management.

Anyway, within a month the story had grown to: "Fifty kids with no supervision, running wild, throwing buckets of paint around the place, with the cops having been called to restore order." My comment, when told this tale, was "Wow. I'm sorry I missed that"

TALE OF THE RUSTY CONDO

And to prove that I am still "with it", I just raised the money for, and supervised a complete 2.7 million dollar exterior remodeling of our Edmonds condo. At 79, no less. Incidentally, this took over a year, almost fulltime.

And now seems to be as good time as any to share some of the trials and triblations, in getting that job done

Ours is a 32 unit condo, with large airy units, and decks with sweeping views. We have spent considerable time and money remodeling our unit, with hardwood and tile floors, and an up to date kitchen and bathrooms.

Ours is the beige building in the center

The homeowner boards who run the place, though, left something to be desired A 90+ guy, who had been a contractor, and didn’t want to spend a cent on anything, dominated the board of directors for years. Assisted by a treasurer, who kept the purse strings tight. Fortunately we lived in CA during the winter months but were told that during the rainy season the place leaked like a sieve, with about as much water inside as outside.

Having had a bit of experience with homeowner’s associations, I volunteered to help out, but no one was interested. After all, because we lived in CA part of the year, they thought that I was a Californian,. And these people were definately not interested in anything, or anybody from California.

Waterfront Park, a block from our place. With ferryboat just leaving the dock.

Well, the old boy finally retired, due to old age, I guess, and a new guy, a doctor, took over the reins. He was inexperienced, and really didn’t get much help. Besides, his efforts to set things straight were usually checkmated by other board members, so things really didn’t get much better.

Our building before start of renovation

Things came to a head when Doc decided to clean up some rusty spots on the south side of the building.  They pulled off some stucco near the rust spots, and guess what, the steel frame, the structural heart of the building, was gone. And I mean gone. See pic below.

Representative of what the building structure looked like

No problem, said the board. We will just clean it up and stucco over. When I suggested it might be a good idea to have a structural engineer take a look, nobody was really interested.

So, they pulled out the worst of the old steel, and replaced it with members about half as strong. We finally got an engineer in, who agreed that we were really botching things up, and we shut down the job.

Nothing happened for a few days, till one morning there was a pounding on my front door about 8:00 AM. It was the Vice President. The building is falling down, everybody must evacuate, he exclaimed, and then asked me what to do next.

I suggested that we go take a look, and yes, the shear straps were buckling, and it looked like one corner might have dropped a bit. I allowed that it did look to me like the building might be trying to move, and this really worried the VP. Anyway, we found a structural engineer, he took a look, and confirmed my diagnosis. Then we met in his office for a council of war. Cooler heads finally prevailed, and we decided we could immediately shore up the building, thus eliminating the need to evacuate, while we decided next steps.

Anyhow it was kind of funny, how I instantly went from outcast to expert, and everybody looked to me to save the day. They even gave me a fancy title. Chairman of the Remediation Committee, or something like that.

So I got them to assess the homeowners $300,000 for working capital. I then hired some experts, including a good Project Manager, and we started trying to make sense out of the situation. We were just starting to figure it out, when the homeowners elected a new board. They threw out the doc completely, one lady resigned in frustration; they brought back the 90+ year old, plus a new resident who was said to be a construction expert, as president.

We then expanded the board to seven, thus getting the Doc back on, as well as the sensible lady who had quit.

One of the experts I hired was a construction lawyer, who worked cheap, and was a reasonable guy. Then the lawyer, the doc and I pretty much convinced the homeowners that the governing documents required that they fix the building.

After they decided to fix the place, my Project Manager and I (mostly the Project Manager) ginned up an estimate of 2.7 million to totally remove and replace the building exterior, (stucco, sheeting, insulation, water barrier, windows, doors, deck railings and associated bits and pieces. This included repairing the steel, and then redoing the total building with better insulation, new internet/TV wiring, new windows and doors, glass deck railings and attractive siding, rather than stucco.

All wrapped up and under construction

This came to an assessment of a bit less than $90,000 per unit, which along with the earlier assessment, was bumping up against $100,000.

Incidentally, to back up our position, we dug up an obscure WA law, which said that since it was a condo, we must fix the entire exterior, rather than just making spot repairs.

The lawyer and I then drew up a collection policy that said that if the homeowners didn’t pay, terrible things would happen, like selling their unit on the courthouse steps, for a start. Well guess what, everyone paid.

So flush with cash, we found a prime contractor and negotiated a contract at a little less than our budget. He did well for us, and his quality is very good

Oh, I almost forgot. The treasurer resigned in mid project when she was unable to quote the Project monetary balance at a board meeting. Then the accountant, faced with an audit, quit as well. And to top things off, the new treasurer, while on a Caribbean cruise, picked up a virulent tropical bug, and was dead in a week.

Here I am, 40 feet up in the air, checking out the job.

Anyway, our condo is now transformed. Livability has immproved, with improved window interiors,  better exterior decks, and decent insulation.

The new look

The value of the units has iincreased as well. We believe by about $200,000. The new exterior is now comparable with other Edmonds high end condos. And finally, the homeowners seem to be a more cohesive group. 

A win win sistuation all around, and certainly not a bad return on a One Hundred Thousand dollar investment.

The real downside for us is that we missed going to our CA home last winter.

In April 2012, all my heart and lung problems caught me at once, and after a ride in the red wagon, I ended up in a hospital room, with a Priest administering the last rites, and some doctors standing around waiting for me to die.

Well, I decided I was not ready for that, and over the next few days. got better, got out of the hospital, and went home.

Aside from erasing most of a month from my memory, I was not quite as strong as before, but no other real effect. In fact, within a month, while in Hospice, I was working full time.

The doctors say that it was a genuine miracle, and have no other explanation. The fact that I became a Catholic shortly before, might have had something to do with it.  Anyway, who knows?

Anyway, here I am at 80, with four incurable diseases, so am bound to be checking out sometime soon. But have faith, folks, and just remember:

WHEN THE ROLL IS CALLED UP YONDER, I’LL BE THERE

John Kuller, Edmonds WA August 2012

During the phase of my career I have just been talking about, we were generally working in remote places, without access to commercial air, Interstates, and the like, so Bush Flying was the preferred, and often the only means of transportation.

A worn out ex Alaska Airlines DC-3, which we used to haul freight.

Since it’s a tail dragger, it can land on the beach.

You have all probably read about intrepid Bush pilots battling impenetrable weather, and other impossible odds to complete whatever transportation assignment they had been given. My experiences in real life were sometimes not much different. But maybe a tad safer, as I still have six or eight of the nine lives that I started out with.

So buckle up your lap belts, and hang on, for some thrilling rides.  

We already talked about the water plant, and I did some bush flying on that job, but one experience impressed even me.  I had to make a business trip, to visit a resort owner in the British Virgin Islands, about 100 miles away. The British Virgin Islands (BVI) as the name implies, was and is a British Crown Colony, one of the last vestiges of the old empire. In those days, it was a real backwater, with less than one hundred whites in the whole place. The best way to get there, it seemed, was on RockAir, a rinky-dink airline which was owned and operated by the Rockefellers, and flew a couple of ancient Britten-Norman Islanders. Now the Islander is an excellent bush plane, but these were a little long in the tooth, as were the pilots, for that matter.

My companion, who incidentally had never been anywhere, and I started the adventure early in the morning by hopping a commuter flight from St. Thomas to San Juan International, in Puerto Rico. There we made contact with the RockAir pilot who drove us to the airplane. At this point our other two passengers joined us, a young American couple on what appeared to be their honeymoon, who were headed for some remote spot in the BVI.

So we threw our baggage in back, climbed in and belted up, and guess what, the machine wouldn’t start. At this development, the pilot, who was a real West Indies character, pulled a rum bottle from under the seat, had a large swig, and passed it around, while he assessed the situation. Then after a short council, we decided that the batteries were flat and we were in need of a starter cart. We finally located such a cart, and after a few more belts of rum, got it hooked up. But you guessed it, the machine still wouldn’t start. At this point, I enquired as to the availability of tools, and finding some in the baggage compartment, convinced the pilot that he and I could probably fix the plane. So, out came the tools, and off came the cowlings. The cause of the trouble soon became apparent. It was corroded battery terminals. So we cleaned them up, put the cowlings back on and got back into our seats. By this time, the rum bottle was empty, but our mechanical endeavors had been successful, and the plane fired up immediately. After an otherwise uneventful flight, we reached Virgin Gorda, the island that was our destination. Through his alcoholic haze, the pilot could barely make out the runway, and he couldn’t believe his eyes. It was a 3000 foot dirt strip wedged between a cliff and the ocean, with a 30 degree dogleg smack in the middle. This really shouldn’t have been a big deal, because the Islander can normally land in 1500 feet or less, but the pilot had never before seen the strip, and was not in the best of condition. Anyway, since we couldn’t stay airborne forever, we decided to chance it. And aside from a good bounce when we landed, everything turned out OK.

Upon alighting from the plane, we bade our newfound American friends good bye, borrowed a Moke, (A Moke is a kind of Jeep, but made in Australia, of all places.) and got our business out of the way. We then repaired to the local watering hole, a quaint thatch roof shack on the beach, with all four sides open to the sea breeze. Like right out of an old Humphrey Bogart movie.

Most of the dozen or so customers looked to be retired British Government functionaries who were playing darts and draughts, while nursing their pink gins and commiserating about the glory days of Empire. There were also a few beach bums, and other lost souls, the kind of detritus which you would expect to find in such a setting.

Anyway after a couple of pints of bitter, I was admiring the dart board when one of the particularly devious looking characters sidled up to me and said, “Do you play darts Yank.” I said, “Not really, but I’ll try anything once. So this guy proceeded to explain the game, also explained that we played for drinks, and proceeded to beat me handily. He then proposed another game and I said OK, but to make it interesting, I suggested that this time it be drinks for the entire bar. Backed into a corner, my new friend had to agree, and when we lollied for starting position, he knew he had been had. I got a perfect fifty bulls eye with my first dart. You can guess the rest, I cleaned him and he stood the bar for drinks. Maybe some Yanks do know how to play the game after all, I told the incredulous barfly, on my way out the door.

But the day wasn’t over yet. While winging home we spotted a rubber raft with what looked like three survivors of a shipwreck. We radioed the Coast Guard, and then circled the scene till the rescue helicopter arrived. We then went on to San Juan, dropped off some stuff and returned to St Thomas. Meantime the helicopter with the castaways had landed, and as we were clearing immigration, we noticed the immigration officers hassling these poor sodden sailors, because they didn’t have the proper entry documents. Quite a day, huh.

Bush flying on arctic Alaska’s North Slope, in the middle of winter is really a barrel of fun. It isn’t really dark, just a grey overcast, something like twilight, along with a perpetual whiteout, which can be disorienting as Hell. They say that if you can see caribou through the airplane windshield, you are flying too low. And that is right, as the caribou stand out as black spots against the perpetual white. And speaking of caribou, the airstrips are built on top of several feet of gravel, to insulate them from the ever present permafrost. This makes the runway marginally warmer than the surrounding ground, and the caribou, being smarter than they look, congregate there to keep their feet warm. Anyway, the point is, that before landing, you have to buzz the runway a couple of times to drive off the caribou.

One of my more interesting and improbable adventures was building a power plant, in a native village called Nelson Lagoon. This place was at the very end of the Alaska Peninsula, and we did the job in the dead of winter. Later I was accused of building this power plant with only a DC-3 load of whiskey and a duffel bag full of twenty dollar bills, but that was a slight exaggeration. The DC-3 was only half loaded with whiskey, the rest being our equipment.

This job involved a lot of Bush Flying, and we used a whole fleet of weird and wonderful airplanes. Most of them were old enough to be in museums, but they were still daily drivers in Alaska.

Anyway, if interested, you can read all about it in the Nelson Lagoon chapter of Workin' 'Round the world, In Appendix xxx of this book

Part of my charter fleet. On the left is a deHavilland Otter. To the right is the Cessna 185 which was sort of my personal executive airplane.

And here is a PBY Catalina, in which he designed the panel modules to be transported. They didn't remove the gun blisters when they converted it to a freighter, 'cause the view from them is so awesome.

And here is a PBY Catalina, in which he designed the panel modules to be transported. They didn't remove the gun blisters when they converted it to a freighter, 'cause the view from them is so awesome.

The routine way from town to jobsite went something like this

As I said, Nelson Lagoon was really remote, and getting back and forth, between there and Anchorage, was usually an adventure in itself. The quickest and most direct route was to take a charter or commercial flight from Anchorage to King Salmon. Then a charter from King Salmon to an abandoned Air Force field about two thirds of the way to Nelson Lagoon, then call in another charter from Cold Bay, or one of the native pilots from Nelson lagoon, to take you the rest of the way. (The reason for all this plane changing was that the planes that had the range to fly from King Salmon to Nelson Lagoon, were unable to land on Nelson Lagoon’s main street, which was the runway there).

Anyway, I well remember standing on that deserted Air Force strip, 200 miles from nowhere, in the heart of bear country, (Kodiak bears, that is) and wondering if the pilot from Nelson Lagoon remembered he was to pick me up this Tuesday. Remember this was before the days of cell and satellite phones, and the old two way radios we had were short range and extremely unreliable.

This old shipping container is the “Terminal” on that abandoned Air Force strip. In event of a Kodiak bear attack, one could lock oneself inside.

Note my engineer with the caribou horns on the roof.

But I couldn't resist spinning one Nelson Lagoon "bush flyin'" yarn here, so here goes.

To emphasize just what a hassle getting back and forth “to town” could be, let me tell you how a supposedly routine 700 mile flight from Anchorage to the job site actually turned out.

It seems that I knew a really great lady in Anchorage who worked for the State Dept of Social Services, and when I was back in Anchorage on business one day, she looked me up. She told me she needed to see the Village Chief in Nelson Lagoon, and could she ride back out there with me. I told her no problem, so on the appointed morning she met me at the airport, slung her duffel into the plane and away we went.

Our airplane that trip was a six place twin engine Cessna, which wasn’t a particularly good bush plane, and couldn’t land on the village street (the normal landing ground) because the Cessna’s wheels were to small and too close together. I had chosen this airplane, though, because I did not want to subject the lady to the hassle involved if I used my 185. I figured that we could land on a nearby abandoned oil company strip, and it would be no problem to get someone from the village to pick up this VIP.

First stop was at King Salmon for gas, then on to Nelson Lagoon. When we got to Nelson Lagoon, or the vicinity thereof, the fog was pea soup thick, and we couldn’t see a thing. We stooged around in the fog for a while, but couldn’t find the town. Remember, this was in the days before GPS, our INS (Inertial Navigation System) wasn’t working, and the LORAN didn’t seem to be reliable.

To tell the truth, the navigation system, at that point, consisted of me, in the right hand seat with a map on my lap, looking out the window, glancing at the gyro compass, and calling out course corrections to the pilot.

Finally, after using up several of our nine lives dodging 10,000 foot volcanoes, we were running low on fuel, so it was back to King Salmon for more gas and a $25.00 six pack of beer, and then up and away again. This time, when we reached Nelson Lagoon the fog had lifted, or more accurately, blown away, but there now was such a crosswind blowing that it was impossible to land. Besides, it was getting dark, so the only thing to do was to go on another 100 miles to Cold Bay, where there was a lighted runway.

Cold Bay was an abandoned Army B-29 base, which had very little maintenance since WW II, but was kind of maintained as an emergency landing field for commercial air traffic to the Orient. There was a primitive transit quarters, consisting of a Quonset hut with no doors on the rooms, and also a bar and restaurant of sorts, called the Tiger Den. This establishment was a holdover from when the old Flying Tiger Lines made a scheduled fuel stop there, on the way to the Orient, before long range jets.

So we put the airplane away, got something to eat, and headed for the bar, which was presided over by my friend Judge Hiker. Hiker was a profane little German but was a real judge, sort of a cross between a Justice of the Peace, and a Superior Court Judge. He was in his cups, as usual, and regaled my lady friend with tales about him being the only f*****g judge in 40,000 f*****g square miles. Hiker, incidentally, was bedding the Nelson Lagoon Village Chief’s white girl friend when the chief was out of town, which was often, so he was a frequent visitor to our job site. But we will hear more about that later. Anyway, after the festivities died down, the pilot and I had to guard the bathroom doorway, (no doors again) while the lady took a shower and got ready for bed.

Next morning, no problem, a clear and beautiful day. We gassed up the airplane and headed out. When we got to Nelson Lagoon, we landed on that deserted oil company strip about five miles from town. And since, contrary to my expectations, and our arrangements, no one came to meet us, we hiked in. About this time the lady looked at me and remarked, “Do you suppose that a letter would have done just as well?”

This is the Cessna 310, and pilot, who flew the lady and me to Nelson Lagoon. Note the winter Alaska outfit I am wearing. Wool shirt with Canadian Indian sweater over that, with wind shell over that. Cord pants over thermal underwear bottoms, wool socks and insulated boots. This plus a Canadian Indian wool hat, would keep me warm down to –30F.

The 310 had two wing tip fuel tanks, with transfer valves behind the pilot’s seat. A favorite trick would be to surreptitiously turn all valves off, and see how quickly the pilot would react when both engines quit. Hey, we had nine lives, might as well use some of them up.

As I mentioned before, I was using a guy with a Cessna 185 quite a bit. Until he filled up with the wrong gas, blew his engine and crashed in Cook Inlet, killing his passenger. (Which fortunately, was not one of my guys.) The first time I made it to town after the incident he looked me up and asked me how much I owed him for his recent flying. Seems he had lost his logbook in the crash, along with some of his memory, and didn’t have a clue how many hours he had flown for me.

Now let me wind up this sordid tale with a yarn starring Judge Hiker. For some forgotten reason, I needed an engineer consultant from Seattle for a day or two. So, knowing that he could not handle the plane changing normally involved, I told him to fly with Reeves Aleutian Airlines to Cold Bay, and then charter a Cessna 185 for the hop to Nelson Lagoon. And if he had a problem to look up Judge Hiker. So, on the appointed day, I was kind of hanging around waiting for the 185, when into the lagoon flew a PBY (A large seaplane), which landed and taxied up to the dock. Imagine my surprise when the door opened and out popped Judge Hiker, along with my engineer. Seems the Village Chief was out of town again, and the Judge, seeing an opportunity to visit his, (and the Chief’s) girlfriend in style, convinced my engineer friend to charter the PBY, rather than the 185. This raised my charter expense by a factor of about four, but I just charged the difference off to public relations.

Back in the old days in the West Indies, there was an airline called Antilles Airboats. This airline was owned, of all people, by Maureen O’Hara the movie actress, and her husband. These guys flew ancient Grumman Gooses, or is it Geese, or maybe just Goose, on an irregular schedule between many of the islands.

If you have never flown in one, I need to explain that these are seaplanes, and about the time you get the plane up on the step, you are in a total spray of sea water, and pretty much blind, till you get the thing airborne. It was always a real thrill, riding right hand seat, when the pilot, taking off in a crowded harbor, finally got the thing in the air, then looked over and exclaimed “Well, we didn’t hit anything that time”.

In the West Indies, we did a bit of bush flyin’ ourselves, particularly to get to Saba, a Dutch island which we both love. It is a very very interesting island, different from all the others. Actually, it  is an extinct volcano, about five miles across, and without a level spot on it. It also has the distinction of having a runway, which at 385 meters long, or short, if you will, is the world’s shortest commercial runway.

The only planes, of course which can use such a runway are STOLs, (Short Takeoff and Landing Airplanes) which haven’t been built for over 30 years, and of which, deHavilland Twin Otters, and Britten-Norman Islanders are the only existent species. A number of these museum pieces are flown by a bush operation, name of Winair, which flies from St. Martin, charging $US260 for a 20 mile return trip. Since the only other way to get there is an erratically operated native ferry, over a really rough channel, there are not, needless to say, many tourists.

    Our transportation to Saba. A Twin Otter bush plane, Circa 1970.

   

        But the flight wasn't too expensive. Only US$260 per person for a 20 mile ride, and return.

     The dreaded Saba airport. At 1300 feet long, the shortest commercial runway in the world.

We can’t leave the West Indies without a discussion about Royal Air Nevis, which had to be the world’s most informal airline. They used ancient Britten-Norman Islanders, and flew one flight, from St Kitts to Nevis, and return, on an irregular schedule.

So when you wanted to use Air Nevis, the drill went like this. You walked into the office, gave the attendant, (who was also the pilot, baggage handler, etc., etc.) a US $20 dollar bill, then walked out to the Islander, threw your duffel into the luggage compartment, or the back seat, and got into the airplane. Then you amused yourself by drinking warm beer, till they had collected enough brave souls to make the trip profitable, usually up to six. Eventually then, the plane took off for a beautiful, and hopefully uneventful trip to the other island. Upon landing you grabbed your duffel, walked off and grabbed a taxi. No hassles with tickets, reservations, TSA, or he like.

Incidentally, when I flew with them 20 years later, they still had the Islanders, but by then had a computer, tickets, scheduled departures, and even uniforms. Just like uptown. And the fare, if I remember was closer to $US 50.

And would you believe, Pat and I do a bit of bush fllylaing close to hame. We have good friends on Waldron Island which can only be reached by air or sea, and Pat chose air, as marginally less terrifying than bt sea. So, wgeb we vusit them we either use Kenmore Air charters or an another friends Cessna 206.

And finally we have done a bit of poking around Lake Chelan

In an ancient Beaver, till the pilot dumped into the ladeuntil the

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