Old Love

 

North Island Naval Air Station, 1940

My grandparents had not one "our song," but two, both by Frank Sinatra.  Both were from when he was with the pre-war Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, "Polka Dots and Moonbeams," (a hit in 1940) and "Oh,  Look at Me Now" (a hit in 1941).
They were popular at the time Gramps and Gran were courting and just married.  Gramps was a young naval officer, an aviator, and Gran was a girl he knew in high

Favorite hang-out, the La Jolla Beach Club

school and ran into working at a cafe when he came back home on leave.
There was nothing special about their romance or their lives, really, though to me it seems the stuff of myth and legend.
They honeymooned at the Hotel del Coronado on a three-day pass Gramps was able to wrangle.
Gran found work at a cafe in San Diego and they rented an off-base apartment. She began attending San Diego County General Hospital Training School for Nurses as a nursing degree student.

Gramps flew F3Fs, then F2As, F4Fs

Sometimes Gramps would buzz the cafe and she would rush out to wave at him.  During breaks from class at school, she used to watch formations of Navy planes fly by and she learned to tell the various types so she could know if they were  the type he flew, and he might be in one.

Lexington at San Diego just before sailing for Pearl,1941

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Gramps went off to fight them and Gran never saw him again till after VJ Day. Where he was or what he was doing she did not know and could not find out.  The newspapers were full of rumors and lies, especially during the first year of the war, and she did not know what  to believe.  Where was the Coral Sea? 

Lexington on fire and sinking at Coral Sea

Why was it important?  Was there really an island called Midway where a titanic naval battle was fought?

Japanese dive bomber shot down while attacking Enterprise

Where was Guadalcanal and why were we fighting the Japs there?
The aircraft carrier Saratoga was torpedoed, the Lexington was sunk, then the Yorktown went down, then Wasp.  We only had five aircraft carriers in the Pacific,  and only Enterprise was left, and then it too was hit.  Fear and dread were shadows walking beside Gran wherever she went, whatever she did.

A division of F4Fs over Guadalcanal

She wrote letters daily to Gramp's FPO address, V-Mail on thin single pages that folded up into their own envelopes. Once in a while, she got a letter from him, printed from a microfilm copy of the original, weeks old, short, uninformative, censored.  But each was a treasure to her.  She knew he was still alive, or at least had been at the date the letter was sent.  She  carried the latest one with her until the next one came.  She read them all over and over until the paper almost wore out.
When the Tommy Dorsey/Frank Sinatra song "Just as Though You Were Here" began playing on the radio in 1942, it made her desperately sad.  In later years, she refused to

Enterprise exploding and burning after hit by Japanese bombers

listen to it.
When she finished school, Gran joined the Navy Nursing Corps.  She thought it might bring her closer to Gramps, maybe allow them to meet.  Instead, it meant his letters always chased her from posting to posting, and hers to him, too.  And his seldom and short leaves never coincided with hers.
She served in New Zealand, Australia, then aboard a hospital ship to the Marianas, including Guam and Saipan, and Okinawa. She ministered to survivors of disasters at sea, shot-down air crew with horrible burns and sailors with lungs full of fuel oil and sea water, marines inconceivably mutilated by the weapons of modern war employed with maddened fury by a foe that neither asked for nor gave quarter.  And each new patient she saw she feared might be Gramps, her beloved, dear husband.

On duty

After  what seemed lifetime after lifetime, the war ended and Gran and Gramps found each other again.  They had to become re-acquainted, it had been so long.  They were tentative with each other, yet constantly looking at each other and smiling.  You're here!  You're safe!  Where have you been?  What have you done?  Tell me everything!  Oh, but you can't.  Maybe sometime later you can.  Maybe you never can. That's all right.  It was all a bad dream.  It's over now.  Let's get on with our lives.  Let's have a family.  Let's have children and live a normal life of peace and quiet.
And so they did.

Finding a Box of Family Letters

By Dana Gioia 

The dead say little in their letters
they haven't said before.
We find no secrets, and yet
how different every sentence sounds
heard across the years.

My father breaks my heart
simply by being so young and handsome.
He's half my age, with jet-black hair.
Look at him in his navy uniform
grinning beside his dive bomber.

Come back, Dad! I want to shout.
He says he misses all of us
(though I haven't yet been born).
He writes from places I never knew he saw,
and everyone he mentions now is dead.

There is a large, long photograph
curled like a diploma—a banquet sixty years ago.
My parents sit uncomfortably
among tables of dark-suited strangers.
The mildewed paper reeks of regret.

I wonder what song the band was playing,
just out of frame, as the photographer
arranged your smiles. A waltz? A foxtrot?
Get out there on the floor and dance!
You don't have forever.

What does it cost to send a postcard
to the underworld? I'll buy
a penny stamp from World War II
and mail it downtown at the old post office
just as the courthouse clock strikes twelve.

Surely the ghost of some postal worker
still makes his nightly rounds, his routine
too tedious for him to notice when it ended.
He works so slowly he moves back in time
carrying our dead letters to their lost addresses.

It's silly to get sentimental.
The dead have moved on. So should we.
But isn't it equally simpleminded to miss
the special expertise of the departed
in clarifying our long-term plans?

They never let us forget that the line
between them and us is only temporary.
Get out there and dance! the letters shout
adding, Love always. Can't wait to get home!
And soon we will be. See you there.
   

 

 

 

Little Things

 

By-gone days

I used to post entries at the 43 Things website, once considered the best social networking service but now long gone.  I don't fool with social media any more, being too busy and too jaded, but once in a while I look back at all that old stuff, and sometimes come across things that make me think that maybe I'm not, or once was not, a total waste of oxygen.

 

Regret never dies

My father told me once
that when he was about twenty
he had a new girlfriend, and once
they stopped by the house on the way
to somewhere, just a quick stop
to pick something up,
and my grandfather, who wasn’t well—
it turned out he had TB and would die
at fifty-two—was sitting in a chair
in the small back yard. My father
knew he was out there, and it crossed
his mind that he should take his girlfriend
out back to meet him, but he
didn’t, whether from embarrassment
at the sick, fading man
or just because he was in a hurry
to be off on his date, he didn’t
say, but he told the little,
uneventful story anyway, and said
that he had always regretted
not doing that simple, courteous
thing, the sick man sitting in
the sun in the back yard would
have enjoyed meeting her, but
instead he sat out there alone
as they came and left, young
lovers going on a date. He
always regretted it, he said.

~ Howard Nelson, from The Nap by the Waterfall

 

I understand. Don't you?

This happened before I met your mother:
I took Jennie Johanson to a summer dance,
and she sent me a letter, a love letter,
I guess, even if the word love wasn’t in it.
She wrote that she had a good time
and didn’t want the night to end.
At home, she lay down on her bed
but stayed awake, listening to the songs
of morning birds outside her window.
I read that letter a hundred times
and kept it in a cigar box
with useless things I had saved:
a pocket knife with an imitation pearl handle
and a broken blade,
a harmonica I never learned to play,
one cuff link, an empty rifle shell.
When your mother and I got married,
I threw the letter away—
if I had kept it, she might wonder.
But I wanted to keep it
and even thought about hiding places,
maybe in the barn or the tool shed;
but what if it were ever found?
I knew of no way to explain why
I would keep such letter, much less
why I would take the trouble to hide it.
Jennie had gone to California
not long after that dance.
I pretty much got over
wanting to see her just once more,
but I wish I could have kept the letter,
even though I know it by heart.
 by Leo Dangel

Words, words, words!

 

Phantoms and Ghosts

McDonnell-Douglas F-4J Phantom II

I saw this airplane, a McDonnell-Douglas F-4J Phantom II, when visiting the San Diego Air and Space Museum with my father.  This particular example was flown by Lt. Randall Cunningham (pilot) and Lt.j.g.  William Driscoll (radar intercept officer), but my dad flew the same type during the same time period, the early 1970s, during the Viet Nam War.  He was in his 20s and being catapulted off aircraft carriers in pointy-nosed airplanes to fight the commies, a genuine Yankee Sky Pirate.

SAM homing in on an F-4 over North Viet Nam

It's hard for me to imagine it. Becoming  carrier-qualified and then going to war in an unforgiving beast like the F4J, attacking the enemy, bombing heavily defended bridges, flying close air support down in the mud where even small arms fire could take you out, evading anti-aircraft fire and surface-to-air missiles, dueling MiG fighters....  

And the idea of being shot down, captured by the enemy--assuming you survived--and tortured if not beaten to death, as so many of our men were:  How could you fly missions knowing that risk was there every time you flew?
I don't understand how you could manage that not once, not twice, not dozens or scores of times, but more than a hundred missions over enemy territory.
My dad flew combat missions against the enemy during the North Vietnamese Easter Offensive in 1972, participated in the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam when our guys went "downtown" and

SAM exploding under an F-4 and setting it on fire.

bombed Hanoi--inflicting so much damage that the communists finally agreed to peace (not that it lasted all that long).
And you know what?  He never mentioned any of this to us kids growing up.  In fact, he never said much about it, even when I asked in later years.  He'd just tell some funny stories or talk about technical issues, discuss the flying characteristics of the airplane.That sort of thing.
But as far as what he felt about flying combat missions in a war, how he managed his emotions, kept himself professionally-oriented to do the job

F-4 breaking up and going down in flames after SAM hit.

and not screw the pooch, as they say; well, that was not something he cared to talk about, and if you were to press him on it he would get a little peevish.
It was just a job was all he would say.  He signed up for it so he did it.  He took Uncle Sam's two bits and did what Uncle told him to do.  And that was the name of that tune.
 I can understand that, actually.  I've seen the elephant myself and I have no desire to discuss it in more than the most general, non-personal terms.  It was what it was, and it's all in the past now, just ghosts pushed to the back of my mind.  I did my job.  Period.  End of story.
That's all she wrote.

 

And now for something completely different

 Art you can hear

 

A more difficult target

 

 

This explains
why it has become
harder and harder
for men to take
a flying fuck
at a rolling donut.

 

 

A warning from 1965

Happy feet from 1957

 

 Oh, can't you just shut up?!

 

 

Made me laff!

A guy walks into a bar with an alligator.
The bartender flips out and says, "Hey buddy, you gotta get that thing out of here. It's going to bite one of my customers." 
The guy says, "No, no, it's a tame alligator. I'll prove it to you." 
He picks up the alligator and puts it on the bar. Then he unzips his pants, pulls out his dick and sticks it in the alligator's mouth. The alligator just keeps his mouth open. 
After about five minutes, he pulls his dick out of the alligator's mouth, zips up his pants and says, "See, I told you it was a tame alligator. Anybody else want to try it?" 
The drunk down at the end of the bar says, "Yah, I'd like to try it, but I don't think I can hold my mouth open that long!" 

 
Lagniappe for the boys...

 

Laos

I’ve been enjoying reading about Linh Dinh's adventures in Laos on his blog, and, more especially, looking at his photographs of the country, which show a normal "third world" nation, peaceful and reasonably prosperous, all things considered.
My impression of Laos, very much different from the country I see in Linh's photos, was formed by a conversation I had with my uncle some years ago.
After a backcountry off-roading accident that saw us upside down at the bottom of an arroyo in his old International Scout with gasoline pouring out of the ruptured fuel tank and the engine roaring, wheels spinning and smoking as they rubbed against crushed sheet metal, a perilous situation from which he extracted us with calm efficiency, we had a long walk back to our camp. During it, he told me how important it was not to give in to fear and to keep your wits about you in a dangerous situation, and to illustrate that, for the first and only time, he spoke to me of his experiences as a helo pilot during the Viet Nam War, and in particular his participation in an operation called Lam Song 719, an attack on powerful North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao forces in Laos in 1971.
His job was to ferry ARVN troops to the battle zone. He told of going into a hot LZ and seeing ahead of him five helos on fire and spinning down, with South Vietnamese troops hurled out of them and flying through the air. He made it safely down to the LZ, hovering as the troops jumped out, but upon trying to lift off he was hit by enemy fire and crashed back onto the LZ, his crew chief being killed in the crash. The survivors were unable to move more than a few feet from the wreckage due to the intense fire poured into the LZ by the enemy. He said the noise of gunfire was louder than that of the firing range at Fort Polk and even shouting it was hard to talk to others. The ARVN troops could not move off the LZ due to the intensity of the fire, and every minute they took casualties even though they were just lying flat on the ground.
My uncle and his crew were finally extracted when jets blasted the whole area with napalm so close he could feel the heat wash over him and the hairs on his forearms were singed off.  Only then did helos have a brief window of safety to slip into the LZ and pick up the survivors before the enemy recovered and resumed fire.
So that’s been my lasting impression of Laos — some remote hell, existing eternally in a murderous war. And then along comes Linh Dinh and his bus ride into a bucolic backwater with the usual crummy hotels and restaurants, littered with the dregs and echoes of the mass global culture that could be just about anywhere — Guam, Guatamala, Ghana. No signs of the mad fury of war, no armies hurling themselves at each other, using every weapon human genius can contrive to slaughter and destroy.
It leaves me wondering what it was all for. And glad that it is now ancient history, forgotten by all but a few old men who sometimes tell their stories, but mostly never do.

Stranger, go, tell the Spartans -- 

No; simply say "We obeyed"....

Make us sound laconic and all iron.  

Well ... what are you waiting for?

Report only what you were bade; then find yourself
Some strong wine or busty girl in that narrow city.

What truth soldiers would speak  

None would hear, and none repeat.

~ Howard Lachtman, "News From Thermopylae"

Musso & Frank's

Musso & Franks is a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood that's been in business seemingly forever.  One of the best stories my family has about it is an episode in the mid-'70s when my father, a naval aviator, was on a short leave visiting my mother, a nurse at the North Hollywood Medical Center, and they stopped in at Musso’s after visiting Griffith Park and walking from the observatory to the top of Mt. Lee, then taking in the tourist sights along Hollywood Blvd. They didn’t have a reservation and were told they could wait and see if there was a cancellation. 

As they were waiting, a waiter came over and said a gentleman had asked them to join him. It was Telly Savalas. A few minutes later, David Carradine came over and joined them, and then Robert Vaughn stopped by. My dad knew Carradine from having done some stunt work on his TV show Shane when he was in college and Vaughn from working on Bullitt as a budding stuntman with Solar Productions under the tutelage of Bud Ekins.

They ended up having a three-hour dinner, paid for by Savalas, who said he had invited them over because he hated to see a young couple looking as tired and forlorn as they did.

We have a photo somewhere of my great-grandfather and a bunch of Saratoga T4M torpedo bomber crewmen celebrating at Musso’s in 1929 after they had gotten back from their success at Fleet Problem IX, where they surprised the defenders of the Panama Canal and were deemed to have destroyed its locks. They all look very happy. 

Happy 4th of July!

4th of July, 1916, 5th Ave at 17th St., New York City, by
Frederick Childe Hassam

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to this ancestor (and others), I am officially
 a Daughter of the American Revolution.

The Face in the Glass

When you get what you want in your struggle for self
And the world makes you king for a day,
Just go to a mirror and look at yourself
And see what that face has to say.

For it isn’t your father or mother or wife
Whose judgment upon you must pass,
The person whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the one staring back from the glass.

Some people might think you’re a straight-shootin’ chum
And call you a great gal or guy,
But the face in the glass says you’re only a bum
If you can’t look it straight in the eye.

That’s the one you must please, never mind all the rest,
That’s the one with you clear to the end,
And you know you have passed your most dangerous test
If the face in the glass is your friend.  

You may fool the whole world down the pathway of years
And get pats on the back as you pass,
But your final reward will be heartache and tears
If you’ve cheated the face in the glass.
~ Dale Wimbrow