Harley Passengers

I was stationed at Fr. Riley, Kansas together with my friend Jake after we both finished intelligence officer training in Baltimore Maryland. Jake and I rented a 2 bedroom duplex in Chapman Kansas which was a small town close to Fr. Riley.

Jake brought his Harley chopper with him to Fr. Riley and used to ride it on the weekends. On one of those rides he hit a pot hole in the road and wrecked the Harley. Later when we were both assigned to Vietnam, I bought Jake's wrecked Harley for $500 and stored it in the back of my parent's garage in Aurora, Nebraska. I also left my car with my parents while I was stationed in Vietnam, but that's another story.

After I came back from Vietnam and got out of the army, I stayed with my parents in Aurora for about a year. I worked driving for a local seed corn company while rebuilding the wrecked Harley. After I finished rebuilding it I took my 12 year old sister, Susie, for a ride around town. Susie was amused at how people looked at her like she was some kind of disgusting biker chick.

After a year I enrolled in a 6 month truck driver school in Omaha, Ne and rented an upstairs studio apartment in one of those big old houses in Omaha that had been converted to apartments. After I had been there about a month I noticed that there was a storage shed in the back that looked like it wasn't being used. I asked Jim, the apartment manager, if I could bring my Harley to Omaha and store it in the shed. He said it was OK with him so I did it.

I went back to Aurora, rented a U-Haul trailer, and loaded up the Harley. I secured it in the trailer by running wire rope cables diagonally inside the trailer and then I tightened them down with turn buckles. When I got back to Omaha, Jim helped me unload the Harley and store it in the shed.

I used to go out early in the morning on the weekends and take a leisurely ride along the Missouri river. One Saturday morning when I had just come back from my ride along the river, Jim, the apartment manager, came out to see me as I was putting my Harley back in the shed. He said that his 14 year old daughter, Anna, had asked him if it would be OK for me to give her a ride on my motorcycle. Jim said that he saw how carefully I had secured my motorcycle in the trailer and thought it would be OK if I gave Anna a ride. I said, "Let's plan for tomorrow morning. That will give me a chance to get a helmet for Anna."

Sunday morning Jim brought Anna out and introduced her. I had bought a silver Bell helmet just like mine for Anna and we spent some time adjusting the helmet padding to get it to fit right for her. I then took Anna for a one hour ride around that part of Omaha. When we got back, she thanked me for giving her a ride and gave the helmet back to me. I returned the helmet to her and told her it was hers to keep which really made her face light up.

I'm sure she had an interesting story to tell her friends at school the next day and she had the helmet to prove it was true. 

 

12th Street and Vine

I've heard the song, Kansas City, many times over the years but I never really understood the lyrics until back when I was working as a truck driver and had a load of California produce to deliver to a warehouse in Kansas City.

I was stopped at a red light and noticed that I was at the corner of 12th Street and Vine. I also noticed that it appeared to be the heart of Kansas City's red light district. Now the song's line,  "Standing at the corner of 12th Street and Vine with my Kansas City baby" made sense.

 As Paul Harvey used to say, "And now you know the rest of the story." 

Little Milton

When I was about 25 I was living in an apartment in Omaha, NE. I would occasionally visit a small record store in town and on one of those visits I bought the album, Little Milton Sings Big Blues. I really liked it and played it quite a few times. 

A few months after I bought the album, an upcoming Little Milton show was announced for the Carter Lake Ballroom on the outskirts of town. I decided to take the opportunity to see him live. The Carter Lake Ballroom was a huge old building with a stage at one end, a large dance floor, and about a 2 dozen small tables in the back.

I arrived at the venue a bit early and found they had filled the dance floor with chairs to accommodate the guests. I decided to sit at one of the small tables in the back and it wasn't long before the Ballroom began filling up with people there to see the show. Shortly before Little Milton's show was about to begin, a nice middle aged couple stopped by my table and asked if they could join me. I said, "Sure."

The show was great and the 3 of us enjoyed it together. 

As near as I could tell, of the several hundred people there for the show, I was the only one who wasn't black. 

  

The 50 mile hike

Before we moved to Pawnee City, NE we lived in San Anselmo, CA. where I was a freshman at the Sir Francis Drake high school. My friend Karl, a sophomore, and I used to hike together in the hills near San Anselmo.

Around that time President Kennedy was actively promoting 50 mile hikes as a way to get the country in shape. Karl and I managed to get a 50 mile hike approved for our school. The plan was to go from the high school to Pt Reyes Station and back which worked out to about exactly 50 miles. It was scheduled to start the next Saturday morning.

That Saturday at 4 in the morning Karl, my brother Chuck who was only 12 years old, my friend Laura, and I started out. We alternated between walking and jogging - we would walk for about 15 minutes and then jog for about 15 minutes.

At that time our family had a 54 Ford 9 passenger station wagon. My mother and my younger sister, Dorothy, loaded our car up with 2 large water jugs, 3 packages of paper cups, a first aid kit, and the 50 sandwiches they had made. The spent the whole day going along the hike's route stopping to help the hikers. They gave them water and sandwiches, massaged legs that had developed cramps, and used the first aid kit to deal with blisters.

When they came across hikers that wanted to give up, they loaded them into the car and took them back to the high school. Mom and Dorothy did a really great job of supporting the 50 mile hike. Without them it could have turned into a catastrophe.

The guys from the school's cross country track team finished first in 11 1/2 hours. Karl, Chuck, Laura, and I came in second in 12 1/2 hours and were really sore for about the next 3 days.

In retrospect, it was a pretty stupid thing to do, but what's the point of being young if you can't do a few stupid things once in a while.  

 

Curtains

 In the 1960's we lived in the small town of Pawnee City, Nebraska where my father was the pastor of the local Presbyterian church. One Saturday afternoon I answered the door when the door bell rang. It turned out to be an old lady who said that she had something important she needed to tell my father.

I ushered her into our living room where she sat down to wait while I went to get dad. When he went into the living room she began telling her tale of scandal. It seems the evening before, a young woman went to visit a young man who was a school teacher at the local high school. After the woman went into the man's house, he had the temerity to close the curtains to the windows in his front room.

After hearing this, my father said nothing. He just got up and very deliberately opened the curtains to the windows in our living room. He then turned and gave the woman, "a look"!

She got up, left, and never again came to my father with gossip.

My father was quite a guy and I really miss him.

Thanksgiving Dinner

In the 70's I was working as a truck driver making weekly trips from Iowa to the San Francisco bay area. Almost every trip while going through Nevada I would stop at a diner in the small town of Carlin to have coffee and a sandwich.

One time I was going through Nevada on Thanksgiving day when I stopped in at the diner. I wasn't really hungry, so I just ordered coffee. The young guy who owned it urged me to have a turkey sandwich. He was really persistent so I finally relented and ordered a turkey sandwich.

After about 20 minutes he came out with my "turkey sandwich". It was a complete Thanksgiving dinner with roasted turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and pumpkin pie. It was really delicious!

When I went to pay, he wouldn't take my money. He said, "Happy Thanksgiving and thanks for being our customer."

Vapor Lock

 I attended Officer Candidate School in Ft. Belvoir, VA which was located not far from Washington D.C. One weekend one of the other students, Roland, asked if my friend, Jake, and I could take him with us on our regular trips to D.C so he could visit his sister who lived in there. We were happy to oblige.

We dropped Roland off near his sister's apartment but when we went to leave, my car wouldn't start. It was a hot afternoon and my old Ford had a tendency to vapor lock when the engine was turned off on a hot day. The only thing that could be done was to just wait for the engine to cool down so the car would start.

Jake and I were standing next to the car trying to decide how to kill time until the car would start when we were approached by two prostitutes. They assumed that the only reason two young white guys would be in that all black neighborhood was to avail themselves of their services.

Jake and I explained we were just waiting for the car to cool down so we could leave after dropping our friend off at his sister's apartment. We chatted with these "working girls" for about a half hour and then said, "It looks like the car has cooled down so we can go now." They laughed and apologized for incorrectly assuming why we were and said, "Thanks for stopping by."

Walking

 I've enjoyed walking for most of my life. You see many things you would have missed otherwise and get to meet all sorts of interesting people.

In 1968 after I finished Officer Candidate School, I was attending Intelligence Officer's Training at Fort Holabird Maryland located on the outskirts of Baltimore. During my training I was staying in an apartment in Baltimore that was near downtown. One Monday evening around 9pm I decided to go for a walk around that part of town.

It was a warm night with a mild haze coming off of the Chesapeake Bay which gave the streetlights a slight halo effect. I hadn't been walking for very long when a young boy about 9 or 10 years old appeared out of the shadows and started walking beside me.

He looked up at me and said, "Hi mister. Is it OK if I walk with you?" I said, "Sure, I'd enjoy having some company. By the way, my name is Dave, what's yours?" He said, "Mathew."

Mathew and I walked together not saying much, just taking in the ambiance of a big city at night. After about a half hour Mathew said, "Thanks, mister. I gotto go now." and he faded back into the shadows.

Mad Magazine and Mom

 When I was about 11 years old we lived in a house on Butterfield Rd. in San Anselmo, CA. One Saturday morning I was out in the garage pouring over the latest issue of Mad Magazine with my friend, Dale, from across the street. That issue had the usual "Spy vs Spy" episodes along with Dave Berg's satires on suburban life. It also included my all time favorite, "Horrifying Cliches".

When my mother came out to the garage to check on the laundry she saw us reading Mad Magazine and assumed it was some kind of smut. She came over to us and said, "What are you guys reading? Let me see that!" She grabbed the magazine from us and started looking through it.

As she was reading it, she slowly started to smile. Her smile grew to a grin and then she laughed out loud. She handed the Mad Magazine back to us and said, "That's pretty funny, isn't it?"

Boogie in Walsenburg

 In 1971 after I got out of the Army, I drove out to Trinidad, Colorado to visit my brother, Chuck. He was living with a couple of his friends in a geodesic dome house that they built themselves. After I had been there a couple of days, Chuck said, "Tomorrow is Saturday so we need to check out Boogie in Walsenburg. It's only about 40 miles north of here" 

Apparently there was a commune of hippy musicians living in the hills outside Walsenburg, Colorado. They would come to town on Saturday evening to play music in one of the bars there.

We arrived at the bar where the music was supposed to happen at about 8:30. It was a long older building that was fairly narrow with high ceilings, wooden floors, and several neon Coors signs decorating the walls. Six slowing turning ceiling fans made a valiant attempt to keep the place cool. A long bar, well worn from many years of supporting elbows, lined the first third of one wall. In the back of the room there was an old, slightly out of tune, upright piano.

Around 9 pm the hippy musicians started arriving. They moved some tables out of the way to make room for their instruments, speakers, and amplifiers and moved enough tables to make a small dance floor. While they were setting up and getting tuned up, the customers started wandering in. A little before 10 pm when they were ready to start playing, there must have been about 70 people in that bar.

They started out playing Jimi Hendrix's "Red House" followed by numbers from Pink Floyd, Cream, some old blues standards and a couple of their original songs. They did an expecially nice version of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb".

After about an hour of playing they stopped to have a beer and take a break. While they were taking a break, a middle aged woman with grey hair sat down at the piano. She started playing a really smokin' 12 bar piano boogie. The guys in the band put down their beers and joined in.

People in the bar moved some tables out of the way so there was more room for dancing and for the next 15 minutes, that place really rocked! When they finally stopped, the woman playing the piano, the guys in the band, and those dancing all broke out in raucous laughter. 

The band good naturedly took requests from the people there and managed to play every request well. One middle-aged woman whose father had recently died, went up to the band and asked if they could play "Amazing Grace" for her. A woman standing near her offered to do the singing.

The woman singing was apparently part of a local church choir and had an amazing contralto voice. I've heard "Amazing Grace" many times before and since, but never like the way it was done that night. By the time they finished I don't think there was a dry eye in the place. The woman who requested the song went up to the band with tears streaming down her face and thanked them from the bottom of her heart.

Later in the evening, a man about 70 years old walked up to the band carrying a violin case and asked if he could join in. The guys in the band said, "Sure, just start playing whatever you like and we'll join in." What followed was about 30 minutes of great blue grass music with a killer fiddle player.

That night I heard everything from blues to blue grass. I'll always be grateful to my brother for introducing me to Boogie in Walsenburg. It was America at its most tolerant, inclusive best.

Finding Queers

Years ago I was living in Omaha Nebraska and working as an over the road truck driver. I spent about a year hauling a load of pork every week from the Rath meatpacking plant in Waterloo Iowa to a meat wholesaler in Ogden Utah. Later, after I got married, I got a job driving a gasoline tanker for Mobil Oil delivering to gas stations throughout the greater San Francisco bay area.

One evening, about 9pm, I was delivering gas to a station on Van Ness Ave in San Francisco when a family in an Oldsmobile with Iowa plates pulled into the station. The driver, a man in his late forties, got out of the car, walked over to me, and asked, "Where do we have to go to see all the queers?"

I said, "You might try Waterloo Iowa. There used to be a notorious gay bar there just outside the entrance to the Rath meatpacking plant."

Itemized Bill

When I was in high school my father told me about a town in Nebraska that had a sewage treatment plant that wasn't working correctly. None of the people tasked with operating the plant could figure out what was wrong.

Finally in desperation the town called in a consultant in the hopes that he could solve the problem. When the consultant got there, he spent about an hour walking around the sewage treatment plant checking everything out. He then picked up a big hammer from a workbench and walked over to a large steel gate valve. He gave the valve a big whack with the hammer and the plant started working again almost immediately.

A few weeks later the city received a bill from the consultant for $10,000. That was real money back then and the mayor was incensed when he found out. He said, "All the guy did was walk around the plant for an hour and then he whacked one valve with a hammer. Why should we have to pay $10,000 for that? Send that bill back and demand that it be itemized!"

Several weeks later the town received this itemized bill from the consultant:

 

• One whack with a 24 oz. ball peen hammer - $1
• Knowing what to whack - $9,9999

 

The town paid the itemized bill.

Elevator Search

When my friend, Jake, and I finished Officer Candidates School, we both went to Military Intelligence school at Fort Holabird in Baltimore Md. The course lasted 4 months so we rented an apartment on the fourth floor of an older building in downtown Baltimore.

The apartment  had an elevator, but it was an old elevator that didn't have modern buttons to select your floor. It had a nice old elevator operator who would start and stop the elevator manually. The elevator had a big handle which he would push forward to go up and pull back to go down. To stop he would put the handle in its default middle position. There was a lot of lag between where the handle was moved to and how the elevator responded. He rarely ever managed to stop right on the target floor. If he was too high he would go down a bit. If he was too low he would go up.

This back and forth would go on until he got it right or just gave up and said, "Please step up or please step down."  Jake and I would regularly place bets on how many tries it would take for the elevator to stop at our floor.

It was an elevator variation on the binary search.

Skirting the issue

When I worked for Juniper Networks, the office of the founder, Pradeep, was in the same area as our group of engineer's desks. Rafaella, an attractive Italian woman in her early 40's, was his administrative assistant and was very good at her job. She always wore very classy, office appropriate attire and always wore slacks.

One morning I met her in the hall near the breakroom and saw she was wearing a very nice dark gray skirt that went almost to the floor. I said, "Rafaella, what's the special occasion you're wearing that nice ankle-length skirt for?" She said, "When I was in Pradeep's office a couple of days ago he complained about me always wearing slacks. He wanted to know why I never wore skirts. So," she said with a mischievous smirk, "I'm wearing a skirt today."

Loading Dock Ballet

Once I had to deliver a load from Iowa to a large warehouse in Los Angeles. The warehouse loading dock was almost half a block long with about 20 trucks in the process of getting loaded and unloaded. I backed my truck into the dock and waited for my turn to get unloaded.

While I was waiting, I watched as a man in his fifties went about loading and unloading trucks using his electric pallet jack. He moved with a casual grace shifting his body from side to side as he maneuvered pallets in and out of the trucks and the warehouse. He had a serene, confident look and moved with a gentle rhythm.

It was almost as though his moves were choreographed to music that only he could hear and I was watching a loading dock ballet.  

On Target

Last night I was doing the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen while chatting with my wife, Lan, who was relaxing in the dining room. I was about finished and had just put the kitchen garbage can in the middle of the kitchen floor when Lan stood up. She wadded her napkin into a ball and threw it right into the garbage can in the kitchen.

She got a sly smirk on her face and said, "Not bad for an old lady, right?"

Happy News

Last week my wife, Lan, and I were watching a Vietnamese TV channel when the commercials came on. At the beginning of the first commercial the voice-over announcer enthusiastically proclaimed, "Tin vui! Tin vui!" This was followed by the rest of the ad.

At the next break a completely different commercial started with the same, "Tin vui! Tin vui!" I was curious so I asked Lan, "What does tin vui, tin vui mean anyway?" Her face took on a somewhat bemused look and she said, "It means bullshit, bullshit."

Tin vui actually means "happy news" or literally "news happy" since in Vietnamese the adjective usually follows the noun.

After almost 42 years of marriage, Lan still manages to surprise me with her dry wit and sarcastic sense of humor.

Nice Way to Die

My wife, Lan, has an old friend that just died. We've known Loan and her husband, John, for many years and they've always been very sweet together.

A few days ago they were sitting together on the couch when Loan told her husband that she was really tired and wanted to lie down. She stretched out on the couch with her head in his lap and went to sleep. Less than an hour later she died.

We all have to die sometime, but that was a really nice way for her to die.

Good News Bad News

I used to drive a gasoline tanker for Mobil Oil delivering to stations throughout the bay area. Our main terminal was the Southern Pacific Pipeline in San Jose where we loaded the trucks. The pipeline had several loading racks and the tankers had to wait in a staging area until a rack was available.

One Monday morning several of us were standing around talking in the staging area when Gary from King City pulled in. When he got out of his truck we saw that he had a large bandage on his left thumb. When asked what happened, he said that he bought a table saw a couple of weeks ago and managed to cut off the end of his thumb while using it over the weekend.

My friend, John, said, "Well Gary, I guess you could say you have good news and bad news. The bad news, obviously, is that you cut off the end of your thumb. The good news is you can now use that thumb if you're hitch hiking and only want a short ride."

Cowboy Club Protocol

In the spring of 1976 I rode my Triumph out to the Washington D.C. area to take in the summer long celebration of our country's bicentennial. I stayed in a small motel in Alexandria Virginia and rode into D. C. every day to check out the festivities. I spent the better part of one week just wandering around the Smithsonian Museum.

A couple blocks from my motel was a huge country and western night club. One evening I decided to walk over there and check it out. When I got to the door, the bouncer said, "I'm sorry, but you can't come in. You're wearing Levis and that's not allowed." I said, "Do you realize how bizarre it is to not allow people to wear Levis in a cowboy bar?" He thought for a minute and then said,  "You're right, that's pretty fucked up. Go on in."

Inside I found a bandstand with a large dance floor and two large groups of tables. Most of the guys were wearing cowboy hats, string ties, and boots. The women favored big hair, heavy makeup, and lots of jewelry. It was a safe bet that the only cow most of those "cowboys" had ever seen was on TV.

I was just standing there taking it all in when one of the two women at the table near me asked, "Are you new here?" I said, "Yes, as a matter of fact I am." She said, "Let me explain the setup. This side of the room is for people that are just here to dance. The other side is for those that are here to get laid."

"Is that posted somewhere?"

"No, but everyone knows about it."

"Well, thanks for explaining the protocol."

It felt like I was in some kind of Twilight Zone episode. I wandered around a bit more and then headed for the exit. The place was just too weird even for me.