LOOKING BACK
by John E. Hunt
c 1996
C H A P T E R 03
(1959-1961)
Newfoundland and the visit with the relatives in New England were behind us and we had settled in to our new home at Virginia Beach, Virginia (actually about seventeen miles from the beach). I started school at Princess Anne High School on Virginia Beach Boulevard, about five miles from the beach proper.
The school was much bigger than I was used to. Classes had in excess of thirty students. Teachers were not able to devote as much time to individuals as had been done at my previous school. I'd missed about two months of school just traveling and visiting relatives. That, coupled with the fact that I had to learn the dreaded trigonometry that year, and couldn't get a grip on it, lead to low marks on my report card (some C's and even a D). I hadn't received low marks like that before, and it was very discouraging.
Bob Pellitier was a new friend I met, and a kindred spirit. He too, was unhappy in school. We began skipping classes and going to the beach. Occasionally, we bought some beer (I could pass easily for twenty-three, even though I was only nineteen – maybe I was just ugly) and went partying along the shoreline someplace. I didn't have a car of my own yet, but Bob's parents let him use their car all the time.
We talked of how discouraged we were with school and planned to enter the Air Force together. One night at the Beach, we partied a little too much, and we had an accident with the car on the way back. We hit a tree. The police made out a report and took us to Bob's house where he was promptly grounded. I had to call my folks to come and pick me up and explain to them what had happened. They were not happy and grounded me also.
I had three months to go until graduation, but I had no guarantee of that happening either. One day I went to the Air Force recruiter by myself and filled out the necessary paperwork. I had to get permission from my parents to enter, but after my current difficulties, I didn't think they would mind if I cut the apron strings. I got the permission, but later when I went back to the recruiter, I passed a Navy recruiting office and stopped in there to see what they had to offer. It sounded good so I signed a commitment. About a month later, I got a notice to report to Richmond, Virginia for induction into the Navy.
The year was 1959 and I had just completed a battery of tests at the induction center at Richmond, Virginia. I was called in for an interview with a counselor. He told me that based upon my rendering the correct number of answers on a Morse Code test consisting of three letters, a, e, and t, or dih-dah, dit, and dah, and the speed with which I copied them, he thought I would make a good radioman in the Navy. Obviously some other consideration must have been taken into account also, right? He said I was smart! Well, I didn't know about that, but it sounded like a job where I wouldn't be getting my hands soiled and would be privy to frequent contacts with my commander, which might lead to faster advancement. I said okay.
I was put in charge of about six other guys (actually given a plain yellow envelope that contained our orders assigning us to the United States Naval Training Center, Great Lakes, Illinois, and meal tickets for all), because I was the oldest or ugliest, take your pick. I hated that responsibility, but the guys were good guys, and didn't rib me too much.
We traveled by bus and arrived at the Center around 2:00 a.m., dragging our butts off the bus. We were led like cattle into this building with a huge room and a lot of tables and chairs. They gave us more tests until about six in the morning. Any sleep we had, had been on the way up on the bus. I guess they were trying to see how the fatigue factor entered into the equation on the test results.
I should mention that this was early April 1959, and winter weather still prevailed. The Center was just outside of Chicago, and cold winds blew right off Lake Erie, to frost our exhalations and shiver our bones.
When we had completed the test, they told us to leave our luggage, fall outside into a formation and go to the mess hall for chow. The normal pace of any recruit is at a run or jog, so that is what we had to do that morning. The necessity of posting a road guard at intersections before crossing streets was quickly explained and apparent once we took off. Recruits who had been there earlier, had seniority at the crossings and we had to put up with the disparaging chants they uttered about us as they passed. We were still in civilian clothes and these guys looked like seasoned veterans in uniform; some were even in step. We truly must have presented a bedraggled sight to them!
My first meal in the Navy consisted of a hot cup of coffee, a tin tray loaded with steak and beans, bacon and eggs with toast, and a glass of milk. I had never had steak and beans for breakfast, but I quickly began to enjoy the meals and could never get enough food, it seemed. I did not realize that the physical regimen we trained under and the classroom work we did was changing the physiological makeup of our bodies. I'll say more of this later.
We spent the remainder of the day getting issued bedding and clothing, for which we had to be measured, and they had a whole gaggle of tailors who went over our bodies carefully with a tape measure and noted various sizes at pertinent points. None of us could understand why the clothes fit so badly when we wore them later. The tailors had been so meticulous in their measurements. We were assigned a barrack, a bunk and locker, and instructed on how to store our gear and make our bed. Of course, we didn't get to bed until later that night at about 9:00 p.m.
Day two arrived at the ungodly hour of 4:00 a.m., in the form of bright, glaring lights from the overhead rafters and a sound like thunder sitting on top of my head. The noise, I subsequently learned, is the sound a coke bottle makes when it is spun round and round inside the mouth of a corrugated trash can, of which, three were evenly spaced down the center aisle. They seemed to have been strategically placed there to allow our drill instructors (DIs) to get our maximum attention at this hour.
We were told in no uncertain terms that we only had thirty minutes to take care of our three S's (shit, shower and shave), get dressed (again in civvies because we hadn't yet marked our clothes with stencils), and fall out in formation for chow. This we proceeded to do with varying degrees of success and a lot of grumbling.
The day was devoted to having stencils made, learning how to mark all our clothing, to include handkerchiefs, how to fold and stow them in a 3' x 3' x 3' foot locker (a place for everything, and everything in its place), and getting a haircut that put a bowling ball to shame.
The start of the third day was the same, but later we met our chief petty officer (CPO Hartley) who was the head DI for our company. We were issued a rifle (M-1 Garand), and told to memorize the serial number. We never fired it. The rifle was to be used to perform exercises called the Manual of Arms and there were sixteen of the exercises. These exercises built our upper-body strength and honed our coordination. We learned how to disassemble it, clean it, and put it back together again, along with the standard issue .45 caliber handgun.
Classroom instruction on military history, terminology, proper methods of address and salutation between officer and enlisted members; the art of swimming and instruction on moving in formation (faces and obliques), took up most of our daily lives. We also learned how to mount a guard on a dumpster for a twenty-four-hour period and the reason for having a fire guard. This was good practice for later when we might be called upon to guard something of more importance. Actually, the guard on the dumpster was occasioned because someone had gotten caught with a woman in one of the dumpsters and they hadn't been looking for something to eat.
On a daily basis, personal hygiene was checked twice daily during formation. You were stood at attention and when the DI passed in front of you, you were expected to reach up with thumb and turn out the neck of your T-shirt. That little white seam that runs around the collar had better not be dirty! Most of us learned to wash our clothes properly, often, and every day. This included the white spats, which had to be worn over the boots.
Clothespins were not used by recruits to hang clothes to dry. Instead, we were given twine ties that had metal studs on each end to prevent unraveling. We learned to tie off the corners of our shirts, pants, handkerchiefs, socks, or whatever, with these ties, and it must be a square knot that was used, and not a granny knot. The ends of the ties had to be even and not protrude more than a half inch. Mother never had it like that!
The time went by very fast, and those who couldn't take the strain were weeded out. Some sickness and injury occurred, which eliminated others. I caught rubella but was not absent from my company long enough to be set back. Graduation was fast approaching, but first we had a liberty coming in downtown Chicago.
The pomp and ceremony of a graduation from USNTC, Great Lakes, Illinois, with the huge parades of newly made sailors marching in review to band music, colorful banners, bright swords, clean uniforms, and expectant friends and relatives sitting in the stands, is a sight that is very stirring. It also takes a lot of practice to pull off to perfection. The last several weeks of boot camp were devoted to getting the moves on the field down pat.
During this period, we were allowed a little more freedom and even given liberty to downtown Chicago, as long as we stayed in uniform. This was a part of the regular initiation of every sailor. He could strut the street in his uniform, showing how sharp he looked. For the more adventurous (and there were always some), the tattoo parlors on State Street beckoned. Other things beckoned on State Street, also. There were the burlesque houses (since closed down, I hear) made famous by such delightful people as Fanny Brice, W. C. Fields, Bert Lahr, and the notorious bevy of scantily clad strippers who traipsed across those stages.
We finally graduated and got our orders to our next duty stations. Most of us took a short leave of absence to visit at home before reporting to our next assignment. Our good-byes were said, and sad, and it was not many who would see each other again, but some of us did. We made some strong friendships there.
I went home to Virginia on leave. My friend Bob Pellitier had gone into the Air Force, and I never saw him again. The time at home was short, but I was glad to take my departure and get on with my training at Radioman "A" School in Bainbridge, Maryland.
In late summer of 1959, I traveled by bus to Hyattsville, Maryland. The driver let me out at about eight o'clock at night at a small store where I was instructed by the proprietor to call the base (the number was on the wall next to the phone) and they would send someone out to get me. This I did, and sure enough, some transportation arrived and took me to the base. I gave a copy of my orders to the duty petty officer, was issued some bedding, and given temporary billeting for the night in a barracks full of other slumbering shapes. There wasn't much talking that night; everyone appeared tired.
In the morning we were taken to the mess hall in a group, but there was a little more decorum to the procession. It didn't seem as though we were being herded, and we were not made to run or march at lock-step. The mess hall was huge and looked like a converted airplane hanger. It had picnic-style tables and benches, which stretched from wall to wall and could feed about a thousand men and women at a sitting.
Along the walls and behind them were several small kitchens where trays were handed in through slotted windows. A trainee separated the knife, fork, and spoon into a tray, dumped and scraped any slops from the tray into a trash can, and emptied cups or glasses of liquid and placed them in a tray. All these items, in their own trays, were then placed on an assembly line that fed through a very hot steam-cleaning cabinet. A trainee operated this cabinet also, making sure that the temperature was always hot enough. He had to check the dinnerware for cleanliness as it came out the other end too.
Everyone hated the mornings that pancakes were served because the syrup got on everything and was hard to clean. Everyone took turns learning each phase of the operation, because at one time or another, he did it all. Other trainees were waiting to carry the newly washed utensils back out to the serving line and separate and stack them properly to await the next meal. Besides the scullery crew, which is what this team of about six was called, other trainees worked the floor, constantly seeing to it that the milk machines didn't run out, the condiment containers remained full, and the floors were free of spillage. At the end of each meal, the floor workers were responsible for cleaning the tables, benches and floors.
Some trainees were detailed to work the kitchen where the food was prepared. Mostly they off-loaded supplies from the trucks when they came in, peeled potatoes, and sometimes broke eggs into bowls for the breakfast meals (I can still crack eggshells one-handed in each hand and empty the contents without spilling a drop of albumen). They washed the pots and pans, and huge mixing pots, and swept and mopped the kitchen constantly. Some were detailed to work the line (ladle out the food onto the trays) during meals, but we were never allowed to actually prepare a dish on the menu.
The reason why I went into such detail here is that every trainee had to pull such duty for three months straight, out of the approximately nine months he was there for training. This included me. Bainbridge trained more than just radiomen. There was a large contingent of fire control technicians and Waves (women sailors) who passed through there also. Waves did not pull the dreaded KP. Why this was so, I don't know! These activities began about three-thirty in the morning, and finished up between eight and nine at night. The day's activities left little desire, nor any time for socializing. Mess hall duty was generally taken up in the fifth or sixth week, after the trainee had learned the basics of typing and had some classes on basic electronics. I had already had some experience typing, so my transition through this period of time was relatively easy.
When I started radioman school at Bainbridge, Maryland, in the fall of 1959, I was part of a class of about forty-five students, who, with the exception of the Waves, of which there were five in our class, lived in large open-bay barracks, with stacked bunk beds lining either side of the room at regular intervals. The obligatory picnic-style tables and benches, of which there were three, were placed in the center of the room and were for us to sit around while shining our boots and brass, or sewing, or doing schoolwork, or just to relax and shoot the bull together.
Class leaders and their assistants were elected by democratic means among us all, but usually those positions went to the more experienced or older of the students. At any rate, those selected wore special arm bands that showed their position of authority within the class. They were given more responsibility over our lives, and less of the menial chores that had to be performed. For example, they did not have to pull fire guard at night, but they were responsible for making out the list of those who did. They made out the duty rosters for the chores that had to be performed on a daily basis, both at school (sweeping the floors and hallways at the end of the day, dusting, etc.), and in the barracks.
One of the additional duties of such a person selected was to make sure that the class was formed up, and marched in an orderly manner under its own banner, to the school area. We were graded weekly on our marching ability and appearance, and at the end of the month, a class was chosen as being, "The Best All Around," and given a new banner to carry, along with the class banner. This singular honor exempted us (if we were the winner) from additional duties at the school, such as police call (picking up trash and cigarette butts).
My particular class happened to have a gimmick that garnered this honor for us many times. We had a Scotsman in the class who happened to have a set of bagpipes, and he knew how to play them. We were the only class that marched to school with the cacophonous roar of bagpipes swirling in our ears. Let me tell you, it takes a while to get used to that! I'll bet Bainbridge never saw the like of us again after we left.
Classes were divided into basic electronic theory-lecture type, or hands-on lab work, where we actually built electrical circuits. We had typing and Morse code classes also. These last were the eliminators, especially the code. The requirement for graduation was to be able to copy twenty-two words per minute accurately on a mill or typewriter. This was no easy task and generally proceeded in stages where one would reach a plateau, say eight words per minute, and get stuck for a week or so, but finally reach the next speed of ten words per minute.
You advanced in speed at your own pace or ability to copy that speed. If you failed to make a certain speed by the nth week of training, you were set back to another class. Naturally, everyone wanted to stay with the same class he started with.
It was not easy! I have seen some students go catatonic in the classroom, and have to be taken away by ambulance to the hospital. That code is a real mind-bender when you copy it day after day, four to six hours every day. I found that after being stuck on a plateau for about a week without being able to advance to a higher words-per-minute speed, it helped to go to the club and get drunk the night before. For some reason, copying code with a hangover made you relax more and not anticipate the next character, which is where most of us made our mistakes. In this relaxed stage, your fingers automatically hit the right key as soon as the code character was heard. This method of getting past a block was not always infallible and occasioned some bad days at school.
It was during this period of time, the dead of winter, that I got a case of bronchial asthma and could not march to class, or do anything of a physical nature, without gasping for breath. Fortunately, I was not made to march, and was given light duties. This enabled me to keep up with the class in school, and not fall behind and get set back to another group.
I took a job (non-paying) working in the library at night and was able to practice my escapism act (reading) during lax hours. The job consisted of taking in, and signing out books to patrons, refiling books on the proper shelves, and maintaining cleanliness and order within the library. The Dewey Decimal System became a familiar one. I met some nice dependents at that job also.
Relaxation on base consisted mostly of a gymnasium, which was quite far from the barracks/school area, and necessitated a good hike. I went mostly on weekends. For socializing, there was an enlisted club up the street that had a tropical motif and sold a lot of pitchers of beer. It was a close-by place, where one could go to unwind, and meet some Waves for female companionship. I think I had the only job in the area (the library) that brought me into contact with non-military female personnel.
I spent some nights, mostly weekend nights, and some Saturdays going to a roller skating rink on the highway just past the Hyattsville city limits. Trouble was, I had to hitch-hike out there and back. In those days, it wasn't so chancy a risk, and it was easy to get a ride. The police looked the other way. For advertisement of my destination, I carried my precision skates draped across my shoulders.
As I said, one place we used for relaxation after school was the small enlisted club on base where we could socialize. One of our number had purchased a cheap clunker of a car when graduation was drawing nigh, thinking to use this for his departure.
On a Friday afternoon after school, three of us guys, and three girls (Waves), who were all classmates, met at the club, and after several shared pitchers of beer, decided to pack small overnight bags, load into the car, and go to Baltimore to unwind for the weekend. One of the girls was named Goode; she was the blond, the other two were a redhead and a brunette, but I cannot recall their names.
It was all innocent fun, the trip there and eating at a restaurant at two o'clock in the morning, but the city was dead. We piled into the car and went back to base, arriving early in the morning, too tired to do anything but crawl into the sack to sleep it off. I mentioned Goode's name, because until graduation, whenever we all met together, someone was bound to say "I feel good." Of course there had been no hanky-panky on that trip, but the statement invariably made Goode blush and vehemently deny any such happening, and it brought a smile to all our lips.
Well, we finally made it through graduation and were now full-fledged, school trained radioman strikers. We were strikers until such time as we made petty officer third class. If you substitute the word peon for striker, you will get an idea of our status. The good-byes were said, and again, they were sad, because of the parting.
Surprise, surprise, my new assignment was the United States Naval Communication Station, Norfolk, Virginia! I lived at home in Virginia Beach, and commuted to work at the naval station with my father and brother in the morning. This was the only time we ever got assigned to the same area at the same time. My brother was aboard a ship at the Norfolk piers, my father was stationed ashore, about a mile from the pier, and I worked in a labyrinth of a huge cement block building, with no windows, and a lot of antenna on top. It was located between the naval air station and the naval operating base, and only about five miles distant from my father and brother.
Our house was a little under twelve miles from the base, so it was about a twenty-three mile round trip by car every day. There were a lot of days that one or the other of us caught duty, which required making other arrangements for transportation.
A redheaded civilian man worked in the automatic switching center downstairs in my building. He lived out beyond me, and worked the same shift I did (three eves, three mids, three days, and three days off), so I arranged with him for transportation. His name was House, and he was a cigar-chomping, philosopher, with a quick wit, and gentle laugh; a fine man to know.
The blockhouse that was NAVCOMSTA, NORVA, had elaborate security. Everyone was expected to wear an ID badge to enter the building and throughout the day. An U.S. Marine guard was posted at the door to check everyone entering or leaving, and believe me, if you had seen this guy 100 times, and time 101 your papers were not correct, the only way you could get in to work was to have your supervisor come out to the entrance and sign you in; and when you left, he had to sign you out.
When I first started working there, I worked in the basement boiler room until my security clearance checked out and a badge was issued. I was a glorified gofer, you know, gofer this, and gofer that. Later, my first job was in what they call torn tape relay, which was located upstairs. The job consisted of logging in the teletype messages received on banks of machinery, making header tapes for rerouting to the addressees, and logging out those rerouted messages. It was not a hard job to learn, but it was tedious.
In 1960, my second job at the Naval Communications Station was working downstairs in the Teletype Automatic Switching Center. Someone from upstairs in Torn Tape Relay had seen me work and thought I was good enough to work downstairs, so I was transferred.
It will not be necessary for me to describe the exact operation, but in order for you to understand how complex an automatic switching center is, I will need to tell you its' function.
Automatic Switching Centers send and receive teletype messages all over the world, twenty-four hours a day, from Saudi Arabia to Seoul, Korea, to any place you care to name. All this is done electronically, and if routed correctly, without the aid of human intervention in between points. At the same time it is sending this traffic (that's what it is called), it makes a back-up copy of the entire message and how it was routed and numbered, spins this teletype, taped message off to a separate room at the back of the center where it is stored on a continuous reel of tape, which must be constantly monitored, tightened, removed from the reel, labeled with date and time and stored. This latter work did involve the intervention of humans and is part of the work I did in the center.
Later, we worked the floor and the back room with the taped reels. The floor work was the difficult part to learn. Picture if you will, a very long and wide room with a center aisle about thirty feet wide; it was very brightly lit with overhead fluorescent lighting. In the center of the aisle was an ultra-modern, four-sided, transmitting and receiving station, containing the latest teletype technological equipment. This station was always manned by the supervisor of the shift on duty. He was generally a GS-15 or higher, and a civilian. There were outgoing banks of consoles on the right and incoming banks on the left, stretching the entire length of the room. Each console was about four feet wide and contained, four, either incoming or four outgoing, pull-out cabinets with reels of teletype paper rolls.
The incoming cabinets had approximately 109 possible audio and visual alarms. The operators had to be familiar with how to correct the alarms (torn or twisted tape, improper transmission sequence of characters, wrong numbers, etc.), and the outgoing cabinets had about 79 alarms. The machinery gave off a constant and loud hum.
There were about eight operators per shift, not counting the supervisor. Most of the operators were civilians, men and women. Of the active duty military on my shift, there was a Wave radioman striker who went through Bainbridge at the same time as me, but in a different class, and me.
Our job was to service the equipment by changing teletype tape rolls when needed, and paper at the center aisle command station. We constantly tightened reels, logged, serviced, and reset any alarms which were caused by faulty routing, and answered request from outlying stations for reruns of messages they may have missed, or received garbled.
We were a major trunk line, with RBEK as a routing indicator, and Washington, D.C., or RBEP, as the other major trunk line on the East Coast of the United States. Over fifty-thousand messages passed through our facility every twenty-four hours.
That should give you a general idea of my work environment at this place of duty. I was there for a little over a year. In 1961, I got orders to transfer to the USS Hoist, ARS-40, an auxiliary repair and salvage ship berthed down the road at D & S Piers (destroyer and submarine). That is where my adventures really began.
I suppose I should tell you that in 1959, the base salary for a new recruit was only seventy-eight dollars a month. For the first three months, he didn't see any of that because it was taken out of his pay automatically to pay for his uniforms and equipment.
While working at NAVCOMSTA, NORVA, in 1960 and living at home, I put on a bit of weight. I went from about 137 to 187 pounds. I was known as "the bear." My uniforms had to be adjusted accordingly, and it got to be expensive. I'd been in about a year by then, and made one rank higher in pay grade, so I was making about $122 a month.
My new assignment aboard ship at the D & S Piers in Norfolk, Virginia, caused me to lose some of that weight. The ship was a salvage ship, known as a sea-going tug. We had experienced deep-sea divers, scuba divers, and some demolitions men, and machinists aboard, who could design and build just about any machined tool to accomplish a task, or could blow up the same. The ship's mission involved clearing the harbor of debris, or towing ships to safety if they lost power, or were not able to get underway.
My job was to support communications by radio voice/CW (Morse code), or teletype while at sea. I had to maintain the radios, teletypewriters, and transmitters in operational readiness at all times, keeping an accurate log of all incoming and out-going messages. Coding and decoding messages was another responsibility of mine. I had to know which messages were important enough to wake up the captain during the middle of the night, and which could wait until morning. A ship at sea could not survive without good radio operators, so the captain of the vessel depended very heavily upon his "eyes and ears," the radioman, and a strong rapport usually developed between the Commander and his enlisted communicators.
Our biggest operation came in early 1961, when the USS Baldwin, a destroyer being towed from Boston to Philadelphia, slipped its tow and went aground on the beach at Montauk Point, New York. This was an island resort town ($$$), but it had a lobstering community on the coast also. My ship acted as Task Force Command ship, and four other ships were involved in trying to get the Baldwin off the beach. They were the Windlass, the Luiseno, the Keywadin, and the Salvager. In the end, the effort was proving unsuccessful, and the beach had gutted her, so boarding parties went aboard and salvaged what they could (I got some new teletype machines and radio receivers.). She was dragged from the beach, towed to sea, and used for target practice until she went to the bottom.
One man was killed on that operation and two were hospitalized. A two-inch-thick u-bolt used on the tow line shattered, and the fragments hit one man in the head, killing him instantly and injuring the other two.
The Second Class Quartermaster, who plotted the day-to-day operation on a piece of parchment, was a friend of mine. He gave me the parchment upon which he had plotted the operation. I still have it here at home. It has an "X" to mark the spot where the Baldwin went to Davy Jones' Locker.
Next we went into dry dock at Portsmouth for three months for an overhaul, which included stripping the entire ship of old paint by sand blasting and air guns, checking all joints and engines and repainting the entire ship. When we finished that, we took the ship out and ran it by the degaussing station at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay to demagnetize it.
We were refitted and received our orders for a shakedown cruise to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. During this type of operation, the ship and the crew are put through every known emergency drill and procedure to make sure they are on a wartime footing. These drills included transfer at sea by hi-line from one ship to another, and target practice at air and sea-towed targets (the Hoist was fitted with 40-millimeter antiaircraft guns).
I had one night ashore in GITMO to look over old haunts, and tried, unsuccessfully, to locate my Cuban friend I played with as a boy, but he had gone to Florida, and I only talked to his sister. We returned to the States and tragedy.
We usually tied up at the D & S Piers at NORVA upon return to homeport. Instead, we were directed to the piers at Little Creek, Virginia, which was out in the boondocks about seven miles from town. There were some moth-balled ships tied up there. Everyone was tired; that shakedown cruise had been a real bummer on all our nerves. We were tested to the maximum of endurance both physically and emotionally. It was time to relax!
I invited the first class quartermaster and my boss, the first class radioman, to my house for supper. We stopped for a few cold beers and to play some pool on the way home. Supper at my house was very good, and Mom didn't mind the unexpected guests. She was good that way, I guess, because my father used to bring home uninvited guests at the drop of a hat, and she could always throw something together to make a meal. About 7:00 p.m., we made our excuses to my mother, and told her we were going to go to a dance just over the North Carolina State line. It was listed in the papers.
The car belonged to my boss, and he started out driving. It was a long trip, so we stopped occasionally for a beer. At one time, it was suggested I drive, but being unfamiliar with the car, I didn't. The QM drove out of the last beer stop.
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Friday, April 03, 2009
Chapter 2 of Looking Back
Looking Back (Chapter 2)
by John E. Hunt
Copyright 1996
This is a continuation of the story that began with my birth in March of 1940. Chapter 1 tells of my early life in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, how my brother and I ended up in an orphanage, were removed and lived for a while on a farm in MA. It told of my subsequent move to Virginia and some of the adventures I had there, then the move to Cuba and my exploits there. When we concluded that chapter, we had just returned from Cuba to Central Falls, Rhode Island. The story continues:
C H A P T E R 02
(1953-1959)
When I left Central Falls in 1953, my father was stationed at Patuxent Naval Air Station, at Patuxent River, Maryland. That is where experimental test planes were/are flown, to iron out the bugs. Keep in mind that this was 1953 through 1955. During that time, I personally know of three fatal aircraft crashes on the test ranges. The planes that were being tested were the forerunners of the Stealth bomber that was recently unveiled. I used to see the plane from time to time, and my parents were personal friends of one of the pilots that crashed. They called it the flying wing. It may not have been the exact same plane they unveiled, but it was one of the early test models.
Before we left Central Falls for Pawtuxent River, Maryland, we visited our relatives in Sabatus, Maine. My aunt and uncle gave me a set of skis for Christmas, and as a going-away present. I used them exactly once in Maryland when we had a half-inch snowfall that lasted all of five hours. I fell quite a lot and gave up trying to be a Jean Claude Killy, downhill racer.
My forte then became exploring the woods around the housing area on post. I led many an expedition, ala Lewis and Clark, into the surrounding vegetation, and discovered many good streams and places of solitude, where a boy my age (thirteen to fourteen) could lose himself from the cares of urban living. My constant companion at that time was my collie, Scotty. We had him since 1949 at Newport News, in Virginia. He was very faithful and smart. Sometimes when I left him at home and meal time came, my mother would tie a note to his collar and let him out of the house. He would invariably find me no matter where I was.
Those streams I mentioned were very tempting places on hot days at school. Butch was a playmate of mine. We began sneaking cigarettes and playing hooky from school together. One day we had gone to one of these streams in the woods and decided to go swimming. We went in au natural after folding our clothes on the bank.
The swimming was great for about forty minutes, but unfortunately, we weren't the only ones who passed through those woods. We heard some voices coming, so we scrambled out, grabbed our clothes and ran to hide and dress. We had been seen, however, and recognized. Our parents did find out about it, and mine forbade me to play with Butch again. That dictum couldn't be enforced forever, so it wasn't long before we were playing together again. My parents didn't like Butch, because they thought he was leading me astray. Truth to tell, I couldn't tell you to this day whom was leading who astray.
The elementary school I went to, was located just outside the gate of the post in College Park, Maryland. I used to brown-bag it to school in those days. That is, I'd carry my lunch. Schools didn't have cafeterias and lunchrooms, so one brought one's lunch in a bag, and perhaps traded with another, if he/she had what looked like a better lunch. We did bring some change for sodas, milk, or candy bars, although I seldom used the monies for what they were intended. At first I was into commemorative stamps, which I bought or traded from other students; then I got into foreign coins and bills. A lot of the students were from military families, and had done a lot of traveling with their fathers to different lands. They had some good-looking currency. The temptations were all around.
Later, I found out that the pinball machines, in the various stores in the park, had payoffs in cash if you won games. That became a big thing for Butch and me. Naturally, the machines did most of the winning.
My parents were happy when we moved off post to Tall Timbers, to a house in the pines, on the shore of the Potomac River. I was starting at a new school, and I think they thought the move would split Butch and me up, and I would no longer get into trouble. Though Butch stayed on post, he, too, was bussed to the same school as I. It was a stalemate. I also made another new friend named Jimmy Calisanto who I had some adventures with, about which you shall hear soon.
I was fourteen, and it was a very exciting age; I lived in a great place. Dad found this place nestled in the tall pine trees, bordering the Potomac River, on the Maryland side. When you walked out the back door onto a screened veranda, the vista was all river, with the Virginia side visible on the horizon about seven miles distant. About forty feet from the back door, was an eight-foot seawall, which dropped to the river itself. There was no beach, but at low tide, it was only about three feet deep at the base of the seawall.
Various houses along the shore had well-built piers, that jutted out into the river some 40 to 220 feet. One had to ask permission of the owners to use their pier, but the neighbors were great about sharing. We fished off their piers a lot, and swam also. Most of the homeowners were Summer People, but some stayed year round. We fit the latter category.
Living right on the Potomac, occasioned a lot of seafood meals in our house. Mom was crazy about crab, so every day, my brother or I would check the two crab pots directly offshore from our house. Generally we'd find several crabs there. Another trick was to take fish heads, tied to long strings, and throw them out and slowly drag them back. Invariably there would be a crab that could be scooped up in a long-handled net carried for that purpose. The crab didn't want to let the fish head go.
Sometimes I went along the shore about three-quarters of a mile, where the seawall tapered off, and a small beach formed. Crabs could be readily caught, by net alone, in the shallows there. This was where I liked to fish also. The most common fish we caught were what we called spot and perch. Sometimes we'd catch eels, but they wriggled in the frying pan gruesomely.
In the deeper waters, rock fish (striped bass) could be caught. This end of the inlet was separated by an expanse of open water about forty feet wide, and having a very swift current when the tide was changing. The shoreline continued on the other side, and sometime, in the slack tide, we kids would swim across, but it was dangerous. If the tide was going out, a swimmer could be swept way out into the Potomac and drown. An incoming tide, led to a harbor for the boats belonging to the local populace.
One day, Jimmy Calisanto and I visited the harbor and took a rowboat out to a launch that had an inboard motor on it. Jimmy and his family knew the owner, so when a guard who watched the marina stopped us to asked what we were doing, Jimmy said we had permission to use the launch. You guessed it! No such permission had ever been given. We managed to fire the engine up, slip the mooring, and take her out for an hour or so. That was great fun, and we got away with it.
Several days later, we tried it again with success. We tried to make it out of the inlet, but the current was too swift, and it's a good thing too. There is no telling what would have happened had we managed to get out and not been able to get back in. When we tired, we brought the launch back to its mooring, secured it and went home.
Jimmy and I were both called to task for our adventures that night. It seems the owners had returned and the guard had asked them about a couple of kids using their boat. I know I got my bottom blistered for that one and placed on restriction too; I don't remember how long, but it seemed forever.
Vallery Grimes was my secret and unrequited love here. She was a beautiful girl, but had a big brother who used to pull the legs and shells off the crabs while they were still alive. I thought that gross! At least my mother cooked them in boiling water, where they died instantly, before she pulled them apart. As I was saying about Vallery, we used to have swims at night at the end of the pier near her house. The pier had lights on it, which allowed late swimming. Sometimes we would just sit out there and sing songs or talk. I didn't realize until later when my brother, Harold, went into the Navy,that he had been sweet on her also.
While living in Tall Timbers, Maryland, and in the eighth grade at Great Mills Middle School, we had a brother and sister of German extraction, who were new to our school, and convinced the school to start up a soccer team. The boy's name was Jacob, and he taught most of us the rules of the game as well as designing the playing field. Looking back on it today, he seemed like a young Pele to me. Boy, he could handle that ball with his feet! It was purely magical.
The only sibling in my family was my brother. He had joined the navy by the time we returned to Central Falls and I enrolled in Central Falls High School. You might say I was an only child from the age of fifteen on, because my brother made a career of the navy, and the only time we were all together again, was when we were all in the navy in 1960-1961, and stationed in Virginia. We had a very disunited family life after that, with never any two of us being stationed at the same place.
In late 1955, we returned to Central Falls again and to the same house at 391 Dexter Street, second floor. I enrolled at Central Falls High School, and once again renewed my friendships and made new friends. Those were great years for me because girls became a focus of my imagination, if not a figment. You really couldn't tell by my actions, because I was most unashamedly bashful in a one-on-one situation. But I could look my fill,and I did that a lot.
Central Falls High School never did have a swimming pool or track, but we kids always managed to stay in shape with some sport or other. For swimming, as I recollect, we used to go to a place called Lincoln Woods. We would ride our bikes, and it would be an all-day affair. Sometimes, we'd go to the YMCA.
On my side of Dexter Street, just down from my house, was a pizza parlor, and a fish and chips store. We used to play the jukebox (Fats Domino, Paul Anka, etc.) while waiting for the best pizza in the world. They used to serve milk shakes there too, only we called them frappes.
After school, I'd jump on my bike and go to Jenk's Park and over to Sacred Heart, which I believe is on Broad, and on down to Ashley's playground. Sacred Heart Park, as it is now called, is where I used to do most of my basketball playing year-round. We would shovel the snow off the court in the winter. There was a railroad track running next to the court, and some swings, but most of it was just field.
Cross Street always was a nice tree-lined street from Dexter to Broad. There were no bars on it, but there was a funeral home on the left-hand side of Cross, about halfway between Dexter and Broad. It had a fancy blue neon sign out front. I remember one evening, an uncle I had, who lived on lower Cross Street, had visited my mom and me on Dexter Street, and had availed himself of an abundance of alcohol at our place. My mother asked me to see him home when he left after dark.
We had to walk because he was in no condition to ride my bike. So with his arm draped across my shoulder, we started for lower Cross Street. Naturally we had to pass the funeral home and they had the neon sign on. You can guess what my uncle thought it was! I had a devil of a time to pass that place with him, but I managed to convince him that the only fluid he could get there, was embalming fluid, and he was well on the way to that state of being anyway.
My father was gone on a Navy assignment someplace whenever we lived in Central Falls. My mother had to raise my brother and me by herself. Sometimes she worked during the interval of separation as a Creeler/Doffer at Coates & Clark in Central Falls. So yes, I guess you could say I had a lot of freedom and might even be compared to what is called today, a latchkey kid. Mom only expected me to stay out of trouble, get good grades in school, and be home on time for supper. I managed to do all that pretty well.
Other families had different situations, and some of my friends' parents kept a pretty tight rein on them. Mostly though, we had fun and freedom enough to enjoy ourselves. The diverse racial and ethnic groups present today in Central Falls were also present in my day. That made for some very good times because we learned more about each others' customs and ways of life. A favorite pastime I enjoyed was going to my friends' houses to eat the different native foods.
We kids had a lot of pressures also from our peers and from the times. They weren't the same kind of pressures that youngsters of today have to live with. Drugs were almost non-existent and the communications media weren't so quick to jump on world catastrophes and present them to you over the supper table or breakfast table as a fact of life. We didn't have nuclear holocaust hanging over our heads constantly. People cared more for each other, or so it seemed. Teen suicides seldom happened and their morals were not corrupted by the environment we live in, such as has happened in a lot of places today.
When a boy and girl went on a date, they usually kept their clothes on for the duration. That's not to say that we didn't kiss and pet, which was acceptable for the times. Parties we attended were usually school or church functions and were well chaperoned.
I generally wore a tie to school (one of the few oddball affectations I had) and was quite studious. My nose would generally be buried in some book or other. We only had one study period during the latter part of the day, and I would usually have my homework finished by the end of that period. After school, if I didn't go to the library to get some reading material, I would go home and get my bike and head for Frank or Jim's house or Jenk's Park or what was then Ashley Field. There was always something to do and someone with whom to do it. On weekends, I would pedal over to my cousin's place in Pawtucket and we would ride our bikes to the rollerskating rink, where I could fall with the best of skaters.
Central Falls is a small city, and a disproportionate amount of drug traffic was found to be passing through there a few of years ago. Drug abuse is a nasty happening, and it's a shame that Central Falls was saddled with that reputation, but that should not stand in the way of cleaning up the city. It's a good city, and the people who made it a good city are inherently good; at least I shall always have fond memories of it.
Some of my secret loves were Marsha Goshenski and Maxine Slakowski. I had other secret loves, but woe is me, they never knew it. Had any one of them even dropped a hint that we could get to know each other better, maybe something more positive could have come of my yearnings. Sometimes the girl has to be the aggressor, I think.
My first money-making job ever, was acquired there in Central Falls. I don't recall exactly where it was located, but it was a Swift Meat Packing Plant. I worked there for two weeks, packing sausage. A skin would be placed over the outlet of the meat-grinding machine and when the grinder was turned on, the meat would be fed into the grinder at the top and would come out and fill the skin at the outlet. A man would twist the sausage into links, pile them into a cart, and take them to the freezer. That is where I worked, along with about five other boys during the Summer.
They gave us parkas to work in the freezer, but when you have to work with knives to cut the sausages into the proper length links, and then pack them into boxes with a see-through cellophane cover, you cannot wear gloves. Let me tell you, it got mighty cold in there and we had to take frequent trips outside to warm up. Sometimes it was so cold, we would cut ourselves and not notice it until someone spotted the blood on the sausages. It usually was just wiped off and packaged anyway. I didn't eat sausages for over twenty years after that experience. I only worked there two weeks because I caught bronchial pneumonia.
My next job was a lot more lucrative. I worked for W.T. Grant on Broad Street. Actually, I was a stock boy and worked in the warehouse diagonally across the street from Grant's, and on a slight uphill on the left. This other stock boy and I, would load merchandise on dollies, take it down the hill and across Broad Street, and into the store, to the appropriate floor and department. It was a rough job, but a muscle-builder also. It taught me to be nimble when crossing Broad Street during the rush hour. The lucrative part was that at Christmas, I got a discount on a model train set that I gave to my cousin. That made a nice Christmas for him and made me feel good too.
Biology was a favorite class of mine in high school. Unfortunately, I wasn't too good with a scalpel and botched a couple of dissections. My drawings, and research on the subject were more than adequate to advance me to the next higher grade.
One show-stopper that I can recall from biology class was the day we first discussed the reproductive cycle in humans. Being an erudite student and well read, when the teacher, Mr. Fay, asked if anyone knew where the sperm that fertilized the ova came from, and nobody raised their hand to answer (as a matter of fact, sex education was not taught in school in those days and was a bit embarrassing to discuss), I volunteered the answer as the penis.
How was I to know that he only wanted a general location like "male" and not the actual physical organ? A pin could have been dropped in that room during the next thirty seconds and it would have been heard by all. A lot of faces turned red, including mine, when the teacher stammered out the answer he was looking for. Occurrences such as that seemed to plague my life for some reason. Perhaps it is my Karma.
I prided myself on my wrestling ability. I had never been beaten. This was mainly due to the fact that I had tremendous strength of shoulders and biceps and my forearms had strong bones that were close to the surface. My most devastating hold was a headlock, which I would then proceed to grind my forearm into my opponent's neck until he hollered "uncle." Most of my adversaries gave up once I got that hold on them. Ed Arage, however, was different. He was always the consummate athlete and excelled at every sport. I, on the other hand, was average.
One day, in Jenk's Park, Ed and I decided to wrestle. We had agreed that punching was out, but other than that, it was no-holds-barred wrestling. Ed, by the way, stood a good head taller than I. It didn't take me long to get my headlock on him, but try as I might, I could not get him to give up. He had the strongest neck of anyone I'd ever wrestled. Eventually, I had to shift to another hold because I tired with that one and it wasn't successful in achieving my goal. I went to a scissors hold around his waist, but he had me down on my back on the ground. I squeezed a little bit, and he grimaced with pain. I had found his Achilles' heel!
At one point, he raised his fist as if to hit me in the face and make me let go. Our friends were watching, though, and were quick to point out that this action had been agreed upon to be unfair. He didn't strike, and with a final squeeze of the scissors, gave up.
I don't know if Ed has been holding animosity against me all these years for that little episode. I certainly hope not. As far as I know, that was the only chink in his armor. He and Bill Nicynski were always admired by me as being the greatest athletes of the school in those days.
I played mostly basketball for the high school, as did many of the boys at Central Falls, but I did play baseball also, and Allie LaChanch used to be my main pitcher. Frank Juchnik was the back-up pitcher, I was the catcher, and I like to think, a good one. At least I was the only one among our crowd who would volunteer for that position.
It is hard for the catcher to strap on all that extra gear when his team is in the field, catch for a half inning, and then be able to hit and run the bases during the next half-inning. That is why, when you see a good hitting catcher, he is really a good athlete. I didn't hit too good during games, but during warm-ups and practice sessions, I used to hit flies and grounders to the boys in the field. I could hit long distances and place the ball exactly where I wanted it to go.
Getting back to Allie, he was our star pitcher and could really put a lot of stuff on that ball. Batters had a hard time hitting him, because they never knew what he would throw next. It was an elaborate set of hand signals we had worked out. To be honest, though, I would have to admit that Allie didn't always throw what I had signaled him to throw, and what he nodded approval of. Sometimes he was as surprised at where the ball would go as was I. I don't believe our baseball team was ever the caliber of our basketball team, but we had fun anyway.
That leads me to our next topic, which is that Allie, me, Jim Panichas, and Hank Dugan had formed a sort of barbershop quartet and used to practice singing in Jenk's Park. We had worked up a nice little ditty, which we practiced over and over to make the harmony sound good.
When I returned to Central Falls for a short visit in 1959, on my way to Virginia, I attended a basketball game at the high school. I remember Allie, Jim, and several others sitting on the top seat of the bleachers behind me, and I think I was sitting with Frank. Allie, et al., kept singing that song to catch my attention, which they did, but I didn't join them, and I think they got peeved. I have always felt bad about that, and should have apologized to them after the game, but I left without doing so. I hope they didn't hold a grudge against me for that.
In 1957, my mother and I moved to Argentia, Newfoundland, where my father was stationed at one of our country's Distant Early Warning (DEW) lines. In those days, the Naval Air Station at Argentia existed solely to support the flight of Super Constellation aircraft that were loaded with sensitive electronic eavesdropping, and radar equipment. Like pregnant ladies wearing top hats, these huge planes had a bulbous belly, and a round, elevated radar antenna on top, in the middle. They were in the air on a twenty-four hour rotation, and flew the entire northern corridor. Their function was to detect any encroachment to Canada or the Americas from the North.
My father was a Master Chief Storekeeper, in charge of logistical supply for the airmen and planes that flew those missions - no small task that! He had to order everything from the food the men ate, and the clothes they wore, to parts for the aircraft.
I would have to make new friends in a new school at the Naval Air Station in Newfoundland during my junior year. My father sent for us when he found housing off post. We would have to wait until a place on post became available before moving among the military families. Meanwhile, we lived about fifteen miles from the base, in a place called Dunville. Only the roads on base were paved. It was a dirt road all the way to my house, the only road between Argentia and Saint John's, the capitol.
Leaving the base, we passed Placentia Bay with its quaint houses, some of them on stilts. This area was all a fishing and whaling area. The bay ran the length of the road on our right to way past my house fifteen miles distant. On the left of the road was mostly mountain and forested area. Upon reaching my house, there was a small sawmill on the left, up the hill a little way, and my house was across the road, and down the hill about eighty feet, where it leveled off for about a hundred feet, and then dropped to a small lake at the bottom of the hill. We did some fishing for trout in that lake periodically.
On the other side of the lake, and across a small rise of land, was the continuation of Placentia Bay. I used to hike over there from time to time. I've seen whales wash up on the beach and die, pilot whales moving up and down the bay amidst the icebergs. It was a very scenic area, and if you could put up with the loneliness of the spot, it became comfortable.
Our nearest neighbor lived about three miles away (this was not counting the workers at the small sawmill at the top of the hill). The temperature seldom got out of the seventies in summer, and only in the teens in winter. This was a wet cold, though, and if it were windy, you felt it. The Gulf Stream swings up along Newfoundland in the winter, or it would be colder.
When I enrolled in Arthur L. Bristol High School, it was the first year of its' existence on post. Military dependents had been going to Saint John's, the capital, for schooling at Pepperrell Army Base near there. There were only five seniors that year, and there were eleven juniors.
I was in seventh heaven because I had spent the summer off-post, with not another teenager to talk with. I had to make up for lost time! All the teenagers, from freshman to senior, totalled less than forty souls, so nobody was ever ostracized from the teen social activities. We formed all kinds of clubs, and joined as many as we could, just to have some socialization.
I joined the teen bowling league at the officers' club and eventually became a team captain. I became a good figure skater on roller skates, and was asked by the military recreation manager to referee afternoon skating sessions at the gymnasium to make sure there was no horsing around. They even gave me a whistle and a black-and-white striped shirt.
Two events that took place during my stay in Newfoundland, are clearly linked to the cold war. They stand out in my mind. The first is the launching by the USSR of Sputnik in 1957. That event was the topic of discussion throughout the school and I can tell you that it scared us kids quite a bit to think that the Russians were that far advanced in space technology.
We had a rocket club in the school at that time. A kid named Dennis Groggin was the president. He lived and breathed rocketry and built and demonstrated a model rocket for the school. He was sure the U.S. was not far behind in their space endeavors, which proved to be correct.
The second event was Fidel Castro's emergence as a strong reactionary against Batista. Most of us were pro-Castro at that time, because he didn't show any leanings toward communism, and he promised to rid the island of the dictator, Batista. By the time he had consolidated his power, it was too late for the U.S. to do anything about him.
To look at an aerial photo of the base at Argentia, it looks rather desolate and barren. For the most part, it was. There were few trees in the populated areas of the post, they had been removed to make room for the airfield, administrative, housing, and recreational areas. In many places the wind, rain, and snow had swept the topsoil from the surface, exposing the underlying rock. That is how it got its’ nick-name of "The Rock." That is what everyone called it and it seemed most apropos.
In the winter, it was unbelievable how the winds cut right through you, stinging any exposed surface. It felt like a cluster of tattoo needles trying to imprint a picture all at once. It is an exposed area right on the edge of the sea. Most foot traffic came to a halt during the coldest of these days. We only ventured out in vehicles, even if it was just to go a short distance.
A friend of mine, Pete Chamberlain, wanted to go camping on a lake we had found. It was early winter, the ice hadn't yet formed on the water and the temperatures weren't too bad. I didn't have a sleeping bag, so my dad got one from recreational services. We hiked in to the lake and inspected its shoreline for a suitable camping site. When we found one, we proceeded to build a lean-to facing outward toward the lake, and about twenty feet from the shore. We lined the bed area with the softest foliage we could find, spread out our sleeping bags, built a fire, and got out our fishing gear. Before it got dark, we had caught and eaten a couple of trout and exchanged not a few stories of our prowess with the opposite sex (most of that being fabricated on my part - probably on his too).
As dusk settled, we began to see "V" shaped waves forming from time to time out on the lake. I'd brought a pair of binoculars, and was surprised to see that it was beaver swimming that caused this phenomenon. Soon, they moved closer and I didn't need the binoculars. I'd heard that the beaver slapped it's tail on the water and dived when they thought danger was near. To test that theory, I threw a stone in the water close to them. Sure enough, they acted to expectation. I'd never seen beaver at work before, nor close-up. We watched them towing branches from point to point until it was too dark to see anymore. Sleep was late in coming that night. We were warm and comfortable in our sleeping bags and the adventure of being out in the wilderness, lent a tang to our life. The night sounds of the animals lulled us to sleep finally.
One time my dad and I went fishing for salmon with a friend of his, a "Newfie" named Paul. This man was the owner of our house in Dunville. We went to a place called Heart's Delight. Newfoundland is full of places with quaint names like that. Nearby was Heart's Content and Heart's Desire, two other small villages. Almost anywhere you went in Newfoundland was good for fishing.
Paul was a huge man and very jovial. We found a stream bed that looked promising and proceeded to walk upstream. The salmon were running, returning to their birthplace to spawn. I'd seen pictures on television of salmon leaping up falls, and battling strong currents to the point of exhaustion, but to actually see this in person, is quite remarkable. It's a sight that I'll never forget.
When we found a suitable pool, Paul showed me how to "jig" a salmon. It was an illegal method of catching them. You're supposed to use live bait or lures to attract them to feed, but at this time of their lives, the salmon only have one thing on their minds, and that's getting back to their birthplace to spawn. It is seldom that they will stop to feed. Most Newfies only fish inland for subsistence, and if they think they can get away with it, will jig the fish. This involves finding a salmon that is resting in the water, dropping a line with a triple barbed hook on the far side and behind him, and working the line up toward his head. When it is in the right position, quickly raising the line, and pulling it toward you, is likely to hook the fish somewhere around the head. He won't have "struck" the line, but he will be hooked nonetheless. Then you'd best hold on for a fierce fight!
The salmon is the greatest freshwater game fish that I've ever seen. Paul hooked one that was three feet long and weighed over twenty-two pounds. That fish was up stream, down stream, half in, and half out of the water for the next ten minutes. It was a gorgeous fish when he finally landed him! After such a gallant fight, it seemed a shame to eat him, but we did that the very same night.
When I became editor of the school newspaper, I learned how closely tied to the military we were. Our advisor on the school staff was the gym teacher. He had to make arrangements with some military office for the use of their mimeograph machine so that we could run off copies of the paper. We students decided the layout for the articles and pictures, and typed up the stencils needed, but the expertise of transferring pictures to the page was handled by the military. When we got the finished pages back, we formed stacks of each page on tables in the cafeteria, and formed lines that moved along those stacks, picking up each page until we had a complete set, then stapling them together. I later learned that this is called collating.
As editor, the advisors gave me leeway in deciding what went into the paper. Articles were submitted by both students and teachers. I considered myself a fair poet (debatable), and when several poems were submitted by a teacher, I didn't think they were anything special. Still, I printed them because I didn't want to irritate the adults. His work was prose, whereas I thought, to be called poetry, the work had to have rhyme and rhythm to its flow. It wasn't until recent years, while perusing an old copy of my school newspaper, that I realized how good his poetry really was. It had a depth of feeling and expression that I have to work hard to achieve. It's amazing how the passage of years will make you view things differently.
In my senior year, I taught chemistry for a week until the teacher arrived from the States. The base commander wrote me a nice letter for doing that. We were extremely shorthanded on teachers for a while. I became editor of our school newspaper and co-president of the student council. It was nice because classes were so small that the teachers had time to give a little one-on-one instruction.
Connie Francis came up with the USO, and put on a show for the boys on the DEW line. All dependents went because this was an event that seldom happened. I sat in the balcony of the theater and Miss Francis sounded as though her voice filled the whole hall. Some singer that! I sat with Carol Townsley, she of the sweet lipstick! She only let me taste it once.
My brother, Harold, hadn't been with us in Newfoundland, because he was aboard the USS Forrestal, an aircraft carrier, at Norfolk, Virginia. The plan for returning to the states, was for me and my father and mother to take a small passenger ship out of Saint John's, Newfoundland, down the coast to New York Harbor, where a catalog-ordered, new Buick automobile was to be waiting for us to pick up; thence by car to Norfolk for my brother, and return by car to New England to visit relatives.
My parents and I boarded the ship in Saint John's Harbor on a cold and blustery day. The whitecaps on the water were heavy and were throwing off spume. We were shown to our cabin, which, while small, was quite luxurious and had two large bunk beds. The three of us would share the cabin for the five-day trip to New York.
Saint John's sits within a sheltered harbor, some three miles long and no more than half a mile wide, with cliffs or hills surrounding this bight. The housing along both shores was low-lying for protection from the winds; it was colorful and spread out, with a lot of docks and piers jutting into the harbor. It is a fishing town, just like Placentia, only bigger. Cod was the main industry, with lobstering running a close second.
As I said, the day we departed was blustery, and it is a rule of the government that ships navigating the harbor in rough weather had to carry a pilot to navigate the inlet into or out of the harbor. Our pilot joined us on a small mail packet (maybe twenty-five feet long), which angled alongside as we were leaving the harbor. I marvel today at the dexterity of those boat-handlers. The packet looked like a cork as it came up on us. The pilot did not hesitate to jump to our ship. A very agile man that! Just after leaving the harbor, the packet drew alongside once again and the pilot departed with it back to the harbor. We were on our own for the next five days.
The first two days were all rough weather, and poor Mom couldn't hack it. She stayed in the cabin mostly, groaning and heaving alternately. She looked ghastly. I only had one moment of doubt before I got my sea legs and began to enjoy the trip. Of course, Dad was an old salt from way back, and wasn't troubled by seasickness. He had to take care of my mother, though, and that wasn't pleasant.
There were about thirty passengers aboard, but due to the mode of travel, we were seldom all together at the same time. Invariably, someone was confined to their cabin with the heaves. Several were strangers for the whole trip. My favorite time of day was when the steward walked the passageway with his little chimes and played various cheerful tunes. This was the call to meals. I enjoyed this the most, and after the first couple of days, even my mother began to enjoy the trip. Of course, it helped that we wer e in calmer waters.
Entertainment revolved around parlor games and the movies. It wasn't a large luxury liner like you see on Love Boat. Still, we had a very nice sea voyage for our return and when we pulled into New York Harbor and I saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time, it was a very stirring moment.
We picked up the car and traveled to Virginia to get my brother. From there, we went back up Highway 1 to New England to visit the relatives. While in Massachusetts with them, I did manage to cross into Central Falls, and see some of my friends, and attend a high school basketball game. I have alluded to that earlier.
by John E. Hunt
Copyright 1996
This is a continuation of the story that began with my birth in March of 1940. Chapter 1 tells of my early life in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, how my brother and I ended up in an orphanage, were removed and lived for a while on a farm in MA. It told of my subsequent move to Virginia and some of the adventures I had there, then the move to Cuba and my exploits there. When we concluded that chapter, we had just returned from Cuba to Central Falls, Rhode Island. The story continues:
C H A P T E R 02
(1953-1959)
When I left Central Falls in 1953, my father was stationed at Patuxent Naval Air Station, at Patuxent River, Maryland. That is where experimental test planes were/are flown, to iron out the bugs. Keep in mind that this was 1953 through 1955. During that time, I personally know of three fatal aircraft crashes on the test ranges. The planes that were being tested were the forerunners of the Stealth bomber that was recently unveiled. I used to see the plane from time to time, and my parents were personal friends of one of the pilots that crashed. They called it the flying wing. It may not have been the exact same plane they unveiled, but it was one of the early test models.
Before we left Central Falls for Pawtuxent River, Maryland, we visited our relatives in Sabatus, Maine. My aunt and uncle gave me a set of skis for Christmas, and as a going-away present. I used them exactly once in Maryland when we had a half-inch snowfall that lasted all of five hours. I fell quite a lot and gave up trying to be a Jean Claude Killy, downhill racer.
My forte then became exploring the woods around the housing area on post. I led many an expedition, ala Lewis and Clark, into the surrounding vegetation, and discovered many good streams and places of solitude, where a boy my age (thirteen to fourteen) could lose himself from the cares of urban living. My constant companion at that time was my collie, Scotty. We had him since 1949 at Newport News, in Virginia. He was very faithful and smart. Sometimes when I left him at home and meal time came, my mother would tie a note to his collar and let him out of the house. He would invariably find me no matter where I was.
Those streams I mentioned were very tempting places on hot days at school. Butch was a playmate of mine. We began sneaking cigarettes and playing hooky from school together. One day we had gone to one of these streams in the woods and decided to go swimming. We went in au natural after folding our clothes on the bank.
The swimming was great for about forty minutes, but unfortunately, we weren't the only ones who passed through those woods. We heard some voices coming, so we scrambled out, grabbed our clothes and ran to hide and dress. We had been seen, however, and recognized. Our parents did find out about it, and mine forbade me to play with Butch again. That dictum couldn't be enforced forever, so it wasn't long before we were playing together again. My parents didn't like Butch, because they thought he was leading me astray. Truth to tell, I couldn't tell you to this day whom was leading who astray.
The elementary school I went to, was located just outside the gate of the post in College Park, Maryland. I used to brown-bag it to school in those days. That is, I'd carry my lunch. Schools didn't have cafeterias and lunchrooms, so one brought one's lunch in a bag, and perhaps traded with another, if he/she had what looked like a better lunch. We did bring some change for sodas, milk, or candy bars, although I seldom used the monies for what they were intended. At first I was into commemorative stamps, which I bought or traded from other students; then I got into foreign coins and bills. A lot of the students were from military families, and had done a lot of traveling with their fathers to different lands. They had some good-looking currency. The temptations were all around.
Later, I found out that the pinball machines, in the various stores in the park, had payoffs in cash if you won games. That became a big thing for Butch and me. Naturally, the machines did most of the winning.
My parents were happy when we moved off post to Tall Timbers, to a house in the pines, on the shore of the Potomac River. I was starting at a new school, and I think they thought the move would split Butch and me up, and I would no longer get into trouble. Though Butch stayed on post, he, too, was bussed to the same school as I. It was a stalemate. I also made another new friend named Jimmy Calisanto who I had some adventures with, about which you shall hear soon.
I was fourteen, and it was a very exciting age; I lived in a great place. Dad found this place nestled in the tall pine trees, bordering the Potomac River, on the Maryland side. When you walked out the back door onto a screened veranda, the vista was all river, with the Virginia side visible on the horizon about seven miles distant. About forty feet from the back door, was an eight-foot seawall, which dropped to the river itself. There was no beach, but at low tide, it was only about three feet deep at the base of the seawall.
Various houses along the shore had well-built piers, that jutted out into the river some 40 to 220 feet. One had to ask permission of the owners to use their pier, but the neighbors were great about sharing. We fished off their piers a lot, and swam also. Most of the homeowners were Summer People, but some stayed year round. We fit the latter category.
Living right on the Potomac, occasioned a lot of seafood meals in our house. Mom was crazy about crab, so every day, my brother or I would check the two crab pots directly offshore from our house. Generally we'd find several crabs there. Another trick was to take fish heads, tied to long strings, and throw them out and slowly drag them back. Invariably there would be a crab that could be scooped up in a long-handled net carried for that purpose. The crab didn't want to let the fish head go.
Sometimes I went along the shore about three-quarters of a mile, where the seawall tapered off, and a small beach formed. Crabs could be readily caught, by net alone, in the shallows there. This was where I liked to fish also. The most common fish we caught were what we called spot and perch. Sometimes we'd catch eels, but they wriggled in the frying pan gruesomely.
In the deeper waters, rock fish (striped bass) could be caught. This end of the inlet was separated by an expanse of open water about forty feet wide, and having a very swift current when the tide was changing. The shoreline continued on the other side, and sometime, in the slack tide, we kids would swim across, but it was dangerous. If the tide was going out, a swimmer could be swept way out into the Potomac and drown. An incoming tide, led to a harbor for the boats belonging to the local populace.
One day, Jimmy Calisanto and I visited the harbor and took a rowboat out to a launch that had an inboard motor on it. Jimmy and his family knew the owner, so when a guard who watched the marina stopped us to asked what we were doing, Jimmy said we had permission to use the launch. You guessed it! No such permission had ever been given. We managed to fire the engine up, slip the mooring, and take her out for an hour or so. That was great fun, and we got away with it.
Several days later, we tried it again with success. We tried to make it out of the inlet, but the current was too swift, and it's a good thing too. There is no telling what would have happened had we managed to get out and not been able to get back in. When we tired, we brought the launch back to its mooring, secured it and went home.
Jimmy and I were both called to task for our adventures that night. It seems the owners had returned and the guard had asked them about a couple of kids using their boat. I know I got my bottom blistered for that one and placed on restriction too; I don't remember how long, but it seemed forever.
Vallery Grimes was my secret and unrequited love here. She was a beautiful girl, but had a big brother who used to pull the legs and shells off the crabs while they were still alive. I thought that gross! At least my mother cooked them in boiling water, where they died instantly, before she pulled them apart. As I was saying about Vallery, we used to have swims at night at the end of the pier near her house. The pier had lights on it, which allowed late swimming. Sometimes we would just sit out there and sing songs or talk. I didn't realize until later when my brother, Harold, went into the Navy,that he had been sweet on her also.
While living in Tall Timbers, Maryland, and in the eighth grade at Great Mills Middle School, we had a brother and sister of German extraction, who were new to our school, and convinced the school to start up a soccer team. The boy's name was Jacob, and he taught most of us the rules of the game as well as designing the playing field. Looking back on it today, he seemed like a young Pele to me. Boy, he could handle that ball with his feet! It was purely magical.
The only sibling in my family was my brother. He had joined the navy by the time we returned to Central Falls and I enrolled in Central Falls High School. You might say I was an only child from the age of fifteen on, because my brother made a career of the navy, and the only time we were all together again, was when we were all in the navy in 1960-1961, and stationed in Virginia. We had a very disunited family life after that, with never any two of us being stationed at the same place.
In late 1955, we returned to Central Falls again and to the same house at 391 Dexter Street, second floor. I enrolled at Central Falls High School, and once again renewed my friendships and made new friends. Those were great years for me because girls became a focus of my imagination, if not a figment. You really couldn't tell by my actions, because I was most unashamedly bashful in a one-on-one situation. But I could look my fill,and I did that a lot.
Central Falls High School never did have a swimming pool or track, but we kids always managed to stay in shape with some sport or other. For swimming, as I recollect, we used to go to a place called Lincoln Woods. We would ride our bikes, and it would be an all-day affair. Sometimes, we'd go to the YMCA.
On my side of Dexter Street, just down from my house, was a pizza parlor, and a fish and chips store. We used to play the jukebox (Fats Domino, Paul Anka, etc.) while waiting for the best pizza in the world. They used to serve milk shakes there too, only we called them frappes.
After school, I'd jump on my bike and go to Jenk's Park and over to Sacred Heart, which I believe is on Broad, and on down to Ashley's playground. Sacred Heart Park, as it is now called, is where I used to do most of my basketball playing year-round. We would shovel the snow off the court in the winter. There was a railroad track running next to the court, and some swings, but most of it was just field.
Cross Street always was a nice tree-lined street from Dexter to Broad. There were no bars on it, but there was a funeral home on the left-hand side of Cross, about halfway between Dexter and Broad. It had a fancy blue neon sign out front. I remember one evening, an uncle I had, who lived on lower Cross Street, had visited my mom and me on Dexter Street, and had availed himself of an abundance of alcohol at our place. My mother asked me to see him home when he left after dark.
We had to walk because he was in no condition to ride my bike. So with his arm draped across my shoulder, we started for lower Cross Street. Naturally we had to pass the funeral home and they had the neon sign on. You can guess what my uncle thought it was! I had a devil of a time to pass that place with him, but I managed to convince him that the only fluid he could get there, was embalming fluid, and he was well on the way to that state of being anyway.
My father was gone on a Navy assignment someplace whenever we lived in Central Falls. My mother had to raise my brother and me by herself. Sometimes she worked during the interval of separation as a Creeler/Doffer at Coates & Clark in Central Falls. So yes, I guess you could say I had a lot of freedom and might even be compared to what is called today, a latchkey kid. Mom only expected me to stay out of trouble, get good grades in school, and be home on time for supper. I managed to do all that pretty well.
Other families had different situations, and some of my friends' parents kept a pretty tight rein on them. Mostly though, we had fun and freedom enough to enjoy ourselves. The diverse racial and ethnic groups present today in Central Falls were also present in my day. That made for some very good times because we learned more about each others' customs and ways of life. A favorite pastime I enjoyed was going to my friends' houses to eat the different native foods.
We kids had a lot of pressures also from our peers and from the times. They weren't the same kind of pressures that youngsters of today have to live with. Drugs were almost non-existent and the communications media weren't so quick to jump on world catastrophes and present them to you over the supper table or breakfast table as a fact of life. We didn't have nuclear holocaust hanging over our heads constantly. People cared more for each other, or so it seemed. Teen suicides seldom happened and their morals were not corrupted by the environment we live in, such as has happened in a lot of places today.
When a boy and girl went on a date, they usually kept their clothes on for the duration. That's not to say that we didn't kiss and pet, which was acceptable for the times. Parties we attended were usually school or church functions and were well chaperoned.
I generally wore a tie to school (one of the few oddball affectations I had) and was quite studious. My nose would generally be buried in some book or other. We only had one study period during the latter part of the day, and I would usually have my homework finished by the end of that period. After school, if I didn't go to the library to get some reading material, I would go home and get my bike and head for Frank or Jim's house or Jenk's Park or what was then Ashley Field. There was always something to do and someone with whom to do it. On weekends, I would pedal over to my cousin's place in Pawtucket and we would ride our bikes to the rollerskating rink, where I could fall with the best of skaters.
Central Falls is a small city, and a disproportionate amount of drug traffic was found to be passing through there a few of years ago. Drug abuse is a nasty happening, and it's a shame that Central Falls was saddled with that reputation, but that should not stand in the way of cleaning up the city. It's a good city, and the people who made it a good city are inherently good; at least I shall always have fond memories of it.
Some of my secret loves were Marsha Goshenski and Maxine Slakowski. I had other secret loves, but woe is me, they never knew it. Had any one of them even dropped a hint that we could get to know each other better, maybe something more positive could have come of my yearnings. Sometimes the girl has to be the aggressor, I think.
My first money-making job ever, was acquired there in Central Falls. I don't recall exactly where it was located, but it was a Swift Meat Packing Plant. I worked there for two weeks, packing sausage. A skin would be placed over the outlet of the meat-grinding machine and when the grinder was turned on, the meat would be fed into the grinder at the top and would come out and fill the skin at the outlet. A man would twist the sausage into links, pile them into a cart, and take them to the freezer. That is where I worked, along with about five other boys during the Summer.
They gave us parkas to work in the freezer, but when you have to work with knives to cut the sausages into the proper length links, and then pack them into boxes with a see-through cellophane cover, you cannot wear gloves. Let me tell you, it got mighty cold in there and we had to take frequent trips outside to warm up. Sometimes it was so cold, we would cut ourselves and not notice it until someone spotted the blood on the sausages. It usually was just wiped off and packaged anyway. I didn't eat sausages for over twenty years after that experience. I only worked there two weeks because I caught bronchial pneumonia.
My next job was a lot more lucrative. I worked for W.T. Grant on Broad Street. Actually, I was a stock boy and worked in the warehouse diagonally across the street from Grant's, and on a slight uphill on the left. This other stock boy and I, would load merchandise on dollies, take it down the hill and across Broad Street, and into the store, to the appropriate floor and department. It was a rough job, but a muscle-builder also. It taught me to be nimble when crossing Broad Street during the rush hour. The lucrative part was that at Christmas, I got a discount on a model train set that I gave to my cousin. That made a nice Christmas for him and made me feel good too.
Biology was a favorite class of mine in high school. Unfortunately, I wasn't too good with a scalpel and botched a couple of dissections. My drawings, and research on the subject were more than adequate to advance me to the next higher grade.
One show-stopper that I can recall from biology class was the day we first discussed the reproductive cycle in humans. Being an erudite student and well read, when the teacher, Mr. Fay, asked if anyone knew where the sperm that fertilized the ova came from, and nobody raised their hand to answer (as a matter of fact, sex education was not taught in school in those days and was a bit embarrassing to discuss), I volunteered the answer as the penis.
How was I to know that he only wanted a general location like "male" and not the actual physical organ? A pin could have been dropped in that room during the next thirty seconds and it would have been heard by all. A lot of faces turned red, including mine, when the teacher stammered out the answer he was looking for. Occurrences such as that seemed to plague my life for some reason. Perhaps it is my Karma.
I prided myself on my wrestling ability. I had never been beaten. This was mainly due to the fact that I had tremendous strength of shoulders and biceps and my forearms had strong bones that were close to the surface. My most devastating hold was a headlock, which I would then proceed to grind my forearm into my opponent's neck until he hollered "uncle." Most of my adversaries gave up once I got that hold on them. Ed Arage, however, was different. He was always the consummate athlete and excelled at every sport. I, on the other hand, was average.
One day, in Jenk's Park, Ed and I decided to wrestle. We had agreed that punching was out, but other than that, it was no-holds-barred wrestling. Ed, by the way, stood a good head taller than I. It didn't take me long to get my headlock on him, but try as I might, I could not get him to give up. He had the strongest neck of anyone I'd ever wrestled. Eventually, I had to shift to another hold because I tired with that one and it wasn't successful in achieving my goal. I went to a scissors hold around his waist, but he had me down on my back on the ground. I squeezed a little bit, and he grimaced with pain. I had found his Achilles' heel!
At one point, he raised his fist as if to hit me in the face and make me let go. Our friends were watching, though, and were quick to point out that this action had been agreed upon to be unfair. He didn't strike, and with a final squeeze of the scissors, gave up.
I don't know if Ed has been holding animosity against me all these years for that little episode. I certainly hope not. As far as I know, that was the only chink in his armor. He and Bill Nicynski were always admired by me as being the greatest athletes of the school in those days.
I played mostly basketball for the high school, as did many of the boys at Central Falls, but I did play baseball also, and Allie LaChanch used to be my main pitcher. Frank Juchnik was the back-up pitcher, I was the catcher, and I like to think, a good one. At least I was the only one among our crowd who would volunteer for that position.
It is hard for the catcher to strap on all that extra gear when his team is in the field, catch for a half inning, and then be able to hit and run the bases during the next half-inning. That is why, when you see a good hitting catcher, he is really a good athlete. I didn't hit too good during games, but during warm-ups and practice sessions, I used to hit flies and grounders to the boys in the field. I could hit long distances and place the ball exactly where I wanted it to go.
Getting back to Allie, he was our star pitcher and could really put a lot of stuff on that ball. Batters had a hard time hitting him, because they never knew what he would throw next. It was an elaborate set of hand signals we had worked out. To be honest, though, I would have to admit that Allie didn't always throw what I had signaled him to throw, and what he nodded approval of. Sometimes he was as surprised at where the ball would go as was I. I don't believe our baseball team was ever the caliber of our basketball team, but we had fun anyway.
That leads me to our next topic, which is that Allie, me, Jim Panichas, and Hank Dugan had formed a sort of barbershop quartet and used to practice singing in Jenk's Park. We had worked up a nice little ditty, which we practiced over and over to make the harmony sound good.
When I returned to Central Falls for a short visit in 1959, on my way to Virginia, I attended a basketball game at the high school. I remember Allie, Jim, and several others sitting on the top seat of the bleachers behind me, and I think I was sitting with Frank. Allie, et al., kept singing that song to catch my attention, which they did, but I didn't join them, and I think they got peeved. I have always felt bad about that, and should have apologized to them after the game, but I left without doing so. I hope they didn't hold a grudge against me for that.
In 1957, my mother and I moved to Argentia, Newfoundland, where my father was stationed at one of our country's Distant Early Warning (DEW) lines. In those days, the Naval Air Station at Argentia existed solely to support the flight of Super Constellation aircraft that were loaded with sensitive electronic eavesdropping, and radar equipment. Like pregnant ladies wearing top hats, these huge planes had a bulbous belly, and a round, elevated radar antenna on top, in the middle. They were in the air on a twenty-four hour rotation, and flew the entire northern corridor. Their function was to detect any encroachment to Canada or the Americas from the North.
My father was a Master Chief Storekeeper, in charge of logistical supply for the airmen and planes that flew those missions - no small task that! He had to order everything from the food the men ate, and the clothes they wore, to parts for the aircraft.
I would have to make new friends in a new school at the Naval Air Station in Newfoundland during my junior year. My father sent for us when he found housing off post. We would have to wait until a place on post became available before moving among the military families. Meanwhile, we lived about fifteen miles from the base, in a place called Dunville. Only the roads on base were paved. It was a dirt road all the way to my house, the only road between Argentia and Saint John's, the capitol.
Leaving the base, we passed Placentia Bay with its quaint houses, some of them on stilts. This area was all a fishing and whaling area. The bay ran the length of the road on our right to way past my house fifteen miles distant. On the left of the road was mostly mountain and forested area. Upon reaching my house, there was a small sawmill on the left, up the hill a little way, and my house was across the road, and down the hill about eighty feet, where it leveled off for about a hundred feet, and then dropped to a small lake at the bottom of the hill. We did some fishing for trout in that lake periodically.
On the other side of the lake, and across a small rise of land, was the continuation of Placentia Bay. I used to hike over there from time to time. I've seen whales wash up on the beach and die, pilot whales moving up and down the bay amidst the icebergs. It was a very scenic area, and if you could put up with the loneliness of the spot, it became comfortable.
Our nearest neighbor lived about three miles away (this was not counting the workers at the small sawmill at the top of the hill). The temperature seldom got out of the seventies in summer, and only in the teens in winter. This was a wet cold, though, and if it were windy, you felt it. The Gulf Stream swings up along Newfoundland in the winter, or it would be colder.
When I enrolled in Arthur L. Bristol High School, it was the first year of its' existence on post. Military dependents had been going to Saint John's, the capital, for schooling at Pepperrell Army Base near there. There were only five seniors that year, and there were eleven juniors.
I was in seventh heaven because I had spent the summer off-post, with not another teenager to talk with. I had to make up for lost time! All the teenagers, from freshman to senior, totalled less than forty souls, so nobody was ever ostracized from the teen social activities. We formed all kinds of clubs, and joined as many as we could, just to have some socialization.
I joined the teen bowling league at the officers' club and eventually became a team captain. I became a good figure skater on roller skates, and was asked by the military recreation manager to referee afternoon skating sessions at the gymnasium to make sure there was no horsing around. They even gave me a whistle and a black-and-white striped shirt.
Two events that took place during my stay in Newfoundland, are clearly linked to the cold war. They stand out in my mind. The first is the launching by the USSR of Sputnik in 1957. That event was the topic of discussion throughout the school and I can tell you that it scared us kids quite a bit to think that the Russians were that far advanced in space technology.
We had a rocket club in the school at that time. A kid named Dennis Groggin was the president. He lived and breathed rocketry and built and demonstrated a model rocket for the school. He was sure the U.S. was not far behind in their space endeavors, which proved to be correct.
The second event was Fidel Castro's emergence as a strong reactionary against Batista. Most of us were pro-Castro at that time, because he didn't show any leanings toward communism, and he promised to rid the island of the dictator, Batista. By the time he had consolidated his power, it was too late for the U.S. to do anything about him.
To look at an aerial photo of the base at Argentia, it looks rather desolate and barren. For the most part, it was. There were few trees in the populated areas of the post, they had been removed to make room for the airfield, administrative, housing, and recreational areas. In many places the wind, rain, and snow had swept the topsoil from the surface, exposing the underlying rock. That is how it got its’ nick-name of "The Rock." That is what everyone called it and it seemed most apropos.
In the winter, it was unbelievable how the winds cut right through you, stinging any exposed surface. It felt like a cluster of tattoo needles trying to imprint a picture all at once. It is an exposed area right on the edge of the sea. Most foot traffic came to a halt during the coldest of these days. We only ventured out in vehicles, even if it was just to go a short distance.
A friend of mine, Pete Chamberlain, wanted to go camping on a lake we had found. It was early winter, the ice hadn't yet formed on the water and the temperatures weren't too bad. I didn't have a sleeping bag, so my dad got one from recreational services. We hiked in to the lake and inspected its shoreline for a suitable camping site. When we found one, we proceeded to build a lean-to facing outward toward the lake, and about twenty feet from the shore. We lined the bed area with the softest foliage we could find, spread out our sleeping bags, built a fire, and got out our fishing gear. Before it got dark, we had caught and eaten a couple of trout and exchanged not a few stories of our prowess with the opposite sex (most of that being fabricated on my part - probably on his too).
As dusk settled, we began to see "V" shaped waves forming from time to time out on the lake. I'd brought a pair of binoculars, and was surprised to see that it was beaver swimming that caused this phenomenon. Soon, they moved closer and I didn't need the binoculars. I'd heard that the beaver slapped it's tail on the water and dived when they thought danger was near. To test that theory, I threw a stone in the water close to them. Sure enough, they acted to expectation. I'd never seen beaver at work before, nor close-up. We watched them towing branches from point to point until it was too dark to see anymore. Sleep was late in coming that night. We were warm and comfortable in our sleeping bags and the adventure of being out in the wilderness, lent a tang to our life. The night sounds of the animals lulled us to sleep finally.
One time my dad and I went fishing for salmon with a friend of his, a "Newfie" named Paul. This man was the owner of our house in Dunville. We went to a place called Heart's Delight. Newfoundland is full of places with quaint names like that. Nearby was Heart's Content and Heart's Desire, two other small villages. Almost anywhere you went in Newfoundland was good for fishing.
Paul was a huge man and very jovial. We found a stream bed that looked promising and proceeded to walk upstream. The salmon were running, returning to their birthplace to spawn. I'd seen pictures on television of salmon leaping up falls, and battling strong currents to the point of exhaustion, but to actually see this in person, is quite remarkable. It's a sight that I'll never forget.
When we found a suitable pool, Paul showed me how to "jig" a salmon. It was an illegal method of catching them. You're supposed to use live bait or lures to attract them to feed, but at this time of their lives, the salmon only have one thing on their minds, and that's getting back to their birthplace to spawn. It is seldom that they will stop to feed. Most Newfies only fish inland for subsistence, and if they think they can get away with it, will jig the fish. This involves finding a salmon that is resting in the water, dropping a line with a triple barbed hook on the far side and behind him, and working the line up toward his head. When it is in the right position, quickly raising the line, and pulling it toward you, is likely to hook the fish somewhere around the head. He won't have "struck" the line, but he will be hooked nonetheless. Then you'd best hold on for a fierce fight!
The salmon is the greatest freshwater game fish that I've ever seen. Paul hooked one that was three feet long and weighed over twenty-two pounds. That fish was up stream, down stream, half in, and half out of the water for the next ten minutes. It was a gorgeous fish when he finally landed him! After such a gallant fight, it seemed a shame to eat him, but we did that the very same night.
When I became editor of the school newspaper, I learned how closely tied to the military we were. Our advisor on the school staff was the gym teacher. He had to make arrangements with some military office for the use of their mimeograph machine so that we could run off copies of the paper. We students decided the layout for the articles and pictures, and typed up the stencils needed, but the expertise of transferring pictures to the page was handled by the military. When we got the finished pages back, we formed stacks of each page on tables in the cafeteria, and formed lines that moved along those stacks, picking up each page until we had a complete set, then stapling them together. I later learned that this is called collating.
As editor, the advisors gave me leeway in deciding what went into the paper. Articles were submitted by both students and teachers. I considered myself a fair poet (debatable), and when several poems were submitted by a teacher, I didn't think they were anything special. Still, I printed them because I didn't want to irritate the adults. His work was prose, whereas I thought, to be called poetry, the work had to have rhyme and rhythm to its flow. It wasn't until recent years, while perusing an old copy of my school newspaper, that I realized how good his poetry really was. It had a depth of feeling and expression that I have to work hard to achieve. It's amazing how the passage of years will make you view things differently.
In my senior year, I taught chemistry for a week until the teacher arrived from the States. The base commander wrote me a nice letter for doing that. We were extremely shorthanded on teachers for a while. I became editor of our school newspaper and co-president of the student council. It was nice because classes were so small that the teachers had time to give a little one-on-one instruction.
Connie Francis came up with the USO, and put on a show for the boys on the DEW line. All dependents went because this was an event that seldom happened. I sat in the balcony of the theater and Miss Francis sounded as though her voice filled the whole hall. Some singer that! I sat with Carol Townsley, she of the sweet lipstick! She only let me taste it once.
My brother, Harold, hadn't been with us in Newfoundland, because he was aboard the USS Forrestal, an aircraft carrier, at Norfolk, Virginia. The plan for returning to the states, was for me and my father and mother to take a small passenger ship out of Saint John's, Newfoundland, down the coast to New York Harbor, where a catalog-ordered, new Buick automobile was to be waiting for us to pick up; thence by car to Norfolk for my brother, and return by car to New England to visit relatives.
My parents and I boarded the ship in Saint John's Harbor on a cold and blustery day. The whitecaps on the water were heavy and were throwing off spume. We were shown to our cabin, which, while small, was quite luxurious and had two large bunk beds. The three of us would share the cabin for the five-day trip to New York.
Saint John's sits within a sheltered harbor, some three miles long and no more than half a mile wide, with cliffs or hills surrounding this bight. The housing along both shores was low-lying for protection from the winds; it was colorful and spread out, with a lot of docks and piers jutting into the harbor. It is a fishing town, just like Placentia, only bigger. Cod was the main industry, with lobstering running a close second.
As I said, the day we departed was blustery, and it is a rule of the government that ships navigating the harbor in rough weather had to carry a pilot to navigate the inlet into or out of the harbor. Our pilot joined us on a small mail packet (maybe twenty-five feet long), which angled alongside as we were leaving the harbor. I marvel today at the dexterity of those boat-handlers. The packet looked like a cork as it came up on us. The pilot did not hesitate to jump to our ship. A very agile man that! Just after leaving the harbor, the packet drew alongside once again and the pilot departed with it back to the harbor. We were on our own for the next five days.
The first two days were all rough weather, and poor Mom couldn't hack it. She stayed in the cabin mostly, groaning and heaving alternately. She looked ghastly. I only had one moment of doubt before I got my sea legs and began to enjoy the trip. Of course, Dad was an old salt from way back, and wasn't troubled by seasickness. He had to take care of my mother, though, and that wasn't pleasant.
There were about thirty passengers aboard, but due to the mode of travel, we were seldom all together at the same time. Invariably, someone was confined to their cabin with the heaves. Several were strangers for the whole trip. My favorite time of day was when the steward walked the passageway with his little chimes and played various cheerful tunes. This was the call to meals. I enjoyed this the most, and after the first couple of days, even my mother began to enjoy the trip. Of course, it helped that we wer e in calmer waters.
Entertainment revolved around parlor games and the movies. It wasn't a large luxury liner like you see on Love Boat. Still, we had a very nice sea voyage for our return and when we pulled into New York Harbor and I saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time, it was a very stirring moment.
We picked up the car and traveled to Virginia to get my brother. From there, we went back up Highway 1 to New England to visit the relatives. While in Massachusetts with them, I did manage to cross into Central Falls, and see some of my friends, and attend a high school basketball game. I have alluded to that earlier.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
Chapter 1 Looking Back
C H A P T E R 01
(1940‑1953)
The Ides of March 1940 is an auspicious date. That is when I came into this world at a place called Fiskedale, Massachusetts. Julius Caesar went out of this world on the Ides of March, and I like to think that maybe I'm a reincarnation of his.
Mom said the doctor was late getting to the house during the storm at 3:00 a.m. He was sick himself and had to have an appendix removed after he left us. After examining her, he lay on the bed beside her to wait for my entrance. When I did arrive, while he was examining me, I peed in his face. That made my mom happy for some reason. She was a weird lady.
In 1943, a crisis in my mother's life occurred. My father, who had been driving taxis in Pawtucket and Central Falls, went off to World War Two in the Pacific. Mom moved us to my aunt and uncle's farm out in Norton, Massachusetts.
The farm was a great place for kids to grow up. I'd guess it was about four or five acres anyway, nothing that a large family without machinery couldn't work. Everything was done by hand: the tilling, hoeing, weeding, planting, and reaping. They grew everything needed for subsistence in the way of vegetables, and kept some chickens, pigs, a couple of cows, and ducks. My uncle was experimenting with a mink farm operation.
In the summer, we walked along a dirt road that paralleled the farm. About two miles down the road, and across a railroad track, was an old, man‑made pond on the right. They called it Pete's Pond, and that's where I learned to swim at the age of four. My cousin George took me out on his shoulders and then ducked out from under me. I cried a little, but by golly, I learned pretty fast. I remember watching the dragonflies, or as some people call them, darning needles, flitter about on the surface of Pete's Pond, and marveling at their changing hues in the sunlight. On the way home, we picked rhubarb that grew wild along the roadside.
Once, my cousins removed an old barn door and we carried it by hand all the way to Pete's Pond to use as a raft. Another time, we found a dead body in the woods by the side of the road,
and it caused quite a stir in the neighborhood. I forget the details of that one, because I think the grown‑ups were trying to protect us little ones.
My uncle had several old clunker cars and trucks that littered the property, and were good places for nesting wasps. I found that out one day while investigating. When my mother came home from work, she couldn't recognize me, because I had been stung between the eyes, and both of them were swollen shut.
We kids had this special place off in the woods in a clearing where we would play. We built sand cars in the dirt, big enough for us to get into, and we'd sit in them and pretend to race each other through the woods. Naturally we didn't get very far. We had to change vehicles just to make sure that the same person didn't win all the time.
Occasionally, my cousins got some vegetables from the garden, some salt and pepper, pots and pans, and other staples, and with rod and reel, we went off in the woods to a fishing hole. From what I remember, we only caught catfish, so we must have been fishing off the bottom. We built a fire, and cut up the vegetables and put them in the stew pot, along with the cleaned catfish. We ate right there on the bank of the pond. Such was the cares of my world then.
During the Second World War, my dad sent back some pictures of himself and a friend having a good time at some club on one of those islands. Both had hula girls, in grass skirts, draped around their necks, and sitting on their laps. That was some war they were fighting, huh? I only mention that in passing, because he asked my mother for a divorce, and this caused her to have a nervous breakdown.
My brother and I were placed in an orphanage. I don't remember too much about the children's home except that for some reason my brother and I were separated. I do remember seeing and talking with him through a tall, chain‑link fence that separated our playgrounds. I remember Mom coming to visit also when she started to feel better. Dad had reconsidered His position and begged for forgiveness, so after some time, my mom relented. They got us out of the home and made a fresh start of it.
My first conscious memory of Central Falls, Rhode Island is from a second‑story window of an apartment on Washington Street. I must have been four years old, so that was sometime in 1944. My father was in the Navy in the Pacific, and my mother was raising my brother and me by herself there on Washington Street. I was too young for school, but I used to watch for my brother to come home from first grade. The school was on Washington Street also; it was a Catholic school, and we only spoke French (My mother is Canadian French, and I didn't speak English until I started second grade in another state, but that's another story.).
The walk‑up in that apartment was a very scary place for a four‑year‑old, especially at night. I still have one very scary memory of a drunk, asleep on the stairs, grabbing my leg as I tried to pass him. His stubble beard on my leg (we wore knickers in those days) scared me, but not half as much as I must have scared him when I screamed.
I remember going to the store with ration coupons to get butter and flour. There was a corner store I used to pass that had an old, wooden, cigar store Indian statue out front. Some old (to me) men used to sit outside on the steps and share a water pipe and the local gossip.
If I'm not mistaken, they cobbled the streets in those days. I remember the iceman delivering ice to the apartments. He'd haul large blocks of ice in his horse‑drawn cart. The ice was under burlap sacks. When you paid him for your ice, he would take his ice pick and chop off an appropriate amount of ice, grab it with his tongs and toss it over his shoulder, and carry it to your apartment, putting it in the icebox for you. He wore a leather apron. If he was in a good mood, you could talk him out of some chips to suck on.
In those days, the pool in Jenks’ Park was filled with water in the summer and all the little kids like me would play in it. The deepest part was less than three feet deep, what is now called a wading pool. I stubbed many a big toe running around the apron. It used to be pretty scenic to walk up the steps to the clock tower, or the gazebo at the top of the rocks, and look out and down at those in the park.
I remember walking downtown and across the Blackstone River Bridge to go to the movie house near there; especially on Saturdays! Those were the days when they had the best cartoons and the continuation of the serials. You were able to learn that the hero really hadn't died in the previous episode, as you had thought, but was saved by some miracle or other.
In 1948‑1949, I was living at the Annex in Newport News, Virginia, a decidedly substandard military housing project. I was in the second and third grade. The housing consisted of long rows of wooden barrack‑like apartments that held four families per building. It was government subsidized housing (read that low rent), and a lot of military families lived there.
We walked to school by following the sidewalk that ran the length of the apartment buildings for about half a mile. On the left was a huge easement ditch, about thirty feet wide, that was always filled with mud and water, but could be waded across as long as it hadn't rained recently. On the other side of the ditch, there were more apartments like ours.
The family of my brother's friend, who lived across the ditch, was one of the first families in the neighborhood to get a television in 1949. It only had a six‑inch circular screen, but it was a great drawing card to pack the room on Saturdays. We'd gather at his house to watch "Howdy Doody," or the wrestling and boxing. I can still see the one‑eyed man with the silk top hat on the National Bohemian can of beer. I hear the man singing, "Say, mister, how are you fixed for blades? Ya better check, Gillette Blue Blades, we mean?" Mom used to tell us that someday, we too, would have a radio like that, with a moving picture. For the present, we had to make‑do with listening to "Buster Brown," who lived in a shoe with his dog, Tyge. "The Shadow, The Fat Man, Green Hornet, Inner Sanctum," and Tonto and "The Lone Ranger" were other favorites. In short, it was the radio for entertainment, or games like Parcheesi or Monopoly. Sometimes, we would make up guessing games and take turns asking if it was animal, vegetable, or mineral. Home entertainment was what you made it.
The housing authority said they would furnish the paint if we wanted to paint the outside of the apartments. All families in each building had to agree. My father was gone, so only my mother and we kids were there. My mom made a game of it by making it seem like fun, and getting all the neighborhood kids to pitch in. Tom Sawyer didn't have anything on her, no sir! The end results looked pretty good too!
A bedraggled kitten showed up on our doorstep one night, and it was sickly. Mom tried to nurture it back to health for several days, but it didn't look as though it would survive. Since it had just rained and the ditch was full, she decided to place the kitten in a burlap sack with rocks and throw it in the ditch. That night, a scratching at the door revealed that the kitten had, somehow, clawed its way out, and swum to shore and to our doorstep once again. Mom didn't have the heart to try killing it again, so she continued to nurture it, and succeeded in bringing it back to health. She never again tried to get rid of kittens that way.
My paternal grandmother came to live with us for a while, but began hallucinating, so my father returned on leave from his assignment, and signed the necessary paperwork to have her committed to a sanitarium in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Then he went back to his ship, and left my mother to make the arrangements for travel to the sanitarium. We went by limousine, and it was a gorgeous trip, with stops for souvenir shopping in the mountain stores, and eating in restaurants.
On the way back, the chauffeur, whom I suspect Mom was having a dalliance with, stopped off at a farm and my brother and I looked at the various animals while a meal was prepared for us. After the meal, we went home to the annex.
Shortly thereafter, we packed our suitcases (we didn't have any furniture of our own) and caught a Military Airlift Command aircraft from Newport News, Virginia, to Miami, Florida, and thence, on to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The flight was very noisy and bumpy. We sat in webbed seats with our backs to the window.
In 1950, my father, who was stationed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ran the golf pro shop at the golf course. Just above the golf club in the hills, there was a riding stable where one could go and rent a horse for fifty cents an hour to go horseback riding. My brother and I used to do this regularly. The trails led down from the hills, around the edge of the golf course and back to the stables.
Those horses were well trained. You can imagine kids who had never been on a horse, but had watched Hopalong Cassidy, Lash Larue, and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans movies, and the horses never, but never walked! We thought the horses were supposed to run all the time, so the minute we had paid our fare and were hoisted into the saddle, we kicked the horse and he would oblige by trotting off obediently along the trail, way from the stables. He couldn't keep a running pace and would slow down after about five minutes.
Invariably, the out leg of the journey was always the fastest. On the return, all the imprecations and cajoling in the world could not make the horse go above a walk. Naturally, we were late getting back to the stables and had to pay an additional fee. As I said, those horses were well trained!
The man who broke the horses and trained them at those stables was an old black man about sixty‑five or seventy years old, and he had ridden with T.R. Roosevelt on the attack at San Juan Hill. He used to tell us kids stories by the hour, but sorry to say, I didn't listen as well as I should have, because he was a part of history in the making.
It appears that during or after the attack on San Juan Hill, this gentleman got separated from his comrades. He may have found a place to hide until it was all over, for all I know. I remember he told us that he was left stranded in Cuba after all the others had left. In effect, he was a castaway.
I didn't place too much credence in his story at the time. Years later, in 1968 to be exact, while I was in the Army and stationed with the Forth Squadron, Twelfth Cavalry, at Fort Carson, Colorado, an article came out in the paper about him that verified his story. Yes, he was in his eighties, and still breaking horses at the riding stables at Guantanamo. From what I gather, the Roosevelt pullout from Cuba was a bit hasty, and he was listed as missing in action. He was restored to the living then and paid all back wages due him.
We lived in a Quonset hut at a place called Bargo Point in 1950. It was built on a peninsula of coral that stuck out into the bay. The peninsula extended out over a huge expanse of salt flats that led to a mangrove swamp.
A Quonset hut has an apartment on both ends. Usually there are two or three small bedrooms in each one. They are separated by a thin partition. If your neighbor sneezes and you say, “bless you,” you can generally hear him say thanks. Got the picture? It looks like a large, corrugated, tin drainage ditch cut in half, turned upside down, and having doors and windows.
We kids used to walk out across those salt flats and usually we found old, tarnished, salt‑coated ammunition shells, and links that had been discarded during the Spanish‑American War of 1898. (That's the one we got in when the battleship Maine was sunk in Havana harbor.) Sometimes the shells were embedded in the flats to form names or dates. We were crossing to the mangrove swamp because there was an old, sunken, rusted‑out ship in there that we used to fish from, and just about the only thing we ever caught were gars, barracuda, or blowfish.
Now those blowfish were funny fish. They had two very big top teeth in front that you had to be careful of, when removing the hook. When you pulled them from the water, they would suck in air and blow up their bodies, I assume, to scare away predators (us). They weren't good for eating or anything else that I've ever heard of, and the skin was tough like leather. We just caught them to see them blow up.
No matter where I was, as a military dependent, my folks had impressed upon me that my actions always affected my dad. If I did something bad and got caught at it, my dad was likely to get called on the carpet for it. That thought was always uppermost in my mind. My father's wrath was to be avoided at all cost. He wasn't a violent man and seldom hit us kids. When he did, it was usually just one whack in the back of the head, and a stern warning not to do again, whatever it was we had done wrong.
I can remember one such incident that happened when we were in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was during the summer months, and I had been going to the wharfs on the base to watch from dockside while the sailors worked on the ships. There were several native banana boats tied up along the wharfs, trying to sell fruits, vegetables, and fish to the sailors. Most of the crews only spoke pigeon English. After seeing me for several times in the area, one boatman became friendly with me and taught me how to peel pineapple for display and to "make a pitch" to passing sailors. He found that with me acting as interpreter, his sales increased. Thereafter, he encouraged me to work for him, enticing nearby sailors over to his boat so that he could make a sale. It was a nice symbiosis we formed, me learning the sales trade and getting an occasional treat to take home to mom, and him learning a bit more English, plus increasing his sales.
One Saturday, when I decided to stay home and read comic books instead of going to the wharfs, we heard on the radio that there had been a big explosion near the piers. Come to find out, one of the ships had been leaking fuel into the water and someone on a banana boat had thrown a cigarette over the side. The resulting explosion had killed the boat crew and caused some damage dockside. I didn't know that at the time, but when my dad found out about it, he told me not to hang around the piers anymore. I disobeyed him the following day, and went down there. It hadn't been the boat I'd been working on, but all the talk that day was about the accident. I was seen on the piers, and word got back to my father. That evening, one of the afore mentioned slaps was administered, and a stern warning not to disobey him again was given. I'd lost my job at the banana boat!
We had a maid and gardener while in Cuba, but nobody should get the idea that we were putting on airs, because nothing could be further from the truth. Under agreement of the lease between the U.S. Navy and the Cuban government, local nationals had to be hired for that type of work. So, yes indeed, we took advantage of it, because the wages were inexpensive, but good pay for the nationals.
The first maid who worked for us was old and had a permanent running sore on her elbow. Though she spoke English well, her cooking was abysmal, and my mother didn't get along well with her, so she was fired. The second maid was a large‑boned, young girl of sixteen, who spoke little English, but could cook and work like a horse. She was very pleasant‑natured and always tried to keep learning things from my parents and us kids. When we left in 1952, Virgin (that was her name) wanted to come with us. She was from Oriente Province across the bay and came from a large, but poor family.
All the domestic help came to the base by boat from Oriente Province early in the morning. They signed into a work pool office and reported to their place of work or to the family they worked for. They worked all day and departed in the evening. A special permit had to be authorized for them to work on weekends because they usually worked weekdays only. They were happy to get the work.
About this time of life, I entered puberty. I knew it, because I had a wet dream one night, and didn't know what strange things were happening to my body. No one had ever told me about that happening! I was scared, but when I asked my mom, she assured me, everything was normal. My mom was great that way. I could usually talk to her about anything. It was almost a necessity, because my dad was not around for a good many years.
Our school May Day festivities of 1951, profoundly affected our banana tree. The banana tree grew outside my bedroom window and was too young to have bananas (about a six‑inch diameter at base), but offered good shade.
The school was about four miles from my house, and we had to walk down the street and around the corner about a hundred yards to a covered bus stop and wait for transportation. Now today, I know you are thinking school bus when I say that, right? Not so! We were transported in converted cattle‑car trucks, with open mesh screen on the sides, and an aroma that led you to believe that it was recently used for the original purpose it was built. The school was up on a hill overlooking the bay and you could see the airport and the open‑air theater with its many bleacher seats off in the distance.
I was in the school band and played the tenor saxophone; my brother played the trombone. For May Day the band played for the visiting parents, and the kids were to put on various skits, play games and dance around the obligatory May Pole.
Naturally, we had to have costumes. My mother had made my brother and me some bright shiny pantaloons of green and red material, with white blouses, and matching bow ties and sashes. This was her idea of keeping the swashbuckling appearance she wanted to achieve. To cap it off, my brother made some swords for him and me, which we buckled onto the sash.
It is necessary to practice for a May Day celebration, so my brother and I decided to practice early. We got a little carried away with the swords, though, and the banana tree that we used to dodge behind, from time to time, suffered more punctures and slashes than was good for it. The tree subsequently died. God ought to have known to make those trees more durable. Our parents weren't too happy about that little caper, but we made it up to them by making them proud of us during the festivities.
The Boy Scouts were quite active in Cuba. We went camping a lot, and hiking, and practiced our knot tying and even built signal towers, rope bridges and such like. My brother and I were both scouts. Harold went from Tenderfoot to Eagle Scout while we were there. I was only ten when we first got there, so I couldn't join. After hearing about some of the glorious hiking and camping that my brother did in the scouts, I pestered my parents to let me join as soon as I turned eleven. One of his camping trips was to the Yatares River in the mountains (I think it's pronounced U‑tare‑as). What marvelous pictures he brought back! There are boys swimming nude in the river, diving from rocks, etc. It just looked grand!
I remember the scout shack down by the water, and a long pier that led out over the water, with many small boats tied up. I'd usually arrive early on scout night and I'd walk out on the pier to see if I could spot any barracuda. Being inducted as a tenderfoot was a singular event in my life.
Not too long after the induction ceremony, we had to put up some static displays on the tarmac near the outdoor theater. There were signal towers, bridges, knot tying stations, life saving skills, etc. All these points were manned by the scouts. Visitors toured throughout the area, asking questions and generally getting a feel of what scouting was like for us. One of my biggest embarrassments was being asked to man one of the signal towers while this kid went to take a leak. I told him I didn't have a badge for semaphore yet, but he said to wave the flags like I was sending a signal. Any fool could plainly see that I didn't know what I was doing up there, and one adult stopped to ask me some questions. I had to admit my inadequacy! What a blow to a young man's pride that was!
In 1951, the Navy took our whole troop aboard three of their ships to visit Jamaica for two weeks during a Boy Scout Jamboree. We anchored in the bay because they had no facilities to handle large ships port side. The plan was to transport us scouts ashore by longboat. We were close enough in, though, that we could see the activity along the shoreline quite plainly. That isn't what held our attention, however.
The water of Montego Bay then, was crystal clear, and though there must have been four fathoms (twenty‑four feet) of freeboard beneath our keel, one could clearly see the bottom. Even before we dropped anchor, the small boats and dugouts put out from shore to rendezvous with us. When they reached us, some of the larger boats had craftsmen and merchants aboard who proceeded along the hull, and attempted to hawk their wares to the sailors and passengers lining the rails.
What caught most eyes, were the smaller craft that began circling us. The occupants, who were mostly young men without a stitch of clothes, and black as polished ebony, began calling for coins to be thrown to them. When coins were tossed in the water near them, several dove in after the coin, and the water was so clear, you could follow their progress until they had retrieved it. They usually caught it before it hit bottom. They stuck it in their mouth and surfaced amid the cheers of the onlookers. What marvelous swimming abilities they had! Those activities occupied us for a couple hours, and then we were notified to get ready to go ashore, so we packed and boarded the longboats.
Ashore, we divided into more manageable‑sized groups for the scout master and chaperons to handle, agreed on a time and place to meet for the afternoon meal (The Pirates' Den Restaurant and Bar, of which I'll tell more shortly), and proceeded to disperse to all points of the compass to do some souvenir‑hunting. Once we were in smaller groups, we became targets for the pickpockets, and some did lose valuables, but we had been warned and most of us came through unscathed.
This was my first lesson in how to haggle price over an article one wished to purchase. Overseas, one never pays the price the merchant is asking, but one must bargain for a lower price or the merchant will not have much respect for you. It is the norm, even among locals. The merchant seldom loses out anyway, because he generally starts his price range at a ridiculously high level, and by the time a price is agreed upon, he still gets a profit and you are satisfied that you got a bargain. It is a shrewd form of business and one that most Americans are not comfortable with (a fact not lost on the local merchants).
I got what I thought was a bargain and still have some of the articles to this day. A baby stuffed alligator (which has since lost part of it’s tail and a leg) now graces a spot under the fireplace logs in my phony fireplace. It scares the cats when they spot it. Some hand‑carved coaster sets, with Jamaican coins embedded in them, are seldom used because they warp if they get wet. They make good decorations (make that dust‑catchers, if you're my wife) on festive occasions. I have some carved bamboo vases and coconut shells and several large conch shells.
After shopping, we all gathered at the Pirates' Den for lunch. The motif was lavishly tropical in nature, with miniature waterfalls, palm trees, and other shrubbery. They even had several large and colorful parrots sitting on perches throughout the restaurant. Occasionally these birds let out a raucous cacophony of sound or said something deliciously naughty. The main draw of the place, though, was the super‑large treasure chest on the stage. It opened up to reveal a small combo inside. They proceeded to play Latin rhythm throughout the meal.
We toured the Island and met other scouts from all over the world. We played a softball game against some Jamaican girls who were supposed to be the same age as we were, but they were head and shoulders taller than most of us scouts. They won the ball game, but we had a great time anyway. I still have pictures of that event lying around in my scrapbook someplace.
When we'd left the states for Cuba in 1950, television was just beginning to come into its heyday. We didn't have one until a year after we returned to the United States in 1952. I think the biggest change I noticed was that there were now machines that sold candy, cold soda, and cigarettes. All you had to do was drop the appropriate coin in a slot and pull a handle or push a button. These things may have been around before we left in 1950, but I sure didn't notice them. They were fascinating to me!
My parents couldn't afford to buy a trombone and saxophone for my brother and me when we returned to the States, so since my brother was the older, he got a trombone. He took it with him upon entering the Navy years later, and ended up hocking it to get money to buy dentures for his new girl friend. She promptly left him for another …but that's another story. I got a promise that my saxophone would be forthcoming at a later date. It never did, because my teeth grew in wrong and would not have permitted me to continue playing that instrument. I took to learning to sing in the shower, much to the amusement of my mother, but I got good enough to sing in the glee club at Central Falls High School.
I went to school in Central Falls at a red‑brick school near Broad Street and Cross Street in 1952‑1953. I don't remember the name of the school, but the playground was asphalt. I had just moved there from Cuba. All the kids at that school used to call me, "Cuba," because on my first day of school, the teacher introduced me as having just come from there, and made me tell something about it. Pretty embarrassing stuff for a twelve year old boy to handle! I got over it though, and even made some friends who remembered me when I returned later.
There was a school on the right‑hand side of Dexter Street, at the lower end, near Notre Dame church. I don't remember the name of the school, but it had a wrought‑iron fence around it and in 1952‑1953, the Boy Scout troop I belonged to, used to hold their weekly meetings in the basement of that school. They weren't as active as we had been in Cuba. All we did was practice our knots and take an occasional hike to Lincoln Wood. I sure hope the scouting picture has improved somewhat from those days.
(to be continued)
(1940‑1953)
The Ides of March 1940 is an auspicious date. That is when I came into this world at a place called Fiskedale, Massachusetts. Julius Caesar went out of this world on the Ides of March, and I like to think that maybe I'm a reincarnation of his.
Mom said the doctor was late getting to the house during the storm at 3:00 a.m. He was sick himself and had to have an appendix removed after he left us. After examining her, he lay on the bed beside her to wait for my entrance. When I did arrive, while he was examining me, I peed in his face. That made my mom happy for some reason. She was a weird lady.
In 1943, a crisis in my mother's life occurred. My father, who had been driving taxis in Pawtucket and Central Falls, went off to World War Two in the Pacific. Mom moved us to my aunt and uncle's farm out in Norton, Massachusetts.
The farm was a great place for kids to grow up. I'd guess it was about four or five acres anyway, nothing that a large family without machinery couldn't work. Everything was done by hand: the tilling, hoeing, weeding, planting, and reaping. They grew everything needed for subsistence in the way of vegetables, and kept some chickens, pigs, a couple of cows, and ducks. My uncle was experimenting with a mink farm operation.
In the summer, we walked along a dirt road that paralleled the farm. About two miles down the road, and across a railroad track, was an old, man‑made pond on the right. They called it Pete's Pond, and that's where I learned to swim at the age of four. My cousin George took me out on his shoulders and then ducked out from under me. I cried a little, but by golly, I learned pretty fast. I remember watching the dragonflies, or as some people call them, darning needles, flitter about on the surface of Pete's Pond, and marveling at their changing hues in the sunlight. On the way home, we picked rhubarb that grew wild along the roadside.
Once, my cousins removed an old barn door and we carried it by hand all the way to Pete's Pond to use as a raft. Another time, we found a dead body in the woods by the side of the road,
and it caused quite a stir in the neighborhood. I forget the details of that one, because I think the grown‑ups were trying to protect us little ones.
My uncle had several old clunker cars and trucks that littered the property, and were good places for nesting wasps. I found that out one day while investigating. When my mother came home from work, she couldn't recognize me, because I had been stung between the eyes, and both of them were swollen shut.
We kids had this special place off in the woods in a clearing where we would play. We built sand cars in the dirt, big enough for us to get into, and we'd sit in them and pretend to race each other through the woods. Naturally we didn't get very far. We had to change vehicles just to make sure that the same person didn't win all the time.
Occasionally, my cousins got some vegetables from the garden, some salt and pepper, pots and pans, and other staples, and with rod and reel, we went off in the woods to a fishing hole. From what I remember, we only caught catfish, so we must have been fishing off the bottom. We built a fire, and cut up the vegetables and put them in the stew pot, along with the cleaned catfish. We ate right there on the bank of the pond. Such was the cares of my world then.
During the Second World War, my dad sent back some pictures of himself and a friend having a good time at some club on one of those islands. Both had hula girls, in grass skirts, draped around their necks, and sitting on their laps. That was some war they were fighting, huh? I only mention that in passing, because he asked my mother for a divorce, and this caused her to have a nervous breakdown.
My brother and I were placed in an orphanage. I don't remember too much about the children's home except that for some reason my brother and I were separated. I do remember seeing and talking with him through a tall, chain‑link fence that separated our playgrounds. I remember Mom coming to visit also when she started to feel better. Dad had reconsidered His position and begged for forgiveness, so after some time, my mom relented. They got us out of the home and made a fresh start of it.
My first conscious memory of Central Falls, Rhode Island is from a second‑story window of an apartment on Washington Street. I must have been four years old, so that was sometime in 1944. My father was in the Navy in the Pacific, and my mother was raising my brother and me by herself there on Washington Street. I was too young for school, but I used to watch for my brother to come home from first grade. The school was on Washington Street also; it was a Catholic school, and we only spoke French (My mother is Canadian French, and I didn't speak English until I started second grade in another state, but that's another story.).
The walk‑up in that apartment was a very scary place for a four‑year‑old, especially at night. I still have one very scary memory of a drunk, asleep on the stairs, grabbing my leg as I tried to pass him. His stubble beard on my leg (we wore knickers in those days) scared me, but not half as much as I must have scared him when I screamed.
I remember going to the store with ration coupons to get butter and flour. There was a corner store I used to pass that had an old, wooden, cigar store Indian statue out front. Some old (to me) men used to sit outside on the steps and share a water pipe and the local gossip.
If I'm not mistaken, they cobbled the streets in those days. I remember the iceman delivering ice to the apartments. He'd haul large blocks of ice in his horse‑drawn cart. The ice was under burlap sacks. When you paid him for your ice, he would take his ice pick and chop off an appropriate amount of ice, grab it with his tongs and toss it over his shoulder, and carry it to your apartment, putting it in the icebox for you. He wore a leather apron. If he was in a good mood, you could talk him out of some chips to suck on.
In those days, the pool in Jenks’ Park was filled with water in the summer and all the little kids like me would play in it. The deepest part was less than three feet deep, what is now called a wading pool. I stubbed many a big toe running around the apron. It used to be pretty scenic to walk up the steps to the clock tower, or the gazebo at the top of the rocks, and look out and down at those in the park.
I remember walking downtown and across the Blackstone River Bridge to go to the movie house near there; especially on Saturdays! Those were the days when they had the best cartoons and the continuation of the serials. You were able to learn that the hero really hadn't died in the previous episode, as you had thought, but was saved by some miracle or other.
In 1948‑1949, I was living at the Annex in Newport News, Virginia, a decidedly substandard military housing project. I was in the second and third grade. The housing consisted of long rows of wooden barrack‑like apartments that held four families per building. It was government subsidized housing (read that low rent), and a lot of military families lived there.
We walked to school by following the sidewalk that ran the length of the apartment buildings for about half a mile. On the left was a huge easement ditch, about thirty feet wide, that was always filled with mud and water, but could be waded across as long as it hadn't rained recently. On the other side of the ditch, there were more apartments like ours.
The family of my brother's friend, who lived across the ditch, was one of the first families in the neighborhood to get a television in 1949. It only had a six‑inch circular screen, but it was a great drawing card to pack the room on Saturdays. We'd gather at his house to watch "Howdy Doody," or the wrestling and boxing. I can still see the one‑eyed man with the silk top hat on the National Bohemian can of beer. I hear the man singing, "Say, mister, how are you fixed for blades? Ya better check, Gillette Blue Blades, we mean?" Mom used to tell us that someday, we too, would have a radio like that, with a moving picture. For the present, we had to make‑do with listening to "Buster Brown," who lived in a shoe with his dog, Tyge. "The Shadow, The Fat Man, Green Hornet, Inner Sanctum," and Tonto and "The Lone Ranger" were other favorites. In short, it was the radio for entertainment, or games like Parcheesi or Monopoly. Sometimes, we would make up guessing games and take turns asking if it was animal, vegetable, or mineral. Home entertainment was what you made it.
The housing authority said they would furnish the paint if we wanted to paint the outside of the apartments. All families in each building had to agree. My father was gone, so only my mother and we kids were there. My mom made a game of it by making it seem like fun, and getting all the neighborhood kids to pitch in. Tom Sawyer didn't have anything on her, no sir! The end results looked pretty good too!
A bedraggled kitten showed up on our doorstep one night, and it was sickly. Mom tried to nurture it back to health for several days, but it didn't look as though it would survive. Since it had just rained and the ditch was full, she decided to place the kitten in a burlap sack with rocks and throw it in the ditch. That night, a scratching at the door revealed that the kitten had, somehow, clawed its way out, and swum to shore and to our doorstep once again. Mom didn't have the heart to try killing it again, so she continued to nurture it, and succeeded in bringing it back to health. She never again tried to get rid of kittens that way.
My paternal grandmother came to live with us for a while, but began hallucinating, so my father returned on leave from his assignment, and signed the necessary paperwork to have her committed to a sanitarium in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Then he went back to his ship, and left my mother to make the arrangements for travel to the sanitarium. We went by limousine, and it was a gorgeous trip, with stops for souvenir shopping in the mountain stores, and eating in restaurants.
On the way back, the chauffeur, whom I suspect Mom was having a dalliance with, stopped off at a farm and my brother and I looked at the various animals while a meal was prepared for us. After the meal, we went home to the annex.
Shortly thereafter, we packed our suitcases (we didn't have any furniture of our own) and caught a Military Airlift Command aircraft from Newport News, Virginia, to Miami, Florida, and thence, on to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The flight was very noisy and bumpy. We sat in webbed seats with our backs to the window.
In 1950, my father, who was stationed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ran the golf pro shop at the golf course. Just above the golf club in the hills, there was a riding stable where one could go and rent a horse for fifty cents an hour to go horseback riding. My brother and I used to do this regularly. The trails led down from the hills, around the edge of the golf course and back to the stables.
Those horses were well trained. You can imagine kids who had never been on a horse, but had watched Hopalong Cassidy, Lash Larue, and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans movies, and the horses never, but never walked! We thought the horses were supposed to run all the time, so the minute we had paid our fare and were hoisted into the saddle, we kicked the horse and he would oblige by trotting off obediently along the trail, way from the stables. He couldn't keep a running pace and would slow down after about five minutes.
Invariably, the out leg of the journey was always the fastest. On the return, all the imprecations and cajoling in the world could not make the horse go above a walk. Naturally, we were late getting back to the stables and had to pay an additional fee. As I said, those horses were well trained!
The man who broke the horses and trained them at those stables was an old black man about sixty‑five or seventy years old, and he had ridden with T.R. Roosevelt on the attack at San Juan Hill. He used to tell us kids stories by the hour, but sorry to say, I didn't listen as well as I should have, because he was a part of history in the making.
It appears that during or after the attack on San Juan Hill, this gentleman got separated from his comrades. He may have found a place to hide until it was all over, for all I know. I remember he told us that he was left stranded in Cuba after all the others had left. In effect, he was a castaway.
I didn't place too much credence in his story at the time. Years later, in 1968 to be exact, while I was in the Army and stationed with the Forth Squadron, Twelfth Cavalry, at Fort Carson, Colorado, an article came out in the paper about him that verified his story. Yes, he was in his eighties, and still breaking horses at the riding stables at Guantanamo. From what I gather, the Roosevelt pullout from Cuba was a bit hasty, and he was listed as missing in action. He was restored to the living then and paid all back wages due him.
We lived in a Quonset hut at a place called Bargo Point in 1950. It was built on a peninsula of coral that stuck out into the bay. The peninsula extended out over a huge expanse of salt flats that led to a mangrove swamp.
A Quonset hut has an apartment on both ends. Usually there are two or three small bedrooms in each one. They are separated by a thin partition. If your neighbor sneezes and you say, “bless you,” you can generally hear him say thanks. Got the picture? It looks like a large, corrugated, tin drainage ditch cut in half, turned upside down, and having doors and windows.
We kids used to walk out across those salt flats and usually we found old, tarnished, salt‑coated ammunition shells, and links that had been discarded during the Spanish‑American War of 1898. (That's the one we got in when the battleship Maine was sunk in Havana harbor.) Sometimes the shells were embedded in the flats to form names or dates. We were crossing to the mangrove swamp because there was an old, sunken, rusted‑out ship in there that we used to fish from, and just about the only thing we ever caught were gars, barracuda, or blowfish.
Now those blowfish were funny fish. They had two very big top teeth in front that you had to be careful of, when removing the hook. When you pulled them from the water, they would suck in air and blow up their bodies, I assume, to scare away predators (us). They weren't good for eating or anything else that I've ever heard of, and the skin was tough like leather. We just caught them to see them blow up.
No matter where I was, as a military dependent, my folks had impressed upon me that my actions always affected my dad. If I did something bad and got caught at it, my dad was likely to get called on the carpet for it. That thought was always uppermost in my mind. My father's wrath was to be avoided at all cost. He wasn't a violent man and seldom hit us kids. When he did, it was usually just one whack in the back of the head, and a stern warning not to do again, whatever it was we had done wrong.
I can remember one such incident that happened when we were in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was during the summer months, and I had been going to the wharfs on the base to watch from dockside while the sailors worked on the ships. There were several native banana boats tied up along the wharfs, trying to sell fruits, vegetables, and fish to the sailors. Most of the crews only spoke pigeon English. After seeing me for several times in the area, one boatman became friendly with me and taught me how to peel pineapple for display and to "make a pitch" to passing sailors. He found that with me acting as interpreter, his sales increased. Thereafter, he encouraged me to work for him, enticing nearby sailors over to his boat so that he could make a sale. It was a nice symbiosis we formed, me learning the sales trade and getting an occasional treat to take home to mom, and him learning a bit more English, plus increasing his sales.
One Saturday, when I decided to stay home and read comic books instead of going to the wharfs, we heard on the radio that there had been a big explosion near the piers. Come to find out, one of the ships had been leaking fuel into the water and someone on a banana boat had thrown a cigarette over the side. The resulting explosion had killed the boat crew and caused some damage dockside. I didn't know that at the time, but when my dad found out about it, he told me not to hang around the piers anymore. I disobeyed him the following day, and went down there. It hadn't been the boat I'd been working on, but all the talk that day was about the accident. I was seen on the piers, and word got back to my father. That evening, one of the afore mentioned slaps was administered, and a stern warning not to disobey him again was given. I'd lost my job at the banana boat!
We had a maid and gardener while in Cuba, but nobody should get the idea that we were putting on airs, because nothing could be further from the truth. Under agreement of the lease between the U.S. Navy and the Cuban government, local nationals had to be hired for that type of work. So, yes indeed, we took advantage of it, because the wages were inexpensive, but good pay for the nationals.
The first maid who worked for us was old and had a permanent running sore on her elbow. Though she spoke English well, her cooking was abysmal, and my mother didn't get along well with her, so she was fired. The second maid was a large‑boned, young girl of sixteen, who spoke little English, but could cook and work like a horse. She was very pleasant‑natured and always tried to keep learning things from my parents and us kids. When we left in 1952, Virgin (that was her name) wanted to come with us. She was from Oriente Province across the bay and came from a large, but poor family.
All the domestic help came to the base by boat from Oriente Province early in the morning. They signed into a work pool office and reported to their place of work or to the family they worked for. They worked all day and departed in the evening. A special permit had to be authorized for them to work on weekends because they usually worked weekdays only. They were happy to get the work.
About this time of life, I entered puberty. I knew it, because I had a wet dream one night, and didn't know what strange things were happening to my body. No one had ever told me about that happening! I was scared, but when I asked my mom, she assured me, everything was normal. My mom was great that way. I could usually talk to her about anything. It was almost a necessity, because my dad was not around for a good many years.
Our school May Day festivities of 1951, profoundly affected our banana tree. The banana tree grew outside my bedroom window and was too young to have bananas (about a six‑inch diameter at base), but offered good shade.
The school was about four miles from my house, and we had to walk down the street and around the corner about a hundred yards to a covered bus stop and wait for transportation. Now today, I know you are thinking school bus when I say that, right? Not so! We were transported in converted cattle‑car trucks, with open mesh screen on the sides, and an aroma that led you to believe that it was recently used for the original purpose it was built. The school was up on a hill overlooking the bay and you could see the airport and the open‑air theater with its many bleacher seats off in the distance.
I was in the school band and played the tenor saxophone; my brother played the trombone. For May Day the band played for the visiting parents, and the kids were to put on various skits, play games and dance around the obligatory May Pole.
Naturally, we had to have costumes. My mother had made my brother and me some bright shiny pantaloons of green and red material, with white blouses, and matching bow ties and sashes. This was her idea of keeping the swashbuckling appearance she wanted to achieve. To cap it off, my brother made some swords for him and me, which we buckled onto the sash.
It is necessary to practice for a May Day celebration, so my brother and I decided to practice early. We got a little carried away with the swords, though, and the banana tree that we used to dodge behind, from time to time, suffered more punctures and slashes than was good for it. The tree subsequently died. God ought to have known to make those trees more durable. Our parents weren't too happy about that little caper, but we made it up to them by making them proud of us during the festivities.
The Boy Scouts were quite active in Cuba. We went camping a lot, and hiking, and practiced our knot tying and even built signal towers, rope bridges and such like. My brother and I were both scouts. Harold went from Tenderfoot to Eagle Scout while we were there. I was only ten when we first got there, so I couldn't join. After hearing about some of the glorious hiking and camping that my brother did in the scouts, I pestered my parents to let me join as soon as I turned eleven. One of his camping trips was to the Yatares River in the mountains (I think it's pronounced U‑tare‑as). What marvelous pictures he brought back! There are boys swimming nude in the river, diving from rocks, etc. It just looked grand!
I remember the scout shack down by the water, and a long pier that led out over the water, with many small boats tied up. I'd usually arrive early on scout night and I'd walk out on the pier to see if I could spot any barracuda. Being inducted as a tenderfoot was a singular event in my life.
Not too long after the induction ceremony, we had to put up some static displays on the tarmac near the outdoor theater. There were signal towers, bridges, knot tying stations, life saving skills, etc. All these points were manned by the scouts. Visitors toured throughout the area, asking questions and generally getting a feel of what scouting was like for us. One of my biggest embarrassments was being asked to man one of the signal towers while this kid went to take a leak. I told him I didn't have a badge for semaphore yet, but he said to wave the flags like I was sending a signal. Any fool could plainly see that I didn't know what I was doing up there, and one adult stopped to ask me some questions. I had to admit my inadequacy! What a blow to a young man's pride that was!
In 1951, the Navy took our whole troop aboard three of their ships to visit Jamaica for two weeks during a Boy Scout Jamboree. We anchored in the bay because they had no facilities to handle large ships port side. The plan was to transport us scouts ashore by longboat. We were close enough in, though, that we could see the activity along the shoreline quite plainly. That isn't what held our attention, however.
The water of Montego Bay then, was crystal clear, and though there must have been four fathoms (twenty‑four feet) of freeboard beneath our keel, one could clearly see the bottom. Even before we dropped anchor, the small boats and dugouts put out from shore to rendezvous with us. When they reached us, some of the larger boats had craftsmen and merchants aboard who proceeded along the hull, and attempted to hawk their wares to the sailors and passengers lining the rails.
What caught most eyes, were the smaller craft that began circling us. The occupants, who were mostly young men without a stitch of clothes, and black as polished ebony, began calling for coins to be thrown to them. When coins were tossed in the water near them, several dove in after the coin, and the water was so clear, you could follow their progress until they had retrieved it. They usually caught it before it hit bottom. They stuck it in their mouth and surfaced amid the cheers of the onlookers. What marvelous swimming abilities they had! Those activities occupied us for a couple hours, and then we were notified to get ready to go ashore, so we packed and boarded the longboats.
Ashore, we divided into more manageable‑sized groups for the scout master and chaperons to handle, agreed on a time and place to meet for the afternoon meal (The Pirates' Den Restaurant and Bar, of which I'll tell more shortly), and proceeded to disperse to all points of the compass to do some souvenir‑hunting. Once we were in smaller groups, we became targets for the pickpockets, and some did lose valuables, but we had been warned and most of us came through unscathed.
This was my first lesson in how to haggle price over an article one wished to purchase. Overseas, one never pays the price the merchant is asking, but one must bargain for a lower price or the merchant will not have much respect for you. It is the norm, even among locals. The merchant seldom loses out anyway, because he generally starts his price range at a ridiculously high level, and by the time a price is agreed upon, he still gets a profit and you are satisfied that you got a bargain. It is a shrewd form of business and one that most Americans are not comfortable with (a fact not lost on the local merchants).
I got what I thought was a bargain and still have some of the articles to this day. A baby stuffed alligator (which has since lost part of it’s tail and a leg) now graces a spot under the fireplace logs in my phony fireplace. It scares the cats when they spot it. Some hand‑carved coaster sets, with Jamaican coins embedded in them, are seldom used because they warp if they get wet. They make good decorations (make that dust‑catchers, if you're my wife) on festive occasions. I have some carved bamboo vases and coconut shells and several large conch shells.
After shopping, we all gathered at the Pirates' Den for lunch. The motif was lavishly tropical in nature, with miniature waterfalls, palm trees, and other shrubbery. They even had several large and colorful parrots sitting on perches throughout the restaurant. Occasionally these birds let out a raucous cacophony of sound or said something deliciously naughty. The main draw of the place, though, was the super‑large treasure chest on the stage. It opened up to reveal a small combo inside. They proceeded to play Latin rhythm throughout the meal.
We toured the Island and met other scouts from all over the world. We played a softball game against some Jamaican girls who were supposed to be the same age as we were, but they were head and shoulders taller than most of us scouts. They won the ball game, but we had a great time anyway. I still have pictures of that event lying around in my scrapbook someplace.
When we'd left the states for Cuba in 1950, television was just beginning to come into its heyday. We didn't have one until a year after we returned to the United States in 1952. I think the biggest change I noticed was that there were now machines that sold candy, cold soda, and cigarettes. All you had to do was drop the appropriate coin in a slot and pull a handle or push a button. These things may have been around before we left in 1950, but I sure didn't notice them. They were fascinating to me!
My parents couldn't afford to buy a trombone and saxophone for my brother and me when we returned to the States, so since my brother was the older, he got a trombone. He took it with him upon entering the Navy years later, and ended up hocking it to get money to buy dentures for his new girl friend. She promptly left him for another …but that's another story. I got a promise that my saxophone would be forthcoming at a later date. It never did, because my teeth grew in wrong and would not have permitted me to continue playing that instrument. I took to learning to sing in the shower, much to the amusement of my mother, but I got good enough to sing in the glee club at Central Falls High School.
I went to school in Central Falls at a red‑brick school near Broad Street and Cross Street in 1952‑1953. I don't remember the name of the school, but the playground was asphalt. I had just moved there from Cuba. All the kids at that school used to call me, "Cuba," because on my first day of school, the teacher introduced me as having just come from there, and made me tell something about it. Pretty embarrassing stuff for a twelve year old boy to handle! I got over it though, and even made some friends who remembered me when I returned later.
There was a school on the right‑hand side of Dexter Street, at the lower end, near Notre Dame church. I don't remember the name of the school, but it had a wrought‑iron fence around it and in 1952‑1953, the Boy Scout troop I belonged to, used to hold their weekly meetings in the basement of that school. They weren't as active as we had been in Cuba. All we did was practice our knots and take an occasional hike to Lincoln Wood. I sure hope the scouting picture has improved somewhat from those days.
(to be continued)
PROLOGUE
You should know that any resemblance to persons or places depicted in this book are purely intentional. This is indeed an autobiographical account of my existence at various locations, at differing times during my life. As such, it is intended to be factual, so street names and place names must remain as written.
I have endeavored to leave off surnames and have changed some of the characters names in the story. At best though, it is a thin disguise and can readily be penetrated by readers familiar with some of the persons or places mentioned.
It is not this author's intent to cause anyone pain or discomfort by these revelations. Rather, it is told to shed some light on a particular moment which has some redeeming quality that caused the author to store the moment in memory until now.
The school and students who wrote to me and awakened my urge to write, are located in the city of Central Falls, Rhode Island. You may recall that several years ago, that city was involved in a major drug bust that netted (at that time) the largest amount of illicit drugs in the nation, and uncovered the Colombian, Medellin Cartel connection. The children of that area are still being affected by those circumstances. Several students, in their initial letters, have alluded to the drug problems the city has had, and, allegedly, is still having.
It was the desire of the author to contact old friends or teachers to reminisce about good times in past years. The letter-writing campaign intensified when it was turned into a
class project. At first I resented this intrusion by so many strangers. As I began to realize, however, the more I wrote to these students, the more clearly events stood out in my memory and the narrative began to flow more and more smoothly. For that alone, I owe the teacher and his students my deepest gratitude.
It is hoped the reader will be able to piece the story together without too much difficulty and that in doing so, will have a good read and perhaps some memory of your own will be called to mind by the narrative.
I wish to thank my wife who has been very patient with my absences and late night toil in this endeavor.
To the reader, enjoy.
John E. Hunt
You should know that any resemblance to persons or places depicted in this book are purely intentional. This is indeed an autobiographical account of my existence at various locations, at differing times during my life. As such, it is intended to be factual, so street names and place names must remain as written.
I have endeavored to leave off surnames and have changed some of the characters names in the story. At best though, it is a thin disguise and can readily be penetrated by readers familiar with some of the persons or places mentioned.
It is not this author's intent to cause anyone pain or discomfort by these revelations. Rather, it is told to shed some light on a particular moment which has some redeeming quality that caused the author to store the moment in memory until now.
The school and students who wrote to me and awakened my urge to write, are located in the city of Central Falls, Rhode Island. You may recall that several years ago, that city was involved in a major drug bust that netted (at that time) the largest amount of illicit drugs in the nation, and uncovered the Colombian, Medellin Cartel connection. The children of that area are still being affected by those circumstances. Several students, in their initial letters, have alluded to the drug problems the city has had, and, allegedly, is still having.
It was the desire of the author to contact old friends or teachers to reminisce about good times in past years. The letter-writing campaign intensified when it was turned into a
class project. At first I resented this intrusion by so many strangers. As I began to realize, however, the more I wrote to these students, the more clearly events stood out in my memory and the narrative began to flow more and more smoothly. For that alone, I owe the teacher and his students my deepest gratitude.
It is hoped the reader will be able to piece the story together without too much difficulty and that in doing so, will have a good read and perhaps some memory of your own will be called to mind by the narrative.
I wish to thank my wife who has been very patient with my absences and late night toil in this endeavor.
To the reader, enjoy.
John E. Hunt
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