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Smoking up history 40 years ago today

It was 40 years ago today that my fellow Navy boot camp “shipmates” were summoned into the “Smoke and Coke” lounge. I realize that since this was 40 years ago it must seem ancient to some. Just that the lounge included “Smoke” makes it equally dated since smoking itself was banned in boot camp quite awhile ago.

I can’t remember what our company commander — these days called a “recruit division commander” — said or if he said anything. He just turned on the TV and, about the time I had lit up a Kool or whatever I was smoking back then, on the tube came our commander-in-chief.  The president of the United States back then was Richard Milhous Nixon, a.k.a. “Tricky Dick.” After a wordy introduction he came to the meat of the matter:

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 ” … I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad.

 “To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home.

 “Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.”

The thunderous applause and cheers from my boot company of about 80 guys quite frankly amazed me. My fellow boots came from Bed-Stuy, Boston, from the Caserios of San Juan, the Fifth Ward of Houston, from the never-ending cornfields of Iowa, from Philly, the Rocky Mountain high of Denver and, of course, from the pineywoods of East Texas. Not to mention from everywhere in between.

Boot camp was the place I was introduced to the true “melting pot” of the U.S. of A. But for some reason, I figured the kids from the ghettos were out hustling or shooting up smack all day, or the farm boy riding their tractors or the rest of us out smoking weed being oblivious to what ailed America. But these guys knew as much, some probably more about our nation’s leadership and what an awful five-something years it had been with Tricky Dick presiding. One only has to remember that Nixon was elected amid the height of the Vietnam War and many of us in boot camp didn’t have any idea as they entered high school or the work force or college whether we would have to some day join the fun fighting the Viet Cong or the NVA.

The postwar 1970s were a pretty cool time to be a young person with an open mind. Being a military guy didn’t make you hero as some are anointed these days. Still, it was a time to release ourselves from the dreaded conditioned called “uptight.” One didn’t have to head for the ivory towers to enjoy those days either. And one didn’t have to be around the news all day to know what was happening at the top of our political food chain.

We came, we saw, we got rid of Tricky Dick. And we cheered and thrust our fists in the air. Ding dong the Tricky Dick is gone. Long live President Ford.

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The telecom boom doesn’t solve all of society’s woes

We are closing in on the 120th year of flight. That is rather amazing in its own right. Flying made the world closer, in certain respects. One needs to look at the good with the bad and flying has had plenty of both in those century-plus years.

The tele-communication boom will be the “turn of the century” bookmark of social history. One only has to go on social media to find more than enough of the good and the bad.

I keep a semi-running commentary on politics and society with my college friend, Paul, who lives in Tokyo. It is rather amazing that we both can communicate with one another at such speed and such a distance. It’s easy. Just look at your phone and view the clock you set for Tokyo. Then, if you are super bored, take a picture of yourself — known in today’s lingo as a “selfie”– and just for the hell of it you can take a look at the compass on your phone to find what direction is Tokyo. Or what direction your life is taking. All of this with a phone and more.

My iPhone is probably the best digital camera I have had to date. I’ve used some professional digital cameras, the big suckers real “shooters” for the media use. Or at least used to use. It’s been some 10 years since I have used one. The iPhone is better than my Fujifilm XP. It is time to upgrade to a better digital camera, if I can find one that is better than my iPhone and is as affordable.

I didn’t come here to talk about cameras, you might be surprised to hear. I just wanted to make a notation about life before cell phones. It wasn’t all that long ago, if you don’t call 30 years or so long ago. Maybe a 30-year-old does.

My pick of three decades is arbitrary. That dates back to the year I graduated from college, which was 10 years after I graduated from high school, joined the Navy, was discharged honorably and became a professional firefighter. Actually, I want to pick the days I worked as a firefighter and just afterwards when for two whole semesters I was nothing but a bearded college student. Then as well include that time right after I graduated and moved to a new town. That is when I dated Liz. More on her later.

The first apartment I rented in college was adjoined by two and then later about four other apartments. I had two different neighbors living — one after another — in the apartment in the back of the building. Both were girls. Both were very cute girls. I dated one later on, during the time I worked at my first job out of college. I imagine I should have dated the other one instead.

I had my first very own landline phone in my apartment. So did Liz, the girl who was literally, as the Cars song went, “my best friend’s girl.” The late, great Waldo and Liz been long split by the time she and I dated.

But awhile before that short “bliss,” I remember Liz calling me one morning after I came home from my shift at the fire station. She asked me if I could turn my music down.

“Sure. Happy to.”

The girl who moved in after Liz moved out worked with my sometimes girlfriend back then, Karen. I can’t remember if Debbie, my neighbor had a phone. If she did, she never called me. That’s because she could just walk next door. If my car was home Debbie would knock. We didn’t really need a phone to communicate. For instance, Debbie came outside one morning as I was about to go for a jog. She asked how far I was going. I said about two miles. So she asked if she could go.

“Sure. Damn straight!”

In ran Debbie who quickly pulled on a pair of sweats. Man, if only more women could wear a set of sweats like Debbie! I wouldn’t call running enjoyable but along with some weights and jumping rope, and racquetball, it helped keep me in shape for fighting fires. I would call it enjoyable running with Debbie.

I remember Debbie telling me after I moved to the shotgun shack, that Karen said she would have to work somewhere else if Debbie and I went out, or whatever one would call it back then. I don’t think it would have bothered Debbie. Or Karen either. Things could get complicated.

My friends rarely bothered calling to tell me they were coming to visit back then. When I moved out to the farm, some might call just to make sure I was there. But even if I wasn’t there, some would still park at the locked gate and hang out. Others who knew the location of the spare gate key would “come on in!” It was a nice place, the country.

Now it seems one has to let others know when you have to take a crap. Not that I tell anyone, that’s a metaphor, or a simile or personification or whatever the hell it is.

Perhaps the communication revolution doesn’t answer the big social questions, like why  did I date Liz and not Debbie? I guess it just wasn’t to be, damn it to hell! It is an outcome that can’t be solved with an iPhone and a You Tube video of a dancing monkey.

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Watch for those fiery tornadoes

This story in NatGeo online oddly attracted me. The viral You Tube video is what the story is about, the subject being a “fire tornado.”

These fiery whirling dervishes of nature are more akin to dust devils than to real tornadoes which can cause nine kinds of hell in practically every part of the United States. This partial explanation from Wikipedia comes pretty close to explaining these whirlwinds:

 “Dust devils form when hot air near the surface rises quickly through a small pocket of cooler, low- pressure air above it. If conditions are just right, the air may begin to rotate. As the air rapidly rises, the column of hot air is stretched vertically, thereby moving mass closer to the axis of rotation, which causes intensification of the spinning effect … “

Most dust devils that form here in Southeast Texas are generally small in size. The same applies, though not always, for tornadoes. I would guess that the size has to do with the humid air we normally have here on the coast. I did see some larger whirlwinds when I have visited Colorado, where this fire tornado takes place. I have never seen a fire tornado although I have seen and been through a few tornadoes. I have seen firestorms as well. Or rather, I have seen at least one firestorm. This is a phenomenon which takes place when a fire is so large that it sustains its own wind system. This can occur naturally, as in a large wildfire, or in other instances such as happened most notably in the massive fire bombing of Dresden, Germany, in World War II.

The fire storm I witnessed happened during a fire that destroyed a plywood mill. It was what you would call a “massive” blaze. I could see the currents inside the heat and fire that drifted across the street and caught a wood yard on fire. A few hours later I went home, about 10 miles in the country from the fire. I found ashes up to a foot long and nearly as wide in the cow pasture. Had it not been spring and the area fair with rain, half the countryside could have been burned.

Nature can play all kinds of tricks with you and your surroundings. When that happens. You need to be elsewhere.

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The days of grocers past

Does anyone remember the jingle: “Let’s go to Henke’s now, Henke’s now, Henke’s now … thrifty place to shop.”

Well, the song is a lot like the one you hear or may have had heard in the past that goes: “Let’s go Krogering, Krogering, Krogering … “

It’s all the same and with a reason. The giant grocer Kroger bought Houston-based Henke & Pilot chain the same year I was born, in 1955. The Henke name was no longer used beginning in 1966, or there about. Although the jingle seemed to hang on.

I suppose if you are under 30 and grew up in the U.S., most grocery stores have always been a constant. I know the grocery chains in East and Southeast Texas haven’t seemed to change much over those years. Where I live, in Beaumont, there aren’t a lot of grocery choices. There is Kroger, of course. Two larger regional chains seemed to have elbowed out any potential large competitors with the exception of Kroger. H-E-B, which was once pretty much a Central Texas chain has grown like crazy and even some of the smaller towns around here have mid-sized or small versions of its stores.

H-E-B has mega-stores in different locations in the state. Two were built when I lived in Waco. There is one humongous H-E-B in Beaumont on Dowlen Road that anchors a small strip mall. When it first opened it featured a small “Central Market,” which is the company’s gourmet grocery chain. One may find all the hipsters at the Central Market in Austin (that should be ‘Markets,’ and they are littered with ‘foodies’ in major suburbs like Plano and Southlake in the DFW area.) I will give the tres chic  H-E-B that it does have many great items one would be hard pressed to find elsewhere.

Unfortunately, Beaumont isn’t a hipster town — at least not in reality — so its H-E-B Central Market was gone and installed was a doc-in-a-box. A new, and presumably likewise large, H-E-B is now solid ground but will be coming up at the site of the old Baptist Hospital at South 11th Street and College. This is next door to the booming Memorial Hermann Baptist Hospital and its surrounding medical village. This is kind of a crossroads of where Beaumont’s  mostly Black, goodly-sized Hispanic and minority White population all have to go at one time or the other. If they don’t go to Baptist they usually go up 11th to Christus St. Elizabeth or to Texas Medical Center in Houston.

Of course, the “Golden Triangle” also has an abundance of Market Basket stores. It is a chain in Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana some half-century old, based in Nederland, Texas, that has seemed to do just fine.

Various other stores either went out of business or got bought out. The Brookshire Brothers chain, based in Lufkin, can be found pretty much in the Big Thicket and Deep East Texas areas. The company has also moved into areas of east Central Texas and parts of Central Texas as well.

One need not mention Wally World.

I think about some of the stores that were once here in Beaumont: Albertson’s, Gerland’s, gosh knows who else. In Nacogdoches, where I spent a great deal of my life, Safeway was once a huge, unionized store. Kroger was also unionized there. One of the first girls I dated upon first moving to Nac, I met at Safeway. Those are the kind of memories one likes to have of a grocery store instead of getting stuck in line to no end. The Safeway girl and I parted quicker than some of those lines, I would suppose. But we left amicably as she wanted to move back to Houston and I said, well, if someone wants to move to Houston then I guess I have no great opposition to it. I was fine just where I was at that time, and several other times.

Also I remember the little East Texas town from where I came. We didn’t have any of those big-named stores. Maybe a couple of years after I left a Brookshire Brothers came. It was a familiar brand because my uncle Sox retired from the company. Uncle Sox then worked part-time after retirement in a little town outside of Lufkin called Huntington. Uncle Sox worked for Boots store, named after a man called Boots. Sox and Boots. Seemed kind of proper, yet still gets a big family chuckle.

Some of the small-town stores I remember delivered. Dick’s Grocery, whom I am named for (Dick, not Grocery), used to set their fruits and vegetables out on the curb. I remember one store, owned by Ira Bean, sold a little of everything. Then there was Joe Harrell’s who we saw for smoked meats and his homemade sausage. And like family was J & J’s, the corner store, but not like in a convenience store. I remember they had a big old wheel of cheddar sitting on top of the butcher case. John & Juanita were as good of people you could find.

Man, those were the days. Well, excuse me because I have to go to Kroger’s. Have a great weekend.

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Putin needs to get a life

It beats me whether I was wrong or right about Russia and its intentions in Crimea. There has been a near orderly and bloodless transfer of power as Russia annexed the portion of the former Ukraine, something upon which Americans pride themselves.

If, however, the whole Crimea exercise by Russia is a means to the end of a separation from the once Soviet Union then that would not be good at all.

There are more than just one splinter of countries in that portion of the world in which people are connected with Russia by language and history. People who have come of age these days — those both in the East and in the West — have grown without the worry of nuclear annihilation.

It doesn’t seem very long ago at all that I graduated from college, in 1984, and saw a brave new world out there for myself. And though it was fading, the Cold War in which I had served as a sailor was fading. The USSR was something still “evil” though fading as Ronald Reagan said, as an “Evil Empire.”

I think there are many good Russian people in the world and those who would rather see a stronger more than weaker relationship between their homeland and the United State. Yes, we are rivals and probably always will be as such. But rivals need not be enemies.

Vladimir Putin is a latter-day Commie spook. He wouldn’t make a wine stain on Mihkail Gorbachev’s head. Let us just hope these flights of Soviet fancy are just that.