Mardi Gras - 1978

 

I was leaving Crown Zellerbach after five years of service.  In the computer field that was a long time.  I’d never stayed anywhere more than two and a half years.  It was a custom in these cases to give the valued, middle-management employee, a freebee business trip, as a parting gesture.  I chose to spend three days at one of the company’s paper factories in Bogalusa, Louisiana, helping them to install new computer software.  Coincidentally, Bogalusa was across the Lake Pontchartrain Bridge leading to New Orleans.  It was also convenient that I scheduled the trip for March 3^rd to 5^th, 1978, three days before Mardi Gras.  To cap this boondoggle off, I asked for and got permission to apply my airfare equivalent expenses to renting a twin-engine Beechcraft Bonanza piloted by my friend Bill Campbell.  It helped that he owned a key contracting agency, supplying our computer department with consultants. 

We planned to spend a long week for this trip; it wound up closer to 12 days.  My girlfriend was Julie Nunes, a nurse who lived out in the Avenues in San Francisco in a large flat with four female roommates.  I met her through mutual friends, and she invited me to a party at her house.  We clicked because I was Joe-Healthy at the time, on a vegetarian diet, no drinking, and focused on the spirituality of my life and those around me.  I was still in the healing phase after my cancer surgery and felt I had my fingers on the pulse of life and could help people just by being in contact with them.

Bill was living with Lois Grushka.  Lois was not having success selling real estate after her two months’ training school.  Bill, Lois, and I had been best friends for five years.  The duty fell to Lois to arrange the travel reservations for everything except the airplane.  We started planning this trip about three weeks before Mardi Gras began.  People in New Orleans laughed at her to start with because Mardi Gras revelers had fully booked all accommodations a year in advance.  But while experienced at this, Lois had perseverance and moxie.  She checked with the French Quarter hotels by telephone twice a day.  With three days left before we had to take off, the best she had found was a motel eight miles out of town.  Then, excited like she had just won the lottery, she called Bill and me at work and announced that we had hit the jackpot.  A hotel smack dab in the middle of the quarter had taken a cancellation five minutes before she made one of her routine calls.  We could have two large rooms for the whole week.

The third couple going on this trip was Scott Peterson, Bill’s flight instructor for multi-engine aircraft, and his girlfriend, Ellen.  This was Bill’s final cross-country checkout run and a great trip it was.  It evaluated his abilities with a dozen mishaps, mostly severe weather problems.  When the Tuesday rolled around that we were to depart, I packed my suitcase and a duffle bag then went over to Julie’s house to pick up her and her luggage.  We arrived about half an hour late, parked the car and walked over to the plane where Scott and Bill stood with mouths agape.  The limit for this plane was six people and that was with light baggage.  Bill might have mentioned this to me, but I had no context to store the request, so if he did, it just went in one ear and out the other.  Scott and Bill routinely carried tiny little cases with a change of socks and a clean shirt and mostly maps.  They had trained their girlfriends to do the same; Lois just carried a large purse.  Julie and I each toted large suitcases and stuffed duffle bags.  The guys helped us carry all this into the tower area and weigh it all so they could re-compute the loaded plane’s weight and probable fuel mileage just to ensure we weren’t going to run out of gas over Death Valley.  They cursed that we had better be ready to jettison things if they got in trouble.

When that panic was over and Bill was stuffing these bags in crazy spots all over the plane, I said, “Just one more thing in the car."  And I ran back and pulled out a bottle of champagne and six paper cups.  “To toast our big trip,” I said.  Bill had another fit.  “Well, Scott and I are piloting the plane, so we can’t drink for the whole trip.”  I stupidly decided to split the bottle with the three women.  Our first trip leg was to get to Tucson, where Bill and Lois’s parents lived, and I had gone to college.  This was about a five-hour trip and we were leaving about eleven in the morning.  As we passed over Fresno, the urge to pee was simply too great.  Not just me, but the women too had been increasingly fidgety for an hour.  I broke the ice by saying, “Julie will hold up this coat for privacy.  I will pee in the paper cup and then pour it back in the bottle.”  Before another hour had passed, everyone had completed the maneuver, except for Bill and Scott, who spent this hour belly laughing.

We got to the Tucson airport and Lois’s mother was there to pick us up and drive us over to her house.  She had set up a camping area in her living room where the six of us could spread out blankets and sleeping bags.  She prepared a filling Mexican dinner and we simply got a good night's sleep after staying up talking until past ten PM.  Lois’s mother was a kosher caterer for at least twenty-five years in Tucson, whipping up a meal for half a dozen weary travelers was nothing for her.  She cooked us a great breakfast and took us back out to the airport in the morning. 

I first met Bill ten years before, in 1969, when I was back at the University of Arizona for a Master’s in Computer Science.  He was an undergraduate there in Philosophy.  He worked at the Registrar’s computer facility as an operator.  I got a job there as well to put myself through school as a programmer.  We became friends because I was trying to date his sister.

 Traveling from West to East, we had tail winds and they helped to get us into New Orleans ahead of schedule.  This second leg was uneventful, and we didn’t bring drinks on board.  I picked up a rental car since I was on a business trip and could write it off.  We drove into town, arrived at the Hotel DuPuy, and had the valet park the car.  The hotel was ornately swanky, wrought iron verandas off the rooms with leaded hurricane windows.  The rooms were large and roomy.  We had discussed breaking into girls’ and boys’ rooms, but finally decided that Scott and Ellen could have one room and Bill, Lois, Julie and I would share the other with the agreement that there would be no sex going on.

I had to get up the next morning and Bill opted to come along with me to visit the Crown Zellerbach factory.  We decided to get something fast to eat and wound up sucking up dozens of oysters with bread and beer, a New Orleans specialty that I loved. 

Bill and I snuck out the next morning before the women got out of bed. We set out across the 25-mile Lake Pontchartrain Bridge and wended our way for another 25 miles to the most depressed town to which I had ever been, as bad as the slums of Mexico City can be.  I had always heard the term, tar paper shacks, but had no idea that this expression was literal.  The other expression we confirmed while we were there was “a company town.”  When we met with the plant manager for lunch that Thursday, he explained to us that there had been nothing here seventy years before when the Zellerbach Company decided set up a paper mill here to be near the timber land and the Pearl River.  The company built the town and the little houses around the town.  Workers were mostly poor blacks and whites.  Nothing had changed in seventy years except time.  Time had run down everything, the mill, the houses, time had run down the whole town.  There were nice houses, up on the hill overlooking the town.  The new car dealer, the plant manager, and the town sheriff owned these.  The nice ,terraced houses down the hill started at the top with the plant manager’s house and worked down by socio-economic status descending the hill, in circular arcs.

Besides depressing, it was desolate: 30-40 miles in every direction was nothing but scattered, small towns.  Bordered by Lake Pontchartrain and the Pearl River, with mostly marshland, like Honey Island Swamp.

Where most businesses might direct cars past a guard at a gate, this place had built a huge car wash.  You had to drive through the car wash when leaving, at least once a day.  That was to wash all the toxins, chemicals, and glues that were thick in the air all throughout the mill.  “How can you stand the smell?”  I asked as we were taking the management tour of the place.  “What smell?” came the reply.  And then, “Oh, I guess you get used to it.  I grew up here myself.”  This was the Data Center Manager who hosted Bill and me around for two days.  We spent all day Thursday, “appreciating the situation,” as Lawrence was told to do in “Lawrence of Arabia.”

We agreed that the next day I would perform the function that Crown Zellerbach had sent me 2,000 miles to do.  Bill and I went back to New Orleans and met up with the women to go out to our first formal dinner in the French Quarter.  New Orleans is a wonderful tourist city anytime except Mardi Gras week.  Nobody can keep up with the chaos that had already set in.  Bad service, mediocre meals, at inflated prices, after long waits for seating.  We only did this once, the rest of the time we worked at finding out of the way places.

On our way back from the Bogalusa paper mill the second day, we ran into the beginnings of a traffic jam just as we entered town.  Not the French Quarter, just the outskirts of greater New Orleans.  It was only a little after 5:00 PM and we had planned to meet up with the gang by six.  Traffic thickened and then we realized that we had spent forty minutes and only progressed four blocks.  I pulled the rental car up on the sidewalk and we got out and walked to the hotel.  What a madhouse.  The party had started, and we were late. 

We met up with our tourist contingent, changed clothes and hit the streets.  We wandered from place to place, eating little and drinking lots.  The singing and dancing were infectious.  You can’t be at Mardi Gras and remain a wall flower or spoilsport; you’ll wind up partying no matter how you start out.  We rocked and reeled back to the hotel at midnight.  Going up to the third floor in our crowded elevator, two young couples were saying, “I can’t wait.”  “I dare you.”  “Jamie?!”  and the foursome started taking off their clothes.  They were buck naked by the time we got to the third floor.  “Isn’t this great party?” said one of the girls when we all got off the elevator.  Next day we got up late and had strong coffee and those funny donuts down by the waterfront.  We watched the parade on Saturday and continued partying that night. 

We were supposed to start back Sunday, but when they called in for a weather report, the airport said a massive weather front was heading our way at low altitude.  The pilots decided that it would be better to wait.  The plane could fly as high as 12,000 feet, but the plane did not have oxygen masks, so we could go no higher than 12,000.  There were deicers for the wings, but nobody relished flying through snow, sleet and hail.  We got it all, over the next few days.

We spent true tourist time on Sunday and visited Tulane University a little west of town, then had dinner in Fat City a little north of town. Fat City is famous for similar merry making at Mardi Gras, but for half the price.  

Monday morning was not encouraging either, but we couldn’t stay forever, so we decided to take off Tuesday morning, come hell or high water. 

We got as far as San Antonio before the weather forced us down.  It was slow going because we were fighting headwinds.  We toured San Antonio; it was a gorgeous town.  We visited the suburbs and shopping malls.  We had dinner along their new canal waterway system, which is the center of town. 

We left in the morning, Wednesday, but the weather forced us down again in Yuma, Arizona.  We had tried to fly over the front and got to 12,500 feet.  We could see the open sky 500 feet above us, but we just couldn’t break through.  The wings had iced up and got so heavy that we couldn’t climb anymore. 

They tried a maneuver where they go into a high-speed dive and the ice starts breaking up off the wings because of the airspeed.  Chunks of ice were hitting this paper-thin fuselage that I could rattle just by pounding my fist on it.  The bombardment sounded scary. 

The winds at low altitude were gusting at 80 MPH as we neared Yuma.  As we took the turn for our final approach directly into the wind, we were only advancing above the runway at about 15 MPH, almost floating to the ground.  Bill screamed back to us, as soon as we stop after we hit the ground, everybody out and grab tie-down ropes and stabilize the plane.  It could easily blow over.  After we were inside the terminal building at this small airport, we watched a commercial airliner coming in for a wobbly landing.  The passengers got out and staggered toward the terminal, all green and three throwing up.  “See, it’s much worse in a large plane,” said Scott. 

Irony:

Thursday : again, the pilots called in for the weather report and the prognosis wasn’t good.  Ellen and Julie were supposed to have been back to work by Tuesday and so was I.  Another delay and we would be into next week. 

I suggested renting a car, driving to LA.  Then taking the next commuter flight to the Bay Area.  Julie, Ellen and Lois joined me, leaving Scott and Bill to go down with the sinking ship.  Ellen called her brother from LA and had him meet us at the Oakland airport and take Julie, Lois and me to my car at the private airport. 

As it turned out, Scott and Bill arrived four hours later; the weather had cleared just after we left.

Summer in Europe - 1960

 

In 1960, this was the de rigueur trip for upper middle-class white kids to take, a six-week summer tour of Europe.  The University put it together brilliantly.  Three days in England to start with, to get our foreign legs stable and to pass the jet lag.  Then we had a single Belgian bus and driver for the whole continental part, which kept us a tight-knit group.

It wasn't really a group of college kids.  There were two little old ladies, two middle-aged ladies, three middle-aged chaperoning faculty members and four other kids besides me.  I was really two years too old for this trip, being 21.  I buddied up with the driver often, and snuck out after hours, sometimes with him, but always looking for adventure, drinking and girls.  I also wound up deserting the group as we were about to travel back to the States, but I'll get back to that story later.

I was jet lagged when we arrived in London at 3:00 in the afternoon.  These were long flights in those days (1960), 13 or 14 hours with a refueling stop in Shannon, Ireland.  We went straight to bed after an early 7:00 PM dinner in the hotel.  I got up about 3:00 AM, unable to sleep, and just having to see what London was like.  I walked for a bit and then got on the underground, but it was over-ground here and I got off when I passed an open air food market, a large one where restaurants and shops came to get their supplies in the morning.  I had breakfast there and then walked back to the hotel, stealing the best bottle of milk I had ever had from someone's front porch, glass bottle with cream at the top, just like when I was a kid.

I felt like I was home here in England, and I felt the same way when I came back to live there twenty years later.  I don't really know why I didn't lose my way that day; I must have walked ten miles.  But I made it back to the hotel and we embarked on a whirlwind tour of England, which was mostly confusing.  Why Stratford?  This wasn’t a theater arts or English language tour.  It sucked up half our time for a play we didn’t understand.  We visited the Tower of London, where England stores the crown jewels and we saw royal guards in costume.

We took the ferry across the channel to Oostende where we met our driver.  The first town we toured was Brussels, but the first I remember was Paris.  What a fantastic city.  I fell in love with Paris and I have been back dozens of times; I'll never tire of Paris.  I figured out that we were staying in a hotel that mostly rented rooms by the hour.  Our faculty chaperon told us to stay away from the hotel bar downstairs, but of course that only made me more curious.  On one of my escapes from the rest of the group, I found myself talking at a Place Pigalle sidewalk café to a drag queen.  We spoke for over an hour about what it was like to live in Paris versus living in the countryside.  Three hours later that evening, our whole staid group was walking to dinner along a main street, and there, riding a bicycle past us is Etienne in full costume frantically waving and shouting, "Peetaarr."  No one knew what to make of it.

We wove our way down through Germany and Austria finally arriving in Oberammergau, which was supposed to be a high point of our tour.  We were "lucky" because they only performed a Passion Play once every ten years and this was one of those years.  The Passion Play consisted of day after day of reenactment of the tortures of Jesus.  Scenes went on for three and four hours, while we sat outdoors, on hard folding chairs, bored, since we didn't understand German and felt that ten minutes of this was enough. But the worst part was the accommodation and especially the food, or lack thereof. 

When you only get tourists once every ten years (and there were few in 1940, 1930 or 1920) then you only pull together makeshift accommodations.  We were all crammed into two rooms, a boy’s room and a girl’s room.  Meals were twice a day.  A perfunctory continental breakfast, which we learned to stuff up on, and an adequate, but sparse dinner meal.  Lunch was on us to forage for, but there was little available in the town to purchase and no restaurants.  The German attendees to the play brought large picnic baskets from home and munched all day.  Neither our school nor tour guide had planned on this.  No one had any experience with a town that only had tourists once every ten years.  Think Oliver Twist.

We left this place one morning after what we felt was three days of starvation.  We drove through the Italian Alps and descended upon a tiny restaurant that our bus driver knew well.  We proceeded to have the best meal of the trip.  And we were all converted to lovers of Italian food and meals.  They started us off with a pasta course which took off the edge of our hunger.  Then they brought a soup course, more bread and red wine.  Then came a fish course and people were beginning to fall by the wayside.  After that the main entrée of roast beef and more wine.  And, of course, there was dessert to follow.  We were all sated.

Tours like these were expensive, even in 1960 – six weeks, chaperoned and guided, all inclusive – I’m guessing $1,000 a week – these days, at least $50,000, up to a hundred for the package.  So, organizers were always looking for cheap sites – CHURCHES.  As we drove through France and Germany, we’d stop at 3 and 4 churches  day.  Now, “after …”, I tended to hang around, to stretch my legs, with the bus driver, as the others entered the church.  We had many conversations: he had a wife and family in Belgium; tour guides were highly respected for their knowledge and experience; he did three trips a year like this which put him in an middle class tier; he got bored and enjoyed carousing a bit at times.

No cell phones, no Euro, no credit cards, no common market, these things caused us to learn about: international communications, financial rates of exchange and money markets, border and immigration laws, letters of introduction.  For my bus driver, six weeks was like a military tour of duty, a secret mission.  He was out of contact with his family, as we were, for the six weeks.  I sent post cards home – he might have as well  There wasn’t a world-wide telephone network, so no calling home.  There were International Operators, just like there were interstate operators back in America, but they were expensive, slow and ify.

Italy was for us and we thoroughly enjoyed Florence and Rome.  I did my "essay" on Florence; we had to write up the trip or an aspect of it, to get credit.  I loved Florence.  It was a sort of San Francisco sized town that you could get to know easily and feel comfortable about.  I met a Jewish man one day having coffee who said the war had blinded him, but he had been an antiquarian book collector before the war.  He took me up to his apartment where to my amazement, there were thousands of old books, mostly rotting.  He felt sure the Nazis had infested worms in his books on purpose.  He didn't know what he was going to do with his collection.  Italy was colorful and earthy – a painter’s paradise.

There are so many experiences gathered on a trip like this – the 6-week tour is the equivalent of an additional year of study, at an important level – language, culture, the universality of life.  It should be a government paid-for option, like the Peace Corps.

When I was working a prolonged project in England in the eighties, I brought my daughter over to attend a prep school in Oxford.  I took her to Paris twice on 3-day weekends.  I sent her on the prep school summer tour, and she fell in love with Tuscany – didn’t want to leave.

Twenty years later, when my daughter was teaching Humanities at Notre Dame University in San Mateo, she chaperoned an NDU group for the summer tour and took her teenage daughter along.  So, me, daughter, granddaughter – it’s a family tradition.

We took the ferry over to Greece and hooked up with a female Greek guide that was so much fun (think Melina Mercouri).  One day, two policemen got on the bus and rode with us for ten miles or so.  After they got off, she translated that they had asked if they could borrow the two young co-eds for a day or two, they would return them to us on our way back.  She had apologized that they were still virgins and the family would have a fit.  On another occasion, she took only us men into a "special" room where the ancient Greeks had pornographic scenes depicted on the walls as murals.  She loved this kind of stuff.

 

The school tour trip was winding down and we were in Frankfurt planning to return to the States in two days.  I got it in my head that it was too soon to go back and so I went out and bought a Maico motorcycle, 90 cc.  I left a note for the faculty chaperon and set out for Bayreuth to see the Wagner Opera Festival.

 

I had no real plan and I was in no hurry.  I purposely picked small roads and small towns.  I’d pick a town and stay at a gasthaus for three days.  I would read the German newspapers, watch German TV, and talk to whoever could bear to listen to my German. 

I wanted to see if I could get along where they didn’t prefer to speak English.  When I returned to the States, I would be in my 5^th and final year of college and taking my 3^rd year of German.  I had one physics and three math classes to complete to graduate, and the rest, elective courses, to maintain my full-time status. 

 

I made it to Bayreuth, but barely and not successfully.  I was coming down with something, flu-like, but with photosensitivity. 

The town was jam-packed – I had trouble finding a room.  Finally, I got a hotel room.  I just wanted to sleep and stay quiet in a dark place.  At one point, a chambermaid came in, and  noted that I was feverish.  She wanted me to take a bath, insisted on it.  I groggily followed orders.  The bath woke me out of a delirium. 

I suddenly realized that I was thinking in German.  The experiment had worked, in the extreme.  I hadn’t used English in days now, a week.  It was easier for my brain to think in German, because it was out of practice for using English.  I saw how this worked five years later when I brought my stepson to America, after a military tour in Germany.  He was five – had only spoken German all his life, and after one year of school in America, he forgot it all.

 

The hotel people urged me to see a doctor – they made me an appointment.  The doctor examined me thoroughly.  He diagnosed me with “Uveitis”, which translates from the Latin as, “You’ve got an eye problem, but we don’t know what or why”.  They recommended that I get back to the States ASAP and see a specialist.

I did go back – but missed the Wagner Festival.  My Uveitis plagued me every 4 years, for the next 25,-and then magically disappeared at age 45, never it be a problem again.  My guess is it was the switch from hard to soft contacts, or a change in the contact lens wetting solution.

Nogales Bullfights 1959

 

In our second year of college, our merry band of misfits discovered Nogales, just across the Mexican border.  Nogales featured a twelve square block red light district.  It took us that entire school year of Saturday nights to explore all the cantinas, dancing with all the lovely señoritas.  By springtime, we began to tire of carousing for a long evening and then heading back home at three in the morning.  Surprisingly, John was the one to lead the way in this regard.  The rest of us had pretensions of love affairs back in Tucson, none of which ever consummated. John didn't.  He wagered all his betting money on Nogales and started spending Saturday night there.

John was the only one with a car, so we had to adapt.  For a while, we hitched rides back with other college kids, but you couldn't depend on this and if you waited too long there were no rides.  John wound up with a regular girlfriend, Lūpe.  He treated her with respect, and she took him home early Saturday night.  If we decided to stay and go back with John, we had to meet him at the Bull Fights on Sunday afternoon.  This became a ritual.  We would sleep in and have breakfast at the cantina with the women we had gone to bed with the night before.  Around noon, we would take a cab to the bull ring.  The partying was just beginning again.  We would take a table in the plaza outside the bull ring and eat tacos and drink cervesas.  John would show up about 1:30 and after another round of beers, we would buy cheap seat tickets and enter the Plaza de Toros.

After having watched movies of the greatest Spanish bullfights at The Sinaloa Café in San Francisco, these Nogales fights were bad.  This was a border town on the edge of Mexico, a million miles from real bullfighters.  If the Torero didn't wet his pants running from an old cow, the crowd would cheer.  We learned just how bad the Picadors could be, mauling the bull and sometimes their horses in the process.  Quite often the Toreros were boo-ed out of the ring for failure to show bravery in front of uniformly poor-quality bulls.  It seemed like at least once each Sunday the crowd would be cheering for the bull.  And once, but only once in my life, I witnessed a bull being set free after the Picadors failed to cut his neck muscles and the bull fighter was so scared that he wouldn’t go in for a kill.

We always left before five, by which time the ring was bloody and the noon-time beer had worn off.  I never got to see a bull fighter go down in the late afternoon's hot sun, as discussed in Garcia Lorca's "a las cinco de la tarde." [1]

Another answer to John's staying over on Saturday nights was to get a car of our own.  Except John's, all our parents had been wise enough to send us away to school with no cars and little money.  In my third year at the U of A, I paid $50 for a twenty-year old, rattletrap 1939 Chevy coupe.  There wasn't much use for the car except (1) going out to eat along Speedway; this was a straight, flat road that had a dozen cheap restaurants -no one ever went over 30 MPH,  (2) going up to Sabino Canyon to try and get laid -this never seemed to work out, but like mice in a cage, young boys never stop trying, and (3) was going to Nogales and this always worked out.

There was this one time when we[2] were coming back on a Sunday, about eight or nine o'clock in the morning.  I was driving and Vince, Rich, and Gus were all asleep.  Well, the problem was, I was asleep too.  I closed my eyes for a moment and the next thing I knew, I was fighting the wheel as we had run off the road to the right and were careening down into a ditch.  I jerked the wheel to the left in an automatic reaction and we veered at a 90º angle back across the road.  If a truck or even passenger vehicle had been going South at that time, it would have broad sided us something terrible.

We went head on into a ditch on the other side of the road and slammed to a stop.  When everybody else woke up, got out and looked at the underside of the car, we universally agreed that the car was toast.  The front tie-rod was bending at a 20º angle, as were the right front tire and fender.  Suddenly, an oversized truck with a Mexican family of twelve appears and they all piled out to look at what happened.  The men climbed under the car to assess the damage.  The kids scattered over the surrounding countryside.  The women magically pulled out baskets of prepared food, chicken, salads, beer and cakes, and set up a picnic.  The men reported that it was simple to fix; just pull out the tie-rod, hammer it straight again and re-install it.  This stunned us.  We assured them that we had no money to pay for repairs.  They said that doesn't matter, they would do it anyway.  We ate the food and played with the kids. 

Amazingly, they were successful enough that we were able to get the car back on the road to great cheers from all.  We limped back into Tucson at four in the afternoon, having traveled at under 15 MPH for 60 miles.  The car was emitting horrible noises the whole way.  I parked the Chevy at Greenlee Hall with the keys in it, a note and the pink slip legally signed and dated. 

My days of traveling to Nogales were over.

---

[1] A las cinco de la tarde.
Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde.
Un niño trajo la blanca sábana
a las cinco de la tarde.
Una espuerta de cal ya prevenida
a las cinco de la tarde.
Lo demás era muerte y sólo muerte
a las cinco de la tarde.

[2] We were all nerds, non-fraternity types: Vince from Las Vegas graduated in actuarial statistics and relocated in Hartford, Rich from the south went into the priesthood, Gus went back to Kansas and took over his dad’s Deere dealership, John from Fargo’s wheat fields married a librarian and got his PhD in brain chemistry, I went back to get a Masters in computer science then traveled the world with IBM.

Parachuting Spring 1961

 

I graduated University that spring and decided to take a summer course while I figured out what to do about military service.  Being a graduate student allowed me to eat at the faculty dining area.  I met this cute Chemistry graduate student over lunch one day.  This woman was into skydiving and I didn't even know what it was.  "Meet me on the faculty dining patio at noon Friday," she said when I proposed to come along on her next jump. 

I was there (I was horny).  It is comical to look back now, in view of today's strict rules.  They asked us to stand on top of the six-foot cement walls around the patio.  "Now jump, and as you land on your bended knees, roll forward putting your body-weight onto your right shoulder and roll forward."  I executed this maneuver three times and they passed me into the "ready" battalion for first jumps.

It was a group of dedicated zealots and I was beginning to forget my friend, who was with her favorite girlfriend.  I met them all, the following Sunday out in the middle of nowhere in Northwest Tucson.  We were in a mail and photography plane, the distinguishing characteristic of which was a hole in the back of the plane's floor for the camera equipment.  This plane was a bi-plane and they asked me to crawl out, when we got to five thousand feet and grab a hold of the struts between the wings.  The signal for the crawl-out time was by a finger-pointing motion and the hands pushing out.  This was because the noise was deafening and you really couldn't hear what anybody said, even when they shouted.

Once out there, they had cautioned me, there would be a rush of air and I must hang on with my hands and let my feet dangle in the wind.  The speed was about 100 MPH and I would dangle straight out parallel to the airplane.  When they gave me the "Thumbs Up," I was to let go, to free fall for a while.  I had to pass the "wash" of the plane and I had to be far enough out on the wing that I wouldn't hit the plane's tail when I let go.  I had no idea what to expect, so I just did as they instructed and it all went as planned.

 

This first jump, they tied my rip cord to the airplane in case I panicked or passed out and couldn't pull it myself.  That doesn't mean we didn't need to know how.  I had two chutes strapped on, a big one on my back and a belly pack on my front.  That was in case the back pack either didn't open or failed to deploy properly.  I only had two seconds of free-fall before the rip cord pulled, but I loved it.  It's an ultimate thrill ride rush and I can understand today's kids loving to bungie jump.  The same moments of thrill, but safer.

Once the parachute deployed, all sense of speed and motion ceased, I was floating, or more like suspended up in the air.  I studied the ground, but it was not getting closer.  Not until I got to about 1,000 feet from land.  The 3,500 feet of descent up until that moment took about three to four minutes.  I had totally spaced out for that time and then suddenly, the ground was rapidly approaching.  The last minute was hectic.  I had to try and use my chute cords to guide myself to the designated landing site.  I was trying to remember everything about how to hit the ground and what to do when I did.  There was no, "wait a minute" option.

I executed the fall perfectly with a proper roll.  They all congratulated me, and I was ready to go up again.  “I’ll do a proper free-fall.  No need to tie the rip cord to the plane.”  I assured them, “I didn't panic or pass out and would be just fine.”  "You'll have to wait until next week, I'm afraid," they said.  "With this little plane, we can only take three at a time, so everyone only gets one jump today."  We went out for pizza afterward and drank beer.  The experienced people told old war stories.

I went out three more times that summer and did do free-falls.  We were always in a different airplane.  Once we went up in a B-25 and a storm was coming in, fierce winds and rain came on us suddenly.  We were going to go to 10,000 feet but the Jumpmaster and the pilot agreed that the wind would blow the parachutes unpredictably and they'd have a challenging time finding us to pick us up with the jump truck.  Coming in was one of the roughest rides I've ever had and scariest too.  The FAA had not checked out the pilot in this plane and the pilot wasn't sure how to manage it in the strong crosswinds at the landing strip.  I've experienced rough landings before.  I wasn't scared in those landings.  The B-25 pilot made me scared because he kept nervously saying he wasn't sure about this.  We would lurch up and down, the wings tilting left and right, tossed about like a rowboat in the ocean.  It was my last jump day for the summer.  I was going into the Army.

I came back the following summer on my way to Germany.  I went up once with the old crew.  I was so scared of jumping that day.  I hit the ground like a rock, all stiff-legged, crumpling into a ball.  I wasn't scared of the jumping part, but of breaking my leg on landing.  I had heard so many stories in the past year while in the Army, about people pulling their rip cords too late, at 500 feet or less.  It sounded like skiing to me.  That was my last jump ever.

Train Trip Across the Rockies – Sept 1991

 

I booked a sleeper car on the train, through Chicago, to Detroit.  My father was famous in the family for always suggesting, whenever someone complained about traffic or airports, "Why don't you take the train?"  I had finally called his bluff.  I was preparing a speech to deliver in Dearborn, and I asked him to come with me on the train across country.  I had him, and he had to say yes.

The train is a faded pleasure.  No more white-gloved porters to wait on your every need.  No more three-star meals.  The train was simply full of people who were fearful of traveling, afraid to fly, and they all smoked.

The cabin seemed luxurious to start with until we realized that the two sleeping berths popped down.  We had to sleep in here too.  In a poor location decision, Railroad management had positioned the smoking car, just up wind of us, so we got the back draft of a hundred people sucking as much as they could on tobacco plants.  The even nastier result of this was that we had to pass through the smoking car to get to the observation car, which was where you could get afternoon cocktails and thus, a place we often frequented.

It took us six hours to get to Reno.  We must have stopped at every crossroad along the way.  If I had known this when I was booking the train, I too would have planned a stop-over there, half the people on the train got off in Reno, just to go gambling.

We pulled out of Reno about 7:00 pm and decided on late dinner.  We had already figured out that an early dinner, 5 rather than 7, left us with the hours from 6-10, or midnight, with little to do other than: smoke, drink, or watch the inky blackness go by.  We opted for the middle path.  The food was atrocious.  I wasn't sure that Dickie could stomach this food.  We decided to stick with hamburgers from here on in, and this worked out well.  The chef was working from a menu that he had seen in an up-scale magazine and was trying to imitate it, but the sauces were bad, the entrée mis-cooked, and the garnish missing.  The whole thing didn't blend well into a meal that was worth eating.

OK, so we had to work to avoid smoke and food. The morning after Reno was the desolate desert around Salt Lake.  It's a big country and we spent the day approaching the Rockies. The vistas were amazing.

My father had driven us past the Rockies panorama on our way to California, when I was ten years old.  He was concerned then with the "When do we get there?" and "I have to pee" type of problems to have seen the view.  We were now in an observation car, crawling along at twenty miles an hour.  I looked straight up a sheer cliff, thousands of feet above me.  It was awe-inspiring.  The vista took me aback.  That was the Rockies and the railroad planned the trip so that we would see the most impressive views of it, late in the afternoon.  How small I felt among the power of nature around me.

Added to the majesty of it, our slow speed let the storm we had started in, back in Oakland, catch up to us, all along the way.  There was thunder and lightning.  We went to sleep with rain falling and an exhausting day behind us.

We awoke the 2^nd morning in Kansas City, and I devoured a local newspaper.  My father told me about growing up in the Plains States.  The rainstorm that had been coming down in buckets when we started was now progressing across the country at about the same speed we were, just preceding us by a 2-3 hours.  We followed that storm front for two thousand miles, back in distance and time, as we made our way to the Midwest where we had both grown up.  We got to talk in depth about life in the Midwest over those next few days.

In Chicago, my father had all sorts of memory places to visit.  We started with the swanky Drake Hotel he had come to, during the war.  It was famous for the Palm Court Room.  We had drinks there and then, on to Shaw's Crab House, still a popular place when visiting Chicago.  It’s a '40s-style restaurant with a vast menu of fresh seafood and live Jazz music.  The place was full of beautiful women and[PA1]  they tempted us to continue partying, but he didn't want to upset me, and I didn't want to upset him.  The next day we got back on a morning commute train.  We talked with a black man the whole way.  He was about my father's age, and we spoke of the war and Michigan in the thirties.  This, as we rambled through gorgeous Western Michigan countryside, flat and well-wooded with water; ponds, streams and lakes.

When we arrived at the Detroit station, I couldn't believe it.  The railroad had kept the station on the outskirts of town.  It was a deserted whistle stop.  There was one taxi cab, a beat-up car.  The trunk lock didn't work; then again, neither did the door locks.  We quivered as the driver took us to the designated hotel along Woodward Avenue.

My father showed me four landmark sites; Tillie's boarding house where Mother lived, before they were married (’37), BH Tool where he worked  (40’s) until the move to California.  We went out to Grosse Pointe to my elementary school and the house on Lewiston.  My parents always associated Detroit with the Lewiston house.  We ate at two places he loved fifty years before, and he told me Detroit stories I'd never heard and don’t remember. 

I wouldn't call it a jam, but my father and I got scared as we left Grosse Pointe and tried to retrace his morning commute to BH Tool, fifty years prior.  We pulled up to a light in a depressed area.  The houses were all boarded up or burned out.  A car pulled up along-side of us and a group of angry, young black men cursed us and screamed at us that they would kill us.  We were scared.  We took out of there like bats out of hell.

He flew back to SFO Sunday night.  I stayed in the area the next few days.  There was an armed-guard riding the “BART” system there; my hotel had keycards that gave me access to certain floors; the mall had full-time police-patrols.  This wasn’t my Detroit.

Detroit was a stepping stone for some during WW-II: the war brought good money, and if you saved it, migration: Exit West, afterward.  For others, it was a jump to the middle class, but then, each subsequent American war brought a new automobile maker into the world market: Volkswagen, Japanese, Korean.  Manufacturing moved South, leaving Detroit abandoned.

---

 [PA1]

The Harp - 1982

 

 

Bettina had moved to Berkeley after threats from her father in L.A. that he'd shoot me and put her in a nunnery if she continued to stay at my apartment.  My fear was serious enough that I bought a bullet-proof vest and encouraged her to move out.  But Bill Campbell and I still went over to Berkeley often to visit.  On one of these occasions she planted the seed that she would like to learn a musical instrument.  I think she was, at that time, strumming away on an old guitar.

My current project was going well.  PEMEX stands for Petróleos Mexicanos, the nationalized Mexican Oil company.  At the request of PEMEX, I had organized the project into two teams, one Mexican and the other American, but with some PEMEX people temporarily relocated to San Francisco and several Rand people, usually me, spending weeks at a time down in Mexico City.  I agreed to do the documentation in English and Spanish, so we were continually doing translations.  For my part, as I staffed the Rand team, I hired native Spanish-speaking people whenever possible.  There were about 12-15 people on each team.  On occasion, we entertained the entire crew in San Francisco, including a taco dinner at my Coleridge Street house with the Mexican men doing the cooking.  They were impressed with my neighborhood food shopping around 29^th and Mission, Little Mexico.

When I used to go down to Mexico City for a stint, the PEMEX staffers would always take the opportunity to drag me out dining and drinking.  They tried to shock me with exotic foods, but I loved this sort of thing.  One place prepared pregnant eel, only lightly cooked so that the baby eels still wriggled as I spooned them down my throat.  These days I much prefer the Japanese style of cooking eel, it is deliciously flavorful.  One night we went to an authentic Spanish restaurant whose specialty was baby pig.  The pigs were so young that you could eat the whole thing and that's the way they served it, one to a customer, apple in the mouth so that the belly would swell up while cooking.  The ritual was for the serving waiter to grab a pottery plate and strike the pig's belly.  This, after they bring the swollen piglet, steaming to your place.  With a flourish, the waiter's stroke bursts the piglet's belly with a loud pop, the waiter tosses the plate into a nearby fireplace smashing it to bits.  The more adventuresome ate the eyes and brains; I did eat the ears and skin and the luscious meat inside. 

There was this one occasion, where there was a Mariachi band playing at the restaurant.  But besides the trumpets and silvery get-ups, one unique twist was that the band also included a harpist.  Not your regular symphonic harp, but sort of a medium sized one, four-foot-tall rather than six and with fewer strings.  The music that came out of that harp was fantastic and it mesmerized me.  They told me that we were at a Vera Cruz style restaurant and that this was a Vera Cruz harp. 

The Harp

I told them, in an off-handed, bantering way, that I would love to get one of these instruments for my girlfriend back in the States.  They picked up on this immediately and began negotiations with the harp player.  He said that it was hard to get them except in Vera Cruz, and I felt relieved.  I was flying back the next morning and didn't want pressure to go on a shopping trip.  But then came the translation, "He will be glad to sell you his, how much would you offer?"  I discussed this around the table, we wound up with $200.  He agreed, to my dismay, and left the harp: my Mexican team-mates rolling in laughter; me trying to figure out how to get this white elephant back to SFO.

I get to the airport the next day, luggage checked through, with the harp in my hands.  "I'll be carrying this on with me."  I said to the check-in woman.  She said she didn't think so but didn't stop me.  "I'll be carrying this on with me."  I said to the ticket collector at the boarding ramp.  She said she didn't think so but didn't stop me.  "I'll be carrying this on with me."  I said to the flight-attendant at the entrance to the plane.  "Let me call the Captain."  She said.  He and I agreed that the harp would ride in the crew's luggage stowage area.  The Captain himself would personally oversee it; and hand it to me on the other end.

 

Bettina and Peter in Mexico City 1981

There was no case for this instrument, made of wood that was old and fragile.  I had been sure that if I had checked it through, I would wind up with a pile of sticks by the time we got to SFO.  My fear was a reverse dè já vu.  Two years after this episode, after a week in the Burgundy wine country of France, my friend Bill and I were returning to England, each with a suitcase containing a dozen bottles of wine.  As the airport carousel chug-chugged away, we began to hear the tinkle of broken glass, then as our suitcases hit the peak of the ramp and started their downward descent, we saw the rivulets of fine French wine leading the way down the ramp. 

I got the harp home OK and two days later Bill and I paid a visit to Bettina and said, "Close your eyes for a present."  She loved such surprises.  "What is it?" she said, and I explained.  She was shell-shocked at the enterprise that had gone into this venture just for a gift for her.  She took three lessons from someone, but it just became a conversation piece.  She was my travel companion in those lonely years on the road: London, Paris, and Mexico City, a youthful party girl, but Valedictorian of her Berkeley graduating class.