Hey, I Wrote That

In the last few months before I left the army, my commander, Col. Archie S. Cannon got me a position with the San Pedro News-Pilot, because he knew I wanted to be a writer. I wrote mostly obituaries but was sent out on a few assignments. One was to interview Guy Pullen, a hairdresser turned artist who created sculptures out of the wire and junk he found in landfills.  I drove to his house in Palos Verdes and conducted a very nice interview. As I was leaving he gave me a wire house he was working on.

I’ve carried that house with me for over 40 years, sometimes hanging it in my own homes, including my current one in Virginia Beach and sometimes simply storing it away in the attic or closet. Recently I gave it to my daughter, Danielle, who always liked it. And that was that until...

Amelia Earhart Luggage

I never really did understand the reasoning that went into naming Amelia Earhart Luggage. I mean, what was the point? Seriously?

 

About seven years before her plane crashed in the Pacific or possibly was stolen in mid-flight by aliens, she crashed another plane on this day, September 25, 1930 at the Hampton Roads Naval Air Station.

 

Later that night at a dinner party she made light of the accident saying, “It was just one of those little things.”—Like a bump in the road, perhaps.

 

If Mitt Romney had been alive then and running for—I don’t know—maybe pilot-in-chief, he might have been heard to exclaim, “Just a little thing! Just a little thing! My God, her plane flipped over and she calls it just a little thing. How out of touch can one person be?”

 

Anyway, when I realized that today was the anniversary of that crash I went looking into my archives—a box labeled “Rejected Stuff.” This was a letter written to the Virginian-Pilot on May 8, 1979, just a few months after we had moved to Virginia Beach.

 

Editor, Virginian-Pilot:

This month’s giveaway at a local bank is a beautiful matching set of Amelia Earhart luggage—“Something to hold your dreams.” It’s good to know someone has a sense of humor although the last people I would have suspected would be the banks.

The possibilities for Amelia Earhart luggage are endless:

 

Say your mother-in-law came over for dinner one night and never left; and that was six months ago! Give her a beautiful matching set of Amelia Earhart luggage for Mother’s Day and kiss her goodbye forever.

 

Say you borrowed $500 from a friend and now he’s beginning to threaten you. Don’t fret. Borrow another thousand and send him on an all-expense paid trip to Pago Pago with his brand new matching set of Amelia Earhart luggage. Watch your money problems fly out the window.

 

Say the 9 to 5 rat race has you beat and you want to get away from it all. Buy yourself a beautiful set of Amelia Earhart luggage and say goodbye to your workday blues.

And say, it you feel your mother-in-law or friend might get bored on their upcoming excursions, why not pack a handsome surprise in their brand new Amelia Earhart Luggage? How about a copy of Wiley Post's Come Fly With Me?

 

The Young Girl, the Salmon and the Genie

This was my entry for the Writers Weekly Summer 24-hour contest, which took place on the same day that grandson Brayden made his appearance into the world. I received an honorable mention for the story as did daughter, Danielle for her story "Something Special." July 15, 2012 was a fine day all around. The prompt for the story was the first paragraph ending with the words, "and she dropped her knife...

Growing up on a fishing boat docked in this small northwest coastal town brought stares from townspeople and jeers from classmates. She desperately wanted to escape but, with competitors driving down charter prices, she knew her dad would never be able to afford a replacement. As she sliced open the Salmon, her eyes widened and she dropped her knife

So, this is about the word, so

This article was published in the August 19 Virginian-Pilot Forum section most likely because the paper felt everyone needed a break from politics. I don't know if anyone else has observed this trend but I have been hearing it everywhere.

The article was accompanied by a picture of Hope Solo and a caption that read: "So, apparently, it's 'Hope Solo,' not 'So Lo.'"

 

 

 

 

So, this is about the word, so

 

So I was listening to an interview today on television, which reinforced for me that a brand new fad is combing the country.

So you might ask, “So what is this revolutionary craze sweeping the nation, and possibly the world?"

So I will tell you. “So” is it.

So what is it, you ask?

“So” is it, I tell you. So let me explain.

 

So what I am noticing is that every day more questions being asked by interviewers are being answered by statements beginning with the word “so”.

 

So maybe you are thinking that this might be simply a case of Beverly Hills teenage valley girls speak and surely not the way the civilized folks speak.

 

So you would be wrong to assume this. So let me tell you how widespread this so-so new way of talking has become.

So I have heard economists begin every sentence with so. So I have heard Congressmen, diplomats and scientists begin every sentence with so.

 

So, today, an astronaut talking about the vehicle that will land in a few hours on the planet Mars, described what would happen in these words.

 

“So the modular carrying the rover will hit the Mars atmosphere. So when it does a parachute will deploy and—”

 

So, and so what?

 

So what happens next isn’t really important.

So what is important is why does every sentence have to begin with the word “so?”

 

So didn’t we already go through this nightmare with the word “like?”

So didn’t we learn our lesson?

So who starts these trends?

 

So I think maybe some public relations firm must hear someone, somewhere start a sentence with “so” and decide that it sounds just different enough to make ordinary sentences and ideas a little more appealing and so it starts advising its clients to employ this unique new way of talking but then other public relations firms latch on to the idea and it starts spreading like so many cultured cells in a Petri dish.

 

So some people even hear it on their own and are attracted to it like so many flies to flypaper and before you know it, every Tom, Dick and Harry so and so is starting every stupid sentence with “so.”

 

So I was wondering if this was simply an American thing or if the whole world had jumped on the “so” bandwagon. So I turned to London where the Olympics, the largest international gathering of athletes were taking place.

So I hear an interviewer ask a girl on the Mexican soccer team who does she think is the best female soccer goalie in the world at this time.

 

“Solo,” she answers cautiously, perhaps not wanting to offend her own goalkeeper.”

 

So I am at a complete loss because for the life of me I have never heard of a soccer goalie named Lo.



September 1973: An Up and Down Month

                                                                            

This story was published this week by the The Whistling Fire web magazine. It describes two events that happened within the space of a few weeks back in September 1973. Hell on Earth, a love story is all about seemingly unrelated events proving eventually to be significant.

The novels Postal Service and Hell on Earth, a love story and my 30-year career in the Postal Service were the result of events set into motion in September 1973—a real up and down month, but a very significant one.

September 1973: An Up and Down Month

                                                                            September 5, 1973—Began classes at Cal State Long Beach

I hadn’t really expected to be going back to school.  God knows my time at Lowell Tech had been long enough and the five years I spent there hadn’t kept me out of Vietnam or gotten me a job.

 

 For sure it was a good experience but I think everyone, including myself, was hoping for more.  I don’t mean that in a bad way. Hell, hoping for more is the driving force that pushes us all. And when the more isn’t what you expect it to be then you hope for something else.

This Teaching Credential Program at Cal State Long Beach was that something else.  Things were finally coming together.  This time I was majoring in something I actually believed in.  And I was sure it would lead to a job and an opportunity to continue writing.  At last, I would be able to look my father in the eye and we would both know that everything was going to be all right.

What he had said the morning I left for boot camp at Fort Dix was still fresh in my mind.

 “I hope the army makes a man out of you,” he said, frustrated by my lack of direction. I have to admit, he had a point.

 “I hope so, too,” was my understated response.

So I went to Vietnam, did some writing for a military magazine and did the soldier thing in the form of guard duty on the third security ring around the Bien Hoa Airfield.  The general feeling was that if anyone got through the first two rings they’d have to be really good and we weren’t going to stop them no way, no how.  Still they gave us M-16’s and the code word of the day.

By the time I got out of the army I was more than ready to get back on the road to my future—a journey I has first started in 1964 and detoured from so many times I was losing count. That’s why I was returning to school. Only this time the plan wasn’t to go to college. This time I was going to college with a plan.

Genesee Brewery 1967

      I've written about the Powers Hotel before. The Genesee Brewery is what happened right after the Powers Hotel demolition job.

                                                       

                                                                      Centum utres dolor in muro centum lagenas cervisiae.

                                                                      Si quis forte inciderit utres, quam multa utres cervisie in murum?

                                                                                                                       —from an old Roman drinking tune

I left the $2.10 per hour demolition job at the Powers Hotel—soon to be the Powers Office Building—for a better paying job at the Genesee Brewery. Some would say a raise to $2.30 isn’t worth the trouble of switching a bus route. They might be right. And certainly, when you throw in the $60 initiation fee I had to pay to join the Teamsters Union and the $15.00 monthly dues it really didn’t make much sense at all.

But money isn’t everything.  Maybe I had learned everything there was to learn about tearing down a wall.  Maybe it was just time to move on, to expand my horizons, to learn different skills, to challenge myself.  Maybe it was time to find a job that let me drink beer while I worked.  Yes, I think that was it—and the other stuff, too.

I heard the brewery was looking for a forklift driver and I had done a little bit at the paper warehouse the previous summer so I went down there one day after knocking down another wall and took the forklift driving test.

 

This is what the forklift driving test consists of: You turn it on, level the blades and line them up with a pallet that has about 25 cases of beer on it.  Then you drive the blades into the pallet, tilt them back, lift the pallet up and set it on top of another pallet of beer cases.  Then you repeat the procedure with those two pallets by stacking them on top of two other pallets of beer.  If you do this without dropping the pallets or hooking any other stacks or spilling any beer or breaking any bottles, you’re pretty much in.

I asked the forklift-driving test instructor when I could start and he told me I could begin immediately, explaining that the man I was replacing left for lunch and never came back. I guess I was fortunate that demolition work doesn’t require two weeks notice to leave and forklift driving doesn’t require two weeks of training to begin.

All in all, I did pretty well.  I kept those cases moving, those stacks growing, and the beer flowing.  It was on that very first day that I learned that the real Genesecret was not Hemlock Lake water or even the postcard portrayal of 20 men standing along the shore of Hemlock Lake peeing into it, but rather the part about “Keeping the beer flowing.”

The California Lunch Room—Where Stylish Woman Shop

Fiction 500 recently ran a contest for short  stories. The prompt for the 500-word story was a picture of a house bearing the sign, California Lunch Room. I didn't win but from the judge's comments, I seem to have made an impression.

 

The California Lunch Room, Where Stylish Women Shop

This is a picture of my first business venture—where it all began.

I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life—a creative genius if you will, whose ideas have always been both on the forefront and on the edge.

I came up with the metric clock when metrics were all the rave. Everyone felt it was only a matter of time before the whole world would go metric. Soda was being marketed by the liter and foodstuff (I wish I’d invented that word) was coming to us by the grams. Yardsticks suddenly became meter sticks and the whole world seemed to be aglow in ten and the powers of ten.

I didn’t care one way or the other but I did see an opportunity.

No one was looking into the time situation. No one was breaking the day down into the morning ten hours and the evening ten hours. No one was looking into hours composed of a hundred minutes, minutes made up of a hundred seconds, or seconds broken into milliseconds—okay they were doing that but why not the other stuff, too, I wondered.

Unfortunately, that idea went right into the 500-liter trashcan.

But I never gave up. I simply went looking for a better idea.

The good thing about ideas is they usually come at you a kilometer-a-centihour.

I was watching the Michigan/Ohio State game on TV one cold Saturday afternoon. Being inside I wasn’t affected by the cold but more importantly my brain was able to keep functioning. None of the frozen brains in Ann Arbor that day were even pretending to still be functioning. 

That’s when I invented the ear sock.

You are probably saying, “What about earmuffs? We already have earmuffs to keep our ears warm.”

Get real. No one wears earmuffs. They’re embarrassing for men and most women find them unattractive. 

As I watched the tuba player march across the field to famously dot the “i” in Ohio, I noticed the tuba had a covering over it, a sock if you will, with Ohio written across it. An idea was born.

College students would be able to purchase my ear socks with their school logos imprinted on it and not only keep their ears warm but also support their team.

Ah, but getting ideas is easy. Backers are another story.

So what about the California Lunch Room? Was it ever a restaurant?

That would have been too easy.

Back in 1947 I was a newly discharged soldier with enough ideas in my head to drive a sane man crazy. I bought this little house and began selling my newest invention—Tobacco gloves.

Everyone smoked in those days but no one liked having yellow fingers. My glove was the answer to a stylish woman’s nightmare. With my gloves she could smoke like a chimney but her hands would always look like pure white porcelain.

Of course to make money I still had to sell snacks, candy and caps and eventually even lunches.