Planet of the Apes (three is enough)

In Hell on Earth, a love story I talk quite a bit about the Tiki Girls, which I discovered about twenty minutes after I signed in at the 19th Artillery Group at Fort MacArthur.


Cecil and I were spending another night in our second home, The Tiki Girls, making mindless conversation with the local fishermen, playing pool with the young toughs and old men, and having deep debates, which neither would remember in the morning. As Walter Cronkite would have said, it was a night like every other night and we were still there.

We first started going to the Tiki because of the barmaids. Rene was the first one. I met her the first day I was in San Pedro, a month before Cecil ever got there. It was 100° and she was sitting on the bar with her feet in the sink with the cold water running on them. After Rene, there was Linda, then Betsy and well, there really wasn’t anyone after them. In fact, a lot of the time, the Tiki didn’t even have barmaids; just some guy working the bar. That's how it was this particular night.

Tijuana Bull Fights/Republican Presidential Debates

I’ve spent the last three or four months totally engrossed by the continuing Republican Presidential Debates. Now that they seem to be over, at least for the time being, I find myself reminiscing for some unexplained reason about the Tijuana Bull Fight I attended over 40 years ago.

The debates have gotten pretty mundane of late. Each candidate has staked out his own territory and is now dancing with the girl he brought to the dance.

I don’t know why I keep watching them except to say it’s just so much fun. Bless their hearts the candidates are doing everything in their power to put on a good show, which is why, I think, they remind me so much of the trip I took to Tijuana to watch the bullfights back when I was stationed in San Pedro.

Flying Silos

I was in the last days of my army enlistment and because I had told my CO that I wanted to write for a newspaper, I was in the early days of my two-month internship with the San Pedro News-Pilot.

As the story in Hell on Earth relates, it was really a judge at the gates of heaven that wanted me to be a newspaper writer, but who knew. I was doing my best to impress my editor but the truth is I was doing very light feature stories and probably wasn’t going to make a name for myself in the short time allotted.

And then one day something happened. It may have been due to interference from some outside force or it may have just been dumb luck. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the two. But I stepped outside my apartment on the upper end of 20th Street in San Pedro, looked down at Los Angeles Harbor, and saw a raging fire and columns of smoke coming from the silos that lined the docks.

I returned to my apartment, grabbed my camera and began taking pictures. It could have easily resulted in just a lot of pictures of smoke, just as in Vietnam I took a lot of pictures of treetops; but this time I got lucky.

As I snapped away, I saw through my lens one of the silos explode and go airborne and suddenly, in an instant, I didn’t just have a picture of a fire but now I had an awesome picture of a fire and a silo looking like it had just been launched from Cape Canaveral —one that was easily newsworthy.

I brought it to my editor and they published it, which would have been good enough but then something better happened. The next day he told me that the picture had gone out over the wires and other papers, I seem to remember the Cleveland Daily Plain being one of them, had picked it up.