After Marine OCS, June 1972- August 1973, Part Four

I cannot remember whether or not I had to pass any written tests when I applied to the Coast Guard, but I am certain I must have.  However, I was directed to an office in San Pedro to take the Coast Guard physical.  This is where all my troubles began.

Remember that I had been incredibly active leading up to and during Marine OCS.  Running, marching while carrying backpack, shelter half and rifle over distances, negotiating obstacle courses, confidence courses, circuit interval courses, simulated combat courses, and so many more physically exhausting training.  And while we ate like hell, the Marine Corps burned it off.  Until I left for Maine and got heavy because I wasn't doing much of anything physically.  Even after I got home and especially after I started working in the warehouse office.

And, what is more, I really really wanted to get accepted to the Coast Guard.  I did not want to work for private industry.  I wasn't happy working for A.U. Morse, no matter what the job.  I wanted to do something that had a little glamour (the airlines) or prestige (the military, ignoring the consequences of an unpopular war on the national psyche).  I wanted some kind of job where I would not be pressured to have a girlfriend, get married and settle down.  I had no interest in the Army or the Navy.  I had already shunted aside the Marines.  The Air Force was not interested.   All that was left was the Coast Guard.  All of this pressure to succeed weighed heavily.

During the physical, I was informed that I had high blood pressure.  They had me lie down, take it easy, and take my blood pressure a few minutes later.  Did not help.  In fact, I think the more I was told the results were too high, the more I stressed out and they, mostly, stayed high that morning.  I was finally told I could come back in a couple of weeks and retake the test since I had never had this issue before.

I finally decided that I needed a few days away from the office job at A.U. Morse to calm myself down and take the blood pressure test again and pass.  I called the office manager about what I needed to do, but I would come back in a week or two when I got more favorable results.  I had no intention of quitting, just take a brief leave of absence.    

Two days later, however, I got a letter in the mail from A.U. Morse and Company that my services were terminated and I should not return.  Honestly, I thought the manager was just being vindictive.  They could have gotten along without me for a week or two.  But since that was their response, I immediately went down to the unemployment office and filed for unemployment.  When they called A.U. Morse with me sitting there to verify my situation with that company, the rep was told by the office manager that I had not been fired but had quit and was not entitled to unemployment insurance.  I promptly showed him the letter the office manager had sent, clearly indicating that I was fired.  I got the unemployment insurance started that day.  

After I had retaken the blood pressure test a couple weeks later and the results were mostly good (one was slightly high, another was slightly low, but all the rest were good), several weeks passed as I waited for the results of my completed application.   Unfortunately, I was finally informed that I was not accepted in the next OCS class because of high blood pressure.  And, besides, Coast Guard OCS classes were very small, maybe a dozen or so candidates in each class, and only a couple of classes occurred each year, so the openings were not many and any minor issues were easily enough to disqualify an applicant.

I was told I could contest the findings, so I determined to contact them again directly in Washington DC.  I decided since I did not have a job, but had enough money since I was still living at home and collecting unemployment insurance, I would fly back to DC and discuss my application with the Coast Guard there.  I had been invited several times to stay with John Robertson, a Marine OCS buddy, and his wife at their apartment near Quantico.  Dennis Zito and his wife were at The Basic School still, so I could see them, too.  I also decided to stop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to spend a few days with Daylin Butler and his wife--he was attending graduate school after graduating from USC.  (Daylin was another of the straight guys, along with James Patrick Mullaney and Patrick Harlan Byrne, with whom I had been infatuated at East LA or Cal State Dominguez Hills.  Of course, falling for straight guys was not going to get me my forever man, but I was still figuring out being gay and how I might meet someone who was gay.)  

These visits with old friends would all take place in late winter of 1973.  My hopes were still high that I would find my career path in the Coast Guard.  As a side note, the fall of 1972 was the first presidential election I was allowed to vote in.   I walked down Cypress Blvd, crossed Firestone Blvd, entered a private home, on the left side of Cypress, and voted using a punch card.  While I had supported Nixon in 1968, feeling betrayed by Lyndon Johnson, I was not about to make that mistake twice.  I voted for George McGovern.  He was, of course, overwhelmed at the ballot box; but already there was talk about a Watergate break in and conspiracy to cover up who ordered the break in and how many significant politicians and operatives were involved.  George McGovern had tried to get the press to care about what was happening with this situation but the press was not interested.  They were having a fun time slamming McGovern and his ill fated choice of Tom Eagleton of Missouri as his VP after it was learned that Senator Eagleton had undergone shock therapy for depression.  Nixon exclaimed that he had a "mandate" and it was full steam ahead for him and the nation.  

After OCS, June 1972 - August 1973, Part Three

After Mike and I graduated from South Gate High School, we actually applied for "airplane washer" jobs at LAX for the summer of '67 before beginning Junior College in the Fall.  I am not exactly sure what we would have been doing.  But I think we believed we would clean out aircraft in between flights at the gate.  Unfortunately, we were not hired because the minimum age requirement was that we had to be 18.  Both Mike and I were still 17.  So he got a job in a downtown sock warehouse through our high school friend, Richard Meyers.  And I got my first full-time job at A.U. Morse and Company wallpaper warehouse on Hunter St. though my dad.  Who you know.

But things were changing in the Summer of 1972.  A significant change for any number of gay men (or straight) was that the airlines were finally mandated to hire men to be "flight attendants" rather than simply continuing the discrimination of only hiring women as "stewardesses" that at one phase earlier required termination if they aged and/or got married.  Primarily, at LAX, TWA and Continental Airlines were accepting applications and, if getting beyond that stage, holding in-person interviews.  Our friend Dennis Madura and I applied to both airlines.  I believe that neither of us even got an interview with Continental, but both of us got interviews with TWA. 

My interview was with a woman who appeared to be in her late 20's or early 30's.  I did admit that I had been at Marine OCS that Spring but decided that the Marines were not for me.  She said her husband was a Marine.  Maybe this seemingly harmless exchanged tanked my interview.  Maybe she did not like the way I looked.  Maybe she did not care for my Hispanic last name (Dennis was also not hired).  Who knows?  But my love of flying and the airlines was not enough to get me hired.  So it was wallpaper warehouse work for me for the foreseeable future.

Not surprising, a friend to whom I confessed my attraction in college--which was a huge step for me, though I was nervous as hell when I told him in his apartment in Torrance--said he also applied to TWA.  Patrick Harlan Byrne was straight but did not mind that I was gay, so he became a significant friend during this time period.  Pat had returned from Europe that summer.  After graduation in December of 1971, he had saved up enough money from working part time for the Post Office to fly to Europe, buy a VW van, and tour the continent for a few months.  Somewhere along the way, he got hired by the Ice Capades to work the lighting on their shows as they toured Europe, which allowed him to stay for a few months longer than he had expected.  But by the summer, he had returned, trying to figure out what he intended to do for the rest of his immediate future.  

Pat was handsome, in great physical shape, lean and subtly muscular, was personable, had been in the Marines in Vietnam.  He told me that same August when the hiring began that he had also gotten an interview with TWA.  And, unlike Dennis and me, he got hired.  A few years later, his girlfriend told me that she used to overhear snide comments about him from pilots (I am sure he wasn't the only male flight attendant to whom such comments were directed).  They assumed he was gay, blah, blah, blah.  Male pilots are macho and male flight attendants and are not--and were likely gay--seemed to be the refrain in those days when male flight attendants were a new sight on domestic flights especially.  (Foreign carries had had male flight attendants before this.)  

I can easily see why Pat was hired.  He went through flight attendant training in St. Louis; and because he was so sharp and did so well in the program, they kept him on as an instructor for several months before he got his first assignment.  He snagged the NYC base so he could fly to Europe during the peak summer months.  That's where he met Sandra, who was also a TWA flight attendant.  But that was all in the future.

(This was a photo of Pat from when the two of us drove up to San Leandro in my '66 Mustang GT, stayed at my Uncle Lloyd and Aunt Jean's home there, and used their place as a base for heading to San Francisco to explore the city on a Thanksgiving weekend, possibly 1971.  [Now, of course, beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, and your tastes may differ; but Pat was always totally handsome to me and a really nice guy.  In fact while walking through the city, we passed what must have been a gay bar.  His walking by got the attention of several of the denizens inside.]) 

Somewhere along the way, and I cannot remember exactly when, but surely it was after the failed attempt to get hired by the airlines, I had applied to be considered for Air Force OTS as a navigator candidate.  I got called into the recruiting office in Huntington Park sometime that fall and took the required tests.  Unfortunately, when the results came back, my scores were not high enough to be accepted as a navigator candidate.  So, like flight attendant before, I set aside the Air Force as a potential career choice and determined to focus on being accepted to the Coast Guard's Officer's Candidate School in Connecticut.  (I must have read about its existence in the newspaper at some point and that they were accepting applications.)  My future was not to be in the air but on the sea I envisioned.

After OCS, June 1972 - August 1973 - Back home in So Cal

 After OCS graduation, the guys had a couple of weeks or more each before The Basic School began, so many were dispersing to parts of the country where they came from to be with family and friends.  Darwin Newlin was headed back to Southern California as was I.  At least the two of us and possibly a couple more, booked a United Airlines DC-10 flight from Dulles to LAX.  I imagine we took the same cab to the airport.

The flight was uneventful and either my sister or my mom must have picked me up at the airport to take me home to South Gate once again and my familiar room at 8940 Cypress Ave.  I don't even remember how many days passed before I was back working at the A.U. Morse warehouse job in LA at 2463 Hunter Street, a block or two from that famous bridge on East Olympic Blvd., over the L.A. River where so many movie and TV commercials are made, whose back entrance lay under the shadows of the Santa Monica Freeway.  

(This is what 2463 Hunter St. looks like today.  This is where A.U. Morse used to reside when I worked there from 1967-1973.  The black door on the lower left was the entrance that lead to steps up to the office.  The front loading dock for UPS is to the right of that.  We never went upstairs.  There were no bars on any windows or doors back then.)

I know I felt a bit embarrassed that my Marine career had ended so quickly and that I had returned with a college degree but no honor.  Worse, they had all gotten together and bought me an electric shaver to take along to OCS upon my departure.  Now I was back, and the shaver had not lasted very long before it stopped working--it must have been a Remington.  Not that that was why it stopped working.  But I had owned Remingtons before and never had one quit like that.

I went back to working in the warehouse, pulling rolls of wallpaper and wrapping up and labeling the package for shipment to wallpaper and paint stores all over Southern California when the UPS driver arrived to haul them off in the afternoon.  I still helped unload the semi-tractor trailer once a week from the manufacturing plant in Ohio.  Still listened to KLOS FM radio on so many sunny days and cloudy days.  

I don't even recall how many weeks or even months this routine went on before I felt I needed a change, any change.  The company had hired a nice looking guy around my age to work in the office, taking orders over the phone from the salesmen (who included my dad and his friend, Bill Barber, and two older gentlemen) or from the paint stores directly.  When I first started working there the summer after high school, with my dad getting me the job, all of the office workers were women, including Faith David, one of the few names I remember.  But Julien had managed the warehouse after Joe was let go, the Italian guy who had a bookie and always bet the horses over the warehouse phone every morning, who regaled us with stories of his days in the Marines in WWII, or his tales of the several women he bedded over the years, even though he was then married, and who drove an ancient, faded green Dodge Cranbrook to work.  And after his stint as warehouse manager, Julien had moved to the office to take orders, finally becoming a salesman like my father, visiting the various wallpaper and paint stores in his assigned district after the oldest salesman retired, whose name might have been Larry (the other might have been Chuck).  

I finally decided to ask to be moved into the office to work, just something different after more than five years in the warehouse.  The move was granted, but it was possibly a mistake on my part to have asked.  The female office manager, an older woman whose sweet daughter I once briefly dated and taken to see the L.A. premiere of THE LION IN WINTER, had retired.  She was replaced by a middle-aged guy who had been a corpsman in the Army and talked about the new T.V. series, M*A*S*H, confirming from experience how realistic it was.  On some level I absolutely knew he was gay.  My primitive gaydar went off even when I still worked in the warehouse when he was first hired. 

I always felt some resentment or negative vibe regarding this office manager.  I am sure he was heavily closeted, living at home with his mother, and he could be rather snarky at times.  I am not sure he liked me, and I am not sure I really trusted him.  And I would have reason not to, eventually. 

There had always been a divide between the warehouse workers and the office workers.  I liked all of the women who worked the phones except the time Faith took offense to a joke I made (which I do not believe was sexist or anything remotely offensive in any way), and she shockingly stomped on my foot, really hard.  It hurt like hell.  She was a very tall, very big woman, much bigger and taller than I, making the stomp seriously painful.  To this day I am surprised that she did not break any bones in my foot with the sturdy heel of her large shoe.  

We used to get two ten-minute breaks, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, in addition to our half-hour lunch break.  After a few years, I negotiated with the manager of  the whole facility to give us 15 minutes during the morning as long as we did not take advantage.  I remember I used to sometimes bring a book and read on my short breaks, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV was one I poured through during college.  Took me forever to finish.  

I made $1.35 an hour when I first started (slightly above the $1.25 minimum wage I had earned at the South Gate Rod and Gun Club as a trap boy in high school), and I may have gotten up to $1.65 an hour at some point a few years later while still in college.  So maybe it was the pay, but most of the warehouse workers were Hispanic and poor or sometimes even white and poor.  Like me in my first summer, most had to take the bus to work.  One Hispanic guy was really nice and we'd chat now and then--he knew and loved music and talked about enjoying Dave Brubeck's "Blue Rondo A La Turk".  At some point he said he needed to borrow $5, which was a lot to me in those days.  But I loaned it to him because I figured it was a dire need.  The next day he showed up obviously drunk, working at a job he probably did not like but with no future since he only had a high school diploma and no training of any kind.  He was fired and I never got my $5 back.  I just felt sorry for him and his situation.  Another Hispanic guy who had a family, a wife and daughter, I was told died a few years later after the owners moved the warehouse and office to Orange County, a much easier commute for my dad in Garden Grove and Bill Barber in the city of Orange.  That employee was in his late 30's or early 40's.

My dad retired from A.U. Morse several years later, soon working part time, just to get out of the house, at the Anaheim Convention Center and, later, Knott's Berry Farm as one of the old characters who inhabited the grounds and chatted up the visitors.  He seemed to be well liked by those who knew him when he worked at the Farm, and his fellow employees said kind things about him in the employee newsletter after he died in 2002.   

Since I was often years, even decades, younger than almost any of the others who either worked in the warehouse or the office from 1967 through 1973, I doubt if anyone I worked with then is still alive today.  Dad was 81 when he died in 2002, and the others were often much closer to his age than mine, Julien and Faith and so many others--whose names have gotten so covered over in the dust of years gone by that I no longer remember--are surely gone.  But I see their faces still, and the smiles and the laughs we sometimes shared, the birthdays we celebrated or the anniversaries we noted.  Or even the conflicts we sometimes got into over that small speaker on the main pole in the warehouse that the office workers used to call out to us when they wanted to know if a particular order number or run number for a specific style or color or brand of wallpaper was still available because a customer had miss-measured his or her needs and not ordered enough of a particular run of wallpaper to finish the job.  

A.U. Morse is long gone, I imagine.  The two distribution sites in Burlingame and L.A. and then Orange County were likely shuttered some years ago.  I don't think people install much vinyl wallpaper or murals in their homes as they used to in the 1940's, 1950's, 1960's and 1970's, made by the Borden Chemical Company. 

I actually still bear the physical scars of working at the warehouse.  Though that's not so impressive as the sentence makes it sound.  At least twice, when using the box cutters we were given to open a case of wallpaper, my right hand slipped.  Twice I had to be taken to a nearby clinic in a very poor part of town, to be stitched up and sent back, which the company paid for.   One scar, between a quarter of an inch and a half inch, is still visible on my left forearm.  The second is on the side of my thumb on my left hand.  It, too, is less than a half inch long and even less perceptible.  The wounds healed long ago but the scars have healed only to a point and faded some but then stabilized.  So I would never forget that I once engaged in physical labor to earn a paycheck that I had to cash at a check cashing facility because I did not even have a bank account or checking account.  And even that facility exacted a proportional fee from my hard-earned wages to give me cash.  The warehouse was certainly not a coal mine, but you had to put your back into lifting the heavy cases of wallpaper day after day.  And the bus ride or drive in a car along Santa Fe Avenue was a tedious one from South Gate.  I do not begrudge anyone who is only able to get such a job and retain it for the rest of their lives.

After OCS, June 1972 to August 1973, Maine and back Part Two

Henry David Thoreau wrote a book called THE MAINE WOODS.  While I had read WALDEN and ON CIVIL DISOBIDIENCE in college, I doubt I read THE MAINE WOODS before experiencing them first hand.

Bill's brother and sister-in-law owned a general store in Waterville.  If I remember rightly, Bill was an accountant.  And I believe they were all up and soon gone.  The first morning after I arose from the dead in that strange but comforting old house, I may have had some light breakfast, but I determined to get up and out the door to do a bit of exploring that first morning. The family had a big dog who accompanied me on my walk into the woods all around their home.  Spring was barely asserting itself as we two took a familiar and worn path.  The leaves of the previous fall were now exposed as the winter snows had all melted or evaporated, leaving puddles of mud and wet leaves behind.

I don't recall coming upon a stream or pond or lake in my first walk.  It was enough to feel the solid earth beneath my Marine combat boots, the one pair I took with me upon departure, along with my Marine cap.  (The second pair of boots I left in the barracks, only to find that they were quickly snapped up by one of the others guys who was staying with the program.  John Ormbrek had been long gone after the first six weeks.  So had Palms.  John Robertson left when I did, but he reverted to his Marine enlisted status and was transferred elsewhere on the Quantico base.) 

I don't even remember how I had gotten to the airport from Quantico, more than likely in another taxi.  And I am certain the Marines paid us enough money upon departure to get us back home, with me flying to Maine instead.

I cannot confess to any profound thoughts or reflections while the dog and I walked.  And I cannot say that I had any luck finding a job in Waterville.  The economy seemed none too vibrant in those days in Maine.  The War in Vietnam was winding down, and the Marines were no longer there.  (Part of the reason I joined the Marines was with the knowledge that they were to be gone by the time I graduated OCS and spent an additional 6 months at The Basic School, the follow-on training to OCS.  Marine OCS grads referred to its initials as The Big Suck and themselves as Lieutenidates.  They may no longer have been officer candidates upon graduation and commissioning, but they still did not feel like full Marine lieutenants either.  But that was all ahead of them and not me.)

I spent the next two weeks merely recharging, I suppose.  I road around town with Bill in his AMC sedan with the steel belted radial tires that always seemed noisy to me.  We made deliveries to more rural and infirm customers of his brother's grocery store.  Bill told me the story of a neighbor we encountered who was none too bright and who, upon felling a tree, miscalculated and whose young daughter's arm got so badly crushed beneath the falling tree, it required amputation.  I had some black licorice ice cream at a  Baskin Robbins store in town.  Spent some time in a house being built a few miles from his brother's house, listening to "Diary" by Bread.  I even remember being hungry and buying a cake of some kind in their store and eating the whole thing myself.

So while I still seemed to have a boundless appetite remaining from OCS, I was doing very little physically.  My weight in the next several weeks and months ballooned to either 180 or 190 pounds while I had always been a trim 160-165.  I was fat.  But I then caught a series of colds, lost the appetite, and managed to lose the weight and returned to 165.  

I believe that one day we drove from Waterville, through Portland and spend a couple of hours at a rocky shoreline.  And we seemed to have driven over into New Hampshire, briefly, so I got a look at Mount Washington in the distance (mentioned in the play OUR TOWN).  But that was about all I remember of my two weeks in Maine.  My destiny was not there but elsewhere, I believed.  And I had to get back to California to determine what I would do next.

But I had already decided to return to Marine OCS and see the guys graduate.  I had kept in touch with Dennis Zito, who had told me in a letter of their trials with "Lt Nickle Nuts", the platoon commander they had grown to dislike and even make fun of.  I told Air New England on the phone that I just could not take another Beech 99 flight and was changing my itinerary:  I would fly out of Portland, Maine, on a Northeast DC-9 Yellowbird to Washington National.  I stayed at a funky but charming and clean motel near Quantico and revisited the barracks and all of the guys before graduation.  I encountered Lt. Nickle at the barracks, and he asked me, "Do you regret your decision [to leave OCS]?"  I thought about his question momentarily and replied, "I don't regret it now, but I hope I never reach a time in my life when I do regret it." 

I had not intended the remark to be prescient, but I suppose it would become so in the next several months until Air Force OTS, and then after I was finally forced to leave the Air Force in 1979.  I had spent almost the entire decade of the 1970's either pursuing one military career after another (more about that later) or in uniform, living one military career or another.  The Marines had been the easiest to join.  Later that fall of  '72 and through the winter of '72-'73, I would have one abortive attempt at Air Force OTS (as a aircraft navigator candidate), Coast Guard OTS, and back around to Air Force OTS once again (as a pilot candidate).

A few months later, I was able to repay Bill and his brother for the kindness they extended to me in allowing my stay with them in Maine after OCS.  Their mother died, never a very strong woman, and they needed someone to pick them up at LAX for the drive to the Southland Motel, where Bill had lived when I knew him.  I was certainly happy to oblige.

The Southland Motel is still there in South Gate, CA.  But the pool I used to love swimming in during the summer of 1965, after I had met Bill in high school and we became friends, is long gone.  Apparently, it got filled in and covered over.  The last time Mike and I drove through our old neighborhoods in South Gate and I saw the motel, it was all parking lot where the pool had been, glistening aqua in the bright sunlight on those endless summer days of my youth.

I am not sure how long after his mother died that his father sold the motel.  I had often helped with the switchboard in the small lobby.  Watched "A Charlie Brown Christmas" special on their TV when it debuted in the fall of 1965.  Helped Bill paint one of the motel rooms.  I remember at one point he handed me the paint brush over the glass shower door.  I dipped it in the paint can and proceeded to hand it back to him over the closed door.  For some insane reason he could not explain, he looked at it, reached up, and grabbed the soaked brush by the wet bristles, covering his palm with paint.  Another time, he regaled for me a story of one time when he was up in the attic of the main building, crawling around with a flashlight.  (I have no recollection of what he was looking for in the attic.)  Anyway, he saw something written on one of the wooden beams just above his head.  When he turned the flashlight on the writing, it read, "If you are in a position to read this, you are in trouble." 

Unfortunately, either later that summer '65 or the summer of 1966, I was told by Bill's dad that the insurance for the motel only covered residents of the motel using the pool, not friends of the family.  Were I to get hurt while using the pool, I could sue them and they would not be covered,  nor would my injuries be covered were I to need a hospital visit.  I was crushed but what could they do?  I still helped out at times on the switchboard and helped out around the motel now and then, but the magic of being able to use the glorious pool in summer was gone.  Summers never quite seemed the same when I could buy a Bubble Up soda (because it was cheaper than a 7-UP) and a Payday candy bar and head over to Bill's place because I did not have to work for a living and had the entire summer off, to just vegetate or the two of us play chess.  I think it was at the motel when I first heard Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come", released not long after his tragic death at another motel elsewhere in the LA basin.  

The Southland Motel had semi-permanent residents besides guests passing through town.  One older couple I knew were so kind and friendly to me.  When they had to move, and could not take their beloved green parakeet with them, I offered to give him a home.  I had managed to acquire three parakeets then from others who did not want them or could not keep them.  One flew away one day to an unknown fate.  The cantankerous one Les Peters fobbed off on me used to constantly shake his cage to the point that it injured one of his legs and was forced to hop around on one leg after that.  Later, at different times, both that parakeet and the beautiful green one died before Marine OCS, so my mom, who never was a pet person, would not have to take care of them in my absence.  

After OCS, June 1972 to August 1973. Part One, Maine and back

Even before I left Marine OCS, I noticed that the record albums were so cheap at the Base Exchange that I started to buy a few on the weekends.  Eventually, I bought so many I was forced to buy a new suitcase to carry them.  I kept that suitcase and used it for many years after whenever I travelled anywhere, even to the UK in the 1990's.  At some point while I was living in the condo on Franklin St. in Denver, I have a memory of giving it away to someone who needed a suitcase.  (I never had enough storage space in the condo.)  I am almost certain it was a large, medium-brown, sturdy, rubbery-plastic Samsonite.  I could always pick it out on the crowded carousels at airports.  I even had a baggage handler at the Honolulu airport compliment me on choosing a suitcase that would never get damaged, no matter how much punishment it endured in all those years of travel.  It did sustain an extensive internal stain once that lasted until I parted with it.  I had always loved Delaware Punch, a distinctive non-carbonated beverage that was made from a Delaware grape grown in Ohio.  The bottling plant was in Texas.  But I could only ever find Delaware Punch in California supermarkets when I visited my mom and my best friend Mike there.  They used to buy six packs for me, some to drink while I was visiting and others to take back to Colorado.  I used to pack them tightly into the suitcase, but one can got damaged in a cargo hold and leaked all over the insides of the suitcase and into some of my clothes, mostly underwear and socks.  I was able to clean the clothes, though I did not bother to remove the stains within the lining of the suitcase.

After spending a week at the out-processing building for Marine OCS, I was off to National Airport (the Reagan plague on the nation and its national airport was a few years off).  For several weeks I had been corresponding with an old high school buddy, Bill Vogt, who now lived with his brother, sister-in-law and family in Waterville, Maine, especially when I knew I was not going to make a career in the Marines.  I'd never been to Maine before, never actually been to the East Coast before arriving at Dulles airport on that extended taxi ride to Marine OCS.   Bill invited me to stay with them for awhile, to unwind from OCS and get my bearings on what I wanted to do after determining that the Marine Corps was not for me.  I really had no idea what I was going to do.  But I didn't want to fly directly back to California, in a way admitting that I didn't have the foggiest notion of where to go next and what to do with my life.  Maybe Maine would provide some answers.  If not answers, at least a pleasant diversion for a couple of weeks.  (Looking back, I ought to have followed the advice of Sir Thomas More in A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, "Be a teacher."  I could have gone back to Cal State Dominguez Hills, gotten a Master's Degree in History or Humanities or English, and gotten a cushy job as a Community College instructor in one of the burgeoning number of new Community Colleges the State of California would build in the next 20 years or so.  But then I would not have written the Rainbow Arc of Fire series, and I would not be here writing this, nor you here reading this, so there's that.)

Frankly, in those days, I did not have a credit card, though I think they were rare, regardless.  I don't even think there were debit cards.  And, besides, I did not have a bank account.  Possibly the Marines gave us an account with the Credit Union in order to deposit our pay checks for being at Marine OCS.  It might have only been a few hundred dollars a month but we had even fewer expenses; and if all I bought were record albums and a suitcase for 10 weeks, I probably had a tidy little sum stashed away.  (Maybe I was carrying it around as cash after I left.  I just do not recall.)  Regardless, I had somehow purchased a one-way ticket on Northeast Airlines, non-stop from National Airport to Boston.  From there, I would be taking Air New England to Augusta, Maine, and then on to Waterford.  In those days, Northeast featured what they would call "Yellowbirds", distinctively painted white and yellow aircraft, in my case a 727-100.

  
When we had arrived in Northern Virginia in March of '72, the landscape was that cold, gray and brown winter somberness I had never seen or felt before, not in perpetually sunny California.  As our Yellowbird winged its way north from Washington DC, the now lush green of Virginia was slowly giving way to a chilling Winter scape.  Spring had not yet exploded, especially below our jet soaring gracefully over lower New England.  I might have had a glass of milk at Boston's Logan Airport before boarding the Air New England twin-engine Beech 99, more like a large private plane than an airliner.  Maybe even a piece of cheesecake.  Both a big mistake. 
  

(A brief sidelight:  On the Northeast flight to Boston, a couple of rows in front of mine, a young and handsome Air Force 1st Lieutenant got on the plane and sat down.  Shades of my Air Force future though I had no inkling.  I had always remembered that Paul Simon lyric from his BOOKENDS album, "Punky's Dilemma":

If I become a first lieutenant
Would you put my photo on your piano?)


The flight from Boston to Portland, Maine, was a nightmare for me.  The air was rough and the skies cloudy.  The plane was constantly buffeted, although I seemed to be the only one extremely bothered and bewildered.  (Perhaps one or two other passengers in this rather full flight expressed their discomfort aloud at the more adventurous bumps and shifts.)  But whether it was the milk or the cheesecake, or my tendency to produce too much stomach acid, I got ragingly sick to my stomach.  Thank god they had airsick bags.  This "airliner" was doing shimmies and shakes I never thought an airplane was capable of.  At least not in 1972.  I vomited profusely, but thankfully into the bag and not onto my fellow passengers.  

When we landed at Portland and just about everyone else got off, the pilot came through the narrow cabin and routinely took my sealed airsick bag--I was dreadfully sick but always thoughtful.  Had there been a cemetery by the Portland airport, I might have crawled off the aircraft and into a shallow grave.  I felt very much at death's door.

Unfortunately, we still had at least a 20-30 minute flight to Waterville.  I cannot image much was left in my distressed stomach, but I somehow recall that the heaves began again once we were airborne.  And while they may have been dry heaves, they were heaves nonetheless.  By the time the plane crawled to a stop in front of the modest terminal in Waterville, I remember stumbling down the steps of the Beech 99 and into the waiting arms of Bill and his brother.  I think they instantly noticed how sick I was, and I believe the pilot briefly explained that I had not handled the flight very well.

Bill and his brother directed me into the back seat of Bill's car and I readily collapsed.  When we got to the house, I was instantly introduced to the family but was taken directly to bed upstairs.  In my lingering distress I fell asleep and did not wake up until the following morning--about 12 solid hours unconscious.  So much for being toughened up by the Marines.  Twenty-four hours away and I was a basket case.
  

Marine OCS Spring 1972 (March through May) American Top 40 radio

Music got us through the insanity of training.  Not while we were training, of course.  But any time we had free time.  Riding in John Ormbrek's tan VW station wagon.  Or hanging around the barracks on weekends.  (We were lucky that we had a few extended weekends because we performed well during the "Dog & Pony shows" for visiting dignitaries.)  Or from the jukebox at the "slop shoot" joint not far from our barracks.  Someone always had a radio on or music going.  I carried around a paperback book of Rolling Stone album reviews that I read whenever I could.  Casey Kassem became a familiar voice since I had not listened to an AM radio broadcast in years.  (At the A.U. Morse wallpaper warehouse, we listened exclusively to KLOS FM.)  

I cannot impress upon the reader how diversionary the music became.  How associated in my mind with Marine OCS and those ten weeks that I now look back upon fondly.  I cannot hear one of the songs listed below and not remember it all, have it all come flooding back into my thoughts, as if the gates of my memory opened wide to those days and that place and there never was another place or time. 

I'm just going to list them below in no particular order.  (As I look through the charts from that Spring, some songs simply never registered while others were primarily associated with those days.)

I am starting with the week ending March 25th (a song was already on the charts that week unless otherwise marked):  

America:  A Horse With No Name
Don McLean:  Starry, Starry Night & American Pie
Neil Young:  Old Man(4) & Heart of Gold
Aretha Franklin:  Day Dreaming
The Sylistics:  Betcha By Golly Wow
Paul Simon:  Mother and Child Reunion
Roberta Flack:  The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
Nilsson:  Without You
Bread:  Everything I Own
T. Rex:  Bang A Gong (Get It On)
Malo:  Suavecito
Al Green:  Look What You Done For Me(2)
The Fifth Dimension:  (Last Night) I Didn't Get To Sleep(2)
Jr. Walker and the All Stars:  Walk In The Night(2)
Ringo Starr:  Back Off Boogaloo(2)
The Chi-Lites:  Oh Girl(3)
Todd Rundgren:  I Saw The Light(3)
Three Dog Night:  The Family of Man(1)
Carly Simon:  Legend In Your Own Time(1)
Cat Stevens:  Morning Has Broken(2)
Elton John:  Rocket Man(5)
Crosby & Nash:  Immigration Man(5)
Bill Withers:  Ain't No Sunshine (this was on the juke box of the slop shoot)

(1) Debuted week of March 25th
(2) Debuted week of April 1st
(3) Debuted week of April 8th
(4) Debuted week of April 29th
(5) Debuted week of May 6th

I would make a tape for my buddy Dennis Zito of these songs.  But that was so long ago, I doubt it he has the tape any longer or remembers the songs a warmly as I still do.