Mom was wearing her un-PC fur coat that day because it was probably chilly. Linda must have taken this picture of mom removing my shoulder boards after commissioning.
A few minutes later, we all departed with our friends and family members. Many of us had promised to get our first salute from an enlisted man who worked weekends at the OTSOM, serving dinner and drinks to us trainees for so many weeks.
I sought him out, he gave me my first salute as an officer, and I reached into my pocket to give him the obligatory $1 bill. Unfortunately, klutz that I am, I grabbed a $20 bill by mistake. He laughed and recoiled when I went to hand it to him, now realizing my error. I fished back into my pocket and found the $1 bill that I'd put there deliberately, a bit embarrassed. I am sure he told that story for years afterwards.
I cannot imagine that giving only a dollar to the first person who salutes you as a new officer is sufficient remuneration anymore.
Mom and I drove around Lackland mainside after graduation. She wanted to see the Officer's Club that she had remembered so fondly from almost thirty years previously. She wanted to see the wooden wall where they had all carved their names or initials years earlier after the long war was over and they'd all survived.
We found the club, though it may not have looked quite as it once did to her; but the wall inside was long since gone. Nobody we asked even knew about any such wall. All the fun that she and my dad and their fellow officers and wives must have had so many years ago had been erased by the passage of time.
After that unsuccessful search for her past, we left the base. We had dinner that night at the HemisFair Park, in the Tower of the Americas revolving restaurant at the top. We spent the night at a nearby La Quinta Inn, where I called USAA Insurance Company the following morning and became a member.
That next morning, we drove off west. I don't recall if we stayed at a motel somewhere between San Antonio and Riverside, CA. We did get to Riverside late at night. I dropped mom off at Mrs. Daly's house. (She and her husband Dan had divorced several years before. A male friend was with her and, when I left mom with them to spend the night, the two of them already sounded drunk.) I drove to the University, found Darryl Butler, and he let me sleep in an empty dorm room that night.
It was to his dorm I went months before after my Air Force physical at March AFB when my eyes were dilated and I could not drive home to South Gate that day.
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