Navy Boot Camp Part IV

One of the things Boot Camp spends an inordinate amount of time on was polishing shoes. We polished the hell out of our shoes. We used a technique called 'spit-shining'. It was the diluting of the polish with, well... spit or... water if you wished. The combination allowed the polish to get deeper into the pores of the leather and fill them to create the desired reflection. And reflect they did, I got mine to the point you could easily see your facial features.

Then, above the boots, all day, every day, we wore leggings. No, not the skin-tight, girly 'leggings' of today but the same kind of canvas leggings used during World War II. You may recall seeing this image from a couple of blog posts ago. They held your pant legs tightly around your ankles and in our instance, kept our new bell bottomed pants from flapping in the breeze. 

Perhaps you remember that Navy uniforms are different during different times of the year. In warm weather, the uniforms are cool white cotton. In colder weather, they are dark blue ('navy') wool. Wool as in Wool. One hundred percent wool. Killer wool. To wear the leggings, you had to wrap the woolen pant legs tightly around your leg and when the leggings were added, they kept that wool tight. Yesss, as in 'tight'. So tight in fact that as we marched along the movement sandpapered the hair off our legs creating unusual patterns. There would be a normal hairy area, then suddenly, a crescent-shaped area of red hairless skin. For all the world, it looked like we had been stricken with mange. 

Now ask me if it ever completely returned to normal. Go ahead! Ask me!

There was also a lot of energy put into shaving. All the time we had gained by not having to comb our hair was redirected to shaving. And since the length of our sideburns was such a concern, those of us not shaving our whole heads were shaving our sideburns up to the level of the top of of ears.

The guys with really heavy beards were always getting screwed because their face could be just as smooth as a baby's butt and they'd still get hit with demerits for their shave because it looked blue.

We redirected all that pent-up angst, of course. Because the shower room was just a room with no individual shower stalls and had a high lip on the threshold, we would block the drains with towels and build a swimming pool and kick water at each other. Don't judge, we didn't have any TV.

Toward the end of this grand experiment, they allowed us 'liberty' to go either to Milwaukee or Chicago since Great Lakes is right in the middle. I chose Chicago, not knowing that many of my relatives had lived there. In fact, my great-grandfather John Pawlak had married Bronislawa Lewandowska there and my grandfather Roman Pawlak was born in Chicago. It was probably different from when I was there. 

What it was, was cold! This was the middle of November and it was the coldest and windiest this Miami-boy had ever experienced. Just the week before I had seen snow for the first time in my life and now I was ready to never see it again. Keep it, you can have my share.

The week before we graduated, our orders came through. I was assigned to a Destroyer, the USS Eugene A. Greene DD-711. Two other guys from my company were going to the same ship.

A week later we graduated with great pomp and circumstance, marching around with flags and loud military music. Some parents actually made the trip to see the graduation. This was another culture shock for me. There were families who actually did things like that!

   

The Navy had paid for my flight to Great Lakes, but I had to pay my own way home, so I took the bus. But it was OK, because I didn't have to report to my ship for 24 days! It was still at sea on the way back from Vietnam so I didn't have to get to Norfolk, Virginia until it did.

Another great adventure begins.
 

Navy Boot Camp Part III

Being in the Navy provided an introduction to discipline. What kind of person would I be if Bob and I weren't so exhausted that day driving down NW 27th Avenue in Miami that going into the Navy seemed like a good idea? Beats me, because that's the way it happened. Would I do it again? Hmm.

There was no one available to kiss your foot in boot camp. This startled some of the company then so I can't imagine what a lot of our modern youth would think of such demands to suddenly grow up. Even the need for cleanliness was a shock for some. We were taught all manner of hygiene and not just for our own health. After all, we were going to be jammed together in tight places for long periods of time and who wants to be near someone who stinks? 

We washed all our own clothes by hand and hung them out on lines in the courtyard or in the drying room and for some bizarre reason we were not allowed to use clothespins. We had to tie the wet clothes on the line with little strips of string called 'clothes-stops'. If the knots were tied wrong, the clothes were pulled down and thrown on the ground. I imagine we were being made familiar with tying knots since knots are very important in the Navy, what with the sails and all.

We marched everywhere to provide us an introduction to coordination and teach us how to respond to orders and we carried those rifles and performed lengthy rifle drills to build up our upper bodies. Of course, no one explained any of this, we just did as we were told. We even marched to meals, where the food was always good wherever I went. The signs were clear and blunt: Take all you want. Eat all you take. Not a bad slogan. 

The Navy provided a guidebook to everything 'Navy' named The Bluejacket's Manual. They started using them in 1902 and they're still in use. I recently acquired a copy of the edition that was current when I joined and sure enough, I recognized every image.  It contains all the basic information required to get along in the Navy: rankings, ratings, when to salute, how not to drown, you know, the basics. A lot of the classes we attended were to explain what was in this book.

Beside the marching and drill work and the classroom study, there were practical, hands-on education sessions. Growing up in Miami, I can't remember not knowing how to swim. So I was surprised when I found quite a few of my company couldn't swim. They joined the Navy and couldn't swim. Huh? A couple admitted they'd never even seen the ocean. Talk about getting out of your comfort zone! But it was good to learn how to surface for air when there's an oil fire burning for hundreds of yards around you. That part of swimming I was unfamiliar with.
 

We spent quite a while on fire-fighting because fires are bad on a ship not just because you have nowhere to run, but pretty much everything onboard can explode or burn. So we became firefighters. Along with that, we had to become comfortable wearing gas-masks as well. Not dying is a priority I easily bought into.

There was also hand-gun and rifle training, ship identification and terminology. It was cool to learn the origin of the terms still used on modern ships. And we had to learn the rules around standing watch. To train us, we had to stand watch over the garbage dumpsters in case someone came on base to steal our garbage. 

Along about the sixth week, each company had to provide 'services' to the command for a week. Depending upon where you were assigned for 'Service Week', it could be custodial work, food service, warehouse work or whatever else was required. Because I was First Platoon Leader, I was assigned as a mentor to a new company in their first week on base to help them with the transition. If we had one of these assigned to my company, I don't remember ever seeing him. Oddly, I found this task to be a lot of fun because they really seemed to appreciate the guidance I could provide. And since this new company spent a lot of time marching and drilling and in the classroom, I had that time to myself. So I wandered around the base exploring and going into all the old buildings. Benefits of rank.

A couple of weeks later, we were marching along and my Service Week company marched by and they all yelled "Hey, it's Service Week!" which was their title for me. They actually broke rank and ran over to me! Boy, there was a lot of yelling and screaming from the instructors. Good times.
 

Navy Boot Camp Part II

My daughter told me recently that, knowing the way I am, she couldn't really see me in boot camp. That I wasn't 'boot camp' material, you know? The circumstances exist that serious physical harm or at the very least, psychological warfare would have raged uncontrollably. Military prison or a very long hospital stay were some of the best possible outcomes. She was right, of course, but it depends dramatically on how one sees 'boot camp'.

You see, I did not go through the boot camp as characterized in the movie Full Metal Jacket. The boot camp the US Navy provided was a series of schools to produce a healthier, more compliant resource that would serve the interests of the Navy and who will not die the first week they were placed in a duty situation. 

As you begin this process, the crutches of the past, your 'self', your individualism, the control of your time for eating and sleeping, bathroom needs, the choices you made about clothes, hairstyles, jewelry, even eyeglasses, are all removed. You are left with nothing to worry about except conforming and complying.

At the start of it all was uniformity. I'm sure you've all seen the movies of the head shaving, the issuing of clothing and bedding, medical and dental testing, all of that. There was no concern about what to wear and no one had to worry about combing their hair in the morning and shampooing was irrelevant. Naturally, some of us had to go above and beyond by shaving our heads right down to the skin. For those who had fairly long hair, there's some awfully white skin under there. Some people were made temporarily blind by the reflected light. 

There were several rounds of inoculations, but there were no needles, the fluids were pneumatically blasted into our arms (or rear ends) with air guns, it was all very efficient. Some guys had to see the dentist quite a bit. I was FINE because I had just had all my own work done on my own dime. It's called 'timing' people, look it up. 

So, after the 'induction' process was over, we were assigned to our units. Bob Deeter and I had joined together, but we were told there was no guarantee where we would end up. After all this, we were both made part of Company 555. We were the first company to use a brand new building in the new section of the Recruit Training Command. We were on the ground floor right where that red arrow is pointing.

As you can see, this was a large facility. Each of those buildings held twelve companies and there were a lot of buildings.  They had to have an efficient process to get us in and get us out.

I don't have an actual photo of what the interior of the barracks looked like, but this is a pretty good approximation. Rows of two level bunk beds with lockers in the center dividing the room. The bathroom, shower room, laundry room and drying room were all at one end, the rest of it was just one big open room.

One of the first creation steps of the new company was the assignment of leadership roles within the recruit population. There were regular naval personnel assigned to us, but this was a hierarchy within the recruits themselves. There wasn't any discussion of who would do which role and no one revealed what the selection process was. It was simply announced that Bob was Company Commander and I was First Platoon Leader. And that concluded our training. Company 555 consisted of perhaps 80 or 90 men and I was suddenly responsible for half of them. I can't recall if Bob and I ever discussed the odds of the two people who knew each other ending up in the top two positions in the company, but there it was.

Someone along the line secreted in a Polaroid camera, and I'm very glad he did since this is the only photo I have of the uniforms we wore as recruits. So here is Bob Deeter on the right and me on the left in front of the World War II-era rifles we carried everywhere. Notice that on our right shoulders we are displaying our recruit rank, Bob with four stripes and me with three.

The Navy did produce a Company 555 'Yearbook' for us with actual photos, but that was lost a long time ago. Perhaps they sent someone in the dark of night to steal it because it had such sensitive information. 

Or not. 
 

Navy Boot Camp Part I

 
About a thousand years ago (OK, it was February and March of 2009), I broached the subject of my being in the Navy. I didn't continue the story because, frankly, the whole topic makes me a little nervous. I'll explain why, but it may not make any sense to you. Here to the right is our callow hero himself in the official photo taken in boot camp. I thought about drawing in a mustache, but you can do that yourself.

It's still remarkable to me that so many, practically all, of my relatives going back generations were in the Navy and even though I was completely ignorant of that... there I ended up. If you're actually bored enough to learn how that happened, well, go back to 2009 in this thing and read all about it.

We're going to pick the story up as I entered the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. At that point, there were only two Navy 'boot camps'. One in San Diego for the western half of the country and Great Lakes, a bit north of Chicago, for the eastern half. Just a few years later, they opened a new one in Orlando, but that would have been too easy and convenient for me and no one wants that.

This is the official insignia of the Great Lakes Recruit Training Command which was only one of the schools in the Great Lakes Center. I don't remember any lightning bolts zooming through the place, but maybe I was there at the wrong time of the year.

With the passing and mellowing effects of time, I'm glad I got to see the historical nature of the place. When I was there, the facility had already existed for nearly a hundred years, so it's a hundred and fifty now. I got to go into buildings in use during World War I and II and it made me appreciate new construction even then.

Here, seen for the first time in fifty years, is the map of the place that I sent home to my parents so they could visualize where I was. I was not in a position to take 800 photos a day on my phone to instantaneously show them what I was doing every passing minute like people can today, so they had to use their imagination.

If you click on the image, you can zoom in on the details. Please note that true North is off to the left.

In this aerial photograph, taken October 26, 1972 just a few years later, you may get a better perspective of the building layout. I have kindly turned it to the same orientation as the map. See what a nice guy I am?

When we first arrived in our dopey civilian clothes with our cardboard suitcases looking like extras from a high school production of 42nd Street, the first thing they had us do was ship our suitcases home with everything we had brought. We were now conformists of the highest degree, the whole 'individuality' thing was over.

Couldn't they just have told us, "Don't bring anything with you, nitwit, we'll supply some new baggy underwear, just calm down." Or would that have made too much sense?

The adventure begins.


 

North By Northwest

No, we're not going to discuss the movie, this is the third installment of my genealogical Peripherals trilogy. 

However, if you're being strafed or buzzed in a wide open area with no cover, like Cary Grant was, the safest position to take is not to run, but to lie down horizontally to the plane's approach thus offering the smallest target. When I was managing people, I used this trick all the time, that's how I survived. Geez, Cary, think things through, you make me nervous. 

Years before I knew anything about Giovanni Venturella, I had gone on a search for the hospital where I was born. Shouldn't be too hard, right? My brother Dave had been born in Jackson Memorial Hospital, one of the largest and most highly regarded medical institutions in the South, so I was probably also born there. Right?

Wrong.

According to my Birth Certificate, I was born at Northwest Hospital in Miami. Well, that should be easy enough. Wrong again. Even the magical Internet had nothing about it - absolute radio silence. Perhaps it was a ghost hospital. If you search today, the only results for 'Northwest Hospital in Miami' are my plaintive requests for photos and information. So, back to the Polk City Directories of Miami and yes, there it was on 79th Street.

My guess was that it was no longer a hospital, but that wouldn't stop me from getting some photos of the place. When I traveled there on one of my sentimental journeys to Miami, I went to the address as listed. Here's what I found.

There, just beyond the Rotor Rooter van was an empty lot, and I couldn't get a really good feel for the place from that. And it turns out that I hadn't missed my photo of the hospital by just a couple of months (wouldn't that be annoying!). No, as near as I can determine I had missed it by fifty years. Fifty years gone and it's still an open lot? Holy crap, was it a toxic waste dump? What the hell happened here? Was it because of me?

Maybe the hospital had been really, really old and had collapsed from the weight of years? But I checked the 1943 Fire Insurance Map, and no, it looked like farm land. But there in the 1948 Fire Insurance Map, there, Northwest Hospital in the Red box! Yay!

Wait a minute.

Northwest Hospital was about as large as a medium-sized McDonald's. Definitely smaller than Jackson Memorial Hospital by a factor of 1,000. So my brother is born in the fancy upscale hospital and I am born at McDonald's. There are no photos of Northwest Hospital because there weren't any cameras small enough! 

However, you may have noticed two other colored boxes on that Fire Map above. The address of Northwest Hospital was 1060 NW 79th Street, just across the street from 1015 NW 79th Street where Giovanni Venturella was operating the Fannie Grill (Green Box) which was next door to 1005 NW 79th Street where Giovanni's Restaurant (Yellow box) was built that same year. See how this all ties together? Well, do you? I made Giovanni's box yellow in honor of the Yellow Meat Market now located there. See what a nice guy I am!

On the Google aerial today, the outlines of some of the Northwest Hospital buildings are still evident. The hospital and the Fannie Grill are gone. Giovanni's lives on as the Yellow. 

I must speculate on how I came to be born at Northwest Hospital. Did Giovanni Venturella tell my parents about the new, little hospital across the street from him? Or perhaps they saw it as it was being built when they went to one of Giovanni's places. Or was it all just a coincidence? There is no one left to ask. Bummer.

There is another possibility. The doctor who delivered me at Northwest was Dr. Paul Vincent Dunn an Osteopath who was a co-founder of the hospital. His address at the time was 1054 NW 79th Street, next door to the hospital and right across the street from the Fannie Grill and Giovanni's. Perhaps my parents met him in one of those places. Or some other bar. 

For Dr. Dunn was an alcoholic. Later, in 1975 when he was Medical Director of Dade County's Alcohol Detoxification Program, he described his experiences to the Miami News and explained that he did not stop drinking until 1970. That was about the time the hospital went away.

His description matched perfectly with what I had seen working with my friend Mike Mulhall when we traveled all over the US together. Mike drank continuously and prodigiously and other than getting redder in the face, never showed it. Is that the way it was with Dr. Dunn?

This makes me really wish I had been there when I was born. Yeah, I guess I was, but I wasn't actively taking notes, I was too busy squalling. But you know what I mean. In addition to what was described here, Dr. Dunn was also a big-time hunter and fisherman with a houseful of trophies and championships in pistol marksmanship and skeet shooting. The Doctor had some interesting elements in his personality. I wish I could have met him again after that first brief encounter.

As I indicated at the outset of this little trilogy, it is the Peripherals that add the spice to a cold, analytic document like a birth certificate. And this particular chain of connections turned out to be spicy indeed.
  
UPDATE: June 3, 2018 - Thanks to the magic of social media, I can now provide a photo of Northwest Hospital. It turns out, it was just a very small place as I had presumed. Very plain and simple.

And that's probably Dr. Dunn's house visible through the underbrush off to the left. It turns out the Internet does have some value!
 

We're Going to Giovanni's

 
There was a television series produced by the BBC named 'Connections'. It demonstrated beautifully that events are rarely linear in nature. "This happened and then that happened as a direct result." Hah! More often than not, it was one accident after another.

In the last episode of this blog-ette, the Lone Ranger had discussed the extensive drinking habits of his parents and concentrated on the legendary Betty B, a prototypical lower-end watering hole frequented by those in the 1940's who had forgotten to charge their smartphones.
 

Here's my Mom, Sophia, on the left with her friend Edna (whose last name is lost) standing before the Betty B. When I was researching these photos, I was able to use tiny clues like this one to uncover the name of the bar. Pretty clever, huh?

But at this point, I didn't know where the Betty B was located, so I flew to Miami (okay, this wasn't the only reason) and examined the old Polk City Directories in the Miami Public Library. No, not the beautiful old library of my youth that smelled of knowledge and a bright, unlimited future. They tore that down and replaced it with a brutalist concrete box.

 
There, in the 1945 Polk, I discovered the address of the place as 700 NE 79th Street and also the name of the owner as Giovanni Venturella. In my tiny but hyperactive brain, this triggered a 'connection' (get it?) with a long buried memory. Just as I could recall the names of bars frequented by my father, Leon, like the Doghouse and Jimmie's Blue Room (I wonder if that's where David Lynch got his ideas), the name 'Giovanni' fired off some long-slumbering neurons. I could recall my parents referring to 'Giovanni's' as in "We're going to Giovanni's".

There in the photos was the proprietor of the Betty B. No, he's not wearing a name tag, only an apron but it's a strong bet that here, direct from Palermo, Italy via Havana, Cuba is gray-eyed, black-haired, 5 ft 4 in, 154 pound Giovanni Venturella who arrived in New York in 1939. 

Are we sure he knew my parents, hmm? Well, this photo is from 1942, so my father was not in the picture yet, but there's my mother's friend Edna on the left and Giovanni Venturella, third from the left. Next to him with his arm around my mother is her friend Charles Gillespie. It is interesting that the soldiers here appear to be wearing no insignia or indication of rank whatsoever. I wonder if this was a wartime thing to keep people from discovering what units are deployed where.

Giovanni lived just a block away on 80th Street. When my parents were married, they lived on 82nd Street, also close by and my father worked at Hayes Gateway Service Station at 8000 Biscayne Boulevard, also two blocks away. Nice tight little grouping, huh? For the visual people among you (I applaud you, by the way) here's the Miami fire map from 1943.

The Red box is Betty B, the Green box is Giovanni's residence, the Orange box is Hayes Gateway Service where my father worked and the Yellow is the apartment where my parent's lived. If there is a lot with no building showing, that means it was an empty lot. There was a great deal of open space in Miami Shores then. That's Little River running along the bottom of the frame.

Nowadays, things are a bit more built up. Many of the original buildings are gone. The boxes and colors are the same. The river is still Little River. My parents' apartment is under a bank.

So, did he change the name of his bar to Giovanni's? No, he moved about a mile west on 79th Street and bought the Fannie Grill at 1015 NW 79th Street and then built a new restaurant building next door at 1005 NW 79th Street: Giovanni's Restaurant! "We're going to Giovanni's". His newspaper ad offered salad and spaghetti for 80 cents. That would be about $9.00 nowadays.
 
The building still stands, even though the neighborhood has... ... changed. The business there is now the Yellow Meat Market. I don't know if there's much call for yellow meat. How hot do you have to get meat to turn it yellow? I'd love to go inside to get a feel for the building, you know, pick up the vibrations in the walls. But I know that once inside I would be murdered two or three times. It's a tough neighborhood now.

It can't be all bad, there's wheelchair access and the barbed wire looks pretty fresh. And with a security camera on every corner, whew! My guess is there's not too much foot traffic.

Giovanni died in 1962, he was 72. The restaurant had a very long run as top players in the bowling leagues. However, there is no record that Giovanni was ever married and I haven't found any reference to a relative at all. But he knew my parents and that's good enough for me and now the magical Internet won't forget him.

If you thought that was the end of the story, oh no... there's more!
 
 

The Peripherals

 
  In the world of genealogy, many people concentrate on their direct ancestors, those who are the DNA-contributors to their current condition. In this instance, 'direct' would be one's father or grandmother and not an aunt or great-uncle. Often, however, those 'indirects' are where you discover your connections to Presidents and winners of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, so we don't ignore them. As you can see from this example, there are usually two direct ancestors per generation and over time this gets very large, even overwhelmingly large. 

Over time, there are other connections you come across in your research, the people and things that may not be related to you by blood at all. These are what I refer to here as the 'Peripherals'. Anyone who has done genealogy for a while has run into such marginal characters, bit players who keep cropping up, just tantalizing enough to look into. They're not absolutely necessary, but they seem to add something to the context, like when a cook adds spices to the stew.

Some such factoids are so marginal they practically fade away. Things like our milkman's name which was Wally. Wally the Milkman. Or that the doctor in North Miami who took a mole off my forehead was named Dr. Peppercorn. Bert Peppercorn to be specific.

All right, I've set this up long enough, time to get to it.

One such Peripheral in my life may have played a fairly significant role. You see, I don't know how my parents met. I had decades to uncover this tidbit, all I had to do was ask. But this is one of those woulda/coulda/shouldas that didn't happen because I was too dull or unconscious (see previous posts) to just ask the simple question. Such is the bane of all late-blooming genealogists.

Back in the 1940's, people did not have online dating apps on their smartphones. Any Millennials out there reading this (really?) probably just passed out. But it's true. My parents were not the church-social or hospital-volunteering types, they did their socializing in bars. Hey, that's the way it was, deal with it. At least if you saw a person in a bar, you knew they weren't Photoshopped. What you saw was actually a living human. Not like when they tried to jam Oprah's enormous, misshapen head onto Ann Margaret's body. Ain't happenin'!

Miami, Florida in the 1940's had a lot of bars, I mean a LOT. It has a lot of bars now, too, but proportionately it was almost silly how many they were. My father, Leon, was a connoisseur of bars, places like the Doghouse, the Hide-Away and Jimmie's Blue Room, names that I heard growing up. My mother, Sophia, on the other hand found a place she liked and concentrated her energies there, not exclusively, but to a large degree. Yes, she went to the Park Avenue 'Stuff' and the Bottlecap Inn, but mostly it was the Betty B.

The Betty B.

My mother was working for the von Neida family who lived on Normandy Isle on Miami Beach for the winters and back to St. Paul for the summers. Here's the von Neida winter home in 1938. When she was off, my mother would occasionally travel the couple of miles on the 79th Street Causeway to the Betty B. Actually, 79th Street was called Everglades Boulevard in those days and the Causeway was put there to get people from the beach to the Hialeah Race Track, so the buses ran regularly.

The Betty B was originally the Betty Jane but there was probably some huge corporate takeover (yeah, right!) and the name changed. It was located just on the Miami side of the Causeway at 700 NE 79th Street. I went back to visit it, but it's a boat sales lot now. It's rare for things in Miami to stay the same for very long.

By a freakish coincidence I DO have photos of the real Betty B! Quite a few, actually. More, in fact, then there are of me growing up. Well, there you go. That's my mother, Sophia, second from the left. I don't know any of the other characters, but the well dressed gentleman with his arm around my mother looks strangely like the evil Nazi from 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', you know, the one whose face melted.

The Betty B was an open-air bar. In Miami! It had a westerly exposure, so in the afternoons, the sun would have beat in there like a blast furnace. Maybe they closed for a siesta, maybe they all snuck around back. I know it would have been too much for me and I was born in Miami. In this photo taken from NE 7th Avenue, the sun is already turning the ketchup to jelly. I've speculated that the cloth piled up on one of the bar stools there is hopefully some sort of canvas sun block they hung up, but I can't be certain. That's my mother sitting on the left being blinded by the sun.

My Uncle Richard, for whom I was named, also frequented the Betty Jane/Betty B. He also worked for the von Neida family. Here is Uncle Richard with Betty Jane Rickard. Hmm, 'Betty Jane'? Could this be the Betty Jane for whom the bar was originally named? I don't know, but rest assured I'll keep researching. He cuts quite the dashing figure here, huh. I hope his spine was okay.

That fence of signs espousing various beers like Old Bohemian is protecting the bar-goers from falling into or driving into Little River which is right behind the sign. Those are Australian Pines showing in the distance in this photo. They were often planted along canals and rivers in Miami.

Now that we're established the geography of this Peripheral, next time we'll discover the human Peripheral who may have played an important role in my family's events. Stay tuned, there are lots more non-essentials where these came from.
 
  

Odd Jobs

 
I've had perfectly normal jobs in my life: computer guy, short-order cook, construction worker, you know, the usual. 

By the way, doing construction work in Miami in the summer is no walk in the park. On this one job, I was doing concrete form work on a high-rise in Sunny Isles very near Haulover Beach. It was white sand and white cement with no hint of vegetation or shade. Golly, it was hot. And the sun was blinding. There are no photos of me in my little shorts and boots and tool belt with a hard hat but this photo is an approximation of what I looked like. Yes, it's just an approximation. If I wasn't already tanned, I would be post haste. Did I mention it was hot? 

But there have been a few jobs that were out of the ordinary. How many of you out there have been the Security Guard at an airplane tire factory? Yeah, I didn't think so. Why was it so important to have a security guard around tires? Because these tires cost maybe $10,000 apiece and the factory was in Miami.

The drug dealers who flew their contraband in from South America and used Miami as their base had to get their tires somewhere and they already had the infrastructure for theft, so... Why spend $50,000 for a set of tires, when you could get them free? Consequently, I guarded them. I must have frightened the heck out of the dealers because I was never attacked.

I've mentioned before that I'm a 'super-taster' with a very heightened sense of taste and sense of smell that goes along with it. When I went into the factory to make my rounds, I had to cut my way through an unusually fetid stench. It was one of those odors that gets onto you and stays with you so as you walk by, people turn to see what died. 

I went back a few years later to take a photo of the Thompson Aircraft Tire factory, but as you can see from the photo, it wasn't just gone, it was gone! Nothing would even grow where the factory was. I imagine the stink had dissolved the place, got into the ground and... that was that. In 10,000 years, it will likely look just the same.

My very next job took me outdoors, you know, to clear my sinuses. I became a Rodman on a surveying team. Yes, that's an actual job title, stop laughing and look it up! The Rodman handles the equipment for the survey team and holds a calibrated pole to nail down distance and elevation. This was actually a cool job, fresh air, exploring to find hidden markers, hacking through jungles with a machete to clear a path for the surveyor. Yes, of course I cut myself with it, everyone did, but at least I didn't have to go to the hospital. 

The thing that made my reputation with Schwebke-Shiskin, however, was as a result of my distaste for working in wet clothes. We were out in the Everglades surveying a canal and I had to swim to the other side with my calibration stick. So I stripped down naked and swam over. I am a native of Miami, so going into a canal was no big deal but the team thought it was the coolest move they'd ever seen. 

After that, I was 'Fearless'. "Send 'Fearless', he'll take care of it!" Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do.

 Far and away the worst job I had only lasted a week. I answered an ad to assist a chemist in Hialeah. The place had a tiny office up front and much larger warehouse and shop. I go in and the guy hands me a one page recipe and instruction sheet and tells me to go to work. The recipe was for hair relaxer to straighten 'naturally curly' hair. The instructions went all the way from raw materials to filling cases with finished product. One page. No problem! I can do this! I worked in an airplane tire factory!! The fact that I didn't recognize the place can be attributed to the fact that the movie 'Mad Max' wouldn't be released for years. I don't have a photo but this image is close.

The centerpiece of the room was a cauldron that would scare the crap out of Macbeth. Dumping all the 'ingredients' into the horrid pot being very careful to get the proportions correct (sure!), I stirred it all up with a canoe paddle. Gingerly, I filled several million bottles with this noxious concoction being ultra careful not to get any on me (it burns! it burns!) because I hoped one day to have children. Then I slapped the labels on the bottles and filled the cases. There were people out there who bought what I had created. Think about that! It's also highly likely there are still unopened bottles out there on store shelves somewhere. Waiting. Waiting.

I have tried over the years to forget this darkness, but sometimes, in the middle of the night when it is quietest and blackest, it all comes to mind and my hair straightens a little.
    

Growing, Growing, Grown

 
I'm still not absolutely certain what I want to be when I grow up.

Yes, I know I'm running out of time, but decisions like this are hard! They seem so... permanent. I recently updated my job history and have determined that I've worked for eighteen different companies, not counting duplicates and self employment. For those eighteen companies, I've had twenty-five different titles and thirty-nine different 'jobs' or different sets of responsibilities.

I don't know if that's a lot or just average. Furthermore, none of these jobs were what I had started out to do, which was to be a History Teacher. I wonder if I would have liked that. I'll never know because we had no money and I was desperately trying to work full time and go to school full time and I pooped out on the whole deal.

The only 'career' I had exposure to as a child was seeing my teachers at school, so that's the direction I went. There weren't too many doctors, dentists or bankers that traveled in our circles, just mechanics, milkmen and maids. Nothing wrong with any of those but I just wanted something new and exciting. Yeah, right.

There are stories about people who decided what they were going to do when they were perhaps eight years old and then proceeded single-mindedly toward that goal. Well, they're better people than I am. However, I've never heard of a person saying, "Oh, I knew since I was eight years old that I wanted to be a mid-grade actuarial at a life insurance company somewhere in the mid-west." 
 

Over the years, I did conceive of my ideal job. After briefly considering shepherd and lamplighter, I finally realized all of my aspirations were satisfied in a single job function: Towel-boy. What a great job! You sit in a little grass hut and hand out towels to sweaty, often partially drunken tourists. There's no overhead, no long-term debt, no sunken costs, no performance appraisals to do and when you're out of towels, you're done for the day! "You want a towel? Great! You want two? Better! Here, take the whole stack!" It is unclear that I could get hired now. Tourists want young, glistening towel-boys, not old, hunched-over towel-men.

As my children were making their own career decisions, I was always working too much to be conscious of the angst of such developments. But I love to ask my grandchildren what they're going to do. I get great answers, too: Princess, Saloon-Singer, Hand Model. I think that last one is brilliant. You can come to work unshaven in your jammies, just leave the chainsaw in its box. 

It will be very interesting to see what they actually decide on. Perhaps Medicine. Perhaps Science. Perhaps working in a salmon cannery on the west coast. As long as they're happy.

I hope one or both of them consider engineering. Engineers can do anything! And there are a hundred different kinds. The job I used to have as 'Programmer' is now 'Software Engineer'. Engineers know stuff and they can make stuff do stuff that the stuff doesn't want to do. I love that.

Here's an example. TiVo was the first real digital video recorder. We've been using them for 15 years and have grown very dependent. Our current box is quite intuitive and has operated flawlessly, but we just went through a major power failure and Internet loss. When the power came back, our TiVo wouldn't boot. O... M... G!! When I stopped crying, I looked for solutions and tried them all to no avail. 
 
Finally one person (undoubtedly an engineer) suggested taking the cover off and running a hair dryer on the memory chips for a minute. No, I'm not making this up and having been around computers for nearly 50 years, this was a new one on me. You might as well have suggested painting my face, chanting and rattling chicken bones. That would have seemed more reasonable than drying the hair on my memory chips. But it worked and TiVo has been working perfectly ever since.

You GO, Engineers!