VIETNAM 1967

During the summer of my sophomore year at college I was a Good Humor Man. I was issued a white shirt, white pants and a black bow tie, assigned a route and sold Popsicles and ice cream bars out of the back of a truck.

I had a bank of three bells on a rope with a hand pull that announced my arrival on the block by my pulling on the rope and producing a rhythmic series of tones, which is the best I can do at describing the sound that was made.

My chief competition for business was Mister Softee who played a recorded song through a loud speaker as he moved slowly through the neighborhood. If you have young children, you may be familiar with the song he played, especially as you sat down to dinner. My other competitor was Jack and Jill and he pushed a button and created a sound not unlike a door bell. Frankly, the cacophony of bells and loudspeakers and buzzers more than a dozen times a day as we all passed through the neighborhoods on our routes must have driven parents crazy.

And it wasn't just the neighborhoods I trolled, it was public swimming pools, break time at farms that employed migrant workers and manufacturing plants full of blue-collar guys who just loved their cold ice cream on a hot summer day. My boss wondered why I was ordering so many half gallons of ice cream because bulk sales were handled in another department. I had to explain how I was paying the guys on the gates of those farms and plants with half-gallons to gain entry to sell ice cream bars to the men.

This was the summer of my content and I was having a blast, making almost $500 a week, my wife and I having no idea what to do with so much money. Boy, I' m telling you we were a couple of 2o year old college students living high on the hog that summer . . .

Until one day in the middle of August.

My boss came looking for me and found me at lunchtime when he saw my truck parked in front of a pizza parlor and told me to hurry home as my mother needed me. My father had been in Vietnam since the previous November and, with my boss being so mysterious, I had a pretty good idea of what was going on.

My mother told my brothers and I that she had been visited by the Base Chaplain who told her that Dad had suffered a heart attack. I couldn't resist a guilty smile. Here he was, 45 years old, in a war zone, and he had a God-damn heart attack!

Remember the old World War II movies when women would receive a telegram that started WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU . . . .? well, by the time of the Vietnam war era, we were much more civilized than that.

Two days later, after no word at all except for that one visit from the Base Chaplain, a staff car pulled into our driveway and three men emerged: a minister and two well-dressed officers. They talked among themselves for a second, put out their cigarettes, and as all of us peered through the curtains with a growing sense of dreadful anticipation, the three of them walked toward our front door and knocked.

This was the first time my mother and brothers and I had been together all at once since my father left for Vietnam. Without Dad, there wasn't much "togetherness." My father was the cement that held our family together and, without him there, we were not very close knit. My father had more than 20 years in the service and mandatory retirement loomed at 30 years. In order to get to 30, he had to accept an overseas assignment and he hadn't been able to decide what to do. I was in college, my brother Bobby was a junior in high school and our youngest brother Ricky, was a freshman. He had the option of taking a three year tour in Europe with his family or go to Vietnam for a year. He was a senior NCO and if he chose the one year in Vietnam, he would receive his money tax-free plus receive bonus pay for being in a war zone. It turned out to be a no-brainer from his point of view. He would make enough money in that year to help pay for our college and still have enough for a down payment on the house he and my mother planned to buy when he retired. He wanted to help design and build it. When we were transferred to Washington DC after our stint in North Dakota, he bought a house and built a workshop in the basement. From that workshop, he built a laundry room for my mother and a rec room for the family with knotty pine cabinets on the rec room side of the basement. He was fond of the words "knotty pine." He found them to be beautiful.

Those men at the front door? They were that proverbial World War II telegram.

Another brick in the Wall

MT FUJI

When we lived in Base Housing on Tachikawa Air Force Base we could see Mt Fujiyama from our front yard. Since "yama" means mountain in Japanese, Mount Fujiyama was redundant and Mt Fuji was how she was known to all. We became aware of the adage about Fuji after a while: A man who travels to Japan and does not climb Fujiyama is a fool. A man who climbs her twice is a bigger fool..

My parents climbed the mountain in 1956 as I have the climbing poles they used in my closet. The mountain is climbed by passing through various stations and at every station your climbing stick received a brand, showing that you had arrived there, and at the summit you received a final brand and a pennant to attach to the stick.

My father died in Vietnam in 1967 and my mother, who is 81, now lives in a nursing home.

Memories memories.

WORD OF THE DAY

SNEAK THIEF

Function: noun

Date: circa 1955

: How my Mother used to refer to our Japanese maid whenever she couldn't find a missing keepsake.

In my previous post, I sketched in our Asian tour of duty. When we first arrived there, our family lived in the Rice Paddies, a hastily constructed group of cottages on land 30 miles from the Tachikawa Air Force Base purchased for just that purpose while housing and facilities to support dependant families were built on the base. We lived there, cheek by jowl, with 20 other families who arrived there on various ships that had arrived from San Francisco and Seattle. We lived there for 6 months before the building project was finished.

The new housing was a series of rowhouses, 6 two-story apartments with a one-story apartments at each end of the structure for the enlisted personnel and single- family structures for the officers. Ironically enough, we lived right next to a fenced in structure where the base commander, a one-star general named Hudnell lived. His son Billy was in my second grade class and I was welcome at his house. In his front yard was a meandering creek with foot bridges crossing with koi in the creek. A really beautiful place.

This was less than 10 years after the end of World War II and several hundred people had been displaced by the base and had constructed rude housing within walking distance from the base. They had ingenious ways of making money. They took beer cans, cut them open, producing small pieces of sheet metal which they bent into various items like trains and cars that they handpainted and sold to the base personnel. They also bought solid colored Christmas ornaments and hand painted them with scenes of Christmas and Santa Clauses and sold them too. It has been 50 years and we still have 20 or so of these ornaments as prized family possessions.

The Japanese nationals who lived in those structures had jobs on the base in different capacities, some worked as laborers for the military but many others worked as maids and gardeners for the people stationed there. Imagine enlisted personnel with a maid and gardener! This was a first for them.

We had a full-time maid who cooked and cleaned and provided day care because my mother worked as a bookkeeper for the NCO club. My mother was slightly paranoid and, whenever she couldn't find a small piece of jewelry she used to call the maid a "sneakthief."

I'm not sure if Betty-san was a sneakthief or not but we were forced to let her got when my mother caught my father taking pictures (without film) of Betty-san topless! I was just old enough to have a glimmering of understanding of what was involved in that little escapade.

WHAT CONDITION MY CONDITION IS IN

Forgive me Father for I have sinned, it has been nearly four months since my last post. Jesus, on how many levels can a nice Jewish boy like myself blaspheme!

I continue to lurk and occasionally post on several different crossword blogs, particularly on Rex Parker's, if and when the spirit moves me, mixing pieces of my life when they intersect with things that are related to the puzzle at hand. I couldn' t resist when Minot North Dakota reared its head one day last week and a Commenter posted that his grandfather was a rabbi in that community in the 1910s and he couldn't imagine a Jewish enclave in that part of the world.

Well, it just so happens that I have first hand knowledge on that subject as that was where my family was stationed after we returned to the United States after spending five years in Japan as part of the US Occupation Forces. My father was a career military man in the Air Force and we were one of the first families to accompany a serviceman to the Orient in the 1950s.

My father went over first and that left my mother, a 27 year old mother of three sons, ages 7 (me), 5 and 2 to get our household goods packed up, shipped to Japan, and to drive from Dover Delaware to Seattle Washington to meet the USS Gaffey, a refurbished troop ship, and sail away with her three children to meet her husband in Yokohama Japan. All this in the pre-Interstate days in a 1952 Mercury. Not bad for a country girl from Easton Maryland!

After our tour of duty ended in 1958, the emphasis in the world had shifted from containing the Japanese to confronting the Russians. Since my father's area of expertise was aircraft maintenance, sending him to where the airplanes were made a lot of sense. Minot (the natives pronounced it MY-nut) Air Force Base was part of the nuclear umbrella that protected the United States. My family had spent the majority of our time on the East Coast which meant we were surrounded by Jews. We believed that being in the Upper Midwest would leave us cut-off from our people.

We were right and wrong. The Jewish community was sparse, true, but, we found out, close-knit. We joined Temple Beth Israel in nearby Eastwood Park and found people who were just like us - far from home and disconnected. The natives were sympathetic to our plight and friendly.

This post was prompted by a random comment posted on RexParker's blog that sparked a memory.

Go figure.