America's Big Weekend: Tanks roll on D.C. streets, Marines protect L.A. from old hippies carrying signs

Top part of an image posted by an old friend from L.A. I told the friend I wouldn't use his/her/their name due to the fact that it's not a great idea to name names right now. If U.S. Senators can get arrested and  cuffed for asking questions of Fuhrerin K. Noem, than none of us are safe. My name is on this blog and has been floating in Cyberspace for 20 years. I cropped this to remove the bottom part of the poster because it was more inflammatory than necessary, or so says the editor. Something about betrayal, what some of us are feeling as Trump sends Marines to L.A. to shoot protesters. He is holding his grand birthday parade in D.C. tomorrow. Wonder how close it will pass to the Vietnam War Memorial just off Constitution Avenue, or the World War II Memorial at the far end of the Reflecting Pool? Will you be able to see those monuments from the tanks clanking down the pavement? I need to mention the name JOLEA on the image. Anyone know who that is, an artist or maybe an organization's acronym?

Sad days for poets, writers, and historians in Washington, D.C.

A. Friend (not a real name) told me that she and her husband are traveling to Washington, D.C., this week to see the National Museum of African-American History. They want to visit it before the Trump people purge the exhibits and dismantle the building. A. Friend is not a Trump voter, not even a person undergoing what MAGA calls Trump Derangement Syndrome or TDS. She and her husband are just regular folks who visit museums and art galleries and historic sites during their travels. Over the years, she has sent me postcards from sites I never knew existed and I am the richer for it. 

Trump's Nitwits have already purged some of the exhibits from this museum. They have never met a museum they didn't suspect of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion or DIE which is an ironic acronym on its face. MAGA terms it DEI because, well IED was taken (Boom!) and IDE was too close to "Beware the Ides of March" which sounds too Shakespearean which might remind Idiocrats of a college English class they were forced to take in 1997. 

I wish A. Friend and her husband Godspeed and good luck. Make sure to take your REAL ID with you just in case there is an ICE sweep on the National Mall.

More bad news from D.C.: Trump's goons have eliminated the National Endowment for the Arts Literary Program and canned its staff including Director Amy Stolls whom I have worked with. The administration had already rescinded grants to literary magazines and presses whose only crime was admitting to DIE. 

I am going to list them here because I have read some of their books and they might not have existed with the writer's non-profit publisher, often hanging on by a shoestring. Here are the names:   Alice James Books, Aunt Lute Books, BOA Editions, the Center for the Art of Translation, Deep Vellum, Four Way Books, Hub City Writers Project, Open Letter Books, Milkweed Editions, Nightboat Books, Red Hen Press, and Transit Books as well as such literary magazines Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, n+1, the Paris Review, and Zyzzyva.

I have read books from many of these presses. I will mention one. Brian Turner's first book of poetry was published by Alice James Books. Poet, essayist, and professor Turner won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet, the first of many awards and honors received for this collection of poems about his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War. His honors since include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize, is Phantom Noise, also published by Alice James Books on New Gloucester, Maine, a teeming metropolis filled with radical outfits such as the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community, Pineland Farms, and the New Gloucester Fair. And one publisher. 

Brian's bio a pretty standard description of a contemporary American poet. But what's that part about the Iraq War? Oh yeah, Turner is a U.S. Army veteran, and was an infantry team leader for a year in the Iraq War beginning November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999 and 2000 he was with the historic 10th Mountain Division, deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

"Here, Bullet" knocked me out. The title poem will tell you more about war's realities than any non-fiction book. Go to the Alice James web site and buy the book. Better yet, buy all of his books and e-books which include individual poems. 

During my time as literature program specialist at the Wyoming Arts Council, I brought Brian to our fall 2012 writing conference in Casper to read from his work and congratulate the writers he had chosen for the WAC's literary fellowships. Later, he joined two other veteran writers on a panel to discuss the role of soldier/poet in "Active Duty, Active Voices," featured Iraq War veterans and writers Brian Turner and Luis Carlos Montalván. The panel was moderated by Casper College professor and military veteran Patrick Amelotte. Montalvan suffered from severe PTSD and wrote the wonderful memoir "Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him." He brought Tuesday with him to Casper that October weekend. I worked with the state's military coordinator to bring other service dogs and their handlers to the conference to demonstrate what they do. 

I wish I could just end this blog with another Liberal's complaint about our current situation. But I have a sad story to tell. In December 2016, the 43-year-old Montalvan was found dead in an El Paso hotel room. He had left his dog Tuesday with a friend. He killed himself and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Delivering the eulogy was Democratic Sen. Al Franken. Montalvan had persuaded Franken to sponsor legislation expanding the military dog program which passed a different Congress during different times. 

During his time in Casper, Montalvan said his favorite poem growing up conservative Cuban in South Florida was "Invictus." You know the one. It celebrates bravery. William Ernest Hanley wrote it and it's always been a favorite to memorize because it rhymes and is in iambic tetrameter. Montalvan memorized it. It ends this way: "I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul."

Rest in peace, Captain.

To the barricades – patiently, part one

Antiwar protests on college campuses are in the news and it’s no longer 1970. In the spring of 2024, young people are objecting to Israel’s handling of the war and the ensuing mass casualties. They also are upset that their universities may be funding Israel’s excesses through investments and other business ties. There are also protests by those who support Israel objecting to a 19-year-old getting involved in politics and saying bad things about Israel. It’s as ridiculous to say that criticism of Israel is antisemitic as its is if you decry Hamas you are Islamophobic.

You don’t have to know every single thing about this war to go out on the streets and check it out. Young people gather for events all of the time. It’s exciting. Their friends are there. The police look amazing in their U.S. Army castoff riot gear and their giant riot trucks once used to quell disturbances in Fallujah. That’s a lot of adrenaline surging through demonstrators’ bodies and things happen. Still, most protestors have been peaceful. I cannot say the same thing about NYC and Boston cops.  

I am a Baby Boomer who saw his first antiwar protest in the spring of 1970. I was a ROTC midshipman and I went to the demo instead of the annual Navy Ball. My dorm friends were going outfitted with gas masks and scarves to take the sting out of tear gas and pepper gas. I went with them to campus where all the action was going to be. Tear gas flew and the S.C. state cops rushed the demonstrators applying their batons to longhair’s heads.

We fled into the dorm complex and ended up in a restroom being used as a first aid station. Men and women were jammed in and those with even a tiny bit of first aid experience helped administer to those with cracked skulls, eyes blinded by gas, and asthmatics struggling to breathe. One guy had been a medic in Vietnam this time the year before. Others like me had been Boy Scouts and knew enough first aid to patch broken scalps.

An ambulance arrived outside and I was drafted (Hah – drafted) to pick up the wounded in makeshift stretchers and carry them outside. One was my buddy Pat who’d sliced off the top of his index finger when picking up a broken bottle to throw at the cops. Yes, there were young people on this night of nonviolent protest who threw broken bottles at cops and picked up tear gas canisters and threw them back.

We were demonstrators once, and young.

End of part one

Orderly disorderly orderly

Jerry Lewis played a hospital orderly in “The Disorderly Orderly.” In it, he’s a bumbling idiot with a heart of gold, a type he’s played before. I am not a Lewis fan but did laugh at some of the “Orderly” hijinks on YouTube film clips. He mixes up two skeletons bound for the research lab. His supervisor warns him not to mix them up. He asks his supervisor how to tell the difference. Her reply: “You don’t know the difference between boys and girls?” He makes a goofy face,. “Yes, but I like my girls [wait for it] upholstered.” Laughed here and shook my head. Let’s face it, not a bad joke, good enough for a laugh. Typical Lewis humor, one which he parlayed into many films, Vegas stage shows, and TV specials.

You don’t need orderly experience, disorderly or not, to appreciate Lewis’s shenanigans. But, with a little research, you find all sorts of info under the topic of “orderly.” Merriam-Webster Online cites two meanings for orderly the noun: a soldier who carries messages and performs services for an officer; a person who waits on others, cleans, and does general work in a hospital.

I have never been the first variety and don't even know if they exist any more. You can find orderlies in war movies especially those focused on the British army. "Orderly, get me a cuppa. Sorry sir, the Huns have blown up all our teacups. Blast." Orderlies in the world wars provided all sorts of services at The Front. In WW1, orderlies often were stretcher bearers and spent some of their time under fire rescuing wounded from No Man's Land. Very dangerous duty indeed. Some were COs who resisted shooting other people and wound up being shot at anyway. A very interesting and readable memoir of this side of the war was written by a member of Evacuation Hospital No. 8, Frederick Pottle, who taught in the Yale English Department after the war. "Stretchers: The Story of a Hospital Unit on the Western Front."  Published by Yale University Press in 1929 and available to read at https://net.lib.byu.edu/estu/wwi/memoir/Stretchers/PottleTC.htm

I have worked as the second kind of orderly, although my duties went beyond those described. Hospital orderlies are now classified as nursing assistants and you get training for that. There still exists men and women in medical facilities who wait on others, clean, and do general work.  

During college years, I worked as an orderly in a succession of three different hospitals. I think of the patient populations I served in this way: one for dying old people, one for critically burned children, and one for the crazy drunks who also were dying slow deaths.

I was young, 23 at my third and last position minding alcoholics at a county hospital. I could be irreverent with my coworkers while still doling out empathy for patients. Face it, I was never going to grow old, turn into a homeless alky, or get caught in a raging fire. That’s the joy and curse of youth, ignorance of what’s waiting down the line. Blessed, blessed, cluelessness. I dated nurses, went to some wild parties, and made friends. Because I could not envision old age, I couldn’t fathom the fact that some of my youthful experiences would be forever burned into my memory. Therein lies the joy and curse of old age: there is no forgetting.

Ormond Beach Osteopathic Hospital was across the street from a nice beach break. When I got off my 7-3 shift, I checked out the surf. If it was good, I would borrow one of my brothers’ boards and go out. If not, I’d call one of my friends and we’d get high while driving along a usually deserted wintertime beach. I was killing time, waiting for my draft notice to arrive. I was 20, just the right age for Vietnam. I’d lost my ROTC scholarship and dropped out of a university I could no longer afford. At the hospital, retirees kept coming in and passing away. They were my grandparents’ age, born at the turn of the century, now in their 70s. A Mr. Fanchon came from Montreal to bask in the sunshine and now was bedridden and developing bed sores on his back end. He moaned all the time, announced his pain in French. My fellow orderlies and I were tasked with turning him every two hours. His moans came from a deep place, a place that me and Jim and Sharon and Marlene had never been, not yet. We said calming things to him in English and he moaned and then barked out a French expression. We were kind. During smoke breaks (we all smoked), we parodied Mr. Fanchon’s French, made up our own expressions. The nurses came in the break room and asked what was so funny. We told them. They jumped right in with their own fake French lines. There’s something about working around the dying and near dead. We needed humor to keep the dreads at bay. Mr. Fanchon was on his way out but we were not. There was a morning when I came in and Mr. Fanchon’s room was empty, already made up for a new patient. I asked about him at the nurses’ station. “Old folks home,” they said. I couldn’t think of anything funny to say. I worked my shift, went home to see what was in the mail.

During my six months working the graveyard shift at a Boston children’s burns center, two patients died. The nurses and doctors worked frantically to save them but could not. We orderlies and nursing assistants were on the periphery, going about our appointed rounds. We knew. I brought water to the boy who had been messing around and fell on a downed high-voltage cable. He now had just one arm and no penis. Electricity has to find a way out, it seems. I brought ice cream for a little boy with bandaged hands. I sometimes changed his dressings when the nurses were busy. The burns on his small hands were in concentric circles. I asked a nurse about the burns, asked if he climbed up on a stove and fell, or something. She grabbed my hand, told me to spread my fingers, then she pressed my hand on a table. She released my hand. “His mother,” she said. “His mother.” I was never the same after hearing that. On that death night, staff waited until the unit was quiet and the other kids were asleep. That’s when they moved the body. A few weeks later, the nursing supervisor took me aside , said the hospital would pay for me to get my nursing degree. I was flattered. It was good to be far away from home and wanted. I turned down the offer, and thanked my boss, told her I wanted to be a writer. A few months later, I was back in Florida with new plans, thoughts already fading of my live-in girlfriend, the one to whom I’d plighted my troth but would only see twice more before she called it quits via long-distance telephone.

The 1200 Ward at the county hospital housed people the cops peeled off downtown sidewalks and brought in the sober up. It was a locked ward, staffed by one orderly of sufficient bulk to corral anyone in DTs and ring the buzzer for help. That was me. The orderly. I took temps and filled water pitchers. I carried a soft plastic tongue depressor for those times when patients suffered seizures. Scar tissue on the brain, that’s how it was explained to me. Again I summoned the nurses and they gave the patient something to settle them. The usual cocktail was paraldehyde mixed with orange juice. Paraldehyde is a relative of formaldehyde and was, into the 70s, used to treat DTs. Nurses demonstrated its power by pouring a shot of P into a Styrofoam cup. It always ate its way through the cup, pooling on the nurses’ station counter. “Orange juice first!” Mrs. D was tiny and weathered but had been a nice looking women in her youth. I worked in 1200 for a year as I eased my way through community college. During that time, Mrs. D was inside the locked doors three times. As we gathered in the break room to play cards, Mrs. D told the best stories, the most disturbing stories. They were funny too in a twisted sort of way. She’d been married and divorced a couple times. She traded sex for booze. Slept in crash pads or on the beach hidden behind hotel seawalls. A week before I quit to go off to the university, she came in with a black eye and broken finger. “You should see the other guy!” When I walked out the locked doors for the last time, she wished me well. “Be good, hon.” Well, Mrs. D, I haven’t always been good. But I did OK. And I remember you."

On rewatching "Band of Brothers" and viewing "The Pacific" for the first time

Here’s how I used to think about World War 2. It was our father’s and mother’s war. My father joined up early in ’42 and served as a radioman in the ETO with the U.S. Army Signal Corps until 1946. My mother trained on the U.S. Navy nurse program and would have served when she graduated in ’46 but the war was over. They were my heroes, members of what Tom Brokaw labeled The Greatest Generation. Time marched on. We forgot about the war. The fascists had been licked and would never return. The Boomers got old and complacent. 

Next thing we know, the fascists are back, at home and abroad. The fiction of conspiracy novels became the facts of 2023.

So, again, I think a lot about World War 2. The Nasties of 1939 Germany, Italy, and Japan are back except they are right here in our neighborhoods. Trump is Il Duce. Storm troopers rampage at the U.S. Capitol. Chinese militarists plot mischief in the Pacific. Hungary elects a right-wing strongman beloved by the MAGA crowd..

I was glad to see that Netflix returned “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.” I’ve watched the first one several times and was impressed. So I watched it again and was struck by the sacrifices made by Easy Company as they fought the Nazis across Europe. The Nazis were our enemy and they and their fascist ideology needed to die.

As for “The Pacific,” that series bowled me over. Saddened me too, for all of those young men who died on islands they never knew existed growing up in small-town America. The savagery of the marine battles for Guadalcanal and Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, were recreated in gory detail. Men who were there wrote memoirs about their experiences that they couldn’t get out of their souls. The Japanese militarists had to be defeated, their twisted philosophy had to die, for the world to have a semblance of peace.

We’ve been told over the years that there was nothing like the scope of World War 2 and the world would never see its like again. The U.S. wasted its treasure and young lives in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan. Such a waste. It left a vacuum that China aches to fill over the next centuries. They think in terms of centuries while we measure our lives in microseconds. We must think in longer intervals to survive what’s coming.

Elmore Leonard: great stories, memorable characters, and snappy banter

There’s magic in Elmore Leonard’s writing. In his novels, he tells a whopping good story and entrances the reader with the banter among characters. I can’t get through one of his books without laughs and a few sighs. Audiobooks do justice to his work and I’ve passed a few engaging hours with “Out of Sight” and “Tishomingo Blues,” among others that I’ve listened to driving through miles of Wyoming sagebrush. The wide-open spaces figure in Leonard’s early writing, when he wrote westerns as stories (“3:10 to Yuma”) and novels (“Hombre”). I’ve seen the movies, too. “Out of Sight,” “Get Shorty,” and Tarantino's “Jackie Brown” (based on “Rum Punch”) were delightful.

Just finished “Cuba Libre,” a bit different from most of his work. Cuba during the Spanish-American War is the setting. Just a snippet of Cuba’s long and violent history. I sometimes forget that Havana was capital of Spain’s New World Empire going back to the 1500s. It was a thriving city while Seminoles ruled the Florida Glades and panthers roamed the forests. Air conditioning was just a distant dream. Leonard sets some of his books (“Maximum Bob,” “Be Cool,” "Pronto" which led the “Justified” series) in South Florida. And why not – kooky characters and Florida are a match made in heaven and/or hell, depending on your POV.

“Cuba Libre” begins in 1898 with one of the main characters surveying the wreckage of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor. I won’t tell you how it ends – it’s a wild ride, and worth reading. Intriguing characters encounter one another and all hell breaks loose. There’s an American cowboy escaping a shady past, a young marine from Arizona who survives the Maine sinking, a rich American expatriate, bad guys from Spain, barefoot Cuban revolutionaries, a hotel filled with U.S. reporters trying to drum up a war, many horses, and many, many guns.

Leonard keeps the story moving. Along the way, he violates all the rules that seemed important in MFA writing workshops. That’s something I’ve been learning reading historical fiction. Keep the story moving. No Proustian monologues. No settings in academia. I had just come from reading Ann Beattie’s stories featured over the decades in The New Yorker. Way too much academia. I liked the early stories better. They were leaner and meaner and more fun. Maybe they had the caring attention of a good editor? I did like the one story I read from her new collection which all center on the Covid-19 Emergency. I want to read the rest of those. Lauren Groff teaches writing at my alma mater UF yet writes amazing stories of Floridians in wild places. Check out her collection "Florida" that features a panther as cover art.

Look, I have an MFA in Creative Writing. I wanted nothing more than a career in the academy but that wasn’t in the cards. I still love teaching but take my writing cues from other sources, other lands, other time periods. The most fun I had recently was watching “White Noise,” a send-up of academia as well as American life. Don DeLillo – that guy can write and the folks who did the movie like it too. Hitler Studies! Airborne Toxic Event!

Go read Elmore Leonard. Plenty to choose from at your local library. Better get them before Moms for Liberty get their grubby mitts on them for the big book burning. 

In "Ridgeline," a Wyoming tale of Hubris vs. Nemesis

Casting about on the new book releases during the summer, I came across "Ridgeline," a new novel by Michael Punke. He's the author of "The Revenant," an historical novel about Hugh Glass, a bear attack in the wilderness, and Glass's long journey to get revenge to those in his hunting party who left him behind. Leonardo DiCaprio played Glass in the movie which did for grizzly bear attacks what Jaws did for swimming with sharks. Seemed like a realistic depiction of what was the western wilderness in the 1840s. 

In "Ridgeline," Punke tackles what's now called the Fetterman Fight at the foot of Wyoming's Bighorns. On Dec. 21, 1866, a contingent of warriors from Plains tribes, led by Crazy Horse and Red Cloud, lured a U.S. Cavalry contingent from their new fort and ambushed them. Indians died but so did Fetterman and his 81 troopers. Next Tuesday will mark the 155th anniversary of that day. The author depicts the battle so realistically that it's easy to feel the heat of battle on that first day of winter so long ago. Anyone who has visited Fort Phil Kearny, the Wagon Box Fight site, and any of these contested lands in what is now Johnson and Sheridan counties. At the end, I was able to revel in the Indians' victory while still feeling empathy for the soldiers. They were guilty of that classic trait of hubris. They considered the Indians ignorant savages and learned otherwise. Funny how history keeps repeating itself. 

I reviewed the book for WyoFile and you can read it at https://wyofile.com/punkes-new-novel-shines-light-on-fetterman-fight/. Punke is a Wyoming native who grew up in Torrington and served as a living history interpreter at Fort Laramie National Historic Site. He's a UW grad and served as a U.S. trade representative overseas before returning to the West and now lives in Missoula. 

Here's the review's opener:

A good historical novel should be a ripping yarn, one that keeps us turning pages long after bedtime. The writer makes this world so interesting that we want to dash off to the library or the Internet to find out more. The novel’s historical facts should also be solid. Nothing like sloppy research to ruin a good read.

It’s a lot to ask. And into this mix comes the red-hot topic of the year: Which history should we teach our kids? Conservatives wax apoplectic about the New York Times “1619 Project” and its stated goal to tell the real story about slavery. Many prefer the history we learned in fourth grade during simpler times, that America is the greatest nation on earth, by jiminy.

Enter Michael Punke’s new novel, “Ridgeline,” published by Henry Holt and Co. It’s a story about what is known as Red Cloud’s War, which began in 1866 along the Bozeman Trail in Wyoming’s Powder River Country. 

Agnes McDermott: The open road in an open car

A recommendation letter written on official stationery from United States Post-Office No. 18859, Mason, Ohio:

July 27, 1914

To Whom It May Concern:

            This letter will introduce you to Miss Agnes McDermott, who was employed by me for three and one half years, as Assistant Post Mistress, at this office. This work consisted of general office work, together with some bookkeeping.

            As to her integrity, honesty, capability and Christian character, I have the highest respect, only words of praise to offer in her behalf.

            It is a pleasure for me to recommend her, and I do so knowing from personal observation, that she is worthy of any position she may seek.

            Very Truly,

            Orville L. Girton, Postmaster

Nice rec letter. It came to me with other family documents. It was in two pieces, paper brown with age, frayed edges. I had to tape it together to read it.

I see my 25-year-old grandmother leaving her job with the fresh letter in hand intent on seeking a new and worthy position in Warren County, Ohio, only 22 miles away from downtown Cincinnati. Mason had but 737 residents when Agnes joined the P.O.

I don’t know what Agnes did after leaving the P.O. I do know that she lived with relatives, her sister Julia and brother Leo. I know that she took a road trip with chums to Colorado sometime between 1918-1920. Or maybe she and her pals set off for Colorado the summer after she left the P.O. Whenever she went, it was no mean feat. Motorcars were such a new addition to the landscape that highways were almost nonexistent.

I have no “On the Road” journal entries from Agnes but I do have plenty from Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower’s First Transcontinental Motor Convoy in the summer of 1919. Army cars and trucks drove 3,251 miles from D.C. to San Francisco in 62 days. You can read the convoy’s daily log online. The log reported that the roads that my grandmother and friends drove from Ohio to Colorado were chucky, pine brick, fair but very dusty, gumbo mud, sandy with some quicksand, soft sand gumbo and, intermittently, good gravel roads. West of North Platte, Neb., many of the convoy's vehicles had to be rescued from a 200-yard stretch of quicksand. Dust was a constant problem, clogging carburetors and fuel lines. Cars and Army trucks broke down and slid off of bad roads. 

Agnes didn’t get to travel across Wyoming as she and her pals detoured south to Colorado. Eisenhower & Company encountered lots of Wyoming wind (no surprise) and rickety bridges built for travel by horse and wagon. It was good that engineer unit was part of the convoy as they had to strengthen some bridges and rebuild others.

Eisenhower was late to cross-country travel. Between 1913-16, suffragists made at least three long-distance automobile trips to promote the suffrage amendment. The earliest, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, was in 1913 when women drivers from all 48 states took turns driving cross-country collecting signatures on petitions calling for a national suffrage amendment. These women crusaders confronted some of the same problems as Eisenhower’s expedition although they didn’t have a platoon of engineers to help them over the rough spots. Sara Bard Field’s and Marie Kindberg’s 1915 tour in an open-air Oldsmobile included a “machinist” and she saw plenty of action. In 1916, Nell Richardson, Alice Burke and their kitten Saxon drove their “Golden Flier” 10,000 miles visiting cities coast-to-coast.

Grandma was not a suffragist. Somehow, she and her friends made it the 1,194 miles to Denver and explored the Rocky Mountains by automobile along dirt roads, some little more than one tracks cut into a steep mountainside that probably got its start as a mule trail or even a trail blazed by Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes. Grandma loved the mountains and returned to stay. 

Agnes may have used her post office reference while job hunting. She worked as a domestic when she met my grandfather, Martin Hett, at a Hibernian Club function. Cities with largest Irish immigrant populations boasted at least one chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, named after references to ancient Ireland by the Greeks and Romans. Denver had three AOH clubs.

My grandparents were an odd match, this tiny ex-postmistress from Ohio a decade older than my tall, lanky and uneducated Irish grandfather. They were married in 1922 and had three children. The middle one became my mother, Anna Marie Hett.

I knew my grandmother as a nice lady who treated us kids to ginger ale and cookies. By the time I moved back to Denver in 1978, she had been dead for four years from complications of arteriosclerosis. In those days, it was called “hardening of the arteries” or that is how it was referred to by my mother the nurse. I was 23 when grandma passed, too busy at school to travel from Daytona Beach to Denver for the funeral. I couldn’t imagine her younger and pregnant, someone who gave birth to my statuesque mother and her sister and their 6-foot-5 baby brother who played college basketball. Whatever was in my mother’s DNA cocktail added to her husband’s Shay-Green mix, brought me to six-feet-tall by the seventh grade and my short but memorable stint as a high school b-baller.

I have nothing written in Agnes’s hand. I can find plenty of official documents online through ancestry.com. Birth certificate, death certificate, census records. Some blank spaces in her personal life cry out to be filled in but, it many cases, there’s nobody around to do that.

I imagine my grandmother tootling along with her pals in an open-top Model T. The road is rough, the way, dusty. She leaves behind her dreary old Ohio burg. She looks ahead, ready for new adventures in a new place. The wind riffles her hair. She can’t imagine that one day it will turn gray and she will be betrayed by the arteries bearing oxygenated blood to a brain trusted by the U.S. Post Office in Mason, Ohio.

But that is exactly what happens.

Message for the Commander, France, 1918

A remembrance for what once was called Armistice Day and now Veteran’s Day.

My paternal grandfather, Raymond Arthur Shay, enlisted in the Iowa National Guard in 1912. He was promoted to sergeant in 1915. In 1916-17, he served under General Pershing’s command at the so-called Punitive Expedition on the Mexican border. In May 1917, a month after the U.S., entered World War I, Raymond Shay was in officers’ training school. He joined the 88^th Division as a second lieutenant and went off to France with the 88^th. He returned home to Iowa in May 1919. Later that year, he was diagnosed with a severe lung condition and sent to Army Hospital 21 (later named Fitzsimons Army Hospital) located in Aurora, then a tiny suburb of Denver.

At the urging of his daughter Patricia, Raymond wrote about his service in the Iowa National Guard that was activated for the Mexican Border War and World War I. He wrote his memories in cursive script on 19 sheets of yellow paper held together by a clip. It’s tough for me to read but readers from future generations will see it as we do hieroglyphics in Egyptian tombs; cursive is no longer taught as matter of course in public schools.

We called Raymond Big Danny. I can find some of the details of his service on ancestry.com resources. The stories are another matter. We listened to his stories as kids but they were so old that they might as well be The Tales of Arabian Nights. I remember a few snatches of his stories. The writing he left behind reminds me of those. How he had to arrest one of his troopers on a train bound for debarkation at a Canadian port. The soldier was a bit drunk and was waving around a loaded pistol, shouting about how he dared the Canadian Mounties to arrest him for his German name. One of Lieutenant Shay's duties was transporting bodies from field hospitals and burying them with honor at the new American cemetery in the Hericourt-Alsace Sector. General Pershing came to inspect the troops based in Gondrecourt-le-Chateau after the Armistice. Big Danny outfitted one of the division’s cavalry mounts with his own French Officers Field Saddle, one he bought himself because it was superior to the U.S. Army’s McClellan Saddle named for a Union general who was sacked by Lincoln and later ran against him in the 1864 presidential election (McClellan lost).  

Old warriors tell old war stories – it’s a tradition. I can appreciate them now since I’m getting old myself – 70 on my next birthday. I’m not an old warrior, just appreciative of their service to the country. I also appreciate the stories and want them to be told forever.

So here’s one remembrance of Lt. Raymond Shay, Headquarters Troop, 88^th Division, U.S. Army. Written in his own hand in Loveland, Colo., sometime in the 1990s.

Setting: AEF front lines, autumn 1918

At Div. Hdgrs I was given a message to deliver to C.O. of 1^st battalion 35^th Inf in front line position. We need motorcycles with side cars for this courier service. I was required to use a regular driver or rider as known then and so I rode the side car. We found Bat. Hdqrs easy enough but it was not exactly as 1 expected. When I asked for the Battalion Commander and said I had a message from Div. Hdqrs, a young 2^nd Lt. said he was. But C.O., I said, I expected a major but would settle for a captain. He said you will settle for a 2^nd Lt as I am C.O. and if I had a message deliver it. When I delivered the message I was still wondering where all the other officers were and asked the Lt. about this. He said well Belfort is only 10 or 15 miles down the road and they are all there living the good life.

The Lt. then asked me the 64-dollar question. He asked if I had ever been in No Man’s Land (that two-block distance between the trenches). I said no as my duty did not take me there. He went on to say one of these days this war would be over and I would be ashamed to go home and say I had never been in No Man’s Land. I said I had not thought of it in that light. I did say it would be better to go home and admit I had not been there than to go into that disputed land and not go home at all. He said I was wrong and he knew how to go out there and it would be safe if I did exactly as he directed. O.K. I said if I don’t go I suppose you will report me to Div. Hdqrs as a poor front line soldier, he said, no, you will get along fine.

He asked if my 45 Colt was loaded, if there was a cartridge in the firing chamber, now pull the hammer back and put on safety catch, hold the pistol in your hand and follow me. He said we would have to proceed with great care thru the communication tunnels as the Germans sometimes sneaked in at night and picked off our men at their convenience. We arrived at the end of this tunnel and were in the Front Line Trench and observation post. The Lt. said we are going out on No Man’s land. He said put your pistol back in the holster and do as I do, follow me, do not make any attempt to go for your pistol unless we are fired upon and that would do no good as we are out of pistol range out here.

We walked around slowly and he pointed to a tree on the German side and said there was a sniper posted there. During all this time, the trench artillery were shelling a small town the rear of the German lines, whatever they were hitting caused a lot of dust to rise.

The Lt. said we have been here long enough so you may return to Div. Hdqrs and tell them that you were in No Man’s Land with the Battalion Commander.

He was a great guy.

Cold War nuke site open for visitors on Wyoming’s high prairie

M as in Mike

I as in India

K as in Kilo

E as in Echo

That’s the spelling of my nickname in the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, commonly known as the phonetic alphabet. You’ve used it if you have a commonly misspelled name, or if you find yourself on the end of a Mumbai-based IT help line. Help: H as in Hotel, E as …….

The alphabet is helpful but can be crucial in a military operation or if you’re a pilot on an international airline flight.

Or, let’s say the unthinkable happens and you are charged with the launch of a nuclear strike from a hole in the ground beneath the frozen Wyoming prairie. “Attention Quebec Zero One, we have some bad news for you and the rest of the planet….”

It never happened at the Quebec 01 Missile Alert Facility located about 30 minutes north of my house in Cheyenne. Coincidentally, that’s the amount of time it would take from missile launch in Wyoming to detonation in the former Soviet Union. On Friday, I thought about that as we returned from our tour of Q-01, now a Wyoming State Historic Site. Born in 1950, I’ve had nightmares about a nuclear apocalypse. But it’s been awhile since those duck-and-cover drills of elementary school and the very real scare of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

My father worked at Denver-based Martin Company, later Martin-Marietta and now Lockheed Martin. He supervised subcontractors building the earlier iteration of Minuteman and MX sites – Atlas and Titan. He did that job in Colorado and Wyoming and Nebraska and Washington State and Kansas. He dragged his big family along, which gave us a unique view of the western U.S. and fodder for future therapy sessions. 

I was 11 when he arrived home from work in Wichita laden with canned goods and water jugs and commanded us all to get down in the basement. That spooky, musty place was where we were going to ride out the nuke firefight unleashed by the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

The fear was real. History provided a better ending, thankfully. We avoided life as cellar dwellers or death as crispy critters. Two years later, we moved to Florida. Dad’s work with nukes was over and he now turned his attention to getting Americans to the moon.

Our family history is part of the fabric of American history. Maybe that’s why I was so anxious to take my visiting sister Eileen to the state’s newest historical site. She loves history, as do I. She is eight years younger than me, so we experienced those times in dramatically different ways.  But, as curious historians, we both know what happened in the world since World War II. The nuclear age began with the twin bombings of Japan that ended World War II. The arms race began between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. that many thought would end with M.A.D. – Mutually Assured Destruction. 

The western U.S. played a major role with Los Alamos and the first tests in the New Mexico desert. Many nuke tests followed, their fallout drifting over many cities, including Denver. We were all downwinders. Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant was established between Denver and Boulder. Coloradans built plutonium triggers there. It was the site of at least one major accident that created a crop of local downwinders.

According to interpretive exhibits at Quebec 01, the government chose the interior West as hidey holes for its missiles for several reasons: Low population density (more antelope than people}; distant from the coasts and possible Russki nuclear sub strikes; the northern Rockies and Plains were closer to the Arctic Circle, the quickest missile route to Moscow and Red nuke sites. 

B-52s took off from western sites on their way to their fail-safe lines. Many a missileer did stints in the frozen wastelands of Minot and Great Falls and Cheyenne and still do. You can forgive a young airman/woman from Atlanta getting orders for Cheyenne and saying something about going to the middle of nowhere.

But I live there and it’s not so bad. I spent much of my working life touring Wyoming on behalf of the arts. You might be surprised by the art that’s created in this big semi-empty space. The humanities play a major role in our lives. Thus, we spawn some fine state parks and historic sites, even have a state agency to oversee them. Wyoming State Parks and Historic Sites employees staff the sites spread around the state. They are based at Quebec 01 to conduct tours and answer many questions posed by the curious. The site opened just three weeks ago after the feds gifted it to the state in 2010.  Staff say that it was stripped to the bone after being decommissioned in 2005. The Air Force brought back some items. Former missileers, retired airmen, and just plain collectors donated other items, such as the VHS player located next to one of the launch chairs (the TV is no longer there). The space looks fine now but it still a work in progress, according to our guide.

There are entrance fees, as there are at most state sites. If you are disabled and use a wheelchair or a walker as I do, call ahead and staff will deploy ramps over the challenging spots in the underground launch capsule. An elevator takes visitors from the topside facility and its historic exhibits to the capsule. Step off the elevator and pass through the gateway that, back in the day, could be sealed by a 30-ton blast door.

For background, go to https://wyoparks.wyo.gov/index.php/places-to-go/quebec-01. The site includes photos going back to its building in 1962 all the way to the recent renovation.

Our history, and maybe your family’ history, is just a short drive away.

The Fourth of July bash at the National Mall will feature lots and lots of Trump and big tanks -- don't forget the tanks!

In February, when Trump announced plans for his grandiose Fourth of July celebration, conservative commentator Bill Kristol responded on Twitter: 

"The last president to try to hijack July 4th was Richard Nixon, who staged Honor America Day on July 4, 1970. It was widely ridiculed. Nixon later left office in disgrace."

What's past is prologue. Trump's "Salute to America Day" on the National Mall will feature Trump (of course), VIP seating, a Soviet-style military parade with lots of hardware (tanks included), and fireworks.

There were lots of fireworks at the July 4, 1970, event, not all of it in the sky. American Nazis attended to protest Vietnam War protesters and the Yippies staging a smoke-in at the Washington Monument. Police tried to maintain a DMZ between the protesters and Silent Majority picnickers. Then that failed, park police fired tear gas at the rowdy hippies and gas clouds drifted over the multitudes. This led, as one reporter wrote, to a "mad stampede of weeping hippies and Middle Americans away from the fumes." At the same time, the U.S. Navy Band played the Star Spangled Banner from the Lincoln Memorial stage.

I was in that mad stampede. I picnicked with my buddy Pat's family. When the fumes reached us, Pat and I scrambled to lead his grandmother and younger sisters to safety. Pat and I had been tear-gassed several times that spring during campus protests of the Kent State killings. It was no fun for young people but could be dangerous for the elderly. We made it out of the gas cloud and, when the hubbub died down, we returned to our picnic. Later, we listened to Honor America Day jokes from Bob Hope and Jeannie C. Riley's version of Merle Haggard's "The Fightin' Side of Me." Then, despite the chaos or maybe because of it, we admired the bitchin' fireworks display. 

Back at Pat's family's house, Pat and I and his brother smoked a joint and remarked on the day's strange happenings. Looking back, I can see that it was a fine snapshot of those confusing times. The next day, I hitched back to Norfolk Naval Base which my buddy Paul, one of my companions on an eight-week midshipmen summer cruise on the John F. Kennedy. On Monday, I called my girlfriend in Florida to say good-bye and she broke up with me because she was tried of saying good-bye to me all of the time. .Here I was, not yet officially in the Navy, and I got a Dear John phone call. I spent the next six weeks sailing the Atlantic and sampling the aircraft carrier's many jobs. And moping, I did a lot of moping. I remember how nonsensical it all seemed. I was 19 and confusion comes with the territory.

So here it is, 49 years later, and I am still confused. Trump is president. He's staging a Nuremberg Rally an our National Mall. As it was with Nixon in 1970, there seems no end to Trump. But Nixon did come to a bad end, as even conservative stalwarts now admit. But the confusion at the National Mall on July 4, 1970, only cemented Nixon's hold on the voters. Hippies interrupting Bob Hope was just too much to bear. America needed a strongman to stem the rising tide of anarchy. So, he cruised to victory in the 1972 election. I was depressed -- I voted for the man from South Dakota, an honorable man, a warrior who wanted to stop the war.

The big question for 2019: when will we see the end of Trump? Think about that as he rants on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Independence Day.

What it was like to be in England "The Summer Before the War"

The war was World War I or The Great War, as it was known before there was a second installment to worldwide slaughter. In the village of Rye in Sussex in England, the Edwardian Era was in full bloom. Men were men, women were women, and sheep grazed peacefully in verdant pastures. A young Latin teacher, Beatrice Nash, lands in the village. She still mourns the death of her father, a semi-famous poet. In Rye, she confronts the sexism of the time with great aplomb which caught this reader's attention right away. Her story is woven into those of Agatha Kent, a spunky middle-aged matron who lobbied to bring Beatrice to the local school. She also shelters her two nephews, Daniel, a foppish budding poet and Hugh, a medical student. The scene is set for this comedy of manners which eventually runs headlong into The Guns of August.

"The Summer Before the War" is Helen Simonson's second book and her first historical novel. She's done her homework, as far as I can tell. I am researching the same era in the U.S. for my novel "Zeppelins Over Denver," although a more accurate title might be "The Summer after the War." Only five years separate 1914 from 1919, but those years changed forever the very different worlds of Rye and Denver. The scope of those changes in Rye were perhaps more remarkable, given that the place had hundreds of years of history with pubs in buildings built in the 15th century. The settlement and later the city of Denver was but 60 years old in 1919, Colorado just 42 years into statehood and still possessed many of the traits of the frontier. Native Americans lived there for centuries but they were expendable during The Great Western Expansion, especially when gold was discovered in Cherry Creek. And we all remember the Sand Creek Massacre.

What happens when you deposit a crop of restless people into a restless place going through its own historic changes? A novel, I hope, a good one and publishable. Some 20 million people died in World War I and millions more in the Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919. More than a million U.S. soldiers went overseas and many returned changed in body and in mind. Nurses, too, women who had only imagined a quiet married life found themselves in bloody field hospitals while German shells exploded around them. Wars tumult sent many of them on the move to new places. Women would get the vote in 1920 and Prohibition began (Colorado got an early start in 1916). Racial strife spawned the "Red Summer" of 1919, when race riots flared in U.S. cities as black soldiers returning from war said they weren't going to take this shit any more. Working men went out on strike and were beat up and killed for their efforts. The Communists had turned Russia red. That "subversive" influence was felt in the U.S., and helped spawn the investigative unit that would eventually become J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. People traveled in automobiles and airplanes, even zeppelins. Jazz was the new sound and the Charleston the wild new dance.

What a time. I share Simonson's passion for the era. It involves digging into archives and digital records available through Google. War videos can be viewed on YouTube, and you can also listen to some great tunes such as "Come Josephine in My Flying Machine" and "How You Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm after They've seen Paree." The audio is tinny and scratchy which only adds to my listening pleasure. As I conducted research, it occurred to me that this entire generation is gone. A baby born in 1900, such as my Irish grandfather, would turn 119 this year. If you were born when the war ended, you would turn 101. There are some centenarians out there, but they are rare. Their collective memories lie within us, their descendants, and in the records they left behind. Their stories live on. However, it is through fiction that they really come to life.

Thus it is with Simonson's novel. Her leisurely writing style is reminiscent of the writers of the era, some of whom lived and worked in Sussex, such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf. But a formal tone and leisurely pace does not a boring book make. Simsonson''s characterizations are sharp and her conflicts very real. Humor, too, a real penchant for satire with writers as her favorite target. She has a lively time portraying the Henry James-like Tillingham, the poet Daniel who, a few decades on, would be wearing a black beret and mumbling his poems in a smoky coffee house, and Beatrice's almost-but-not-quite-famous father.

SPOILER ALERT! The townspeople rise to the occasion when was breaks out. They welcome refugees from Belgium. However, when one of the young women, Celeste, turns up pregnant and its discovered she was raped by German soldiers, angry residents lobby to turn her out. When her father arranges for Celeste to go to a convent, Daniel, the foppish poet, agrees to marry her. While Simonson sets her book in a bucolic setting in the midst of a beautiful summer and fall, she doesn't want us to forget that humans are fallible, even horrid, creatures..

"The Summer Before the War" is published by Random House. The trade paperback sells for $17. Listen to the 2016 Diane Rehm NPR interview with Simonson at https://dianerehm.org/shows/2016-03-22/helen-simonson-the-summer-before-the-war

Part V: The Way Mike Worked -- Serving Fish 'n' Chips in Shrimp 'n' Grits Country

We called her Mom. She insisted. Never found out her real name. Her husband Tally called her "dear" or "hon" in the Southern way. She was younger than Tally by a decade or so, or so she seemed. Tally walked a limp that we thought came from the war, World War II, the one that all of our father's fought in. He said it came from a gunshot, a disagreement among bootleggers during Prohibition. We had no reason not to believe him.

We met at Long John Silver's Fish and Chips across from the University of South Carolina campus. Mom was the manager. She had replaced our first manager who had been skimming a bit off the top of the nightly deposit. One day he was our boss. And then he was gone.

In October of 1970, I was one of a half-dozen employees, mostly students, at this fast-food restaurant named for the fictional pirate in "Treasure Island." Color scheme was the brown of "a dead man's chest" and the gold of new doubloons. Everything was fried in vats of hot grease that was a shimmering gold when new and a dark brown when old and ready to be refreshed but it was almost quitting time and the day crew could do it. All of us wore grease-spatter splotches on our arms. Meals were served in cardboard replicas of a chest of gold. Sides were fries and hush puppies. Condiments were tartar sauce and malt vinegar that the Brits allegedly used on the fish and chips they bought at street corner vendors in London. My co-workers and I tried to cook up extra food at the end of the night so we could carry some home for late-night greasyspoon snacks.

Fish-and-chips were a new concept in the South. Some customers ordered and then wondered why they got fries instead of chips. We had to explain that in England, fries were called chips. The potatoes were a bit chunkier over there, not flat or curved or crispy, but they still were called chips.

After avoiding work and most of my classes my freshman year, I decided that I needed a job. I had premonitions of bad juju to come. I could read the tea leaves that we used in our sweet tea. I could divine the stars. I also could read the grade reports sent home by the university. I was on probation after a lackluster freshman year. I swore to the Navy ROTC unit's marine major that I was going to do better, really I was. He looked at my grades and the report of my lackluster performance on my first-year summer cruise. I had sailed to Guantanamo Bay and back on the USS John F. Kennedy. I had neglected my duties.

I did, however, distinguish myself during a 1970 Fourth of July weekend leave in D.C. when my BFF Pat and I rescued his younger sisters and grandmother from a stampeding crowd at the Honor America Day Concert at the Washington Monument. The riot wasn't a reaction to another sappy tune by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or another joke by Bob Hope. But a cloud of tear gas launched to disperse the Yippie-sponsored smoke-in at the monument. Pat's and my quick action didn't save any lives but we were proud of it nonetheless. Too bad that didn't show up in my midshipman record. I might have received a medal. "For valor in rescuing civilians threatened by a cloud of tear gas fired on pot-smoking hippies." Something like that. Later, Pat and I and his older brother Mike smoked a joint and talked about what a weird night it was.

When I returned to Norfolk, just before our ship sailed to Cuba, I called my girlfriend and she broke up with me.

I was looking for a new girlfriend when I returned to campus in the fall. I had a crush on one of my fish-and-chips coworkers. Kaley was pretty, blonde and had a wicked sense of humor. She also had a boyfriend, a Vietnam vet named Tim whose hair got longer and shaggier every time he came to pick Kaley up from work. The duo invited me to a party one night. I hung around Kaley and Tim as I didn't know anyone and my short haircut fueled my paranoia and everyone else's, or so it seemed. Tim broke out a syringe and prepared it, junkie-style. He shot up Kaley and then held up the syringe for me. I was almost stoned enough to say yes. But I didn't. Tim proceeded to minister to himself. They were soon in la-la land and didn't notice as I slipped out of the house and walked several miles back to my dorm.

The U.S. Navy revoked my scholarship in January and I was on my own. I could finally grow my hair and major in English. I kept working at Long John Silver's. When spring sprang, Mom and Tally asked me to come to their house and mow the lawn. Mom would feed me lunch. I agreed. It was the first of many trips to their house. By summer, the mowing of the lawn was an ordeal, with sweat streaming off of me and me pining for AC and a cold drink. One afternoon, stunned by Carolina heat, I went into the house. Heading for the bathroom, I opened the wrong door into a bedroom. It had a single bed, a shelf with photos and football trophies. The photos showed a young man in football uniform, in graduation gown, in army uniform.

"Our son Tom." Startled, I turned to see Mom in the doorway. She wore a sad face, unusual for her. She walked in and stood next to me. She picked up the photo of her son in uniform. "Missing in action. Vietnam. We kept his room ready for him but he hasn't come back. Three years now. Our only child." She replaced the photo. "Lunch is ready." She walked out and I followed. Mom and Tally were the same talkative duo they always were. Now that I am an old man, I recognize the relentless nature of sorrow. Sometimes, small talk over lemonade and sandwiches with tomatoes fresh from the garden are the only things for it.

A few weeks later, a traveling circus troupe came to town with a batch of purple haze fresh from the octopus's garden. We had a wonderful time. The circus people left town but I found my jacked-up self in the campus cafeteria babbling over breakfast to a group of exchange students from Hong Kong. They were very polite. And then I was at the university infirmary, knocked down by thorazine.

At the end of USC's summer session, I ended my college career and quit my job as a fish-and-chips wrangler. I left town. My plan was to live at my parents' house and surf until I got drafted.

Part IV: The Way Mike Worked -- This job stinks!

"This job stinks," I complained to Ronnie.

He looked at me over a pile of dirty laundry. Smoke from a Marlboro wreathed his face. He removed the cigarette and exhaled a big cloud. "Do what I do."

I stared. I was dense. "What?"

He unrolled the pack of cigs from his T-shirt sleeve and popped one out. He walked over to me, stuck the cigarette in my mouth and lit it with his Zippo. "Inhale," he said.

I inhaled. I'd smoked a few cigarettes before, usually late at night at a beer bash when anything seemed like a good idea: smoking cigarettes, skinny dipping in a gator pond, driving on sidewalks. In the summer of '69, I was a latecomer to nicotine. My parents smoked, as did most of their friends. Some of my buddies smoked. But I was a jock in high school and coach commanded that we not smoke. I wanted to do what coach said. 

"Watch me," Ronnie said in his Tennessee drawl. He gripped the end of the rolling container with its mound of laundry. You could almost see the fumes coming from the sheets and towels accumulated in 24 hours at the nursing home. "Let the smoke drift up into your nose -- that knocks out the smell." He pushed his cart out the laundry room doors and down the corridor, smoke trailing behind him. I followed with my load. Smoke rose from my mouth to my nose to my eyes. Within seconds, my eyes watered. I kept close to Ronnie, lest I run over one of the dazed oldsters wandering the halls. I was getting it -- the smoke blocked the smell. It also burned my nose and eyes, but it was a small price to pay for not smelling the smells of incontinent old people. I was 18, Ronnie my elder at 25. We were usually not burdened with inconvenient odors unless we let loose with a fart as we drove to our appointed rounds for the Acme Laundry (not its real name) of Holly Hill, Florida. But that was different. We were not old.

When we finally wheeled our loads up a ramp into the step van, our smokes were burned down to nubs. We tossed the butts on the ground as we returned to the truck cab. My eyes still watered as we continued on our rounds. Ronnie was already on another smoke. "See how easy?" he said. 

I just nodded.

I became Ronnie's assistant one hot Florida July afternoon. I worked in the laundry, loading washers and dryers with towels and sheets from old folks homes, beachside motels, and other businesses. I had left my job as bagboy at the Pantry Pride grocery store because I needed to make more money for my upcoming college expenses. The laundry doubled my salary. The work was tougher and sweatier than hauling housewives' groceries out to their station wagons. I hated the laundry, doubted I could make it to the end of August. One day, after Ronnie delivered a load to us peasants chained to our machines, he came over and introduced himself. He was a big guy with Elvis-style hair and tattoos. He looked like something out of 1955 instead of 1969. I probably did too, with my Howdy Doody face and short haircut. 

"My helper just quit," he said. "Want the job?"

"When do I start?"

"Tomorrow at 6."

"Six in the morning?"

He laughed. "See you then."

What a reprieve! Riding with Ronnie started an hour earlier but I didn't care. We hit the mainland businesses first as the laundry only started piling up in the late morning at the beach motels as the housekeeping staff worked their way through the rooms. Sometimes Ronnie picked me up in his muscle car as I had sold my own car as it was a POS after three years of hard use. We knocked off at 3 just as the world really heated up or burst into an afternoon thunderstorm. 

Ronnie just got out of the Navy the year before. He served a stint on a ship off of Vietnam and had accumulated some tattoos and a dose of the clap in the Philippines. He got a kick out of the fact that I was off to be a Navy ROTC student, someone who one day might be an officer giving orders to the likes of swabs like him. For now, he was the one giving orders. "You ain't no officer yet," he'd say if he caught me loafing. "Yes sir," I'd say. His response: "I ain't no sir -- I work for a living. That's what my chief used to say."

I think about my 18-year-old self. I was excited and scared to be off to college. I was sad to leave my girlfriend behind -- she was attending a school 300 miles from me. I loved her and I said so and she loved me, or so she said. What did we know? Our family home burned down that summer but all 11 of us survived. We lived in a small place while waiting to rebuild. Problem was, all the clothes I'd collected for college burnt up in the fire or were impregnated with smoke. Early in the summer my surfboard had been stolen and, for the first time in four years, I felt left out of the beach scene. 

About a week before I quit the laundry, Ronnie took me to his trailer for lunch. He wanted me to meet somebody. We got out of the step van and walked to the door. A woman answered. Ronnie introduced us.. 

"Hello ma'am," I said. 

The woman wore long gray hair pulled back in a braid, a pleasant face etched with tiny lines around the mouth and eyes. "Don't call me ma'am -- I'm Shirley."

"OK, Shirley." 

Ronnie planted a kiss on her lips and I suddenly realized this was his wife. I'd called her ma'am because I thought she was his mother. I was surprised and a bit embarrassed for me and for Ronnie. Shirley served us tomato and mayo sandwiches and lemonade. She as nice and had a good sense of humor. She wasn't really that old, maybe in her late 30s or 40s. Old enough to be my mother but not Ronnie's. As we ate at the trailer's tiny table, she asked about me, what I liked to do, my plans for the fall. 

"You got a girl?" She smiled.

"Yes ma'am..."

"Shirley."

"Shirley, I have a girlfriend."

"She's pretty, too," Ronnie said as he chewed. "Drives a Firebird."

"It's her dad's," I said.

"Your girl going to the same college?"

"No. We plan to see each other for football games, and during school breaks.,"

"That's good, hon," she said. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder."  She explained that she and Ronnie met at a Daytona bar after she left Georgia after a bad divorce.They hit it off and married after a few weeks. "Newlyweds," she said.

Earlier I had caught a glimpse of an unmade bed at the far end of the trailer. I imagined the two of them in that bed. I didn't want to but I couldn't help it. The trailer began to close in around me and I was relieved when Ronnie said it was time to get back to work. We said our farewells and that was the last time I saw Shirley. 

As we returned to our route, Ronnie, as if divining my thoughts, said, "She makes me happy." 

I just nodded. He drove the rest of the way in silence.

On my last day at work, Ronnie and I sat in the step van in a motel lot watching the waves break. A half-dozen surfers bobbed in the line-up.

"Those good waves?" he asked.

"Pretty good."

"We could have brought your surfboard with us on some of our runs. You could have done some surfing."

I told him that my board had been stolen. 

He nodded. Handed me his Zippo. On its side was a U.S. Navy emblem. "Going-away present."

"Thanks," I said. "I may try to give up smoking."

"No matter. You can light some of your marijuana cigarettes with it."

I laughed. "They're called joints, Ronnie."

"No matter. All you kids smoke it. My shipmates did. A lot of the guys in Vietnam. I tried it a few times. Just made me tired. I'll stick with beer and whiskey."

I thanked him again.That afternoon, I said my farewells to Ronnie and the laundry. My girlfriend picked me up. A week ;later, we said our own forlorn farewells during a last walk on the beach. 

Somewhere along the line, I lost the lighter and I lost my way. Shall I pin the blame on marijuana cigarettes? It's more complicated than that. 

Blogger's Note: I changed the names of the characters in this piece and the name of the laundry. I had to reconstruct the dialogue because it was 49 years ago and I wasn't taking notes. Most of the rest of the story is true. 

Another blogger's note: The Laramie County Public Library kicks off the fall season with the Smithsonian exhibit, "The Way We Worked." Sponsored by Wyoming Humanities, the exhibit "engages viewers with a history of work." It opens Sept. 22 and runs through Nov. 13. Grand opening is a "Hands-on History Expo" on Sept. 28 where you can "dial a rotary phone, draw water with a hand pump, enjoy old-fashioned refreshments (make your own ice cream!) and much more." You can see antique tractors, a wheat-washing machine and an old-fashioned library card catalog. I viewed the exhibit-in-progress yesterday. Great display of tools used to mine, log, and build railroads and dwellings in the West. I finally understood the difference between a dugout and a sod house or "soddie." One thing I know -- I would have gone stark-raving mad living in either one.