Friday, September 30, 2022

HAVE A HEART


This little bragging rights quiz was posted by Facebook friend and fellow Wapakonetan, Chris Glass. Okay, Chris, I'm game!

The idea is to see how many of these queries you can "heart". Typical of me, however, I can't resist some clarifying comments:

Been married

Been, and still am, going on 52 years. (Hold the applause).

Been engaged

I suppose you could call it that. No ring or anything. But for a couple of years I lived halfway—well, let’s say, a quarter of the way—across the world from my future wife, Virginia, and only visited her once, for a month, in Buenos Aires, my first time out of the country. We had met when she was the first Youth for Understanding exchange student at Wapakoneta Senior High from which we both graduated that same year, 1968, that I sold my car, bought a ticket and flew down to South America to see her.

With Virginia in the Paraná Delta, age 19.

In fact, that was my first time anywhere further from Wapakoneta than Lake Superior or Niagara Falls—although once before that, I did have an inaugural half-hour joy ride on a Lake Central prop passenger plane. It was a promotional flight to advertise the opening of the then-new Lima (Ohio) Airport, which was supposed to offer limited regular commercial services to Cleveland, Chicago and a few other big cities, back when Lima was still a small but important industrial town. Obviously, the rust belt that started a decade later changed all that.

Well, so, I won it, the little Lake Central adventure, for being the top seller of a cookbook, published in twelve installments, with a special hard-cover binder to which purchasers added each new monthly section until they had a full set. It was distributed through the local newsstand, whose owner, Russ McLean, every now and then, had one of these moonlighting assignments for any newsboy, like myself, with the ambition to take it on.  

And then, after that—after my exciting, life-changing roundtrip to Buenos Aires, not after my half-hour of newsboy fame on Lake Central (they also gave me a coin-changer for my weekly newspaper collections and a cheap Wiley Coyote-style Acme imitation of a Kodak Brownie Star Flash camera)—I was more than halfway across the US from her. She was studying at Bowling Green University in Ohio and the Army posted me in LA. So, for nearly an additional year, I only got to see her on a handful of long weekends, most of which were spent making my way, first, from Fayetteville (North Carolina), and then, from Norfolk (Virginia)—my two postings prior to LA—and finally, from California to Ohio via military standby. But in those three years, I never dated anyone else, so, yeah, engaged I guess you could call it, as in “taken”, not available.

Enough was enough, and eventually I worked up the courage to ask her to make the insane decision to give up a university scholarship and come out to LA and marry me, when I was a Spec-4 soldier making a hundred eighty dollars a month. If my dear cousin Dee-Dee were here, she would say—as she did at one of my book-signing events in our mutual home town— “Tell them how you proposed.” The answer (of which I’m not particularly proud) is, “Drunk, from a phone booth, from the Army base in the Port of LA, forgetting entirely that there was a four-hour time difference, and with her whispering urgently the whole time that her roommate was sleeping and that she’d talk to me later, and no, she wasn’t going to answer me that minute, and that, indeed, she was going to be hanging up now!”

Still, when I stepped out of the phone booth, I turned to a buddy who was waiting there, and who had encouraged me to call her, and said, “Well, Dave, I’m getting married…I think.”   

Been divorced

Like I said, no. Till death do us part. That’s what we vowed to a nice lady called Judge Olivera who married us at the LA County Court House. (We were No. 13 in the matrimonial line-up that morning).

Been to Disney World

Yes, but only because I traveled to Florida with my two oldest Argentine nephews, who were fifteen and sixteen at the time, and wondered what sort of uncle I would be if I refused, on ethical and aesthetical grounds, to take them to "the happiest place on earth." I swear, it was utter torture for me, and shockingly expensive, but I thought, "Okay Tío Dan, take one for the team." I was so proud of Federico, the younger of the two, when, after several hours of hoofing through the “the most outrageous place on earth,” he turned to me and said, “Tío, this place is all about money!” 

I washed the bitter taste out of my mouth by chartering a fishing trip with them out of Key West. That was a great day! Fede even hooked himself a pelican—an accident, actually: he was pulling out a yellowtail, the pelican made a grab for it, got the hook instead—and Fede flew the squawking bird around like a kite for a short spell until the skipper hopped down on deck, reeled it in and unhooked it from my nephew’s rig before setting the big bird free to go flapping away, wiser for the experience.

Skipped school

Oh, hell yes, every chance I got. So many of us used to skip school to hang out and shoot pool at the local Brunswick Bar that the city finally named one of the owners, tough-guy Ike Schnell, to be the ad hoc truant officer. What that meant was that when we punks showed up at a suspicious hour of the day, Ike would say, “Hey, don’t you have school to go to?” And before you could answer, he’d say, “Get your ass outa here.”

Been to Canada

Yes, a number of times. In fact, there was a time I wanted to live there. Both Virginia and I loved the city of Toronto. So instead of flying from Buenos Aires to New York and then to Dayton when we were back home on a visit, we would fly to Toronto, spend a few days vacationing there, and then fly across the “puddle” to Cleveland and make our way home to Wapakoneta from there.

Once, when my younger brother Dennis was managing a Camelot Records branch in Flint, Michigan, we flew into Detroit instead, and then rode down with him on I-75 to Wapakoneta for Thanksgiving. And still another time, autumn, not winter, we rented a car and drove down from Toronto.

With Virginia in Toronto, 1979

We had a great trip there at Christmas time in 1979, when we also traveled with my brother-in-law, Miguel. A Buenos Aires boy born and bred, he found snow fascinating, and Toronto didn’t disappoint, sparkling like a gem in a blanket of white and twinkling with colorful Christmas cheer. We also spent a few days in the snowy Christmas enchantment of New York, as well as in Washington DC.

Then, in Wapakoneta for Christmas, we decided to do a winter road-trip and, in neighboring New Bremen, bought a six-year old Chevy Caprice for six hundred seventy-five dollars, because it was cheaper than renting a car, and toured six states, along the way getting snowed in at Colonial Williamsburg, which turned out to be a magical experience, because the power was down and the entire seventeenth-century town was lit by candle and lantern light that night.

On the way back we spent another few days in wintry Toronto, and none of us was really anxious to leave. A few years later, I was tapping my contacts in the Canadian Embassy in Buenos Aires to probe the possibilities of my getting a job with a Canadian paper—ideally the Toronto Star—and was told the chances were good if I first acquired a working knowledge of French as well as my native English and fluent Spanish. I found a teacher and started studying French, but then…I don’t know. Life happened, and Toronto didn’t.

Rode in an ambulance

This happened rather recently—2018. It was a really stupid freak accident. I slipped on the ice right outside my door in Patagonia, and instead of just doing a prat fall like any other normal human being, I rather dramatically fell from a height of about seven feet into my patio, landed on my back on a rock and broke a rib.

I didn’t know it was broken. I mean, sure, it hurt like hell, but I figured once I caught my breath, I’d be okay. I wasn’t. By an hour later, I knew something was amiss because I could hear the two parts of the broken bone click when I moved a certain way. So I had my wife drive me into town to the hospital. 

The emergency room doctor examined me and, with her thumb and index digits, let her fingers do the walking down the back of my ribcage until she found the broken one—she knew right away because I about went through the ceiling when she came to it. She sent me for an X-ray and confirmed her suspicion that the rib was broken.

“Not much you can do for a broken rib,” she told me, “except make no physical efforts whatsoever for six weeks, and get a lot of rest.”

It was winter and living where I live in the Andes, winter means firewood.

“Can I chop firewood,” I asked, rather obtusely, I admit.

Nophysicaleffort!” she said again emphatically. So clearly I was going to need help from a neighbor to provide for our needs, which I’m never comfortable with.

I probably should have mentioned to her that, at the time, I was taking blood thinners. But I didn’t, even though I noticed she was closely examining the quickly spreading hematoma on my back and side.

Long story short, throughout the next day, I felt progressively worse. Above all, I was exhausted, but I just put it down to the fall. That evening, I stood up from my armchair in the living room and immediately felt dizzy, and then got tunnel vision in which the tunnel was quickly closing like the aperture on a camera. I thought to myself, “So this is what they mean when they talk about ‘blacking out’.”

I managed to get to the sofa and lie down, telling my wife I wasn’t feeling well and that if I didn’t feel better soon, I was going to ask her to drive me to the hospital again. But I never made it off the couch. I drifted in and out of consciousness and, at some point, which I sincerely don’t recall, I told Virginia to call for an ambulance.

How on earth the two emergency folks who answered the call—one of whom, the most veteran of the two, was a thirty-something woman who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred ten pounds soaking wet—managed to carry my two hundred fifty-pound humanity the thirty yards up a steep hill to the closest place they were able to park their ambulance, I have no idea. But somehow they did, and I will be eternally grateful for their effort.

Gladder still that they kept me alive while we were in the ambulance because, by that time, I had a liter and a half of blood accumulated in my damaged lung and at least another half-liter pooling in the hematoma on my back. I faded in and out of consciousness all the way to town, a twelve-mile trip, and while the woman drove, the male attendant kept talking to me and calling my name to keep me from slipping away. At one point, I heard him say, “Better hit the lights and step on it, because I’m having trouble finding a pulse.”

That was about when I felt an enormous exhaustion and thought to myself, “This is a lot easier than I thought. You just fall asleep and…let go.”

So yes, I’ve had an ambulance ride—although I don’t recall much of it.      

Been to Hawaii

I haven’t been. I read Hawaii by James A. Michener when I was fifteen, and back then, as I was reading, I thought it would be a cool place to visit. But after I’d read nine hundred pages or so, I kind of began to think I knew enough about it for a lifetime.

My little brother Dennis went there on his honeymoon the second time he got married. The pictures he brought back were absolutely gorgeous. And I have a childhood friend who moved there some years ago. It looks like he lives in paradise and he seems quite happy there. But oddly enough, in all the places I’ve been and everything I’ve seen, Hawaii has never been on the list of Next Places I Want To Go. Not even, in fact, on my Bucket List, most of the items on which are either in the continental United States or, even more pressingly, in the vast expanses of Patagonia, where I make my home, and which it would be hard to ever know completely.

Been to Las Vegas

Oh, Vegas... Well, Vegas ended up being another one of those misencounters between Whitie (my dad) and me. And it’s just one more of those things I’ve had to feel guilty about ever since.

Virginia and I were back on a visit to Wapakoneta. Whitie, who was severely bipolar for most of his life, was on a manic high. I had issues from childhood with his bipolarity, since, as a kid, I had a lot of trouble separating the man from the pathology. To me, his lows were always personal, and, I felt, somehow my fault, because when he was like that, he seemed to find it exceedingly hard to love me. And when he was on a high, I always had the feeling it was an act, that he was reeling me in, making me feel everything was going to be okay, just so he could dash my feelings on the rocks again when he plummeted back into the black depths that seemed inevitable.

In other words, in our dicey father and son relationship, I was always about me, never about the hell Whitie was living through.

So, there came a time, from my rebellious teens on, when I not only quit striving to please him and to attract his affection, but also did pretty much everything I could to displease him. Much of the time, that habit kind of carried over into young-manhood.

Whitie and I really didn’t have the same taste at all in what we considered something cool (or ‘neat’, as he would say) to do.

For instance, he hated anything to do with camping and trekking—both of which I loved doing—since, he said, “I spent four goddamn years camping and trekking in World War II and don’t know why I should ever want to do it again.”

Meanwhile, some of his ideal outings made me break out in a rash. Like the time he insisted we just had to drive over to Fort Wayne, Indiana for supper at this place where, according to him, “The food is good, and cheap, and they’ve got this organ. You’re a musician, Dan, you’ll love this.”

“An organ?”

“Yeah, but not just any organ. This one’s unique. Only one like it in the world and it’s right over here in Fort Wayne.”

“What’s so special about it?” I asked suspiciously.

“Well, for one thing, it has one of the most beautifully lacquered finishes of any instrument ever made. It’s got…hey, Reba, how many coats of lacquer did that organ in Fort Wayne have on it? Reba? Reba? Anyway, it’s got like, I don’t know, twenty or thirty coats of lacquer on it and, I swear, Dan, I shines like a damn jewel.”

“Are we talking about a pipe organ?” I ask dubiously.

“How the hell should I know? No, electric I think. But you’ve got to see it. You won’t regret it.”

Let him talk me into that one. And did regret it, as we ate greasy burgers and greasier fries, drank tepid beer and watched a coiffed and sequined Fun-Machine artist play “Alley Cat” and other greatest hits on the most garish organ I’ve ever seen, perched on an elevated turntable in the middle of the eatery, which looked, for all the world, like a barely converted warehouse.

So anyway, when Whitie wanted to go to Vegas with us, I put my foot down. Vegas, I told him, would probably be one after the last on the list of places I would ever want to visit. Besides, who had the money to spend on five or six days in Vegas—the flight out, the hotel, meals…

No, he told me, all of that was really cheap because they wanted you to spend your dough in the casino. But still, I countered, why should I want to spend any money on going to Vegas when I hated casinos and taking money out of my pocket and putting it in the mob’s, or didn’t he know that the house always wins?

“You don’t have to gamble, Dan. Hell, there are all kinds of great shows. Hell, Wayne Newton lives out there. And all the other big names perform nightly.”

I was adamant.  He looked dejected and said, “I just thought maybe we could do something fun together. How ‘bout this. I’ll pay for it.”

When he said that, I should have realized how important it was to him, because I think the last time I’d heard the words, “I’ll pay for it,” from Whitie’s lips, I was fourteen and had to have an emergency appendectomy. Still, I stood firm. Told him to go with Mom if he felt like it, but that I had no interest.

He was disappointed and his disappointment showed for the rest of the visit. As with so many other unresolved things between Whitie and me, it’s one of those I wish I could do over. Forget about the constant rivalry between us and just say yes! I’m sure we’d have had a ball.

So no, regrettably, never been to Vegas.

Been to Texas

Yes. Just once. El Paso. A horror story. It was in the eighties. I was feeling stuck in my job. I was looking for a way to go back home to the States from Argentina, and I reached out to the company that owned sixty percent of the newspaper where I was editor.

The CEO was very amiable but said there was nothing for me at headquarters in Charleston at the time, but had I ever thought about electronic journalism.

I said, no, that I was a writer and editor. I was a newspaper man, period. I liked hard news and commentary. Yes, he said, but the future was electronic news media and as a young, experienced guy, I might want to sink my teeth into it early.

Electronic journalism? I was a writer!
They had a TV station out in El Paso that needed to revamp its news department. It needed better writing, better ideas, somebody who gave a damn about investigative reporting. And they needed somebody with my language skills who could connect with both the white and Hispanic communities. Why didn’t I just let him fly Virginia and me out there to talk to the station chief before I decided.

The station chief wined us and dined us at what he considered El Paso’s best Texas steakhouse and filled me in. He wasn’t happy with his TV news section. The reasons were the ones the group CEO had outlined earlier. He told me he’d have “his guy” at the station show me around the next day.

It didn’t take me long to realize that this guy was not only an experienced newsman, but a fellow with a sound career in, and understanding of local TV. He showed me around El Paso and the TV station—where I felt at a complete loss. He had a keen insight into how being a border town affected places like El Paso. He was a guy who had clearly overcome a retiring nature in order to become an effective newsman. I got him and he got me.

That evening, over cocktails with our wives, he said, “So Dan, what exactly is the job that the boss is offering you?”

I said, “Well, I’m not exactly sure, but it sounds like he wants me to head the news team.”

The guy slowly nodded, gazing frankly at me, and said, “So, essentially, my job.”

 “Geez,” I said, “I don’t think so. I mean, if that were his plan, why the hell would he have you, of all people, showing me around?”

“You clearly don’t know the boss,” he said. “He can be one twisted sonuvabitch.”

The die was cast right then, and if it hadn’t been, it was the next day when the boss told me the salary he was offering, which was exactly a third of what I was getting as a managing editor at the paper in Buenos Aires.

Visited Mexico

Like I say, close—El Paso, just across the creek. Well, and Senator Wash, California, just a half-hour from the Yuma-Mexico border crossing. Speaking of which…

Seen the Grand Canyon in person

With Army Buddy Dave Zeiss at Senator Wash, 1971
No, and I’d like to. I did camp for a few days once with a couple of Army buddies at Senator Wash, California, about half an hour from Yuma. Harsh, rough and absolutely beautiful desert terrain and rocky chocolate brown foothills in the distance.

Back then, I’m talking 1971, it was a desolate place where there were mostly aquatic birds, kangaroo rats, lizards, rattlesnakes, coyotes and wild burros—a legacy of nineteenth century amateur miners. We didn’t see another human soul the whole time we were there. I understand that, nowadays, it’s kind of a camping hotspot.  But that’s about as close to the Grand Canyon as I ever got. Which isn’t all that close.

Flown in a helicopter.

No. But once during Basic Combat Training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the training sergeant got the whole company together to listen to a recruiting spiel by a chief warrant officer helicopter pilot. The guy was really a great salesman, and by the time he was done, I was feeling really gung-ho about maybe just reneging on my enlistment contract for the Army Bands and, instead, becoming a chopper pilot.

The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. And, I figured it might be something Whitie could be proud of me for in my life. Especially since he was always trying to get me to think about the future and he didn’t think wanting to be a musician and a writer qualified. Having a helicopter pilot’s license when I got out of service seemed like a pretty good tool to have—one that could get me a high-paying commercial aviation job, or a respected post with lifelong benefits flying a police chopper until early retirement.

My mind was almost made up when I drew courier duty for the duty sergeant the next night. My boss that night was a very veteran combat infantry sergeant. He had a chest full of combat ribbons, so many that his medals made the other DI’s look like rookies by comparison. Despite that, he was only a buck sergeant, which didn’t make sense, until I heard from another drill sergeant that the guy had been an E-7, got busted two ranks and did jail time for twice punching out superiors. But he was too good at what he did to give him a dishonorable.

Obviously, he looked older than his years. I’d been his courier before. That other time, we started talking, which was odd. DI’s didn’t usually talk to maggots. But I’ve always been a good listener. He told me he didn’t believe in the Vietnam War, an admission that, coming from him, I found shocking. I asked how many tours he’d done there.

“Four,” he said, “which is why I don’t believe in it.” When he saw the unspoken question on my face, he said. “So why’d I go four times, right? Because I’m a combat infantryman. It’s what I do. It’s all I know and I’m damn good at it, and Nam’s the only war I got right now. And I sure as hell would rather be there than here trying to train you maggots.”

Taking advantage of the intimacy of the moment, I said I’d heard the talk by the helicopter pilot and was thinking about signing up for warrant officer pilot training after Basic.

He looked at me as if I’d just spit in his coffee cup, and said, “Are you out of your goddamn mind, trainee? The life expectancy of a chopper pilot in Nam is about seven-feckin’-minutes. Or why do you think they’re here trying to recruit you friggin’ idiots? You can take down a chopper with an M-16. I have taken down an enemy chopper with an M-16. Knock out the tail rotor and they drop outa the damn sky like damn lead balloons. And you can bet your ass that as soon as they pin those WO-1 bars on you, you’ll be off to Nam to fly combat missions.”

“So,” I thought, “maybe Whitie’ll have to find something else to be proud of me for.”      

Been on a ferry boat

Been on a lot of ferry boats—down on Chesapeake Bay, on the Main in Frankfurt and on the Bodensee out of Konstanz in Germany, from the mainland to Chiloé in Chile, all through the Delta out of Tigre in Argentina, and a number of other ferries in different parts of the world. But there are two I remember particularly well.

Reba Mae, Grandma Allice, Whitie, my sister
Darla and me on the City of Petoskey, 1953.
The first was when I was maybe four years old. It was on one of our summer vacation trips from Ohio to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. We usually went with Whitie’s parents, Grandpa Murel and Grandma Alice, and a couple of days out of the always fleeting week we spent in what were then the wilds of the UP, we did some sightseeing that usually included a trip to the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes and to Traverse City.

I don’t know why, but that year we also decided to board a ferry, christened City of Petoskey, that took us on a cruise through the Straits of Mackinac between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.

I don’t recall a lot about the trip, except that it was a clear, clean summer day, the navy blue of the deep water contrasting with the azure sky. I remember standing on the deck of the vessel in the lake breeze, holding my Grandma Alice’s hand and watching an old gent with the most beautiful long white hair, who was leaning over the railing right below us and holding up pieces of stale bread that the lake gulls gently and deftly took from his fingers as they flew past.

It was one of the most magical moments of my infancy.

The other one was when I was stationed with the Seventy-Second Army Band in LA. We had a stage band gig on Catalina Island. The Port of LA was right outside the back door of our barracks and rehearsal hall, so it was just a little drive in our Army bus down the road to the terminal for the San Pedro Ferry. On a rare clear day in LA, we could sort of make out the profile of Catalina straight out from the upstairs window of the barracks. It was a twenty-six-mile voyage that took an hour or so aboard the ferry. There was a little bar on the upper deck, and some us had our morning coffee—others their morning beer—up there to while away the time.

It was a warm, dry, beautiful California day and this was a gig we could actually enjoy. We were playing for a star-studded garden party at the fabled Wrigley Mansion—a solid, sumptuous home, the true foundation of which was chewing gum. We’d have been a lot more comfortable in shirtsleeves than in our dress blues, but it was fun anyway and the hosts laid on a wonderful luncheon buffet for us.

When we were done with the gig, we were done for the day, so except for trying to maintain the decorum befitting our uniforms, we could relax on the way back. Typical of the Old Man, our chief warrant officer commander and band conductor, Mr. Truitt, he was nowhere to be seen. When it came to enlisted men, he always made it clear he wanted to be “familiar but not friendly” with us, so at times like this, he made sure we didn’t see him and he didn’t see us.

Our first sergeant was a World War II and Korea vet, Master Sergeant Nate Riddick. He and I hit it off from the start. I was the Old Man’s clerk as well as a band member, so Sergeant Riddick and I worked together on a daily basis. But on this trip, we bonded more than ever before.

Master Sgt. Nate Riddick

We were the first ones in the topside bar on the way back before other band members started drifting in. The bartender was a Vietnam vet and this was his first job since getting out of service. He seemed to like it. “What can I get for you, Top?” he said when Nate took a stool, and then added, “It’s on me.” Riddick thanked him and asked for a seven-seven, then the barman turned to me and said, “How ‘bout you, soldier? Don’t be shy, it’s on me.” So I asked for a vodka-tonic.

I guess the guy saw Riddick’s Vietnam Service Ribbon and recognized a brother in arms. He seemed to see me as an extension of the Master Sergeant since I had bellied up to the bar with him, so neither of us paid for a drink the whole trip back. And when he mixed them for us, he was generous with the hooch. Every time the master sergeant reached for his wallet, the barman raised a staying hand and said, “Your money’s no good here, Top.” He and Riddick traded war stories and both Nate and I plied him with tales of eccentric musicians we’d known and worked with. Meanwhile, he plied us with booze. The barman was also something of an amateur comedian and kept us, and the other guys who drifted up, in stitches for the entire voyage.

By the time we docked in San Pedro, the top sergeant and I had pretty much drunk our weight in free cocktails. I turned to him as I stepped onto the pier and said, “Hey Nate,” first time I’d addressed him by his given name, “is this a floating dock.”

He laughed and said, “Sure as hell feels like it, but it looks like concrete to me.”

“Then I think I drank myself legless,” I said.

From then on, I only called him Top or Sergeant Riddick if we were in front of the other men or if the Old Man was around. But when we were working alone together in the office, I always called him Nate, even though he referred to me as Newland. He was to become like a surrogate father to me for the rest of the year I spent in LA, always keeping me on the straight and narrow and offering me wise advice. And though I never saw him again, he often comes to mind still today.

I recently found out that he lived to be ninety-two, and, in 2013, passed away in Carson, California, where he had made his home since 1967.       

Sang in the rain

Sure, hasn’t everybody?

Been to California

As I mentioned above, I lived in LA for a year, and that’s where I got married, so although they were impoverished times, there were also some very happy ones there.

We didn’t have a dime to spare, but we made the most of our newlywed status and were constantly looking for little ways to celebrate. Walks and impromptu picnics on Cabrillo Beach near the harbor or in Averill Park, up the hill from the port off of Walker Street. An occasional sweet treat from the Pilatus Italian bakery, or a delicious pizza from Nuncio’s—Nuncio himself would answer the phone and after you placed your order, he would always say, “She’s a-ready ten-a minutes.” An infrequent perusal on the Wines of the World basket in the local supermarket, where, if you were lucky, you might find a decent chianti or liebfraumilch for less than a dollar.

Just married, LA, 1971

Even our “wedding reception” was as fun as we could make it. Our witnesses, Spec-5 Branin Smith and his wife Shelley, took us out to Shakey’s Pizza after the brief courthouse ceremony, and we all stayed there enjoying a prolonged luncheon of thin-crust pepperoni pizza, drinking dark beer, and watching the old silent comedy movies that they displayed on the wall.

I had found us a small house in the backyard of a bigger house, both owned by an Italian fishmonger called Migliaccio. I could barely afford it, but it was dirt cheap by LA standards and a fairly cozy, quiet place, straight up a long steep hill from my base, Fort MacArthur. But then another of the owner’s sisters moved over from Italy, and he insisted we vacate that place and go to another rental property that he owned, which he rented to us slightly cheaper in compensation.

It was the downstairs of a two-apartment house. The upstairs, accessible by a steep ladder staircase, was occupied by a hard-of-hearing retired Sergeant Major, who listened to his radio and TV full-blast, and his blind old dog from which he was inseparable. The house shared a yard with the home of another of Migliaccio’s sisters, her husband and three kids.

It was a much livelier place than the first one and gave onto an alley instead of a street. The owner’s sister was wont to play opera loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear, and if the lyric theater happened to include a duet, the couple was almost certain to break into song themselves, in a sort of experiment in operatic karaoke.

They also had a habit once a week or so of pounding on our door and hollering for us to “shut-a da windows”. A warning that was followed by the husband, bare-chested and wearing only thongs and colorful boxers, hosing down the entire house from top to bottom, often while still singing his part in the opera over his shoulder to his lovely wife, who, leaning out the back window of their place, answered in kind, and in her best, if far less than successful, imitation of Renata Tebaldi.

But in its defense, the apartment was clean and sunny, and we were still celebrating our honeymoon.    

Been to New York

New York had been a dream of mine throughout my early days as a jazz musician. I promised myself back in Wapakoneta that I would one day live in New York City, where I would be both a successful studio musician and a bestselling author. But the first time I actually went there was with an Army buddy from the Army Element of the Navy School of Music in Little Creek, Virginia.

His name was Paul and he was utterly and completely out of place in the Army. He was an accomplished pipe organist, choir director and musicologist with a doctorate in liturgical music. He was so brilliant that he’d achieved his doctorate and graduated definitively while he was still young enough (barely) to be drafted, when he no longer had a student deferment. 

A balding, pear-shaped, civilized, urbane and intellectually mature man of twenty-six, I can’t imagine the hell that Basic Combat Training must have been for him, but he’d enlisted, like I had, in the Army music program and, against all military odds, made it to this music school assignment. A band posting was out of the question—military music doesn’t include pipe organ and he had no talent for or interest in jazz, so making him a piano-player in an Army stage band was out of the question as well. But the Navy commander in charge of the school recognized talent when he saw it and got Paul assigned, for the duration of his three-year tour, to the institution, where he was promoted and given a teaching position.

We became friends early on. And it was Paul, who was from the New York area and couldn’t believe I’d never been there, who drove me up to the city one weekend and gave me a tour of “his” Big Apple—the Church of the Heavenly Rest (which he humorously referred to as “the celestial snooze”—another thing he told me was that New Yorkers often refer to the two-tiers of the George Washington Bridge as “George and Martha”: George is on top)— Union Seminary, where he had studied sacred music, St. John the Divine Cathedral, and many other points of interest throughout Manhattan that I’d only ever seen in the movies.

I would visit New York a number of times after that—when I was a correspondent for ABC Radio News, when I went to negotiate a reprint contract with Forbes Magazine for a business publication I worked for in Buenos Aires, when I stayed for a few days with my friend and colleague Claudio Remeseira and his wife Marcia at their place in Harlem, when I was there with my wife and brother-in-law on vacation in 1979, and with Virginia another time following a special issue presentation I made for the Buenos Aires magazine I worked for at the IMF Annual Meeting in Washington. But I will always be grateful to Paul for that first glimpse of one of the most fascinating cities on earth.        

Played in band/school color guard/ orchestra

With fellow WHS drummers Jane Siferd and Mike Krebs

Band became pretty much my life throughout high school. Not only at school but beyond as well, since it was through band and my two high school band directors that I first started giving percussion lessons, first was introduced to the area’s professional music community, joined the American Federation of Musicians, started playing nightclub and country club gigs and landed a part-time job in a music store.

As a high school upperclassman, I lettered in band and served as head drummer, band president, student conductor and director of the pep band that played at basketball games. My senior year, I acted as the band director’s assistant arranger for the music we played in the football halftime shows. I competed solo and with the band at annual Contest, headed the percussion section two years in All-Area Band and, in the summer of my junior year, won one of two scholarships to a two-week Summer Music Clinic for gifted young musicians from all over the state, held at Ohio University in Athens. I was also both a student and a marching and percussion instructor for the younger kids at summer Band Camp my last two years in high school

Directing the WHS Pep Band
Yes, I couldn’t have played more in the band if I’d tried.

Sang in the school/church choir

I enjoyed choir—or chorus, as it was called in school—but I only did it prior to high school, because there, I was entirely too busy already with band. The first choir I was in was the Children’s Choir at what was then the First Methodist Church in Wapakoneta. I later graduated to the Youth Choir, but by the time I was old enough to be in the main Chancel Choir, I was no longer attending church—having, to Whitie’s chagrin, flatly refused to go any more after I turned fifteen.

At school I was in chorus during junior high—our director was Mary Lee Lament, who had, earlier in life, been a member of a very famous professional choir, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians.

I would make only one more appearance as a clear but far less than outstanding tenor, when my Army buddy Paul, whom I mentioned earlier, landed a weekend gig directing the choir and playing the organ at a well-to-do church in neighboring Virginia Beach. The choir was light on tenors and he asked me to sit in. I balked at first, but I owed him so many favors I couldn’t say no, since he’d always been generous to a fault. It was a lively group, he was a great director, and in the end, it turned out to be fun while it lasted.    

Sang karaoke

Never had the opportunity and can’t think how drunk I’d have to be to want to sit in a bar listening to other drunks sing out of tune and out of time all night. That said, when I was fourteen, I was in a kid band called The Trees, and sang backup from the drum kit along with rhythm guitar player and childhood friend Steve Combs. Our front man was Dave Emerson and the truth is, he’s the only one who really knew how to sing like a pro.

Laughed so much you cried and peed

Shed a tear or two, but hey, even if I had done the other thing, I’d plead the Fifth…or perhaps it would have been after a fifth.  

Caught a snowflake on your tongue

Not only have I caught a snowflake on my tongue, but have also, as a boy, been hit in the face with and ice-ball and been taken down and had my face rubbed in the snow by three older boys.

Had/Have/Having children

No. We got married at twenty-one (Virginia and I are the same age) and decided definitively by twenty-three that we didn’t want to have children. We were from the sixties culture when we still understood that humans were destroying their own environment and when we still got that there was a certain carrying capacity, which, when overtaken, would start creating problems that we wouldn’t be able to solve.

The main issue that we understood clearly then was overpopulation. (Indeed, the world population in 1960 was three billion and today, just six decades later, it’s eight billion, so the science wasn’t wrong about that). And in our youthful, intellectual seriousness, we figured that there were millions of children worldwide or even right around the corner who didn’t have homes. If we wanted children, there were plenty to go around without our making more.

Then we got older and wiser, and decided that, actually, the best reason for not having kids was that the two of us were having enough trouble just bringing up ourselves, without ruining some other poor human being’s life by messing up their childhood as well.

That said, if I’d ever had a child, I’d have wanted a little girl, who would have been the smartest, most self-aware, most self-confident and most spoiled little girl in the world. And when she got old enough to be interested in boys—if, indeed, she was interested in boys—then I’d have made every boy’s life who got near her a living hell, until I was sure he was the love of her life, and deserved to be.   

Had a pet(s)

Over the years, my wife and I have had many pets—dozens, in fact. In the twenty years that we lived in Buenos Aires, we started out in our two-room efficiency apartment with two cats (Capusát and Sweetpea), who gave birth to a third (Oliver), and moved with us to our second, much larger apartment that had a lovely terrace balcony. There, we added Maxwell, Rocky and Blueboy. By the time we moved to a house with a full terrace Oliver was the eldest and he and the others moved with us. There we added Chester (who died quite young of a heart ailment) and Rudy, a strange, autistic cat who’d had such terrible experiences with humans that he lived in a tree, and barely survived with the food a neighbor tossed up to him. Food, water and our other cats eventually coaxed him down and he became part of the family as well.

By the end of our two decades in the city, when we decided to move a thousand miles southwest to the Andes Mountains in Patagonia, the only animal friends we had left were Rocky and Rudy—Maxwell, who was nearly fifteen, passed away just days before our departure. Rocky and Rudy traveled with us in our Dodge station wagon to our new cabin home. The climate agreed with them and they lived to be a ripe old age, Rudy to about fourteen and Rocky to more than twenty.

But things only escalated from there. We were always finding a dog or a cat that needed a loving home, and there always seemed to be room at the table for another one. Every one was different, each with his or her own personality and with their own tragic stories. Out of all the animals we’ve had, only one was born at home. The rest were all strays and animals urgently in need of rescue. The most we ever had at one time were seven dogs and seven cats. Now we only have three dogs, Simbad, Calypso and Anteia, and six cats, Clemens, Nina, Emma, Josefina, Roxy Anne, and Anabella.

This won’t be the last time I mention them, I’m sure, because, whether still here or gone, each has touched our lives in a different way, but always making us the better for it.

Been sledding on a big hill

Born in winter, it was about my favorite season as a kid. And from the time I was old enough to have a sled—a beautiful Radio Flyer that I got for Christmas when I was about six—I was always in search of the highest hills I could find to use as sledding runs, which wasn’t easy since the land in our town is barely hilly. To my father’s fury, because of the ruts it made in the yard beneath, down the embankment in front of our big old house on West Auglaize. Down the low slopes of Harmon Field, our main city park. Down the icy dip in our road on Kelley Drive. Down the banks of neighbors’ backyards along the Auglaize River. Wherever there was the slightest incline in our snowy west central Ohio winter, my Radio Flyer and I were there.  

Rode on a motorcycle

When I was about fourteen going on fifteen, I got a job as an usher and janitor in the Wapa Theater, our local movie house. There, I made friends with a boy nearly two years older than I who was the projectionist. His name was Howard, but everybody called him “Herbie”. It was funny. Everybody you talked to liked Herbie. What wasn’t to like? He was a really good guy. Do anything for you. But he didn’t really have a lot of friends, people he hung out with. He was, basically, a loner.

Despite that, Herbie was ubiquitous. He was the yearbook photographer at school, the manager for a couple of the sports teams. He was always on the fringes but never really a direct part of anything that was going on.

I think it was that eccentricity of Herbie’s that made me like him. Since we worked together at the movie theater and were often the last ones there—him busying himself with maintaining the arc-light projectors, making them ready for the next night’s show, me cleaning up the theater, and then both of us changing the marquee together whenever the movies changed—we talked a lot. It was something neither of us did very often with other people. Not, at least, about what bothered us or what our dreams were, or which girls we had crushes on but who hadn’t the slightest inkling we were alive.

So anyway, at some point that year or so we worked together, Herbie surprised everybody by acquiring a barely used Honda Superhawk 305 motorcycle. It was black and silver and killer-sleek, and suddenly, Herbie had a brand new loner-cool mystique.

For several months, when he wasn’t giving a lift to any girl adventurous enough to hop on, I cruised around on the back of Herbie’s bike with him every chance I got and couldn’t wait to have the age and the money to get one myself…that is, until we laid it down on the ice once and he flew one way and I the other, while the heavy Superhawk, luckily, found a path of its own.

Suddenly, Herbie had a Fury and then a Mustang, and I kind of forgot about motorcycles forever. But it was fun while it lasted.   

Been to a drive-in movie

Loved the drive-in. We went fairly often with Whitie and Reba Mae when my sister Darla and I were still small. But when my little brother came along five years after me, it was too much trouble for my parents to go with Darla and me and a baby, so the habit kind of petered out.

It was fun, but the concession stand wasn’t part of our outing, though Darla and I both begged and whined for it to be. Instead, my mother would take pressed ham sandwiches, a big bag of homemade popcorn and “some nice apples”, as she said. If we were thirsty, there was a Thermos of “nice Kool-Aid”, because, Whitie let us know, he wasn’t about to pay “the goddamn outrageous prices” they demanded in the concession stand.

Depending on what was showing, we went to the Midway, halfway between Wapakoneta and nearby Saint Marys, or we drove a little further and went to the Sharon or the Gloria in Lima, Ohio, north of us fifteen miles.

But I never really knew how much fun the drive-in could be until high school, when some of us got driver’s licenses and cars of our own—‘nough said.

Rode an elephant or camel

No. Never been to Asia or Africa. A camel did spit on me at the zoo once though.

Rode a Horse

I mean, rode is misleading. Bounced around like a sack of potatoes on a horse is more like it. As a little kid I always wanted to go on the pony ride at the fair. In the Army, during Basic Training, I found out that Ft. Bragg had some stables and, on Sundays, if a trainee was willing to go after chapel and shovel manure for a few hours, he would be rewarded by allowing him to exercise a horse or two for another couple of hours.

There were a lot worse things you were called upon to do than shovel manure in Basic Training, so it seemed like a nice outing. I did it a couple of Sundays during my eight-week cycle.

Longest horse trek I ever did was in the Patagonian province of Chubut, nearly five hours into the mountains and three hours back. It was an incredible adventure, but it’s a long story that’ll have to wait for another day.  

Been on TV

Several times as a newsman guest on national stations in Buenos Aires back when I was a newspaper editor. I was also called on once, while I was a radio correspondent for ABC in Buenos Aires, to do a TV broadcast because they didn’t have a television correspondent available. That time, as in the cases of the guest spots, I was like a deer in headlights, my mouth almost too dry to speak. In every case, everyone seemed pleased with my performance, but you sure as hell couldn’t have told it by me.

Stayed in the hospital

Had an emergency appendectomy when I was fourteen and fell impossibly in love with a young nurse called Miss Weir. She was the one who gently did the preliminary preparations on me for surgery.

I lost one of my socks somehow in the emergency room. After the operation, I found the missing sock on my hospital nightstand. It had a note safety-pinned to it. I think it read something like: “Found this sock in the emergency room. Think it’s yours. If not, please advise the nurse’s station.” It was signed, Nurse Weir, and she’d drawn a pretty little daisy with a smiling face next to her name. I think I kept it in my sock drawer until I graduated high school.

Been in a few other times. Once in my fifties when I severed a tendon in my foot and needed surgery. Another time when a bout of chronic arrhythmia landed me in the ICU for a few hours. The last time in 2018 when I was in for a week after the accident I described earlier.

But the only other time that stands out, was when I was seventeen, was already a working nightclub musician, and had to have an upper and lower GI series done because I was having stomach problems.

Part of the testing was particularly humiliating. I was taken to an exam room full of complicated equipment. A very pretty young technician, assisted by an equally pretty younger technician, first flipped me over onto my stomach on a table. I was wearing a hospital gown that, from the rear, left little to the imagination. I kept reaching back and trying to cover up, but there simply wasn’t enough gown to go round. The pretty technician patted my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, honey, I’m gonna have to get in there anyway.”

Very soon, she kept that promise, priming me with some lubricant on her gloved finger and then replacing the finger with a slender hose that she slipped in pretty much as far as it would go. Then she opened the valve on a large pouch of thick white liquid that she allowed to drain into me until I felt like bursting.

While this was going on, she said, “You look so familiar. Do we know each other from somewhere?”

“No,” I said laconically, and inside my head I was screaming, “Geezus! Tell me she doesn’t know me!”

Then she leaned close, put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Okay, I’m gonna take this out now, and you’re gonna have to hold all that liquid I put in you, okay? Don’t let it go.”

Easier said than done. I almost lost it when she pulled the hose out. Then she strapped me down and said, “Okay, now we’ll take some pictures.” With a remote control, from a safe distance, she maneuvered the hydraulic table this way and that, snapping X-rays from this angle and that for what seemed like forever while I made such an effort to hold onto the liquid that sweat beaded on my forehead. Finally, after flipping me so I was almost standing on my head, with the gown up around my waist for the final portraits, she said, “Okay, all done. See, that wasn’t so bad, was it.”

“No,” I thought, just the most humiliating experience of my life. “Okay, honey, there’s a toilet right over there behind the curtain. You can go get rid of that stuff now.”

It was as I rushed over to the curtain, pinching my cheeks together to make sure I made it, then took a seat and let go of the liquid in a noisy torrent, that I heard the technician said, “Hey! Now I know where I know you from. You’re the drummer with the jazz trio that plays at the Wayside. Hey, you guys are really good. My boyfriend and I go to hear you all the time! Next time, I’ll say hi!”   

Donated blood or plasma

Can’t. I’ve had hepatitis twice. Long story. I've gotten blood though. Two transfusions after almost bleeding out. 

Gotten a piercing

Can’t imagine what I could possibly want pierced. Certainly nothing normally invisible to the passing eye. Maybe a single earlobe. If, that is, I could find a very specific earring that I always thought would be cool—a large gold hoop with a big green parrot perched in it. It’s that or nothing.

Driven a stick shift vehicle

All the time. Ever since I’ve lived in South America, I haven’t driven anything else: three-speed on the column, a French dash-mounted four-speed, four on the floor and five on the floor. Currently, a five on the floor with high and low four by four.  

Got a speeding ticket

Once, in the middle of nowhere, on the outskirts of a Patagonian town called Picún Lefú. It’s in the middle of the high desert. Nothing around for miles. The town surrounds a hydroelectric project. As I’m coming up on it, I see a sign reading “Urbanized Zone 40 kph”. That’s like 25 mph! I’m on a highway where I haven’t seen ten cars in the last hour and I’m easily doing 70 mph, or about 112 kph.

Seeing the sign, I think how ridiculous it is because, as far as I can see, there’s nothing out here but scrub brush, coarse volcanic sand and the occasional bird of prey. But signs are a rarity in Patagonia so I don’t brake, but I do take my foot off the gas and am letting the car slow naturally, when I come out of a long curve and, up ahead, I see a provincial patrolman pointing a radar gun at me.

His partner waves me over. They tell me I was doing 70 kph in a 40 zone and write me up. They tell me I can pay it at the police station a click off the main road. I take the ticket and say, “Fine.” Then I add, “You know, there are studies that show that policemen who have to use these radar guns all day often wind up getting cancer.”

Gave him something to think about.

Gotten stitches or staples

Yep. I have an appendix scar with stitch marks, one on the side of my right foot where they repaired my severed tendon, and one high up on the right side of my thorax where they put in a drain to empty out the blood that accumulated there after I punctured my lung.

Traveled alone

For the last twenty-odd years, all the time. Ever since we moved to the mountains in Patagonia in 1994, my wife and I, as I say, have hosted a large number of cats and dogs in our home, which really is their home. We don’t have anyone we can or want to leave them with in order to go away for any length of time, nor is it safe to leave a cabin in the woods alone very long either. Too many things that can go wrong.

So we never travel together. One or the other of us is always at home.  

Been zip lining

Never saw a zip line I would have trusted to hold my weight without snapping. And don’t tell me they’re made to hold a lot more than a big man’s weight because there’s no way to prove that until you find yourself in the middle of it.

Shot a gun

My father, a guy who earned four bronze stars in combat during World War II, was bitterly against having guns in the house. This was probably for the best since he suffered from prolonged manic lows in which he was considered potentially suicidal.

But I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandfather in the great outdoors, and he was a hunter. So there was pretty much nothing I wanted more than a gun of my own when I was growing up.

I finally got one on the sly from a friend when I was fifteen. Bought it for ten dollars, since he’d gotten a new semi-automatic .22 for Christmas. It was a single-shot, bolt-action .22-caliber. I kept it hidden in my closet and had to sneak it into and out of the house, but every chance I got, I was down by the Auglaize River plinking away at cans and rusted out oil drums and all sorts of other junk that littered the shallows. I did a little hunting with friends in high school but was always more interested in being a good shot than in actually killing anything.

In the Army, the years of plinking away with my single-shot .22 paid off.

On the shooting range, during Basic Training, the captain came up behind me while we were practicing. I was in the prone position at the time and there were a hundred and ninety-nine other M-16s rattling away around me, so the officer rapped on my helmet with a stick he was carrying to get my attention. When I saw it was him, I sprang up and snapped to.

“Captain, sir!” I said according to protocol.

“At ease, trainee. Do you always shoot left-handed?”

“Yessir, I’m a southpaw, sir.”

“You’re gonna burn hell outa your face that way with the brass ejecting right.”

“Yessir,” I said. He was right. A small blister had already formed just beneath my cheekbone and I’d had to learn not to flinch every time a capsule was ejected.

“You like bein’ burnt, trainee?”

“Nossir!”

“So lemme see ya shoot right-handed.”

“Sir?”

“Right-handed. Ya know left from right, don’t you?”

“Yessir.”

“So get your ass down there and shoot right-handed for me.”

I did as I was told, emptying a clip without hitting a single target.

“Awright,” he said. “Switch to left again.” I reloaded and, on his signal, emptied the twenty-round mag one shot at a time in slow, deliberate rhythm. Every shot was a kill.

“Damn, trainee,” he said, “I think we finally found something you can do. Put a piece of tape over that cheek and carry on.”

On qualifying toward the end of the cycle, I shot the highest score in the battalion and was given a three-day pass, as well as an Expert Marksman’s badge for the M-16. The training taught me that an assault weapon “isn’t your daddy’s shotgun” and that it is designed for one thing and one thing only—killing people as quickly and effectively as possible.

Although I still own a few guns today, I have long been an advocate of sensible gun control, and knowing what I know about AR-type weapons—of which the M-16 is the granddaddy of them all—I don’t think they have any business being in civilian hands or anywhere else but on the battlefield.       

Been to another country

On the Bodensee
This could be my longest story yet, but I’ll save the details for some other time. But thanks to the Army, for Virginia and me, my last fourteen months in the Army and our second year of marriage was, for the most part, an almost bohemian existence in which, except when I was on duty, we lived as if we were two people on an extended honeymoon. When we weren’t on tour with the Thirtieth Army Band in Germany and France, I was free on compensatory time that we spent traveling on our own. Daytrips all over Germany visiting museums and castles, staying in quaint gasthausen and enjoying a meal and a beer in taverns that had been taverns for hundreds of years. Taking weekend trips to Paris and staying on the bohemian Left Bank. Making longer journeys to Switzerland, Italy, Monaco and the Mosel wine valley, to Bavaria and Austria, and all like two veteran travelers with all the time in the world.

In South America, both my work and pleasure have led me to explore some of the vast regions of Argentina and to travel to Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and the Tri-Frontier of the northeast. And there’s still so much more I’d love to see.

But as I never tire of saying, every time I go back to my home town of Wapakoneta, I find something new or some memory of old to write about. And although I’ve traveled to many different foreign lands, some of the most breathtaking sights I’ve ever seen are within easy walking distance of my Patagonia home.

 

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