IN ANOTHER LIFE

Downtown Buenos Aires

 I’ve been in Buenos Aires for a couple of weeks. I came the day after my birthday. Something about that, turning three-quarters of a century old, causes you to reflect. Whether you like it or not. I mean, like, despite the fact that I was born American and will die American, that I still feel my American roots deeply, that I still carry some of my native soil with me, like some aging vampire, wherever I go, I’ve now lived in this foreign land half a century longer than I lived in my own.

When that thought hits you unexpectedly, it’s kind of like somebody just punched you in the solar plexus. It takes a minute to catch your breath.  And just when you’re recovering, you start thinking about how familiar you are with this city. Despite its sprawling size, you know it like a New Yorker might know the five boroughs of his or her city. Back when you lived here, you walked its streets, rode its subways and buses, lived in its barrios, reconnoitered its myriad nooks and crannies and knew its people for more than two decades. You come back frequently, and feel at home when you do, despite all of the changes, of which you take note right away. And you almost always wish things were like they used to be. You felt old and streetwise back then, when you left it in your forties, just as you do now. It’s your town—even though it’s not any more.

My corner of Patagonia

Just when you’re contemplating that thought, however, you remember that, for the past three decades, you haven’t lived here anymore, either. No, you’ve been holed-up for thirty years (it will be thirty-one in a week or so) in your own little hollow in the woods, in Andean Patagonia. Out there, in Patagonia, there’s no knowing the place “like the back of your hand.” You may be familiar with enough parts of it to think so, but you’d be kidding yourself. Patagonia is just too vast, wild, untamed and mysterious to “know”, and it’s exceedingly easy to die trying. But then, you don’t try anymore. Those days of exploration are over, but the awe inspired by the surroundings remains. Even your very own surroundings—the immediate ones, as they say—the two acres of forest and cabin that you call home, are awe-inspiring.   

So, anyway, in a place so vast and wild and diverse, you choose your spot, “settle it”, and make it your own. You live near a town for the communications, the medical care, and the groceries, but in the process of adopting it, you may, like me, come very close to becoming a hermit. It’s only when you fly out or fly in, only when you get far enough above it, the nearby town, I mean, that you see just how alone and isolated you really are. All around, it’s miles and miles and miles of nothing. Well, or, of something. But nothing that a man can survive for long. Not on his own. It’s powerful. And daunting. But oh, so beautiful!

Being here—here meaning back in the city—made me remember when I first arrived, like a lifetime ago. First thing I did when I got here earlier this month was go to supper with an old friend, who just also happens to be my brother-in-law, Miguel.

Joy's

We went to our favorite place. Well, his favorite place. I can take it or leave it. But he swears by it. When we walked in this time, however, even he murmured, “Dios mío, this place gets more Kafkaesque all the time.” Actually, it’s more like Dante’s ninth circle of hell.  

The place is called Joy’s—the owner’s own unique spelling of his nickname, Joey, so like Jo-y (I’m guessing his real name is José). It’s at the intersection of a major avenue, Rivadavia, and a narrow alley of a one-block street (locally, una cortada) called La Porteña.

Joy, arguably, offers some of the best pizza and empanadas money can buy. Really. No kidding. Outstanding food.

But the ambiance! It is a crepuscular hole in the wall of indistinct color and dubious lighting with a jumble of furniture that looks as if it were discarded from the block by the auctioneers at a series of pizzeria fire sales. There are only about eight eclectic tables with chairs in varying states of disrepair, and they are always pretty much full, but Joy usually manages to find a place for us.

Joy does a famous business in home delivery, obviously, so the tables are mostly a prop for beer-swilling regulars. Bathrooms are at the back next to the kitchen, but it’s a good idea to make a pit stop before you arrive and to hold it thereafter until you are on more civilized ground, because if the dining area is iffy, the bathroom is almost terrifying. In the men’s, there’s a urinal, a squatter—I mean would you actually want a toilet seat?—and a light bulb dim enough not to encourage close inspection. If you plan to keep your shoes clean, you’ll want to watch your step  as you gingerly pick your way to the pissoir.

The first thought that passes through your mind on entering Joy’s is whether it might not be a good idea to get a tetanus shot before taking a seat. The second is to wonder how the health department has never closed it down. But just then a squad car pulls up, gives one hoot on its siren and a young cop gets out of the passenger side and comes in with his cap under his arm to pick up some packages of food for him, his partner, and apparently for some of the guys and gals at the precinct as well. A streetwise senior reporter I used to work with once told me that you can always tell if a police visit is official or “friendly”. If cops have business with you, they'll keep their caps on. If they’re hoping it may slip your mind to charge them for their lunch, their caps will be under their arms. If there’s one thing cops know, it’s where to eat. They’d be the first to tell you that while the venue might be a nightmare, the pizza and empanadas are righteous.

I suppose that also explains why, despite being in what has become a none-too-safe area of town, Joy doesn’t seem to sweat trouble or getting robbed. (In fact, he’s one of the most laid-back guys I’ve ever known). I figure he takes care of the blue bloods, and they take care of him. But then again, Joy’s isn’t the sort of place where you want to even accidentally stare fixedly at other patrons long enough for them to ask you what the hell you’re looking at, unless you’re in the mood for an altercation. A lot of these (mostly) guys—with an occasional savvy-looking girlfriend thrown in—are fairly marginal types, and hardly amenable to prying eyes.

The clientele is mostly made up of Latin American immigrant population. When I first started living in Buenos Aires fifty years ago, this area of town—Flores-Floresta—was the first I came to know. It was my wife’s family’s neighborhood. It’s still my friend, brother-in-law and brother-by-another-mother’s. Back then, it was an area of town mostly populated by the typical mix of Argentine immigrant bloods—Italians and Spaniards. My wife Virginia and her brother Miguel’s family were all Italians. Some from northern Italy and some from the south, but all “tanos”. Well, except for her paternal grandmother, who was a Basque. Floresta, my wife’s native corner of the world, also had a significant population of Hasidic Jews, who lived side by side with another significant population of Syrio-Lebanese Arabs. So on one corner you had the RC Church of the Candelaria, up the street a branch of the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina, and, almost within spitting distance, a branch of the Centro Islámico. It was very cosmopolitan, and everybody lived in relative harmony and did business with one another.

Buenos Aires’s old rag district, Barrio Once (literally Barrio Eleven) in midtown, hosted the great majority of Jewish population that burgeoned between the two world wars. Today in Buenos Aires Jews number about two hundred thirty thousand, with the city ranking fourteenth for Jewish populations out of all cities worldwide. Definitely a large population, but no comparison with people of some sort of Arab blood—mostly Syrio-Lebanese—that number 3.5 million in Argentina as a whole, but are more integrated into the general population, since a large proportion, on emigrating, were already, or later converted to Catholicism.

Bustling Avenida Avellaneda - the new rag district

Over the years, I’ve seen the demographic and cultural changes that have taken place in Flores-Floresta. And the catalyst was clearly the expansion of Jewish commerce to the west side, beyond the boundaries of the overcrowded midtown area. It was natural that the new, auxiliary rag district that they would found should be in Floresta, where a fairly large community of their number made their homes. At first, it was a few clothing stores and workshops that sprang up on and around Avenida Avellaneda, a main Floresta thoroughfare. But then, suddenly, it was a wave, a trend, and Jewish clothing merchants and manufacturers were buying up every property they could in the area.

It got so that the old traditional majority Italian and Spanish-descent residents quipped wryly that they were going to have to change the name of the neighborhood to Five-and-a-Half, because half the Jews of Once were moving there. One smart guy even seized on that idea and opened a small cafe and bar called Cinco y Medio (Five and a Half) which became immediately popular with local merchants.

Anyway, it was interesting to watch what happened over the course of the following decades.  Jewish merchants hired Korean immigrants to work in their clothing operations in Floresta. As they became ever more upwardly mobile, the Koreans started pooling their money and buying out the Jews. The new Korean proprietors then started hiring newly arrived Bolivian and Peruvian immigrants to work for them, and the Bolivians and Peruvians, learning the process from their Korean bosses, started buying others out and opening clothing operations of their own.    

Bolivians holding an ethnic celebration in Buenos Aires

Today large numbers of Jews and Koreans are investing in other areas of commerce, and Bolivians have taken over as textile industry leaders. In keeping with this trend, the population of Flores-Floresta has mutated as well.

My own personal symbol of that cultural and demographic change is the big restaurant on the northwest corner of iconic Plaza Flores. For many years it was an upscale Italian restaurant that also featured an excellent asado grill and fine Argentine beef. We knew the mostly Italian, white-tunicked waiters by name, because they had been there for decades and were nothing if not professional.  

As the neighborhood changed, so did the restaurant, for a time becoming an all-you-can-eat grill. And now, it is a restaurant and takeout place specializing in Peruvian cuisine.

 But then, everything changes, and so do we. Getting old has an upside. Long experience has taught you some things. You aren’t nearly as scared of, or worried about things as you once were. Being more obviously finite, life isn’t so driven anymore, and thus not as stressful. When a “what if” doubt pops into your head, your wiser self will often say, “so what?” At this stage, who gives a crap?

Then again, obviously, it’s not like there aren’t things about getting old that suck. Perhaps the worst part is that, in your mind’s eye, you’re no older than you ever were. It’s only when you meet friends you haven’t seen in a while and ask yourself how they got to looking so old, or when you pass a store window and gasp at your own reflection that the passage of time smacks you between the eyes. It’s also when you take a seat in the middle on the subway and then wonder how you’ll get up without something to grab onto. Or when you’ve been sitting, like you used to, in a bar talking to friends for a few hours and when you finally stand, with the help of the table, you have to stay there a minute making a little extra small-talk while your vertebrae and knees accommodate themselves, so people won’t have to watch you limp away.  Up to then you might have been feeling just fine and having a great day. C’est la vie.

Miguel and I invariably talk about the old days when we get together. We remember people who are no longer with us, the neighborhoods as they used to be—what used to be here, who used to live where. When we were a little younger, these conversations used to just be a lot of fun. The older we get, the more emotional they become, and now, several times, we surprise ourselves by feeling a knot in our throats and having tears involuntarily well up in our eyes.

Friends for most of our lives, Miguel and I on a
road trip we took together in Canada in 1979.

Miguel has been having some medical issues. They started after he and Virginia’s older sister Alicia died a few years back, following a three year struggle with dementia. Watching that process close up and personal, seems to have drained a lot of strength and resolve from Miguel. Each time I’ve seen him since, in my occasional trips to the city, I’ve noticed, with dismay, how much frailer he has gotten.  Now, however, one of his sons has stepped in and gotten him to start seeing some doctors and to undergo some medical and neurological testing. I’m pleased to see that he is at least feeling less dubious about his condition, that he’s being proactive, that he’s finding out what’s ailing him.

These things sneak up on you. There’s a sort of dichotomy you deal with as you get older. On the one hand, the things you recall seem like they happened only yesterday. As memories, they’re fresh and detailed in your mind. But thought of in chronological terms, it’s as if they had happened in another life to some other person. So much so that, if you don’t remember them mutually with your contemporaries, you might question whether, perhaps, you didn’t just imagine them or make them up. And that, I suppose, is the value of sharing memories—knowing that they are real, that someone else recalls them just the way you do. It’s self-comforting. It’s life-affirming.

Miguel and I talk a lot about the guys at the gym. Back in the day, Miguel was, pound for pound, one of the strongest men I ever knew. He was a highly disciplined bodybuilder, who was once crowned “Mr. Buenos Aires”. He’s the one who got me interested in weights and bodybuilding. I only competed with myself, but for a long time—almost twenty years, in fact—I was highly devoted to it, and spent every spare hour I could in the gym. I went to several different gyms over the years, but Miguel always went to the same one, and still drops by now and again to visit the owner, who is now in his eighties and still working out, leaving running the place to his son.

I always think of that place, the Apolo Gym, as where I learned the weight-training discipline well. Now, over pizza and beer, Miguel and I remember that gym—cramped, spartanly-equipped, but a gathering place for some of the most physically powerful men in the city, none of whom were the yuppy types who frequented the scintillating physical training centers advertised on TV. Rather, they were boxers, wrestlers, cops, firefighters and bodyguards, among others. They took training seriously. It was life-and-death to them, or at least the means of maintaining the tools of their trade. And since I was Miguel’s brother-in-law, some of them befriended me, and taught me what they knew. For the first time in my life, I was an athlete, and loved every minute of it, not just for the sport, but also for the strange array of roughnecks who hung out there and who became my chums.

Ernesto in the seventies

There were two guys everybody looked up to, no matter how powerfully built and gritty they themselves might be. One was the owner, Ernesto. Nobody messed with Ernesto. He was a man of really small stature. Not more than five-feet-five or six,  but so powerfully built that there was no way you could think of him as “small”. He was very image-conscious and made sure all posing images of him were shot with no comparative context—usually outdoors. He owned his own bodybuilding magazine that actually sold on downtown newsstands. Though in person he was laconic, only perfunctorily polite and monosyllabic, he wrote knowledgeably about bodybuilding and bodybuilders, as well as about anatomy and its application to sport. He was an excellent weight-training coach, who, from the outset, made sure that you trained in a disciplined and carefully coordinated manner, creating workout routines and making sure you did them properly. But once you had it figured out, he only provided instruction when you asked for it.

Ernesto’s own training as a phys-ed instructor was obvious, but unless you knew that the murals on the wall of the tiny gym were his, you never would have guessed that he also had a degree in fine arts. He had been a pro wrestler in his youth, performing under the handle of “Mr. Músculo”, and tossing guys twice his size or more around the ring to the delight of local crowds and TV audiences. Part of his performance was also a really impressive display of the muscle control he was famous for, capable, as he was, of individually flexing every muscle in his body, or of combining flexes to create a head to toe ripple effect.

The unobtrusive Apolo
Gym, where some of
the strongest guys in
the city trained.

Wrestling audiences weren’t the only ones who were impressed. Ernesto, over the years, had competed internationally in major bodybuilding contests and had won numerous trophies in his size and weight class. One person who was duly impressed was Arnold Schwarzenegger. After a Florida competition in which they had both taken trophies, five-time Mr. Universe Arnold asked Ernesto to have a picture taken of the two of them together.

“No,” Ernesto responded flatly.

“Why not?” asked Arnold.

“Because I don’t want to,” said Ernesto.

“Oh come on, “Arnold cajoled. “Don’t you want a picture with me?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Suddenly Schwarzenegger started getting offended, then a little pissed off. Who the hell did Ernesto think he was? But even Arnold knew that was a stupid question. Ernesto was every bit the bodybuilder The Terminator was, just in a mighty-mite version.

Realizing he was offending perhaps the most famous physical-culturist of all time, Ernesto said, “Okay, look, I’ll do it if we do it my way.” Arnold grinned and nodded. I mean, you had to hand it to the little guy. He had spunk!

“Okay,” said Arnold.

“All right,” said Ernesto, “me standing in the foreground, and you taking a knee or sitting behind me.”

Schwarzenegger agreed. There were only two photos on the wall in the gym. One was a large poster of Raquel Welsh boasting the skimpy skins she wore in One Million Years B.C. That one hung right above the torture board where we all did our sharply inclined crunchies, and was meant to inspire us to keep sitting up. The other was of Ernesto posing in nothing but a Speedo in the foreground and a smiling Schwarzenegger keeping an amiable low profile in the background—two icons for us to admire and aspire to.

Raquel encouraged us to keep
sitting up on the torture boiard.

But the most intriguing character by far was the Big O. He was a heavyweight. Nearly six feet tall and two hundred twenty pounds of solid muscle. He was a physical trainer, reluctant but talented boxer, and, at the time, an enigmatic and, in his circle, notorious bodyguard whom nobody wanted to cross. Such was his reputation that, when he came to train from work, he would hang his shoulder holster, with his fully-loaded nine-mill automatic snapped down in it, on a peg in the dressing room while he worked out. He knew nobody would be stupid enough to touch it, and that way, he had it close at hand…just in case.  

O was part of what was known, back in those dangerous days, as “la pesada” (literally, “the heavies”). It was a semi-secretive community of plainclothes paramilitary goons, often drawn from among retired or discharged cops and Army personnel, who, prior to the 1976 military coup, acted as a far-right shock force at the service of  leaders of Peronism’s Iron Guard. It was a lawless but vertically well-organized  group that performed every sort of task from gang-style kidnappings and slayings of left-wing rivals, to serving as the bodyguards and enforcers of Peronist union bosses. O was part of this latter group and, we gathered, ranked somewhere at the top of that pyramid.

He had been, for instance, a bodyguard to José Ignacio Rucci, head of the powerful General Confederation of Labor, and a key figure in the dramatic return of General Juan Domingo Perón to the presidency of Argentina after nearly eighteen years in exile. Rucci, one of the most visible heads of far-right Peronism, was murdered by the left-wing Peronist Montoneros urban guerrilla organization the same month and year that I first arrived in Argentina. O was nothing if not a canny survivor and I’ve never been completely sure I bought the story that he simply “had the day off” the day Rucci was assassinated. 

At any rate, O would live on to become one of the chief bodyguards for Lorenzo Miguel (who, after the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic 1972 film, would often be referred to as “The Godfather”). Lorenzo Miguel headed the powerful Steelworkers Union, and was a man with a sharply fascist bent. He would later be rumored to be a key figure in the organization and operations of the clandestine Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, or Triple-A, a far-right paramilitary hit squad whose nominal chief was former Federal Police corporal (who would later magically rise to the rank of captain) and Perón confidant José López Rega.

Lorenzo Miguel

In tamer moments, O had often served too as a sparring partner for famed Argentine heavyweight Oscar “Ringo” Bonavena. Bonavena was a serious contender for the heavyweight crown, who had gone the distance twice with Joe Fraizer (knocking Fraizer to the canvas twice in early bouts of the second fight), and later fought a famous fifteen-round match with Muhammad Ali. Ultimately, Ali KO’d Ringo in the fifteenth bloody round, but had to knock him down three times to do it. Ali grabbed the mic after the fight and shouted, “I have done what Joe Frazier couldn't do—knocked out Oscar Bonavena.” Some experts blamed Ali’s loss on points to Frazier in a subsequent fight on the beating he took from Bonavena before he finally knocked him out.

A flat-footed boxer with the instincts of an alley-fighter and a concrete jaw, Ringo was better known for making other heavyweights see stars with his punches and for being able to take a brutal beating himself while remaining on his feet than he was for grace and style. The Big O, on the other hand, was known for being an almost beautiful boxer to watch, for keeping the other guy’s gloves off of him, and for knowing how and when to land a killer punch. By all accounts, he was a better pugilist than Ringo had ever thought of being, but he had no real ambitions for the ring.

“Do I look stupid to you?” he would say when asked why he wasn’t title-fighting. That wasn’t the sort of question you would want to answer “yes” to. Nor did he look at all obtuse. O had Victor Mature-style good looks, sharp eyes, and, incredibly, a perfect nose and not a scar on his face. “Those guys end up with scrambled eggs for brains. I get in the ring, train the guy, get out and get paid. Let the guys who aren’t smart enough to make a living some other way do the prizefighting.”

They said O was one of the fastest heavyweights ever to enter a ring. I later found out why, when, while on a seaside vacation, I wandered into a camera store owned by a rugged, cocky-looking little guy in his sixties who, apropos of nothing, asked me if I boxed. I said, No, that I’d always been too slow to box, why did he ask? “You look like you train,” he said. I said I did a little weight-training.

That got us onto the subject of training and gyms and people we both knew. When I said I went to the Apolo Gym in Buenos Aires, he asked if a guy called O still trained there. I said that, indeed, he did.

“Why, do you know him?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m the one that taught him to box.”

Turned out this pint-sized older guy was none other than Cacho Paredes, a former Argentine champion bantamweight from back in the forties. He asked if I’d ever seen O fight. I said I hadn’t had the pleasure. “He’s fast. Real fast for a heavyweight. That’s because I taught him to fight like a little guy. Stick and move, stick and move, and only go toe to toe when you see the other guy’s guard is down and he’s ready to take one on the chin. That’s boxing. The rest is just brawling. You box with your head, not your fists.”

But for me, O was just a buddy of my brother-in-law’s and the most disciplined weight-trainer I’ve ever known. Our workout times usually coincided, and he was only too willing to take the time to teach me to train effectively. Later, when there was such a thing, I realized that I would have had to pay thousands of dollars to a personal trainer to gain the knowhow that I did working out next to O and working out with Miguel. In fact, after the dark and dangerous seventies, O cropped up again—after a prudential period of lying low—as the owner of a luxury gym of his own, where he made money on the growing middleclass fitness trend, but where he also trained up-and-coming amateur and pro boxers.

Anyway, these, and more, were the times and the guys Miguel and I talked about during our suppers together in Buenos Aires. Like I say, it made him feel a lot better. Indeed, it made us both feel a lot better. We might look like a couple of old geezers. In fact, we might be a couple of geezers. But we knew who we’d been. And we knew too, that if we made the effort to dig deep enough, those guys were still there, living inside of us.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

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.

“No…physical…effort!” 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.