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Of Rats and Men (and little boys)

August 13, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: Family, fun, Humor, Lessons, Life, Stories | by tomroush | 3 comments

Well, it’s that time of year when the kids visit the grandparents back east, and it got me thinking of the year they did that and I had to do some rat sitting.

See, at the time, the only pets we could have that – well, that you could pet, that no one in the house had any weird allergic reaction to, were of all things, rats.

I know, I know… there’s big, ugly rats, and then there’s – well, small, icky rats… but somewhere in there there are pet rats – and they’re usually white with some spots on them, and we got one for our son, who absolutely adored her.

He called her Sonic, and after a while, she kind of grew on us. We’d let her out of her cage for some time every day, closely supervised, of course, and she’d run around and we’d train her or play with her, and have fun with her.

One of the things she liked to do was sit on the arm of the couch and either watch me as I read a book, or watch as I worked on the laptop. I’d have my right arm up on the arm of the couch, and she’d be there, just watching, and then invariably, she would decide that she needed to run across to the other side of the couch, where my wife or son was sitting.

But it’s what she did, EVERY time that eventually just got to me. She’d run down my right arm, across my hands, and then off to wherever she was going that time. But the constant was that she would piddle on me on the way across the back of my hands, and it became a tremendous source of amusement for the rest of the family, while I was just kind of stewing… After even a little longer, I realized that I was upset, in large part because – well, she only “blessed” me with her piddling, and no one else. You’d think it would be predictable, you’d think I’d be able to prevent it, but as regularly as it happened, she always figured out a way to make it *JUST* a little different, and I could never catch her without inadvertently propelling her straight up toward the ceiling.

Every time…

She wasn’t too hot on getting frequent flier miles, so I had to be extra careful.

At one point, I realized that the reason I was – well – “pissed off”, is because I was constantly getting pissed on. The evening I came to that conclusion pretty much brought the house down.

Sonic was a dear – if you can think of a rat as a ‘dear’ – to my son. She gave him hours of amusement, companionship, and friendship, of the kind you can’t get anywhere else. We learned from her, what exactly a “pack rat” was, because she would literally find things she was interested in, and put them in places only she knew about.

If she could, she’d run off with car keys because they jingled, but most often it would be a receipt, or a scrap of paper, or in the case of my son, she gave him new ways to come up with excuses for his teacher…

“Um… my rat ate my homework…”

And by golly, I saw her do it once, too – he was working on something, laying on the living room floor, with her and some papers, and she found this piece of full sized notebook paper, snagged it in her mouth, and jumped across the living room like she was Pepe Le Pew, and before we could catch her, she’d scampered under the couch, where at some point, she’d managed to chew a little hole so she could get at the INSIDE of the couch, where it was far more comfortable for her.

Right.

So one year, the family went back east to visit grandparents, and I had to stay home and work. My job was to go to work, come home, let the rat out, play with her, feed her, clean the cage, etc…

No problem… she’s just a rat. I figured, in the immortal words of Jeremy Clarkson, “How hard can it be?”

And… just as they find out on the show, Top Gear, where the quote comes from, I found out, precisely, how hard it could be.

So the night they were to leave, I took the family to the airport, where they flew on a redeye east, into what became the great power outage that gripped the East Coast that year (that’s another story, for another time) – and then I went home…

After I got home, it was late, she was fine, and everything was cool for a couple of days or so, but after one long day, I let her out, played with her a little, and then she, like oh so many females, decided to be coy. She’d run out to see me, as if to say, “Come get me!” and then when I did, she’d run away… She wanted to be chased, she just didn’t want to be caught. (It’s funny, both Bill Cosby (in his Adam and Eve sketch, if you can find it) and Sir David Attenborough comment on this coyness, even though they’re referring to different species…)

Anyway, back to Sonic the rat, who decided, at that moment, to hide.

Not under the couch, IN the couch.

This was not good.

I tried getting her out.

I tried encouraging her to come out.

I got treats.

I got toys.

It didn’t matter.

She didn’t care.

What got me was that she just disappeared. She had this penchant for chewing on things, (the couch being evidence of that) and I was well into what would become an 80 hour week at work at the time, so I didn’t have a whole lot of bandwidth to be thinking rationally about a rat that had gotten loose in the house. I know, some people would have just trapped her, but she wasn’t taking any bait of any kind and since she was our pet, trapping was out of the question.

But making the inside of the couch uncomfortable wasn’t.

I took the cushions off and tossed them aside and started beating on what was left, yelling, making noise, and in general making the inside of the couch a pretty miserable place to be. I wanted her to think that coming out of the inside of the couch would be a most excellent idea.

She had no ideas of the kind.

In fact, she was quite happy where she was, deep inside the couch.

This had to change.

So I started rolling the couch across the living room.

Understand, the couch had no wheels, which made rolling it – well – a bit different, but I did, truly, roll the couch, (thump, thump thump, across the living room. It didn’t faze her at all. In fact, I had to take a breather myself with the couch upside down and her ‘treasures’ from inside scattered all over the floor to listen to where she was. While I was standing there looking at the it all, off to my right I saw her stagger out from under the couch…

… over to under the love seat, which apparently was her vacation home.

Well, given that rolling the couch had gotten her out of it, I figured that trying it again with the love seat would be just as effective, and so I took a couple of deep breaths and started rolling it across the living room, too. To be honest, I was mad, I was tired, I had so much I had to do, and just didn’t have time for this, so that kind of narrowed my whole ability to creatively deal with the problem of her getting loose. However, she wasn’t interested in coming out, no matter what I was doing, and I was getting awfully tired, and while I wanted to make her uncomfortable enough to get her out of the couch, dang it, I liked her, and had no desire to hurt her.

After a few rolls across the living room, I figured we’d both had enough, and since I had a long day ahead of me the next day, I had to give up, so I put all the furniture back to where it had been, and went to bed, not sure what evilment she’d get herself into overnight.

I got up the next morning, and was sitting on the couch, already starting my day, when she warily poked her head out from under the couch I was sitting on, wondering if Armageddon was over. I reached out, picked her up, petted her (just a bit) and put her in her cage, where she stayed until the family got back. She was fed and watered, the cage was cleaned, but for her safety and my sanity, it was better that way.

And it’s funny, looking back on it, – well, you’ve seen police shows or heard of reports where the police are called, and they determine that there was “evidence of a struggle.” Had they stood on the front porch and listened, they would have thought, with the sound of the couch bashing its way across the living room, followed by the love seat doing the same, that there were two big guys really going at it in there, and that it was a life and death struggle.

Um… No… it was just me… and Sonic the Rat.

When the family got home, we (Sonic and I) were both glad to see them, but I think Sonic was really glad to see Michael.

We had her for about two years, loved her to pieces, and then she, bless her, went to Rat Heaven (I’m sure there is one.)

And even though I don’t miss getting piddled on, I do miss the little fuzzball that did it.

Puff balls and Pastries

July 28, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: Dad, Dad's stories, Family, Friends, Humor, Lessons, Life, Stories | by tomroush | Leave a comment

One of the things I’ve been doing in these stories is writing down history. I’ve written down a number of stories about my dad and his time in the military. There are others in the works, but I happened to run across a couple that I’d convinced him to write before he passed away. They’re rare because he printed them, and then later the computer they were stored on was stolen, so these are the only stories I have that he actually wrote. I think that’s one of the reasons I’m doing my own writing – so my kids can see and read some of the stories that are part of their history and that they’ve heard over the years.

I’ve been baking artisan bread for the last little while (bakers go back in the family for generations, and my son got me this book which has been absolutely wonderful). So given that, the other day I was thinking about baking bread, and it got me to thinking of this next, actually, the second of the four stories that dad wrote about his times in the Air Force.

We have to travel back in time to about 1953, when my dad was in his early 20’s, in the Air Force, and just past basic training at Keesler AFB, in Mississippi, and into the technical training (radio operator and some things he wasn’t allowed to talk about) that formed the beginning of his career. If we were to set the stage, we’d have to do so with the understanding that World War II was still very much in people’s minds, the Cold War between the former allies of the United States and the USSR was just ramping up, and the Korean War was in full swing. The Air Force was training thousands of new recruits every month, on an assembly line basis at a quantity that was as mind numbing for the recruits as it was for those trying to keep track of them, keep them busy, and keep them healthy.

These recruits were resources, and the Air Force had to take care of them by feeding them, giving them shelter, and keeping them occupied when they weren’t busy learning whatever the Air Force had decided they would learn. On top of all the classes and mental training for the actual skills, there was the physical discipline that was taught by having the recruits do daily calisthenics, and the mental discipline that was accomplished by assigning daily tasks that were simply not optional.

So while they were taking classes in some of the most technical, and classified, jobs and skills available at the time, they were also to take care of themselves and each other in the most basic ways you can imagine. There were assignments to clean the barracks, mow the lawns, maintain vehicles, buildings and property, and to scrub things till they shined. The person in charge of tasks like this was, in civilian terms, a manager. In the military, he (at that time and in that place they were mostly “he’s”) was a Sergeant. Very few recruits ever saw Generals. All recruits saw Sergeants, and the Sergeant wore the hat of your mother, your father, your elementary through high school principals, your cop, and pastor, and occasionally, your bartender, all in one very crowded body, and your Sergeant could change hats faster than you could blink an eye, so staying on his good side was your greatest mission in life.

Make your Sergeant proud, he’d take care of you. Embarrass him, and your life would be a living hell. You would be cleaning bathroom floors with a toothbrush for a month – and it would likely be your own toothbrush you’d be doing it with.

From the Sergeant’s point of view, you’re a hands-on leader, and in the military, as anywhere, good leadership is the key to getting things done. You depend on your soldiers (or sailors, or airmen, or Marines) to get the job done.

When things don’t get done, there are consequences.

Your job, as a Sergeant, is to make sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that those consequences are so unforgettable so that whatever caused them never, ever happens again. At the same time, your job is to be in your soldier’s corner, letting them know you support them and will get them what they need to get the job they’ve been assigned done.

In doing that, you want to make sure that if they screwed something up, the screwup is fixed at your level and goes no higher. You know that if a soldier ends up being called on the carpet in front of their commander, whether that’s a Sergeant or a general, there are only three acceptable answers to questions that might be asked, and those answers were simply, “Yes, Sir”, “No, Sir”, and “No Excuse, Sir.”

Three very important things here.

You never wanted to have to be in a position ask those questions. It meant something had gone wrong.
You never, ever wanted to be in a position to have to answer those questions. It meant that you hadn’t been able to fix whatever went wrong.
You never, ever, ever wanted to have to give that last answer. It meant you were the one who was responsible for whatever went wrong. It was the equivalent of falling on your sword

And Sergeants, without whom there would simply be no military, were well known for coming up with creative ways of not falling on their swords, so to speak. Some of the ways problems were “solved” were due to ingenuity borne out of the rare moments when you are faced with the only fate worse than death itself, having to say the dreaded words, “No Excuse, Sir.”

Occasionally, if the situation demanded, things were literally covered up. This was only done as a last resort when everything else had failed. It meant you were out of resources, out of supplies, or out of time.

This is important to remember. The stress of running a huge kitchen like they had at training bases like Keesler was enormous, the time available to feed thousands of recruits was limited, so the kitchens had staff working around the clock preparing food for those three mealtimes when everything had to be ready to go, all at once. Some in that staff were there full time, others were there as assigned. This meant there were often people working there who didn’t really understand the significance of what they were doing. (or not doing, as the case may be)

There were officers in charge of the entire operation, but it was the Mess Sergeant in charge who took care of day to day things in the Mess Hall. It was the Mess Sergeant in charge who made sure the kitchen ran with – well, military precision. And it was the Mess Sergeant who did everything possible to eliminate all the variables he could, and make sure everything worked, so he could feed everyone coming through the door quickly, efficiently so they could go out and get trained to fight the enemy, whoever that was.

Under no circumstances did he want to stand in front of his commander uttering the words, “No Excuse, Sir”, so he instilled in his underlings a fear far worse than the fear of God; it was the fear of the Mess Sergeant.

So, there’s a lot of background to this story. Take a deep breath, smell the smell of a big, industrial sized kitchen. Here you can smell the vegetables being chopped up for the next lunch. Walk a little further, you can smell the aroma of freshly peeled potatoes for tomorrow morning’s hash browns, and hear the stories two young recruits are telling each other about anything but potatoes. A little further, the steamy vapor coming out of an industrial sized dishwasher tickles your nose, and finally, a bit further on, you can smell the yeasty smell of bread dough rising, mixed with the smell of coffee and cigarettes, and above the constant roar of the fans, you hear a number of 20-somethings laughing and goofing off.

Around you are huge stoves, walk-in refrigerators and freezers, hand trucks to make moving the huge sacks of raw ingredients easier, enormous chromed ovens, and mixers that you could mix enough dough in to feed an – well – an Air Force. Come with me as we stand off to the side and lean up against the wall and listen for a bit, as a much younger version of my dad tells the story behind a rather strange article that appeared in the paper that week. It’s below, just as he wrote it.

We had a certain number of KP’s to do as we went through the technical training. “Kitchen Police” is the full title of the job. With so many trainees, we had a mess hall row. Only one of the mess halls had a bakery, and even then I enjoyed the smell of fresh baked goods. We were assigned to the midnight shift, and were supposed to make rolls. Lots of them. One of the KP’s got some flour that wasn’t the right kind of flour we needed and dumped it in the big mixer, then I was left to watch the dough rise while the rest of them had coffee break. They had a super long break that night, and our KP pusher caught us goofing off.

I told him it hadn’t risen enough yet.

He started sweating, a lot, for the mess sergeant was due in any time.

There was a growth of bushes separating the places where the men were marched in, so he had all of us KP’s dig holes for the large quantity of dough to be poured and hidden. We went to work with a will and even covered the pile of dough with the sweepings. There was a picture in the paper later of the finding of a giant puffball mushroom by the mess hall.

…and, in the inimitable words of Paul Harvey, now you know “The Rest of the Story“

Take one teenager, add horsepower, and get…

July 14, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: Aviation, Civil Air Patrol, Family, Humor, Lessons, Life, Saab Stories, Stories, Stupid things that Papa did when he was Little | by tomroush | 3 comments

This is a story about cars.

Well, more than just cars…

One complete car.

Parts of two others.

And me, who used the Infinite Teenage Wisdom ® I was so blessed with at the time.

Wait – a better way to describe “Infinite Teenage Wisdom ®” is “Stupidity beyond comprehension” – and before I get any notes from angry teenagers, read on, and see if you don’t see yourself in this – (note: don’t try this at home – or, for that matter, anywhere else. )

So aside from me, the cars involved in today’s story were:

A 1965 Saab 95 – with a three cylinder, two stroke engine of a whopping 46 cubic inches. (for comparison: a standard Harley Davidson has almost twice that, about 80 cubic inches, across two cylinders).

A 1956 VW Bug (but mainly the engine – an original 1956, 36 horsepower, 4 cylinder, air cooled, ORIGINAL Bug engine)

And a 1972 Ford Ranchero, with a 390 Cubic inch V8 under the hood, with a 4 barrel carburetor, dual 2 ½ inch exhausts that made a barely passing attempt to muffle the roar of the engine.

It was said it could pass anything but a gas station, and I learned much later, how true this was. Of course, this was back when I was irritated at gas costing a whole 66 cents a gallon, and refusing to buy it at that price…

The Ranchero belonged to my uncle, and I’d had some trouble with the Saab, the kind that had the engine sitting on the shop floor while we figured out how to drill a rather important broken bolt out of it.

This took a bit longer than expected, and I had to do something that evening, before we were able to get the engine back in the Saab.

You see, I was the cadet commander for the McChord Composite Squadron of Civil Air Patrol, and one of the things I did was teach the younger cadets about anything having to do with aviation, leadership, and in general being a good cadet.

One part of aviation is airplane engines, and so I figured, given that I was trying to restore a 1956 Bug, which happened to have an air-cooled engine of the same configuration as many airplane engines, I’d planned on using it to demonstrate to the younger cadets what an airplane engine might look like.

I’d been gathering parts for the Bug for some time, and had found, for $100.00, an absolutely bone stock, original, 36 horsepower engine actually out of another 1956 bug that had been in a front end collision. With the gas tank in the front, the car burned, and was a total loss. The only thing worth saving was the engine, so the owner had taken it out of the car and put it in a garage and there it sat for a couple of decades. It still had the original distributor cap on the distributor, still turned over, and interestingly, still had oil in it.

To actually, run, it would need to be rebuilt, (the spark plug wires were a little crumbly from the heat of that fire) but you didn’t find engines like this very often, and I was absolutely thrilled to have it.

However, I’d planned on taking it to the Civil Air Patrol meeting in the back of the Saab, and the engine of that car was sitting on the floor of my uncle’s shop.

My uncle, bless him, offered to loan me his Ranchero.

Now understand, I was used to an engine with three cylinders the size of coke cans pulling me along.

The Ranchero’s engine had 8 cylinders the size of small Central American countries, and had about 7 times the power of the Saab.

In fact, let’s just say that the gas pedal on the Ranchero worked really, REALLY well. In fact, it worked far, FAR better than the gas pedal of any car driven by a teenager should work.

And then there were the brakes.

Oh my gosh, it had disk brakes, 11 inch, Internally Ventilated, Power Assisted, Disk Brakes.

The ones I had in the Saab were little itty bitty drum brakes that I thought sucked – and it turned out I was right… only two of the four brake shoes on the front of that Saab actually worked at the time.

The difference was incredible.

I was used to a certain level of acceleration from the Saab (a speed rivaled by melting glaciers, I might add), and it became very obvious, very fast, that I would have to recalibrate my right foot for the increased acceleration available in the Ranchero.

What was not obvious was that I would have to do the same for the increased deceleration – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I took the Ranchero home, backed it up to where the VW engine was and then just kind of stood there, trying to figure out how to get the engine up into the back of the thing. Eventually I got some planks, and slid the engine up onto the bed on them, getting it into the back by myself, and with the engine loaded in the back, I shut the tailgate on the bottom and the canopy gate on the top.

By this time, what with the original problem with the Saab, plus the loading of the engine and such, by the time I put my Civil Air Patrol uniform on and got in the car, I was quite a bit later than I thought I would be, and so I did the rather typical teenage thing.

I tried to turn my uncle’s Ranchero into a time machine.

There was an 8 mile stretch of two lane road that I’d driven many, many times in the Saab, and with the acceleration that it had (imagine that under the hood are three hibernating squirrels (because of the glacier mentioned earlier) who had NO intention of accelerating the car enough to pass someone that’s going too slow for an impatient teenage driver) I’d learned that if I were driving that Saab, there were only two or three spots on this 8 mile stretch that were actually safe to pass another car in. So my standard process, regardless of impatience, was to fade back from the car I was about to pass and wait until I had plenty of clear space in front of me and lots of clear space in the oncoming lane before I started to pass someone.

When the time was right, I’d floor it to get a running start, staying directly behind the person I was about to pass, because I needed the draft that their car pushing through the air provided to keep my speed up. I’d then, at the last second, pull out and pass them, assuming everything was clear. If it wasn’t, or if I didn’t get enough speed up, or my timing was off and there was still oncoming traffic by the time I (the passer) got up to the person I was passing (the passee) I’d have to try to abort the pass, and with the brilliantly functional brakes (sarcasm intended) on the Saab, trying to abort a pass at that late stage could be a touch challenging.

I mean, by the time I got to the point of making the decision to pass, I’d be gaining on them at about 10-20 mph, and at the last moment, I faced one of two choices

If there was still no oncoming traffic, I’d pull out and pass them.
If there was oncoming traffic, I’d have to abort the pass, which would give me the following decisions: I could
1. Rear end them (generally undesirable at that speed)
2. Whip out into oncoming traffic and risk a head on collision… (significantly less desirable at that speed) or
3. Slam on the brakes and hope and pray that I had enough brake shoes making contact with brake drums to actually slow me down to keep from rear ending them.

So there I was, late… impatient as all getout… not in the underpowered Saab I was used to, but in this car that was not my own…

…that had more power under my right foot than I’d ever had in my life.

…that had more braking power than I’d ever had under my right foot in my life.

…and that had more rubber on the road in two of its four tires than I had on all four Saab tires.

Now just between you and me, I’m thinking this is a recipe for disaster, right?

Well, let’s find out…

I made it about 3 ½ miles from home, and on this road it didn’t (and still doesn’t) seem to matter what time of day you’re driving it, there will be someone who isn’t in nearly as much of a hurry as you are… In this case, I was stuck behind someone who insisted on going 50 mph (which was below speed limit). I was late and impatient, and in my teenage mind, I just couldn’t take any of that, so I waited for a clear spot I’d used in the Saab, hit my blinkers, the gas pedal (oh… my…) and pulled out to pass.

Now one of the things to know about this road is that a lot of it is in shadow most of the day, with occasional little spots where there is sunshine.

I was in that sunshine, passing the car that was driving so slowly, and I was passing him like I’d never, ever passed a car before.

This time, I had room to pass.

This time, I was going way, way faster than the person I was passing.

This time, everything was going to end up just peachy.

I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

…which is when a bright flaming red 1974 VW Bug popped out of the shadows about a quarter of a mile ahead of me.

Understand…

Red…

Sunshine…

Bug…

There’s no radiator on the front of this thing, it’s all bright freaking red.

Like a stoplight.

And it didn’t look like it was a quarter of a mile away, it looked like it was a hundred yards away, and coming at me with a closing speed of about 130 miles an hour (figuring my 75 plus his 55). I knew, in that moment that I had to do something, and do it quickly.

So I, using my Infinite Teenage Wisdom ®, did what would have made sense if I were driving the Saab, which would have been to stop badgering the hibernating squirrels under the hood and stand on the brake pedal, trying to avoid a head on collision.

But remember, I wasn’t driving the Saab.

I was driving the Ranchero.

And as I said, I was doing about 75 miles an hour – which is fast for that road, (impossible for that Saab) but is also a good passing speed for a short distance, and, well, let’s put it this way:

My body was driving the Ranchero.

My brain was still in Saab mode.

And with that big bright red Bug in front of me, I did the only thing I could possibly think of doing.

I hit those brakes.

…those 11 inch, Internally Ventilated, Power Assisted, Disk Brakes.

With, remember, more rubber on just the front wheels than the Saab had on all four.

The Ranchero went from 75 to about 45 like it had hit a brick wall.

The driver I was passing had to be confused beyond words, I mean, here’s this blur of a car roaring past him, not like he’s standing still, but like he’s going backwards. He’s expecting to see tail lights any second, but what he saw were brake lights out the side window, the back of the Ranchero kicked up, the nose went down, and then it simply disappeared.

He looked around, and the next thing he knew, it was behind him again, weaving around a little bit, but definitely back there.

What the driver of that car didn’t know was that while the Ranchero had those huge brakes, the classic 36 horsepower 1956 VW Bug engine, the one with the original everything including the crumbly spark plug wires all the way down to the spark plugs, did not.

In fact, it decided to maintain its speed for about 8 feet, at which point it hit the front of the bed of the Ranchero. It did this by rolling, yes, rolling to the front of the bed, where it sat, wounded and bleeding 25 year old dinosaur juice all over the bottom of the bed while I tried to swerve back into my lane so I didn’t end up squished between not one, but two VW engines (one from the red VW in front of me coming at me, and one from the wounded and bleeding engine behind me).

On top of it all, I was stunned, shocked, embarrassed, and furious at myself for not only not having thought this through, but for doing something so stupid in the first place, but there was nothing I could do but seethe as the person in front of me tootled along for the next 4 ½ miles, definitely below the speed limit.

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson, but remember, I was operating under Infinite Teenage Wisdom ®, and I knew that when we got to the next intersection, I’d be able to turn left, onto a multi-lane road, and I’d be able to pass him.

Which is exactly what I set out to do when we got there.

The light turned green, the slow driver ahead of me turned left and went into the outside lane. The rumble of the 390 in the Ranchero turned into a roar as I turned left, cut inside him, and floored it.

I heard all those cylinders firing, I heard the transmission whine, I heard those two exhausts roar, and I heard my 1956 VW Bug engine , its ability to travel completely lubricated now by all that ancient oil between it and the bed of the Ranchero, sliding, trying to make a hasty exit out the back.

Really.

I looked in the rear view mirror just in time to see it hit the closed tailgate and knock it open.

All I could imagine in that blink of an eye was the guy I’d just passed wondering why it hadn’t been enough for me to pass him like that, why he was now being passed by an old VW engine sliding down the road – without even a car attached to it.

I couldn’t let that happen, so with the image of the engine popping open both the top and bottom tailgates frozen in my mind, I remembered just enough of my physics, and did the only thing I could possibly do at the time.

I hit the brakes.

(Yes, those brakes)

Those 11 inch, Internally Ventilated, Power Assisted, Disk Brakes.

Attached to a veritable plantation of rubber…

…and the engine (the VW one) came rolling back to the front of the bed, where it lay, like a prize fighter down for the count.

I pulled over.

I just couldn’t drive any further right then, with the back open and the engine sitting there all cattywompus, so I got out and checked the tailgate. It was fine. I shut it to see if it would, actually, shut, (it did) but one look at the engine, and it was a mess. The distributor cap was broken, the rotor inside the cap was broken, various important fan shroud pieces were now dented and mangled.

I opened the tailgate again and got up in the back, trying to keep myself from slipping or getting too oily in my clean uniform. I managed to manhandle the engine upright, (which is a challenge when you’re trying to keep your shoes and knees out of the oil on the ‘floor’ there – and an even harder challenge when you realize how very little room you have trying to stand up in the back of a Ranchero with a canopy on it). I pushed it all the way to the front of the bed, knowing that hitting the brakes would put it there anyway. That oil coating the bottom of the bed now really changed things a bit, so I had to be extra careful, and I still had to get to the Civil Air Patrol meeting, where I’d be teaching the cadets about all the exciting things they could learn about aviation, and how important lubrication was in allowing metal parts to move past each other… freely.

Remember, I was the commander, and I was supposed to look sharp, and be calm, cool, and collected.. Having a greasy uniform wasn’t an option, so after getting the engine all upright and everything, I wiped my hands on the only thing available (the ground) and drove, very, VERY carefully out to McChord, to train my cadets.

They learned a little, and I managed to get myself, the Ranchero, and the VW engine home safely.

But I think, as I look back, I learned more.

I learned that impatience can be expensive, and dangerous.

I learned that otherwise intelligent people can do stupid things.

And the cadets, who looked up to me both figuratively and literally, had absolutely no idea, as leaderly as I looked, how fully capable I was of doing stupid things that would boggle their minds, and in my impatient attempt to get there on time, how close I came to not getting there at all.

TEOTWAWKI* (if you’re an arachnid)

July 7, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: Humor, Life, Musings | by tomroush | 1 comment

Yesterday was the morning to end all mornings for a small Seattle spider.

She made the mistake of dropping into my coffee cup…

…and I didn’t notice her until I started pouring.

She was pretty excited there for a bit.

I suppose, for a Seattle spider, that’d be the way to go, drowning in coffee…

*The End Of The World As We Know It

Rockets, Styrofoam airplanes, the Fourth of July, and Jimi

June 30, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: Aviation, Friends, fun, Holidays, Humor, Independence Day, Life, Photojournalism, rocket engine, Stories, Stupid things that Papa did when he was Little | by tomroush | Leave a comment

July 4^th…

Here in America, it means there are lots of events involving fireworks. Some of these things are legal, some are not. Some can be made with good old Yankee ingenuity, and some can be made with a little bit of knowledge of chemistry. There can be an astounding variation of things, but the bottom line is that they all explode, fly, or make lots of sparks.

And of course, if you do it right, they’ll do all three.

And the thing about my friend Jimi was that if there was any possible way that something could blow up, or fly, or make lots of sparks… he’d figure it out. It seemed like “The Fourth” for Jimi was a day to celebrate everything – and he went all out on it.

One time – he and I had decided that the big Styrofoam gliders you could get would fly better if they were powered by something stronger than an arm, like, say, a rocket engine. So we found that there was one kind of thing, called a ‘ground bloom flower’ – that, if aimed correctly and taped securely to each Styrofoam wing on this glider, two of them might produce enough thrust to get it airborne.

It turns out that timing the ignition of these things was a pretty major challenge – and that the concept of asymmetrical thrust – that is – one of these things lighting before the other – was not theoretical at all, and the plane, when we did manage to get it in the air, didn’t fly so much as spend its time trying to do a very colorful pirouette to one side, followed by a lurch forward for the split second both “engines” were firing at the same time, followed by a feeble attempt at another very colorful pirouette to the other side as the first engine died and second one lit off.

Was it entertaining?

Heck yes.

Did it fly well?

Uh…. No.

It’s safe to say that it really didn’t fly very well.

It’s also well to say that it wasn’t very safe, at all…

I mean, a highly flammable object, that’s already got a totally unpredictable flight path, combined with devices that are already spewing sparks and flames…

What could possibly go wrong?

<ahem>

In our misguided attempt to actually get the thing to fly, we kept fiddling, and finally got things set so we could try again – and found that where the fuse came out of the ‘ground bloom flower’ wasn’t exactly where the fire and thrust came out.

We were able to deduce this by the large hole the flame had burned in the right wing. We taped over that and decided a single producer of thrust would work better if we could center it.

So we – after long and hard thinking of all the things that would be illegal to purchase and let fly in Shoreline (where Jimi lived), we realized that model rocket engines would be perfect (and legal) – and bought a few of those, made a self-ejecting holder out of some ductape, stuck a fuse into the engine, lit it, and threw the plane, figuring it’d fly, gracefully, as it should.

Turns out that adding that much thrust to one of those things doesn’t necessarily improve anything in a predictable way – and after even more fiddling, the first one that actually flew did a very tight loop, hit some wires, and came down hard, mostly in one piece.

The next one was a little better, but it was the last one, that I didn’t see, that was clearly the best.

I’d just run into the house to get something, when I heard the rocket engine fire, and I heard Jimi yell. I heard a thump, the rocket continued to burn, and Jimi laughing like an absolute lunatic.

By the time I got out there, tears were running down his face, he was holding his stomach, and having trouble deciding whether to laugh or breathe.

I looked around and followed the smoke to the hood of his car. It seems the engine had burned itself out by then – the smoke more of a haze at that point – but before it had done that, the little rocket engine had pushed the plane up high enough so that one wing had hit a telephone wire again. That spun the plane around 180 degrees, pointed right at the ground. It came down at full power, almost pulled up, but hit and bounced on the hood of Jimi’s little Chevy Nova, getting the nose stuck under one of the windshield wipers. The little engine that could wasn’t done yet, and continued to burn with the plane trapped by those windshield wipers – finally ending up burning the paint off part of the hood of the car.

Jimi was just beside himself.

I was mortified, and thought that he’d have to figure out how to explain that to the insurance company, but he just wanted to leave it the way it was. The scorched metal, the blistered paint, was worth far more as a story to him than getting a new hood put on the car ever was.

I’ll always remember that laugh of his – and how much it meant to just hear that childlike joy.

It’s funny – Jimi and I were so much like kids in all of that that neither he, an award winning photographer who never went anywhere without his Olympus cameras, nor I, a budding photojournalist who never went anywhere without my Nikons, took any pictures of the event.

We just laughed and laughed and laughed.

And some memories are best left there, in your mind, as a memory that remains strong, and bright.

I miss him.

For now, just imagine the intense hiss of a model rocket engine, the hollow metallic thunk of some hard Styrofoam on a metal hood, and the sound of two grown men laughing like the little boys that were still very much alive inside us.

Those little boys who had read all the small print on the fireworks and rocket engines… “Use under adult supervision…”

Yeah, we supervised alright.

It was a good day.

Years later, in Jimi’s memory, I decided it was time to share that joy of Styrofoam airplanes, rocket engines, and some adults who still remembered what it was like to be a kid with my son, but that’ll be a story (complete with pictures) for another time.

Have a safe Fourth of July, folks.

Men, Women, Cannon Beach, and Chocolate

May 5, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: Cannon Beach, Family, Holidays, Humor | by tomroush | 3 comments

In honor of this upcoming weekend, I thought I’d write a little story about one of the traditions we used to have for Mother’s day, and something I, as a guy, learned about both women and chocolate.

As a guy, learning about either of these two things, and the interaction between them, can be both a stunning and humbling, if not totally baffling experience.

See, it seems like chocolate affects men a whole lot differently than it does women. Me? I can take it or leave it. Now I’ve talked to friends who happen to be female about this whole thing – and the word chocolate is uttered with a reverence a guy might have for – oh, say, the remote… or beer… or both… I don’t know – all I know is that chocolate holds a place near and dear to every woman’s heart that I know, and none of the men I know really grasp the concept of how important, how heavenly, how earth shatteringly WONDERFUL chocolate can be to the women I’ve talked to.

As is often the case, it’s so much easier to illustrate than to explain, and of course, that takes us into tonight’s story, about Mother’s day, Chocolate, and a gender gap the size of the grand canyon.

We used to go down to Cannon Beach, in Oregon, and stay there for Mother’s Day weekend at a house right on the beach. It was a neat place, and there were at least 4 bedrooms upstairs, and I think 23 couches and a ping pong table downstairs in a room just a touch smaller than the footprint of the house.

One of the things do aside from walking the beach and going out to Haystack Rock was try to have some fun stuff to eat while down there – and since there was a kitchen in the place, we’d bring food or get some locally to make while we were there.

One year my sister decided that something called Raclette, kind of like fondue – but she had it in her mind that instead of cheese, we’d do it with chocolate instead. So a bunch of chocolate was melted, and plates of all kinds of things, especially fruit were brought out – and we – well, the guys of us, that’d be my dad, my son, and my brother-in-law and me – didn’t quite get the whole concept of dipping perfectly good fruit into hot, gooey chocolate, but that seemed to be the thing to do.

So we did.

And I learned something about chocolate that evening.

It turns out that it affects men and women differently.

Those of us with a Y chromosome didn’t quite understand what the fuss was all about with the chocolate, and kind of half-heartedly put our little dishes up onto the grill to melt the chocolate, and then dipped our fruit into it after it was melted.

And I’d have to say, it was okay, but it just didn’t seem like “two great tastes that go great together” – and if we ate much of it at all, we’d eat the fruit, then maybe the chocolate, and pretty much forego the melting part altogether.

But it’s what the chocolate did to us (and I’m speaking of us as in guys) that was so different. See, by the time we’d gotten to the point where we realized that waiting for the chocolate to melt for the second go around, all the sugar had overloaded our systems, and to a man (and boy) we were slowing down.

In the meantime, as if through a tunnel, we were hearing the women (that’d be, in chronological order, my mom, my wife, my sister, and daughter) laughing and chatting and just having a really good time…

Pretty soon it was clear that staying at the table was going to be a challenge – this was more sugar and/or chocolate than any of us guys had had in a long time.

We were fading, and fading fast.

Meanwhile, on the double X chromosome side of the table, the partying was going on with wild abandon. Jokes were being told, laughter was clearly the order of the day, and chocolate flowed like – well – um….. Melted chocolate.

The XY members of the group drifted to the living room area, because – well, it was quieter, and tiredness was descending on us like a down comforter.

Meanwhile, at Party Central, those left at the table were now being regaled with stories that brought howls of laughter the likes of which I’d never heard.

For “the guys” – it turned out the living room, which we’d gone to to escape the noise, was still too loud. The call of the down comforter was too strong, and trying to keep our eyes open was a battle that simply could not be won.

The guys, The “Team of XY” all faded off to bed, with a mumbled “Thanks for the nice dinner” as we each shuffled to the bedrooms, resigned to lose not just the battle, but the war.

I put my son to bed, and heard the laughter still ringing in my ears, the sound of three generations of laughter and merriment in the distant background.

And suddenly – it stopped – as they noticed we were all gone.

I couldn’t help it. I could barely keep my eyes open. In those few moments, my son was already deeply asleep. I’d just managed to crawl into bed myself before falling there, but the last words I heard before succumbing to the arms of Morpheus, and I don’t remember who said them, were, “Now isn’t it just like those men, leaving us to do the dishes!”

Yup.

Just like those men.

But I blame the chocolate.

Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms out there, no matter which chromosomes you’ve got.

Shock and Awwwwww…

April 28, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: Humor, Lessons, Life, Stories | by tomroush | 1 comment

Please note: this story is written in the third person because one of the main characters simply can’t be me, and the other character is definitely not me.

It’s been suggested that I make that particular fact clear up front, so there it is.

Also, the original title, “Static Electricity, Paperclips, and Convex Curves” has been completely been blown away by a friend’s suggestion of the title that you see above.

So with that, we now return you to our regularly scheduled story, already in progress…

Nerds and Girls.

Not only nerds, but socially inept nerds trying to impress said girls…

And of course, that brings us to our story, which happened some years back, less than 20 miles from where I’m writing this now.

By way of introduction, I’m sure there are many, many ways one could describe a nerd, but the common theme I remember noticing at the time was that often nerds were absolutely brilliant when it came to communicating with computers, and at the same time, absolutely unable to communicate with other humans.

Note – this didn’t mean they didn’t occasionally have the desire to communicate with other humans; they just didn’t have the ability to do it effectively. When it came to male Nerds communicating with female Non-Nerds (anti-Nerds?) – that effectiveness dropped to absolute zero.

As a professor in college was fond of saying, “You will see this material again.”

Enter Stage Left: A software engineer (um… Nerd) working at a rather large software company with a name synonymous with, oh, say, really, really small squishy things.

Seated at stage right: The receptionist for the building our Nerd worked in.

Note: The receptionist is astoundingly attractive, and our Nerd found himself absolutely smitten with her. He, as often happens with males, wanted to impress her, but none of the small talk worked. He’d talk about all the esoteric technical things he was good at, and she would smile and nod politely until he finished his attempt at communication for the day. When he was finished, she’d usually say she had to get back to work, and he’d slowly walk away, trying to hide his dejection, scuffing his feet on the carpet as he went.

This went on for quite a while.

Summer turned into Fall.

Fall turned to Winter, (he was pretty determined) and while the heat in the building kicked on, there was no heat, nor were there even sparks, between our intrepid Nerd and the Beautiful Receptionist.

This was about to change.

One day, as he scuffed his way to the door to get out of the reception area and into the office area, he reached out to open the door and got a horrific shock.

He’d built up a charge of static electricity because of all the scuffing on the dry carpet, and reaching for the door handle completed the circuit, and sparks literally flew.

Anyone having been around computers for a bit knows that static electricity is bad.

Nursing his sore hand, he made his way back to his office, a land of straight lines, of monitors, computers, and keyboards and sat at his desk to think this through. He put his feet up on that desk, and pondered a bit, trying to figure this spark problem out, and how to solve it, idly bending a paper clip into oblivion as he did so. He crossed his legs and thought some more, and in the end, poked the paper clip into the side of his shoe.

Somewhere, Thomas Edison’s ghost handed out another light bulb as the brain cells in our Nerd’s head put two and two together.

See, static electricity is created because electricity is generated but has no place to go. To oversimplify it greatly, clouds rubbing together (think thunderstorm), or shoes rubbing on a dry carpet, can create enough static electricity to make some pretty brilliant sparks.

But if you figure out a way to allow that electricity to bleed off a bit, you don’t have static anything.

And that’s exactly what our nerd figured out. He left the paperclip stuck in the side of his shoe, with the bent part dragging on the carpet.

He then scuffed his way to the door that had caused him trouble, and reached for the handle.

No spark.

Heh…

He walked away – took the paperclip out and did it again.

Scuff scuff scuff scuff scuff…. <SPARK!>

Ow.

Okay – time to confirm it, to, as they say in software development and testing, “Can you repro(duce) it?”

Paperclip in.

Scuff scuff scuff scuff scuff….

… No spark. Hmmm…

Paperclip out.

Scuff scuff scuff scuff scuff…. <SPARK!>

Ow.

But his testing was proving that his idea worked. He wasn’t the first to come up with this idea, but he came up with this on his own, and he was proud.

He had something that would impress people.

He could fire sparks at them at will – and he could turn the sparks on and off with a simple paperclip.

He could impress peop –

Oh…

Wait….

He could impress the receptionist.

He left the office and left the land of the straight lines, and went to the land of the curves, where the curves were all in exactly the right places. He was both smitten, and a man on a mission. He was going to impress this receptionist, and she was going to really smile at him now.

So he tried to explain it to her – and it didn’t work. In fact, it was, as is often the case, easier to illustrate than it was to explain, so he convinced her to come out from behind her desk so he could illustrate it for her.

So while explaining – he scuffed his way over to the door without the paperclip, and touched the handle.

And she saw, and heard, the spark.

Then he did the same with the paperclip back in his shoe, and he touched the handle again.

No spark.

But wait – she seemed interested! Our nerd was on his way to scoring – uh – something… Even he wasn’t sure what it might be, but he’d never kept her attention this long before, ever. He was going to show her how brilliant he was, that he could control the spark, and that it wouldn’t spark, that he could (oh, dare he?) touch her, and it wouldn’t spark.

He was going to show her, yeah, that was it.

Actions speak louder than words, right?

So he scuffed, vigorously, from the door all the way over to where she was standing. Oh, this would absolutely prove that his idea worked, that he was smart, that he – that he could impress a – a girl.

He scuffed hard, harder than he’d ever scuffed, just to prove the power of the paperclip…

…which would have proven its power had it been in his shoe and not lying on the floor behind him where it had fallen out.

(Folks, that’s known as foreshadowing)

He got right up to her, and said “see?” and reached out his finger just to point – but it was pointed at her, and, given that he had entered the land of the curves, his finger was a few safe inches from one of them.

…had there been a paperclip.

However, the vigorous scuffing had created such a charge in him that one could say there was a spark between them.

Oh yes, there was a spark…

Just like before, she saw it.

And heard it.

And this time, she felt it.

And it was in the wrong, wrong, WRONG place.

The surprise on our Nerd’s face as he looked at his finger in disbelief – the ‘smoking gun’, as it were was more than matched by the absolute shock (pardon the pun) on the face of our receptionist.

While our Nerd looked back to see what had happened, our receptionist was experiencing a pain the likes of which she’d never, ever experienced, in a – a location which had never experienced such pain.

While she was still processing this, our Nerd found the source of the problem. He’d noticed the paperclip was gone, and retraced his steps to find it on the carpet. He got it, and came back to her, beaming, holding it up like a trophy, “I found it! I figured out what went wrong!” – and as his eyes focused from the paperclip to her face behind it, the expression that had started off as mild interest, but was rapidly transitioning through pain, a short detour at embarrassment, and then at the moment his eyes finally focused on that face of hers, came out of that detour and arrived fully at rage.

The beaming, triumphant look on our Nerd’s face was frozen completely solid by our receptionist, who turned around, and with her arms firmly crossed, walked back behind her desk, to the Nerd Free zone, and focused on her monitor… her phone, ANYTHING but him.

She couldn’t even look at him. She wouldn’t look at him.

Our Nerd, his frozen triumphant look thawing into an agonizing realization of what had just happened, was embarrassed beyond belief, and any attempt at apologies were immediately frozen again.

He realized that as attractive as the land of the curves was, it was a dangerous place for someone only used to straight lines…

He sighed the sigh of the deflated, the sigh of the lost, the sigh of the forlorn, and slowly turned back toward the door, twirling the paperclip in his hand.

And as the curtain came down on our little drama, the door, as if sensing what had happened, didn’t even spark as he opened it, going back to the land of the straight lines.

Where things were safe.

Bathtime…

April 7, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: Family, Humor, Life, Parenting | by tomroush | 3 comments

Bathtime…

A quiet time, when the cares of the day are soaked away by a warm, relaxing soak in the tub…

…for people without kids, that is…

* * *

When my son Michael was much younger, we used to take baths together, you know, a father-son kind of a thing…

Well, he’s gotten bigger, and unfortunately, so have I, and so getting the two of us in the tub at the same time isn’t as easy as it used to be. So I’ve taken to sitting on the edge of the tub with my feet in it, having taken my shoes and socks off and having rolled up my pants…

That said, one night, many years ago, he was taking a bath, and as is often the case, he called out, “Papa, can you come in here?” (Actually, it was “Papa, kannsch du do hehr komma, bitte?” – he still knows some of his German – Southern German to be clear.)

Sometimes he wants someone to read him a book while he’s in the tub, sometimes he just wants someone to play with.

This time, he wanted someone to play with…

Okay, I thought, what are my options? There was a TV program I was considering watching, that will probably be rerun, and I have the childhood of my little boy, which will not.

It was a no brainer…

So I went in there, and we’ve got some old shampoo bottles there (which make far better bath toys than anything else. You can make boats out of them, submarines, bombs (filling them and then dropping them into the tub – they make a pretty good splash when dropped by a creative 6 year old), and most of all, squirt guns…)

I was planning on just kneeling down beside the tub and playing with him, grabbing one of the shampoo bottles and kind of having a squirt-gun war… But when I got into the bathroom, he said, “Can you put your feet in the tub?”

Well, that would have meant taking my socks off, rolling my pants up, and in general getting ready. He would have had fun, and that would have been that.

On the other hand, I thought, “what if I just get in there with him?”

So, right after he said that, I stepped into the tub, socks, pants and all. He was looking down at the time, heard the splash of my left foot, and saw something just slightly unfamiliar at the bottom of the tub.

A foot.

With a sock on it.

At the bottom of a hole in the water.

Attached to a leg.

With pants on it.

The water splashed back, and he followed the splash and the leg up to the rest of me with this look that was a mixture of, “No, really? and “You’ve GOT to be kidding me” and “WOW!!! This is COOL!!!”

Then he started laughing that wonderful belly laugh that just makes your heart melt…

We had fun…

We found that if you have the shampoo bottles that have the little button on top to push down to get the shampoo out, you can actually take that whole unit off without taking the actual lid off and have a really good squirt gun.

So we did.

…and started squirting at the little lids that were now floating in the tub, the other stuff in the tub, and each other.

Within a minute I was significantly wetter than I’d planned on being.

We called Cindy, who had that, “Oh, you boys…” kind of look on her face…

Oh well…

So we went back to squirting each other…

Now after awhile my pants were pretty darned wet, and it was getting close to “Bedtime for Bonzo”, so I got out, and tried to take the pants off.

Now if you’ve ever tried to take wet pants off you know that it’s a bit harder than taking dry ones off, because they cling to your legs and won’t let go.

Michael watched with amusement as I made this discovery

So there I am, hopping around in the bathroom on one foot, with my very wet socks sklorching every time I hit the floor, part of one semi removed pant leg flying about, splattering water everywhere, and Michael’s laughing…

After flopping and splashing and sklorching and kicking for a very intense minute or so (it was probably less, but it sure seemed that long…) I managed to get my right foot out of the pants leg and onto the floor.

But in that last desperate kick to get my foot out and catch my balance, I very skillfully kicked the pants leg into the toilet.

This couldn’t be happening.

Michael howled.

Had he not been in the tub, he would have been rolling on the floor.

As it was, he was laughing that laugh that you just can’t get from anywhere but a small, happy child.

So, I got me dried off and changed, got him dried off and changed, and then got him bundled off into bed.

Ahh, Bathtime…

Such a relaxing time…

An “Inconvenient Truth” – and how important asking the right questions is.

March 31, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: Civil Air Patrol, Friends, Humor, Life, Stories, Stupid things that Papa did when he was Little | by tomroush | 6 comments

I was on the phone with my mom the other day, and she said a couple of words that I’d never, ever heard from her.

We were all going through a rough time, so she wished us well, she said, “individually and collectively”.

The last time I’d heard those words said like that was in 1978, at Kingsley Field in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and I realized I had another story to write.

Back then I was in Civil Air Patrol, and our squadron, based at McChord Air Force Base, had one of the best military style drill teams around. We had a group of young men and a few young ladies who could march beside each other, between each other, we could literally march rings around each other. You name it, we could do it, and we looked sharp. Each state was organized as a “Wing” – and several of these “Wings” made up a Region (several states)

We had Wing drill competitions, (Youtube link as an example) and our reputation was such that the folks at Wing wanted us (McChord Composite Squadron, CAP) to compete simply because they wanted to see what we’d do at the Regional competition.

In fact, now that I think of it, for these Wing competitions, we had to get our uniforms looking absolutely perfect, including the shoes, and we learned how to spit shine them so you could see your teeth in them. At one Wing competition, I’d gotten a brand new pair of shoes that didn’t have any creases in them yet. I shined them to within an inch of their lives, and then walked carefully out to where we’d go through a very thorough inspection. The fellow doing the inspecting noticed those shoes with the mirror finish and no creases, and looked me square in the eye,

“Wha’d you use on those shoes, Cadet?”

He said the word “Cadet” with all the affection a cat might have for a hairball it’s trying to cough up. Clearly he’d noticed, but also clearly he thought I’d used a spray shine, which was way faster, way easier, and was definitely considered cheating. Not knowing what else to say, I answered truthfully:

“Kiwi and spit, Sir!”

He wasn’t sure about that response

“Are you mocking me, Cadet?”

I was just being honest…

He’d asked a question.

I answered it…

Truthfully.

He just wasn’t used to seeing shoes without creases – so not only could he see his teeth in them, but he could see his eyes, his nose, heck, if he wanted to, he could even see his nose hairs – really, they were good (the shoes, not the nose hairs). They’d be that good only once, but once was all I needed, and so to answer his question of whether I was mocking him, I said,

“Sir, No Sir!”

I mean, he couldn’t get me on anything, I wasn’t being disrespectful, I was answering his questions truthfully, so he harrumphed a bit, then turned off to inspect and harangue the next cadet.

Well, we won that competition, and were officially the best drill team in the state. We were going to Regionals – which was a tremendous honor, and it was held at an airbase in Klamath Falls, Oregon, a place none of us had ever been.

The Regional competitions at the time seemed to be a little more involved than the Wing ones. They involved the drill competitions as expected, competitions in individual physical fitness, meaning a mile run, and team physical fitness, which was a volleyball game, I believe there was some level of written test or tests, and of course, you were expected to be on your best behavior at all times, because anything, and I mean ANYTHING you did could sway the Judges’ thoughts or ideas about your ability – or eligibility – to compete.

What this meant is that You Did Not Want To Screw Up.

The ride from McChord to Klamath Falls could take well over 7 hours, but with an old Air Force van, and the requisite stops complete with fluid exchanges (for both the vehicles and the passengers) it took a bit longer.

By the time we got there, we had just enough time to get out of our traveling clothes and into our uniforms for a meeting in a classroom, where the schedule would be given, the expectations would be set, and the law, we learned, would be laid down…

We’d just gotten in and were thinking we were pretty cool for making it when we heard the sound of marching.

In the hallway.

Marching?

INSIDE?

That just didn’t make sense. But as we turned toward the door see where the sound was coming from, the squadron that had won the Nevada Wing competition marched in.

This was clearly not their first competition.

They all had matching flight jackets.

We didn’t.

They all marched to their seats, and stood there…

We hadn’t.

…in those glorious flight jackets…

Which we didn’t have.

…and they were at attention.

Which we weren’t.

We were stunned into silence..

Their commander called out, “Ready, Coats!” and every one of them took off their flight jacket, held it over their left arm, and at the command “Seats!” they all sat down…

As a unit.

Our eyes must have been big as saucers – this was clearly psychological intimidation, and to be honest, right then, it was working just a bit on us, in spite of the fact that we thought they were really pushing this thing over the edge just a bit. Later, we were all wondering if they did everything in unison, and imagined that same march, only not through a classroom door, but through the men’s room door, followed by the command, “Ready, Zip!”

Nahhhh… not possible…

We knew good, but what we were seeing was more than good, it was just plain arrogant, and we weren’t having any of that.

We’d learned that at some of these competitions, a squadron might send out spies to watch another team practice, and actually steal their moves. If the team with the spy went first in the competition, the team who’d invented the moves would look like they were the ones stealing them.

With all the talk of honor and stuff that we’d had drilled into our heads, this was just not right – but, as has been said many times over the years, all’s fair in love and war.

And in the inimitable words of Bugs Bunny, “Of course you realize, this means WAR!”

So that evening, we did a quick run through of our routine as far away as we could get from the barracks. It was very, very clear that we were ready, we were functioning as a machine, and we were simply ON. So on the way back we figured if they wanted to see something, we’d give them something to see.

Now the way it works when you’re marching in a situation like that, is you’ve got one person, the commander, giving the commands, and the rest follow.

And the way the commands work is this: there’s the Preparatory command, which tells you what to do, and then there’s the command of execution, which tells you to do it. So you’ve all heard “Forward, March!” in movies and the like, well…

“Forward” – that’s the preparatory command…

“March” – that’s the command of execution…

And instead of “March”, we’d learned to say “Harch” – because when you’re trying to say it really loud without yelling, you can just get more volume into it. Also, if you ever did something that was different than the standard “Forward, Harch” – (like Doubletime, Harch) – you could always undo that command with “Forward, Harch” again.

You always start out on the right foot, and even if the command was “To the Rear, Harch” – you take one step forward, pivot 180 degrees, and then go on your way, as a unit.

So now that you know all that, remember, we’re marching back toward the barracks we were staying in, (think dormitories, if you’ve never heard that term ‘barracks’) and we just knew that some of the Nevada team would be on the lookout, and we wanted to make sure they saw something, and that what they saw would mess with them just as much psychologically as they’d done with us – just from a different direction.

We had this fellow in the squadron named Ken Meloche. He was Canadian, and reveled in the whole “for Queen and country” bit – and when he marched, he liked to march like the English did, with their arms and legs swung high. So just as we came in sight of some of the windows in the barracks, and to mess with the Nevada boys a bit, our commander gave the command,

“Meloche Walk, Harch!”

– and every one of us, without skipping a beat, started walking just like Ken did.

Including Ken.

“Forward, Harch!”

– and we all marched normally again, like a drill team should march.

Heh – this was fun.

We marched for a bit, and could see more of the windows in the barracks – and out of nowhere came a command we’d never, ever heard before in our lives:

“Double to the Rear with Three Hops in the Middle, Harch!”

– and again, without skipping a beat, we did a ‘To the rear, Harch’ – which is just a reversal in direction, but we all took one step, and literally as a unit, did three hops. I think there were twelve of us there, and I remember hearing the sound of three distinct impacts, we were that in sync. We took one step forward, then did the next ‘To the rear, Harch’ and tried like heck to keep from grinning from ear to ear… (we tried that double to the rear with three hops in the middle again later – and could never repeat it).

This was just NOT what drill competition was supposed to be like. It was supposed to be more serious than this.

When the final windows of our own barracks came into view, we heard the command,

“Walk like slobs, Harch!”

And I suppose the best thing that you could liken what we did to that exists in current culture is that we walked, in formation, like a bunch of zombies, knuckles dragging, feet dragging, drooling, the whole bit.

For about 10 steps.

“Forward, Harch!”

And we were back to looking sharp as tacks.

It was great…

If the Nevada boys wanted to mess with our minds, we’d mess right back.

So after we’d had dinner, and gotten into our bunks and everything – there were four of us in each room, and we were all full of spit and vinegar, the night before the competition. One fellow in the room decided that since the body can produce, – let’s just call it a ‘greenhouse gas’ – one that is flammable, he wanted to show us that it could be done. And in a split second, I found myself taken back to a story my dad told me from when he was a kid. Well, not so much when he was a kid, but when he was in that ‘no man’s land’ between childhood and adulthood, where bodies grow faster than brains, you know… And in it he’d told me it could indeed be done. So as background, let me tell you that story from his “young adulthood”, as it affected things a little further down the road in my “young adulthood”.…

So I knew from my dad that “it” could be done. He’d told me the story of when he was

a) Young, and

b) Male

…of how a group of his friends got together to prove that this, um, ‘greenhouse gas’ could be produced by a human, and could be lit.

On fire.

(Note: male… teenager… fire… cue the ominous music)

One of that group of his friends produced some matches, and two separate things happened that changed the outcome of that story forever.

Note: there was no one suggesting that this might, in fact, be dangerous, or that there was a possibility of injury… No, these were young men, with at that age, possibly a single functioning brain cell between them. That they had to share. And the fellow with the match was rather modest, so his plan was to demonstrate this flammability factor without exposing any skin – the implication being that this gas could escape through cloth and everything would still work.

That it would work was true, but the cloth also kept a bit of it between the skin and said cloth before it escaped. This would have been well and good, and had the experiment been successful, there might have been the possibility of some hair follicles being ignited. Other than that, no problem.

This was under the assumption that the cloth was cotton, or wool, or some natural fiber.

But it wasn’t.

This was back when the artificial fibers that we’re now used to wearing – be they Nylon or Rayon or whatever combination of things we have that make cloth last longer now – were just being experimented with.

And if you didn’t know, Nylon is flammable.

And those pants were made of Nylon.

So when this greenhouse gas came into contact with an ignition source, that which had made it past the Nylon ignited very well.

But remember about the cloth? – and that some would gather inside before making it through?

It did.

Which meant that on both sides of this flammable Nylon was flammable methane.

That was on fire.

The Nylon pants didn’t stand a chance.

They caught fire, and melted, and… let’s just say the area around the source of the methane was tender and blistered for weeks to come. It’s likely that the ‘modest’ young man had a story to tell his grandchildren years later – and a peculiar scar in a place only his doctor would see once a year.

It was with this story in mind that I suggested to – we’ll call him ‘Bill’ – that maybe getting the layer of cloth away from the – um – source of the methane would be a good idea, and given that I’d told the above story fairly well, including using the words “second degree burns”, “blisters”, and the phrase “his pants were melted to his butt” – ‘Bill’ agreed, and lied down on his bunk on his back, his knees up by his shoulders, trying to arrange things in such a way that the gas would be lit, but other, shall we say, delicate objects in the vicinity would be safe.

It took quite a number of tries with a little Bic lighter that someone had with them, and eventually, the timing, and location of everything was right. There was “fuel”, there was “ignition” and it really worked. It was indeed evident that methane was flammable, though not with the full blown cataclysmic flame-throwing display that we’d all been hoping for. Slightly disappointed, Bill put everything back where it belonged, but there was some evidence of our attempts with the Bic wafting about, and one of the rules that had been laid down early on was that there would be no smoking, no matches, no fires.

Period.

An adult who was supposed to be responsible for safety on that floor of the barracks we were in came storming into the room and absolutely wanted to know what was going on.

We thought we were dead.

This was the night before the Regional drill competition. We were the best Washington had to offer, and we realized might have just blown it, in more ways than one – so to speak…

The tone in his voice made it clear he was taking no prisoners, and taking no excuses. He wanted answers, and he wanted them now.

“Have you been smoking?”

Not knowing what else to say, we answered truthfully.

“No sir.”

“Have you been playing with matches?”

Matches? We didn’t have any matches, we had a lighter.

“No sir”

He kept at this for a bit, asking us as a group, then one by one, the same questions.

We told him the truth, every time.

The problem was, he kept asking us all the wrong questions.

He then called his superior into the room, explained the situation, and asked the same questions all over again. Eventually he said, as if justifying to his superior why he’d even been called into the room:

“I’ve asked them individually and collectively whether they were smoking, or lighting matches, and they all said no…”

They decided that they needed to go talk this over, and about the time they left, we looked at Bill and suddenly realized that this could disqualify us before the competition even started. The dawning realization of how deep the doodoo was that we might have gotten into – and what we would have to tell the people back home if we were disqualified, was agonizing, but we knew what the right thing to do was.

We told Bill he had to go down to tell the guy everything and straighten it out, and he did. Well, we don’t know what exactly he told him, but we told him to tell the guy the truth.

And I’m sure, as Bill was trying to explain this whole thing to this stern adult, that deep in that stern adult’s mind was a young man who’d likely done exactly the same thing a few decades earlier.

We were let off with a warning – as long as we <snicker> didn’t do it again….

And somehow, we got away with it…

The problem was, not ONCE had he ever asked us if any one of us was using a Bic lighter to try to light farts with.

We were allowed to compete.

We came in second – I mean, we did really well in the drill competition, and did okay in the volleyball game, and I remember my time for the mile run being okay – a little over six minutes – but my pulse was 228 and my gums were bleeding as I crossed the finish line – so I knew I’d given it pretty much all I had. The reason we were a little short in the physical fitness part of it was because we were used to the elevation of McChord Air Force Base –a whopping 283 feet. The 4,000+ foot elevation of Klamath Falls just did a number on us.

I don’t remember what maneuvers we did for the drill competition, really, it was the silly stuff we did that we remembered. The stuff we got away with.

So… when I heard my mom say “individually and collectively” the other day – the floodgates in my memory opened up, and I realized, “Oh, no… there’s another story there…” – and I told it to her pretty much as you read it above, and she laughed…

Blackbirds, Blue Saabs, and Green Porta Potties

March 17, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: Aviation, Humor, Life, Saab Stories, SR-71, Stories, Taking Risks | by tomroush | 1 comment

So based on Greg’s comment on last week’s story about me ‘embellishing’ things – I just had to put this story up. It happened in August of 2010, and like a lot of my stories – it started out as an email to a friend, in this case, one who’d told me to go out and do something fun that weekend.

It involved Greg.

And he gave me permission (well, actually, told me I had to) write this story.

So without too terribly much editing, here’s the story/note I wrote to my friend who wanted me to go do something fun, and come back with pictures to prove it…

I had a fun morning – went to see the Blue Angels down at the Museum of Flight.

I chatted with my buddy Greg for a few hours in the parking lot of the Museum until the coffee we’d drunk earlier at Randy’s needed a place to go…

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Greg and I had been sitting in my ’68 Saab, sharing stories, and watching the planes at Boeing Field. One of the stories involved something that had actually happened about 50 feet from where we were sitting right then, it was a story of me talking my way onto the only flying B-29 in the world, but before that, successfully badgering a newspaper photo editor I didn’t know,

…for a paper I’d never seen,

…into holding space on the front page

…for a picture I hadn’t taken yet,

…from a plane I had never been on,

…and was quite literally trying to talk my way onto.

We laughed, and Greg kept talking about my golden tongue and how I could talk my way into anything – using that B-29 as an example. I needed the laughter. I’d been feeling a little down about a lot of things, wondering about life and stuff, and recovering from some recent surgery, and Greg’s a very good friend, and did a lot of listening, and a lot of encouraging, for which I’m grateful.

Eventually, the coffee we’d had earlier needed to be dealt with, and since it was still raining, we just drove down toward a row of Porta Potties at the far end of the parking lot. As we did, we looked around and noticed we were one of only two cars in the formerly crowded lot. We saw that the other car was parked beside the Porta Potties we were heading for, right next to this canopy kind of a thing with a sign on it that said something like “SR-71 Pilot and Author”.

That got us talking about SR-71’s, (there’s one in the Museum of Flight) – and I told Greg about this one mission – the only one I could remember reading about right then, in which one of the pilots had flown from England to Libya, and on the way back out, the plane just flew faster and faster – and they had to hang a left to meet their tanker out by Gibraltar. They did (when you’re flying Mach 3+, that takes a bit of geography) – and the pilot pulled the throttles back over Sicily – and still ended up overshooting the refueling tanker over Gibraltar… (note: if my math is right, that’s about 1,100 miles of coasting – you can read the story here.

We stopped, Greg got out to take care of his stuff, and I took a second look at that sign, “SR-71 Pilot and Author”.

It was still raining, and under that canopy was a fellow, sitting in the only dry chair in the parking lot, surrounded by a bunch of empty, wet tables, all of whatever he was selling was gone – he was just sitting there with his feet up, talking on a cell phone.

Alone…

In the parking lot.

In the rain.

Hmm…

SR-71 pilot?

Well heck, I figured that there couldn’t have been too many of those, I wondered if he knew the guy who’d done that Libya flight Greg and I’d just been talking about. So while Greg headed off to take care of his business, I approached him – and he motioned he’d be off the phone in a minute, so I waited, and while I was waiting I saw the name on his banner – “Brian Shul.”

Hmm… I had no idea who Brian Shul was, but it seemed like he must be that SR-71 pilot – or maybe know him.

He ended his call.

“Are you Brian?”

“I sure hope so, been signing his name all day.”

“Say, I was just telling my buddy here about an SR-71 pilot who did a mission out of Libya and ended up overshooting his tanker out by Gibraltar… “

“That’s me.”

“… and I was wondering if you happened to know who that pilot might be…”

“In fact – the whole story’s in my book, would you be interested in a copy?”

My mind was already several sentences past that last one before it came to a screeching halt and processed what I’d just heard.

“He… you… that pilot – waitaminute…”

I had no idea that I’d actually stumbled into one of my own stories – and turned around to see Greg, who’d heard that interaction as he was coming back, and saw his jaw do what mine must have done just seconds before, which was to simply obey the law of the acceleration of falling objects and hit the pavement of the parking lot in just under a second.

You see, one of the things we’d been talking about was how Greg thought I might have embellished some of my stories – and about how easy it can be to do.

But the funny thing is – if I tell a story – well, I tell a story… I don’t think I embellish it, I just tell it. (often they simply didn’t need embellishing, they just needed to be told well).

We talked with Brian for a bit.

I shook his hand.

I bought his book.

He autographed it for me.

Greg took a picture of him and me – beside my very definite “sub-sonic” Saab, because I needed proof to show a friend that I’d done something fun that weekend.

And the funny thing is, Greg and I both learned something that afternoon.

We learned that you never know when you’ll stumble onto – or into a story, and it had become very clear that I didn’t need to embellish a dang thing on this one, because no matter what anyone asked, it was absolutely true that at the very moment I was telling Greg the story of the SR-71, the very pilot of that plane in that story, was sitting not 100 feet away, under a canopy, in the rain, on the south end of the parking lot at the Museum of Flight, right next to the Porta-Potties.

Coincidentally, in the picture above, Brian and I are standing next to my Saab 96, built in 1968. The plane Brian was flying (tail number 960) in the story I was telling Greg, is now down at the Castle Air Museum, right next to Castle Air Force Base, where my dad was stationed, back in 1968.

Tag Archive

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Take one teenager, add horsepower, and get…

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Rockets, Styrofoam airplanes, the Fourth of July, and Jimi

Men, Women, Cannon Beach, and Chocolate

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An “Inconvenient Truth” – and how important asking the right questions is.

Blackbirds, Blue Saabs, and Green Porta Potties

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