Reminiscences of a 77 year old guy

[viking]

I don't know why all this stuff came to mind recently, but it's amazing how many things I found that pertained to my recollections, brain is still working after all these years, thank God. So here is one that I was surprised to find info on the internet. During my time stationed at McCord Air Force Base, in Tacoma, Washington I spent a lot of spare time at Clarks Paint Shop along South Tacoma Way, I'm sure I wouldn't recognize the area today. Anyway, along the way a guy came into the shop and asked if he could have a 430 cu.in. Mercury engine he had to install in a 1949 Ford coupe, I looked the Ford over and took measurements and said I could do it, I did it and we became friends, he was in the Army at the time, at Fort Lewis, which was at the southern border of McCord Field. He got out of the Army and ended up buying a teenage night club in south Tacoma, it was called The Red Carpet dance hall and was for teens only but being as I was a friend, I was able to be there and did odds and end of work for him. What was extremely cool was seeing all the bands, including The Raymarks, the bass player was a guy I went to high school with. The Red Carpet had a number of well know bands that played there, including Paul Revere and the Raiders, they are not mentioned on a list of bands that had been there but they were there a number of times and Merrilee and the Turnabouts, Merrilee Rush, her recording of "Angel of the Morning" can be found on the internet, she was very good. There were many other local PNW bands that played there and most were very good. My friend Don Consola and his wife Donna only ran the dance hall a few years before moving back east. One other thing was that Don liked fast cars and he owned a 1965 AC Cobra, I used to tune it for him at the drag races where he regularly made Corvette owners literally cry, that Cobra was fast. While thinking of that time period, 1961 to 1966, it came to mind the Big Bad Wolf Tavern roving beer, music and dance get togethers, if I remember right, the cost of entry would give you all the beer you wanted to drink, the crowd was mostly underage, that's why they moved around, I think I went a few times until I heard that the police were going to do a raid, which they did and rounded up a couple of bus loads full, I'm pretty sure I was only 20 at the time, yeah I was also underage. Just a short story to end my Tacoma experience, just after getting out of the Air Force in 1965 I got a job at ABC Motors in south Tacoma, they sold Studebaker, Renault, Rover cars and 4 wheelers and Alfa Romeo, they had the last year made in the USA Studebaker which then was powered by a 283 Chevy V-8. I had the chance to drive a Studebaker Avanti even though I was only a lube rack guy. More memories to come.

 

[viking]

This story is before the Tacoma story, this was when I was living with my dad in Lofall, Washington on the Kitsap county peninsula. My dad was working on a ferry boat that was used to cross Hood Canal to the Olympic Peninsula before the floating bridge was built across the Canal, I think the name of the ferry was the Kitsap, first pic. Being as my dad worked on them, he knew the engineers that worked in the engine rooms, so on occasion I was able to go down into their engine rooms, the engines were huge, second pic. After I got out of school, before entering the Air Force, I had seaman papers to work on ferry boats and I got a few jobs working as a deck hand, helping park cars on the vehicle deck. I worked on a few ferries on the run between Bremerton and Seattle, the newest, I believe, was the Evergreen, like the last pic which is the Illahee and the last one I worked on was the Kalakala, a ferry that was built in 1926 that at first was used on San Francisco bay, in its day was very fancy and it was streamlined in shape, third pic. Some people tried to restore the Kalakala, but it was too costly and it was sold to a Canadian and he had it salvaged, as far as I can find out. Too bad I didn't go back to working on the ferries, good job and good pay, thing is, I'm happy not to be living in Seattle.

 

[Patchouli]

Paul Revere and the Raiders, YES!

My uncle came home from Vietnam in the late 60s. He is one of the smartest people I have ever known. He drove a sports car after that, until his new wife said no. lol
He always had lots of stories from his time in Europe.

 

[Weedygarden]

Thanks for sharing, Viking. I liked the music of the 60's, but didn't get much chance to listen to it. It wasn't really available on the radio much in South Dakota. We got American Bandstand on Saturdays, Ed Sullivan on Sunday evenings and could listen to KOMA out of Oklahoma City at night later in the years. We'd get that snapshot exposure to the music and musicians. No one had much money so when we went to the bigger towns, we might be able to buy a 45. Collectively, we could listen to everyone's records at school dances.

 

[viking]

1. Sad to say, my computer is just not fun trying to get things done on, I almost lost all that I had written on the last post, thankfully this site had what I had done so that I didn't have to go trough all the remembering of what I had written. Anyhow, I have one other ferry to talk about and it also ran at one time in the San Francisco Bay. It was the San Mateo, it was also built in the 1920's, I believe it was the most beautiful of all the ferries I have been on, lots of brass and hardwoods and it was steam powered, it had a progressive three cylinder engine and was very fast for as old as it was, sad to say, it was also junked out. Trying to restore those old treasure was just too expensive for even rich people to be done. I just did some checking and found that the first ferry boat pic is of the San Mateo, sorry, trying to get the right pics from my files is often troublesome. Anyway here's an old pic of the old Kitsap that had that large engine, the maximum RPM of that engine was 300.

 

[viking]

Believe it or not but Puget Sound can get some wild winds and big waves, I've been on a ferry to Seattle when it was rocking pretty good, don't know if it was as bad as in this pic but I've seen pics that were frightening, were water was going up on the car deck, this pic would be a fun ride for me.

 

[Patchouli]

Ferries are cool, when it's safe.
I've been on a newer one at the Outer Banks, NC, to Ocracoke Island.
I enjoy your stories but I'm sure it'd be more fun to hear you sharing.

A family we were friends with owned an old boat, a small yacht, fixed it up, was built in the 1930s I believe. Lots of brass and wood on it too. Sad to say, it eventually caught fire.

 

[viking]

It seem as though I'm going back in time, rather than starting from the beginning, oh well it's all good because I can still remember. So here are some of the things I remember from the years growing up on Erland's Point, which is just north of Bremerton, WA, some of the dates I can't remember and some are very clear. I don't remember how old I was when I was given an old plywood rowboat, if I cleaned the old paint off and painted it, anyway I did the job and rowed it all over Dye's Inlet, a small bay that was about 2 miles wide and 10 miles long, thing is I caught a lot of sea run cutthroat trout from that bay and one day while I was out on the bay I saw a fish swimming along with almost 1/3rd of its body above the water, I recognized it from seeing a picture in a dictionary and when I came back home I looked it up and it was an Ocean Sunfish, they can get over 1,500 pounds but the one I saw was young and only weighed around 500 to 700 pounds, thing is, this fish didn't belong in our bay, it's a tropical fish and it would have had to travel from the Pacific Ocean, through the Straits of Juan de Fuca, down through Puget Sound, up the narrow passage to Bremerton and then up the Narrows to Dye's Inlet, very likely the fish was there because of the warm Japanese ocean currents. Probably in the same year a guy caught a 16 foot Blue Shark on that same bay, these all happened around the mid to late 1950's because we also saw a lot of Northern Lights around the same time period, were we lived we could see the Olympic Mountains and they glowed like blue flames due to the Northern Lights. At this time I might as well mention 1949 & 1950, in April 13, 1949 we had a 7.1 earthquake I was in grade school while it happened and was out on the playground when I saw the ground looking like sea waves and an apple tree nearby was shaking violently, I'm sure I was bouncing on the ground, all I know is that I wanted something solid to hold onto, I don't remember but more than likely I possibly peed my pants. Then to top off another wild year, in the winter of 1950 we had a blizzard, that bay we lived near was splashing waves clear up on the bay window causing a covering of thick ice that crackled and popped enough that my foster dad covered the inside with a sheet or blanket, after the winds died down the bay froze over, looked like a lime smoothy and I knew better than to walk on it, too much salt water to freeze hard. My foster dad had a work bench in the basement and I experimented with all kinds of things, on was an old 2 or 3 hp Briggs and Stratton engine, one time I borrowed a wheel from a neighbor and bought a couple of tubeless wheels, I mounted a 6" v-belt pulley on one wheel made a wood frame and made a steering shaft from 1/2" water pipe, I made a three wheel scooter and mount the engine on the back with a 2" pulley, when I got this thing running I drove the thing all the way around the Erland's point loop road and when I got home the 2" pulley had warped from the heat and would go no further, good thing no sheriff was making rounds. This was about that ame time I took up radio and electronics as a hobby, first thing I did out of curiosity was to take my real dad's push button AM radio apart just to see how it was made, it never got back together and my dad didn't seem too upset, anyway from there I went on to get my novice ham license and build transmitters and amplifiers, I even built an electric guitar, used the neck off an old acoustic guitar, wound my own pickup coils, they weren't hum-buckers but they worked, I tried to learn how to play on my own, but to no avail, foster parents didn't want to learn, I guess they were afraid I'd end up playing in bars. To this day I wish I had learned, but then that may have put me on another path in life and I'm happy to be on the one I'm on now, dang computer, it put me on italics and I can't go back to normal type, so I'll end this remembrance for now.

 

[viking]

I forgot to mention that I rowed that little boat around in storms that were just about as bad as the storm shown with the ferry boat, I'm lucky to be alive, it was a very dumb stunt. It was another storm that tore my row boat to pieces, my fault, I hadn't pulled the boat out of the water, the biggest part left was a small portion of the bow were the rope was tied.

 

[Weedygarden]

Interesting life, viking. You may not want to talk about it, but I am curious about you being in foster care while your biological father was still around. I know you will address this only if you are comfortable with it. Maybe you lost your mother and your dad thought he couldn't take care of you alone?

 

[SheepDog]

Viking,
I used to take my canoe out in the sound. I learned to use the wind to my advantage and to stay out of the traffic lanes. Those ferries and tour boats don't have to yield to a canoe and as a target you are fair game.

 

[viking]

Interesting life, viking. You may not want to talk about it, but I am curious about you being in foster care while your biological father was still around. I know you will address this only if you are comfortable with it. Maybe you lost your mother and your dad thought he couldn't take care of you alone?

I wasn't told until I got much older, supposedly my mom was messing around with another man and it was found that there was a picture of me in his home, thing is my mom told me some things about her dad that make far more sense and added to my dad's fathers' feelings of Catholics, mom grew up Catholic, it's my feeling that my two grandfathers got together and arranged to separate my dad from my mom and when that happened, the court wouldn't allow me to go to my mom or dad, I went into my dad's cousins home, my foster fathers wife. This leads to a whole other story and this was after my foster mother died in 1959, a few years later my foster father started dating and ended up marrying a real hell on wheels, one drink could change her personality into a real bitch and one time I confronted her on this and the next thing I knew, my foster father was taking me up to my dads place in Lofall, I later heard that she told my foster father that she was going to have her son beat me up, he had some real mental issues and later blew his brains out. There are a lot of areas in my life that I won't go through here, let's just say that they were not good and it's amazing that things are going as smoothly as they are now, I guess I've learned a thing or two in all my years on this planet. Some of the things I've been through could have made me into a real SOB and at times I think my DW thinks I'm bit of a SOB, maybe it's because I don't tolerate BS to any degree, I do try to be tolerant and non-judgemental, I realized that I have plenty of bad things over the years, things that I pray have been forgiven for doing and realize that if I were judged for doing them, I'd really be up the creek without a paddle, like I said this is another story that I'll leave alone.

 

[Weedygarden]

I wasn't told until I got much older, supposedly my mom was messing around with another man and it was found that there was a picture of me in his home, thing is my mom told me some things about her dad that make far more sense and added to my dad's fathers' feelings of Catholics, mom grew up Catholic, it's my feeling that my two grandfathers got together and arrange to separate my dad from my mom and when that happened, the court wouldn't allow me to go to my mom or dad, I went into my dad's cousins home, my foster fathers wife. This leads to a whole other story and this was after my foster mother died in 1959, a few years later my foster father started dating and ended up marrying a real hell on wheels, one drink could change her personality into a real bitch and one time I confronted her on this and the next thing I knew, my foster father was taking me up to my dads place in Lofall, I later heard that she told my foster father that she was going to have her son beat me up, he had some real mental issues and later blew his brains out. There are a lot of areas in my life that I won't go through here, let's just say that they were not good and it's amazing that things are going as smoothly as they are now, I guess I've learned a thing or two in all my years on this planet. Some of the things I've been through could have made me into a real SOB and at times I think my DW thinks I'm bit of a SOB, maybe it's because I don't tolerate BS to any degree, I do try to be tolerant and non-judgemental, I realized that I have plenty of bad things over the years, things that I pray have been forgiven for doing and realize that if I were judged for doing them, I'd really be up the creek without a paddle, like I said this is another story that I'll leave alone.

Thank you for sharing. Some children really do not have it easy. Some of them get put through tough times that they should never have to experience. Anytime a child is not growing up in a home with their biological parents, there has been a challenge. Well, even then there can be some challenges. I used to envy children who grew up with both of their parents and where alcohol had not wreaked havoc. We would never know that you can be a SOB here, but perhaps you never get backed into a corner here or feel threatened in any way.

 

[viking]

Truth is that the things I read from fellow posters here, I find pleasing. There is a lot of empathy, people who really care for one another, words written frequently out of love for one another, I would say that many here are more family than our own flesh and blood. I see this with some of our friends, we consider them family. We have family members that never call, I can't count the times when we have called family members that they say to us, "We were just thinking about you.", we don't love them any less, but it's rather interesting that we have more in common with our neighbors and people on this forum, God bless you all!