The House. The Legend

Part of the theme you have picked up about Dad is how when he decided he was going in on something, he was ALL in.

I don't know what Halloween looked like for him as a kid, or even as an adult before I was born, but by the time I was old enough to notice, it was clear his investment was high.  I'll just describe the house as it appeared upon approach, on the evening of October 31.

As you came up the block, you could hear an evil laugh coming from... somewhere?... it wasn't a recording, and it was pretty loud, nearly always getting startled screams from those up close even though they probably knew it was coming. And background music. Chains, ghosts, cackles, cats and dogs fighting, creaks, explosions... And oh yeah, for some odd reason you'd hear a car horn honk and more screams. Seriously, what the HELL is going on at that house?

Finally you were done at the neighbors, and it was... time... to approach 4317 South L Street.

Hanging from the lower outer edges of the enormous maple tree at the edge of the road, which easily enveloped the entire front yard with a dense overhead canopy, were these hanging lights. Two skulls, two jack o lanterns, spread out evenly in all four directions from the trunk. They would slowly, ominously, light up one at a time... and then all go out at once. And then you'd realize what else was wrong... it was so dark! There's supposed to be a lamppost in front of this house, but where is the light??

As you walked under the tree, you'd notice an ethereal unsettling light from up in the branches. A body, bathed in black light and wearing clothes painted in patches of fluorescence, slowly but steadily rotated at the end of a noose.

And the noises from the house, they just kept coming.

As you approached the steps, there, sticking out from the shrubs, on either side, were a pair of legs, each missing a high heel shoe and with slightly tattered nylon stockings. Poorly hidden bodies??!

Before you could process that, the loud evil laughter erupted, not in front of you as you expected, but from somewhere behind you, from the street or something!! So you'd run up to the stairs to the porch, the only lit area offering apparent... safety?

The scary sounds are here, but everything else appears... safe? C'mon, it's Halloween, this isn't so bad, right? So you'd press the doorbe--HOOONK! Two freaking bona fide car horns mounted behind you up high on the porch ceiling, hidden from street view, go off and scare you right out of your sneakers.

No longer confident the surprises are over, you watch warily as the door is opened and you are greeted by... A CLOWN. But it's a very nice clown, cheerful, friendly. And you were ready for the clown to suddenly go evil, but it never did. It just gave you candy and sent you on your way, leaving your body primed for another jump scare that never arrived, so you leave to see the next house with your tension on maximum and not released.

What a good, wholesome time! LOL

Mom and Dad split when I was seven. I was a little too young to do it all myself right away, but by the time I was about 10, I was doing much of this of this Halloween stuff myself. It was WAY more fun to run our house than to go out for candy!

The source of the scary sounds? In the house, hooked up to speakers on the porch, was piped-out spooky sounds and music from a 33RPM vinyl album, that would need to be periodically restarted. The scary album and turntable to play it on had not disappeared, so that was back in play. Incidentally, I just did a search on Amazon and of course the actual version we had is the current top pick. Click the link and read the track listing, lol. 

The scary street laugh I couldn't do, but the secret is revealed. Dad, being a HAM radio guy, had a receiver in his 1963 Dodge 330 (named Eloise, his version of Farley), and it had an accessory external speaker behind the grille. Using a handheld two-way radio inside (a rare thing for civilians to own in the late 1970s) he would key the mic and laugh like a crazed maniac into his radio, blasting it from Eloise and scaring the yagoobers out of everyone arriving at the house.

The lamppost was hidden with a heavy duty cardboard box that Dad had carefully modified to slip over the light. Ever safety and civic minded, there was a sliver in the back that allowed a little light to still make it to the street, but in the direction of the house, it was eerie dark from normal, seeing as how well it was covered with heavy fabric and painted black. That box was so well taped up that it lasted a very long time!

The hanging skulls and jack o lanterns were still present, and always put up. The lights were controlled by a gadget he had repurposed from an old readerboard sign with lights that used to be on an arrow, sequencing to show the direction the arrow was pointing. You could plug any four things into the panel he built with that gadget, and they would turn on, one at a time, until all four were on, and then they'd all go off and start over. Spread out on the maple tree, it felt random and unsettling, but in the context of an arrow lighting up slowly from one side to the other, it made perfect sense.

The mannequin legs were around for a while, but even I thought they were too creepy so I eventually stopped using them.

The hanging body in the tree was an old set of coveralls stuffed with gobs of old newspaper. The name on the coveralls was "Bob". Bob hung in our basement 363 days a year, only coming out for Halloween. Yeah, going down into our creepy old dim basement and having Bob down there wasn't emotionally scarring to us young kids or anything, I assure you. By the time I was old enough to hang Bob in the tree and run the black lights up there, the electric motor that rotated Bob had disappeared, and the black lights with it, so I just put Bob on the porch. Up close he was still pretty traumatic to behold, his disheveled curly brown hair wig, and his styrofoam face painted orange and his eyes these huge black empty sockets. Once, in later years after most of us kids moved out, Mom thought she heard something moving in the basement and called the cops, and they came to check things out. Bob scared the crap out of one of those guys and nearly got shot, to hear the officer tell the tale.

The doorbell horns were genius. This required some electrical trickery, because household doorbells run on 24 volts, but the car horns were 12 volt. To swap from doorbell to car horn required running a set of wire from the actual doorbell in the kitchen down to the basement, and 364 days a year those wires were coiled up in the rafters in the corner. On the big day, you had to disconnect one wire inside the doorbell unit up high on the kitchen wall, then go down to the basement, lug a car battery over to that corner, pull the coil down and clip those wires to the battery. Show time!

Over the years I modified the show a little bit, sometimes dressing up in camo clothes and makeup (Rambo was still big at the time) and jumping out of the bushes off the sides of the porch to startle folks, but kept most of the rest of those gadgets and decor going as long as I could before moving out.

Sadly, I don't know what happened to any of this stuff, but I suspect it got tossed when Grandma moved into the house on 54th Street, which you all know as the house where Super Pickle was always hiding.

But like anything else that Dad did, when he got sold on doing something, it got done to the fullest extent of reasonability, and for that reason our house was legendary year round, and at school we could sometimes hear kids who didn't know it was our house talk about our place to new kids in the neighborhood when the middle of October rolled around.

Good times.

Going ONCE.... TWICE..... SOLD!

One of my favorite memories of things to do with Dad was to attend auctions. We hit some random events now and then, like a store going out of business or something, but the majority of the time it was either ham radio auctions or the State GSA auctions, which were held twice a year, spring and fall, to liquidate surplus state stuff. There was all variety of things at the GSA auctions, like office equipment, surplus materials, randomness, but the thing he was usually there for was the vehicle auctions. They sold surplus heavy construction equipment, work trucks, trailers, fleet motor pool cars, and my personal favorite: police cars.

Now Dad's motivation to go to these was that he would typically buy two or three vehicles at an auction, get them home, clean them up, fix minor things he had identified that he recognized at the auction that made the price drop but weren't difficult to fix, and then resell them for a nice little profit.  It wasn't huge money, and he didn't need the money, either, but for him it was fun.

The way this worked on site for the vehicles, the auctioneer would stand on the loading dock of an enormously long warehouse, the people would stand below a ways back, and the vehicles would be driven in one at a time between the crowd and the auctioneer to be sold. But prior to the auction, everyone was free to wander up and down the rows of parked vehicles, open them up, check under the hood.

So we would get there way early, wander the vehicles in the gravel lot, and he would take notes on the ones he thought might be good candidates. Those were early mornings, and sometimes it was cold. The earliest auctions I attended I wasn't a coffee drinker, but there was always a little canteen truck that showed up to sell sandwiches and snacks and coffee... and hot chocolate. I knew to not bug him for anything, and eventually we would go over and he would buy me some nice stuff. Small pleasures like that were heaven to me back then.

Around the time I was 13 or 14, I'd been going to these often enough that I knew most of the state workers getting the vehicles running by name. One day I was cold, and a little bored of standing around, so when the crew guys went out to start the vehicles up, I went out to help, because why not? Most of these cars and trucks had been sitting for months, and more than a few were being sold off precisely because they had issues, so oftentimes they didn't want to start. The intent was to get them up and running so they could idle and warm up a bit before their turn, so the guys were usually about 20 cars ahead of where the auction was at any given time.

The crew guys had a variety of things with them besides the huge board of numbered keyrings on hooks, so they could start engines that might not want to cooperate. Jumper cables, carb cleaner and spray starter, gas cans, and other random things. The guys basically accepted my help without my asking, I just stepped in and started doing stuff. It's how I've gotten into a lot of stuff and accomplished a lot of things in my life - sometimes you just stride in like you belong and no one asks questions, you know? And because of this I also got to know the people who tended to be the regular drivers. A different crew of maybe six people, they'd drive a vehicle up to the line, about three trucks deep, take their turn getting auctioned, then drive it back and park it and turn in the keys before grabbing the next vehicle.

And so one day a few years later, the driving crew was a little short of normal strength, and there we were getting cars and trucks started, and someone came over and said the auctioneer was unhappy because there kept being pauses between auctions because of not enough drivers, and one of the driving guys asked me to take the next truck and go.  I was like..... what?? I mean, I had my license by then but just barely, and I definitely wasn't an employee. He looked at me again and nodded, and I was like.... OK. Sure thing.

And the look on Dad's face when I drove the first work truck through there. He just had this big satisfied grin. If he was surprised, it didn't last long, and quickly gave way to "of course, that's my kid." I gave him a little wave but tried to keep a straight face and act professional like I was supposed to be there. Waiting for someone to stop the show and yank me out for being the imposter, but nothing happened, so I kept doing it.

After that auction I kept helping with starting cars, but then joined the driver rotation after everything was running. So fun.

Dad bought so many vehicles from these auctions. A few stayed and became semi-permanent, but most came and went. Vans, work trucks, the occasional police car, or basic motor pool cars. It was a retired Dodge St. Regis police car, like the one pictured, that was Dad's daily driver when I went with him to work one day and then he just set me loose for the day to do what I wanted. That car was a boat, but it was also FAST! I'm not sure letting me have the run of Tacoma with that car was the wisest decision he ever made, but it demonstrated trust. So actually it was probably an act of calculated risk, rooted in wise parenting?

We had a baby-blue15-passenger van that, as far as I know, is still in Maple Valley. For a while we had a sea green forestry four-door cab pickup with an extended length service body (compartments), I don't know what the plan for that rig was, but it got kept a long time, and I ended up driving it to school for months. I liked to pick up my friends in it, and we stowed our school bags in the compartments. Sound familiar? Truly a preposterous vehicle for a high schooler to drive. Several police cars that I took any chance I could get to drive for an errand. And of course, Farley himself came from a state auction, he was the second of three Dodge Diplomats that came from there.

The one time I think I annoyed Dad a little bit at an auction was one of the last ones I went to. As we were strolling the vehicles before auction time, I became enamored with a wonderfully clean and very low miles 1976 Dodge Coronet, that looked almost exactly like this one, color and all. By now it was around 1990, and most vehicles coming through were 1980 or newer, so this one stood out for both being older relative to most, and also in great shape. I told him about it, thinking he would be interested, he didn't seem to share my full enthusiasm, but I pressed him to know how high he'd be willing to go.

It was near the end of the auction, so after we got everything started, I deferred being a driver and went to find him to be with him when it went through. Dad was meticulous about recording the price of every vehicle that sold, on a clipboard to which he always affixed his carefully-handwritten bidder number in big beautiful digits, whether he bid or bought something or not, but when I found him he really needed to visit the bathroom and handed me his clipboard, asked me to write prices down, said there wasn't anything he planned to bid on anyway. I told him the Coronet was still coming up, and he said his top end was $350, and disappeared into the crowd. There came that beautiful car at last, and I was the first bid. It bounced up to $300 right away and my hopes faded, but I took it to $350, someone bid $375, I was like, what's $50, and raised my hand again. Someone else had actually bid the $400 and I ended up holding the $425 bid. Oops. But hey, it's just $75, right? Once, twice, sold!

I was excited, but I also had violated his directions, and sheepishly explained how I ended up buying the Coronet for $75 over his limit, upon his return. To his credit, he made it his daily driver, and drove it for five or six years, he ended up loving that car after all. In the end I don't know what happened to it, it disappeared at some point after we moved away from Washington, when he decided he preferred comfortable midsize station wagons going forward, and that's basically the kind of car he drove for the rest of his life after the Coronet.

I have never lost my love for all kinds of in person auctions that I acquired from him, and still attend them as often as I can even though my motivations are different, but the rise of the internet has pushed in person auctions nearly out of the picture, resulting in higher prices and no fun. But they're not gone completely and can be found if you look hard enough.

Last time I was in Maple Valley was just after his memorial, there were still multiple old auction vehicles there, even though he'd stopped attending them years before.

If you've never been to an auction, I hope you can find your way to one. They're kind of an acquired taste, but worth giving a shot, and if things go well you can get some amazing interesting deals while also having fun.

Dad's USMC Stories, Part 2 of 4 - Boot Camp

In 1960, Marine Corps Boot Camp was twelve weeks long.

Our living (?) quarters were WWII Quonset huts.  Each one had two rows of metal bunk-type beds (“racks”), one row down each side.  I would guess that each hut held maybe two dozen men?  Everything we did and everywhere we went, we double-timed (fast trot).  The DI’s were always right there, sharp-eyed and just waiting to pounce on an errant move or failure to do exactly what was ordered.  And we had to begin everything we said with “Sir,” followed by our words, ending with another “sir!”  Furthermore, we were required to speak of ourselves in the third person.  “Private!  What is your serial number?”  “Sir, the private’s serial number is 1 9 1 0 9 0 0, Sir!”

One of my more humorous recollections is when one guy forgot and answered a question about himself and several other recruits with “Sir, we (blah-blah-blah), sir!”  This DI stood right in front of the guy, literally nose to nose and screamed “WE??  Do you have a mouse in your pocket?!”  But what made it so funny was the way this one DI spoke.  He sounded almost like he was out of breath half the time, so his question came out almost like a wheeze.  “Do you have a (final exhalation) mouse (pause) in your pocket?”

But you better for darn sure not laugh!

Punishment for screwing up - and it seemed like nobody could do anything right the first few weeks - was to “Drop and give me twenty” (pushups).  These were performed with your body in a straight line from your toes to your head, only touching your nose to the ground each time you went down.  And you had to count out loud as you did them.  If you slipped up in any fashion, you had to start over again.

It was one thing after another all day long.  We started out with several days’ worth of classes on Marine Corps history.  This is not to say that we escaped the getting up at 0430 every morning, falling out into the platoon area in front of the DI’s Quonset hut, and going through an hour of PT (calisthenics) and then going for a 20 minute run.   Needless to say there were quite a few guys who were not in any kind of shape to be doing this, myself included.  And since I was one of the “Fat Boys”, so I was ordered to jog out in front of the platoon wherever we went.  But even though I was huffing and puffing like an overworked steam engine and seeing stars before my eyes, I managed to stick with it.  Guys who dropped out of the run were put through more PT once we returned to the barracks area, the idea being to bump up their endurance.

There were other classes as well.  Learning the military rank structure, for instance.  Keep in mind that the Marine Corps is a department part of the Navy (the men’s department, we like to say!), so we had to learn the Naval rank structure as well as the Marine Corps rank structure.

And classes on personal hygiene, military courtesy (recognizing and saluting officers), how to wash and fold our uniforms (we washed all our clothes by hand on concrete washracks, with bars of Fels Naptha soap, then hung them up with good old wooden clothespins (issued that first night).

Keeping our platoon area spotless was another thing.  Every day at one point or another we would be called out and form up in echelons, then walk though our area picking up every single thing that didn’t belong.  I learned another saying about that.  It wasn’t quite literally true, but it was close.  “If it moves, salute it.  If it doesn’t move, pick it up.  If you can’t pick it up, paint it white.”

One of the things about MCRD San Diego was that everywhere you looked, paths and everything were bordered with white-painted rocks.  And at one point our platoon did (when we were working for Base Maintenance) was to take a bunch of rocks that a previous recruit platoon had gathered - on average about four to six inches in diameter - and paint them all white so that they could be used for decorating the planted areas in front of Quonset huts.  Really.

Smoking.  Remember that back in 1960, cigarettes and smoking was still pretty much socially acceptable.  We were allowed two or three smoking breaks during the day.  When this happened, the DI would call out “The smoking lamp is lit!”  The smokers would take out their cigarette packs and light one up.  But you’d better not even think of smoking a cigarette unless the DI gave you permission.  One or two guys got caught sneaking a quick smoke in the head (bathroom), and they were made to chew up and swallow a couple of cigarettes.  You can imagine just how sick they got.  All it took was once or twice, and the whole platoon learned not to even think of sneaking a cigarette.

On the other hand, for those of us non-smokers, we could just stand there and relax for a few minutes.  The break from the constant on-the-go stuff was nice.

The smokers were instructed very specifically on how to dispose of their butts.  They were to be “field-stripped”, which meant tearing a strip down the length of the butt, crumbling the unsmoked tobacco out of the paper and scattering the tobacco bits out on the ground, followed by rolling the little piece of paper up into a tiny ball to be put in your pocket and then thrown in the butt can or garbage can at the next opportunity.

Speaking of pockets.  We were to keep our pockets buttoned at all times.  An unbuttoned pocket - shirt or trousers - was an invitation for the DI to come up, grasp the pocket flap and tear downward violently, ripping the flap and usually part of the pocket from the shirt.  The recruit had to go around for the rest of the day with his torn pocket flapping in the breeze, but that night he had to sew it back on again (with a little sewing kit also issued that first night) and then present it to the DI for inspection.  Again, it didn’t take too many episodes like that to get the keep-your-pockets-buttoned message.

Even though we were terrified of the DI’s (three to a recruit platoon), we respected them and we paid attention.  After all, they were accomplished Marines and they knew what they were talking about.  And we gradually improved.

We were also spending a lot of time learning close-order drill.  That is to say, learning how to do ‘right face’, left face’, ‘about face’ and so on.  Once that seemed to have soaked in, we began learning how to march in formation.  The first few days of that was comical, with the usual collection of guys who just couldn’t seem to catch on, turning the wrong way, starting out on the wrong foot, and generally wreaking havoc.  Soon enough we started getting it together, and we felt really good when the DI told us that we’d managed to get through a practice session without screwing up too Badly...

Three or four weeks into boot camp, the recruit platoons would take their turn either working a week in the Mess Hall, or working on cleanup tasks for Base Maintenance.  My recruit platoon was designated for working for the Base Maintenance people (civilians).  I lucked out the first couple of days when I made the mistake of speaking up (NEVER volunteer!) when we were asked if anyone had any lettering & painting skills.  Consequently, my job for the first two days was painting identification markings on a couple of large, garden-cart type wagons.  The man in charge wanted me to trace the letters and numbers through a stencil, and then hand-paint them in with a paintbrush.  Who was I to tell him that there was a faster way (but not as ‘clean’) to do it.

Once we had that week’s work out of the way, we were finally issued our rifles.  I’m speaking of the M1 Garand.  We had to learn those weapons inside and out.  take it apart and reassemble it.  More stories that you may have heard - we were not judged competent until we could take them apart spreading the pieces on a blanket, have the DI pick up the blanket and shake it a bit, then reassemble it again with half of the blanket folded over the pieces so you had to do it by touch.

Of course you had to learn the name of every piece of nomenclature about the M1, and how it functioned.  “Sir, the M1 rifle is a 30 caliber (30.06, actually), gas-operated, semi-automatic rifle with a magazine that hold a clip of eight rounds, sir!”  What this means is that each time the rifle is fired, part of the expanding gasses are diverted down a small aperture to drive the piston of the operating rod back which unlocks the bolt, moves it backward while at the same time extracting then ejecting the spent casing, then move forward again picking up a new round from the clip and guiding it into the chamber, ready to fire again.  The M1 can be fired, one shot at a time, as fast as you can pull the trigger.

Here’s another bit of info.  There is a difference between a clip and a magazine.  A clip is made from a single piece of metal that holds the rounds in place.  A magazine is made up of more than one piece of metal, usually several pieces, to hold the rounds with an internal spring that keeps the rounds pushed up so that the bolt can pick up a fresh round.  For instance, the .45 automatic pistol has a magazine.  And that’s kind of a misnomer - the pistol isn’t really ‘automatic’; it’s semi-automatic like the M1 rifle, one shot per trigger-pull.

But there is an incredible emphasis on understanding the M1 rifle, in that it is about the only thing between you and the enemy.  If you take care of it, it will take care of you.  To that end, we had to disassemble our M1’s every day, clean them and re-assemble them, and then stand inspection.  If the DI found so much as one speck of dirt, you had to do it all over again until it was judged acceptably clean.

Having become passably able to perform COD, we then began to learn the Manual of Arms.  This amounts to learning how to bring the rifle up onto a shoulder, then bring it down and transfer it to the other shoulder, how to bring it to Port Arms, various forms of rifle salutes, and so on.

Another thing about the Marines.  Everyone in the Marine Corps is first and foremost a rifleman.  Cooks, office clerks, motor pool mechanics, everyone!  It is a fact that when the chips are down, if you can’t use your weapon and hit your target, you’re useless in a battle.  We were told that there were instances in WWII where personnel in other services who had a job other than that of an infantryman were needed to man the front line, where battles were lost and men died unnecessarily because some of them had only fired a rifle in their boot camp, but never again after that.  Possibly true.  But not only is every Marine expected to know how to shoot and hit the target, they are required to qualify once a year with the rifle.  Again, everyone, officers, non-coms, and grunts alike.

I’ll tell you how well the training was pounded into me: I can, to this day, still remember the serial number of my first M1.  888217.  After we graduated from boot camp, we turned in our rifles and were issued new ones once we reached our duty assignment.  The serial number of that one was 3747117.  No lie!

A last bit of lore about the Marine Corps and rifles.  You do not ever, ever drop your rifle, or call it a “gun”.  One guy in my recruit platoon dropped his one day, and the DI made him sleep with it, holding his arms around it, for a whole week.  A recruit in a platoon next to ours made the mistake of calling his rifle a ‘gun’ and sure enough, he was ordered to run around each of the recruit platoon areas, one at a time, holding his rifle over his head with one hand and holding his crotch with the other, screaming “This is my rifle (holding it), this is my gun (holding his crotch).  This is for shooting (rifle), and this (crotch) is for fun!”  Seriously, this really happened!  I saw it!

One learns to pay close attention and learn what you’re told, very attentively, let me tell you!

Positive Energy

I have always placed a high emphasis on trying to help leave you all with good memories. Maybe it is a character flaw if I've overdone it, but confidence is high that it has worked out for you all more often than not, right?

As I've said before, Dad was always super high energy about memory making, and doing his best to be what he thought was the best parent possible. His own mom and dad, my Grandma Shirk and Grandpa Billington (Frank Jr), split up when he was fairly young. Grammy Shirk ended up marrying a not very nice man, Stanley, who really didn't treat her kids well, and in particular seemed to harbor great disdain for Dad, who was the oldest of the siblings. To hear it from Aunt Lynn, Uncle Johnny, and Aunt Barbara, Dad did his best to just stay out of sight, in the upstairs or attic, or basement, or out with friends, to avoid coming into contact with Stanley and having to absorb whatever physical or verbal abuse might get directed at him.  Dad missed out on having a good dad around, and I think he tried hard to compensate for that. Even after he and Grandma Crook split up, he kept up as best he could.

Up until I was 7 years old, my parents were together, and I didn't realize it until much later in life, but Dad's energy to try to be involved with us kids seemed limitless. As a young kid, I thought everyone's Dad did of course did those kinds of things. Later as an adult, I realized how much more he did than most parents, and for me and my siblings in particular, and more than I was ever really able to do for you guys, and that is really what led me to always try to compensate in my own way, because I never was able to match his energy level like that.

I can remember, when I was in day care during the work day, because Mom and Dad both worked, that every holiday Dad would make sure my wardrobe was ready. For example, on St. Patrick's Day, I didn't just have green pants and green socks and a green shirt... Dad also spray painted my saddle shoes green!  We would sit in a circle, I'm like 4 or 5 years old, and the staff would be leading a sing along... "I see someone with a clover bow, a clover bow..." and working their way through the kids. When they got to me, it was always, "I see someone in alllll green". No matter what holiday or event, Dad made sure my outfit was not lacking.

After day care, when I was in regular elementary school for the first time and all of 6 years old, there was going to be a Christmas program for the students and community to mark the beginning of the holiday break, and Santa Claus was going to be there for photos! Pretty cool! I mean, I knew Santa was not real by then, but at 6 years old, it is still neat.

The big day came, it was exciting to go to the school at night, just a totally different vibe than the school day. We got in line to get our photos taken, and when my turn came, I was parked in Santa's lap, and he asked what I wanted for Christmas.

Wait. I totally know that voice!

I turned and looked at him. Most of his face was obscured by the bushy white mustache and beard, and of course his hair was covered by the red stocking cap, but there were his eyes. Dad.  MY DAD IS SANTA CLAUS.

I kept my cool, because I for whatever reason decided his secret needed to be kept safe, but I still wanted to tell EVERYONE that SANTA IS MY DAD!

I still don't know how he arranged that, and didn't know until later that he didn't borrow a Santa suit, he bought it outright. He did the Santa thing for several years and at some point I noticed his suit hanging mostly hidden in the back of his closet. Even after Mom and Dad split up he did Santa for many years at my school as well as the school in Maple Valley where he ended up moving after marrying Laura (Grandma Billington).

But that was not all. The elementary school in Maple Valley also had an annual carnival in the spring, which felt a lot like the Halloween events at the Rice Lake Fire Station in Duluth, or the Trunk or Treat events at the big church in Vancouver. Lots of little booths with skill throws and toss the rings and dart the balloons and stuff like that. The first time I went to one of those, I didn't notice that he disappeared shortly after we arrived. Was having too much fun playing. At some point I heard the voice of someone entertaining kids with silly magic and making balloon animals, and it gave me the exact same kick as Santa Dad. There was this tall and round clown decked out in a full silly head to toe costume with goofy shoes, heavy face paint, big red nose, and fabulous rainbow wig. And yes, of course, it was Dad.  I had not known he knew how to do clown stuff. He had the voice, the mannerisms, the silliness. He surprised me all over again that night. And when I had found Dad's Santa costume in his closet those years later, yes, this clown suit was right with it.

I don't remember how many years he did these things, but this is a level of community involvement that I don't feel like I was ever able to match. He wanted to make good memories for us kids, but not just us, rather for all kids. In those years, he poured his energy into trying to make things better for any children who might be having a rough go. He always seemed to be trying to make the world a better place, in his own way, and I'll always be grateful and proud of him for that.

So I had you guys pick topics, and Indie chose first. "Clown sounds fun."

Yes, it absolutely was.

The Prankster

Dad was known, mainly when he was younger, for being willing to invest a great deal of time in order to pull off a great prank.  And he knew how to work with others.

Not that he wasn't afraid of impromptu fun, either. Once, when he and his younger sister, Aunt Barbara, were walking in the relatively new Lloyd Center Mall in Portland as teenagers, in the middle of the crowd, without any warning whatsoever, he stopped cold, and in his commanding voice announced:

NO! NO, I DON'T CARE IF YOU ARE PREGNANT, WE ARE NOT GETTING MARRIED!!

And then he stormed off, leaving her stunned and speechless, shocked bystanders left to draw their own conclusions and having no way to know they were actually siblings.

Aunt Barbara tells this tale with a chuckle now, but I'm sure it was highly mortifying then, being around 1960 when things weren't as loose as they are now.  I seem to recall that this was not unprovoked, that she had pulled something on him earlier and this was payback.

But this is not the tale to tell with this post.

Dad was a complete gearhead, owing to his propensity to take everything apart to understand it and put it back together again. Following his short stint in the Marines, in fact, he worked at a car dealership doing repair in their garage before getting his first big break with Boeing outside of Seattle in the late 60's. Cranking and wrenching on 1930s and 1940s roadsters was totally his thing back in and after high school.

So he and a group of his compadres set up one of their cars for the event. They rigged up a metal cup of some sort on a hinge or swivel, over the exhaust manifold, which is the hottest thing on a running car. Ran a pull cable or string into the passenger compartment to tip it on demand, and filled it with old motor oil.

Then they filled a few baskets with really critical car engine parts. Things a car absolutely cannot run without. Including things that you can't even get to without a few hours of labor digging into the engine. Things like pistons, pushrods, intake/exhaust valves, rocker arms and springs, radiator hoses, distributor caps, spark plugs and wires.  Major components. And they nested these in the engine compartment of the car.  Mind you, cars in those days had huge engine compartments with lots of extra space, they weren't hyper engineered and packed tight under the hood like cars today.

So then like eight guys would pile into the car and head out for downtown Portland. And when the timing was right and they were drawing up to a very busy intersection and were going to be at the front, someone in the car would pull the wire and tip the cup.

The oil would pour onto the exhaust manifold and instantly create billowing clouds of grey/white smoke that would pour out of the engine compartment. The driver would drop the clutch as they rolled to a stop, making the car lurch a bit before sputtering the engine dead. All the guys would jump out like it was a clown car, throw open the hood, and "go to work!".

So there they are appearing to discuss what's wrong, and guys would grab a part from one of the baskets, a couple guys would look at it, shrug like yeah we don't need that any more, and toss it over their shoulders into the intersection. There were so many guys crowded around the engine compartment that none of the bystanders around them could see what they were actually doing. Over the next 60-90 seconds, these guys are crowded around a heavily smoking car and chucking parts onto the street like nobody's business.

One of the guys was a spotter, and when he saw the light for the other direction go yellow, he gave the signal, everybody jumped back, someone slammed the hood down, they all piled in, started it up, and drove off, leaving a cloud of smoke and critical car part debris and dozens of flabbergasted onlookers to try to process what they'd just watched.

Dad loved telling this story. They did it more than once, sounds like always to great success.  And yeah, they littered, I guess.... but it was the late 1950's. Kids being kids, right?

Good times!

Dad's USMC Stories, Part 1 of 4 - How It Began

I have around 25 more notes on things I want to write about, and I keep adding to that list now and then when something comes to mind, but it's been hard to get to it after the first few.

Then I remembered that Dad wrote to me about some of his experiences in the US Marine Corps.  His time in the USMC something he was especially proud of, and these came about because I told him I wanted to know more about what that time was like. Here's the first one.

Regrettably, after getting these, I failed to follow up and ask more about it, so the four essays he wrote only cover his time in the beginning of his enlistment, while he was still in training and stateside. I got these all the way back in 2007, and always figured there'd be time to ask him to continue, but it always slipped my mind, and now the stories of his time overseas are lost. I'm having a hard time knowing my responsibility in that. But at least we have these, instead of nothing at all.

--------------

It is May 25th, 2007, the beginning of the Memorial Day 2007 weekend, and I have just discovered that F-4 is interested in the USMC part of my life.  Perhaps the interest has been there all along and I was oblivious to possible hints or signs?  I don’t know, but a chance statement of his recently led me to ask him about it.  And he was.  So here we go.

By the way, this will, at least in the beginning, probably take the form of random thoughts set to paper.  Perhaps as the thing begins to fill out, more organization will appear.  Who knows?

How it began

The first thing that occurs to me is to answer the question “At what point in my life did I become aware of the existence of the Marine Corps?”

The short answer is “I don’t know.”

The next thing is to answer the question “What led me to chose the Marine Corps?”

Read on…

I honestly cannot tell you when I became aware of the fact that The Marine Corps even existed.  Maybe it’s buried somewhere in my sub-conscious; I don’t know.  

Practically every kid - at least when I was a young boy growing up back in the 40’s and early 50’s - just seemed to be aware of America’s military forces, whether they’re imagining themselves in the cockpit of a fighter plane, on the deck of a ship, or crawling through the bushes with a rifle about to capture a hill somewhere.  In all cases, the ‘pretend’ role is that of an about-to-be hero.  Maybe it was due to how recently we were involved in WWII.  Back then, the enemy was the “Japs” or the “Germans.”  I don’t know why kids didn’t refer to the Germans as ‘Nazis’.  And in my sheltered innocence, I was mercifully unaware of the atrocities being committed against the Jews and other selected minorities by the Nazis, or against the captured Allied prisoners of war by the Japanese.

But there’s one thing that I do remember.  Once in a while, walking the four blocks home from Boy Scout meetings at Ainsworth school at eight o’clock at night, singing the Marine Corp Hymn at the top of my lungs!  Go figure.

Another little bit that I recall was having a squarish shield-shaped decal of the Marine Corps mascot - a very fierce-looking bulldog - centered on the headboard of my bed.  Not a very respectful way to treat a family antique.  I think that my father bought it for me at my request.

And the funny part of it is that I don’t care for that particular representation.  Maybe it’s because I’m a ‘cat’ person…

When I first entered high school - Benson Tech - I had great hopes and plans of going on the college.  But I didn’t easily catch on to the academic aspects of education and either flunked most of my classes or passed them with 4’s (“D’s” to you guys).  On the other hand, I did really well in my various shop classes, mechanical and architectural drawing classes, and art classes - or anything else that was more of a hands-on type of thing.  Those classes I passed with 1’s (“A”) and the occasional 2 (“B”).

Didn’t find out what was behind that problem until many years later when ADD and ADHD was identified as a cause of son Daniel’s inability to stay focused or concentrate on the task at hand.  It suddenly hit me that we were hearing the same thing from his teachers that I recalled my teachers tell my mother - - and son Jamie’s teachers tell us!  “He’s such a bright/intelligent child!  If only he’d apply himself!”

Then everything fell into place!

Keep in mind that back then, ADD kids were regarded as goof-offs - or worse.  Because of my mediocre grades, my mother transferred me to our neighborhood high school - Lincoln.  But it didn’t really make much difference.  If anything, my grades got worse.  Great in the various shop and art-type classes; horrible in academic classes.

As the end of my senior year approached, my counselor (a family friend but I can’t recall her name any more.  Nice lady, though!) told me that even though it looked like I was going to be a credit and a half short, I would be allowed to graduate.  Then, my Senior English teacher told me that she was going to have to flunk me.  Can’t blame her; I wasn’t doing the work.

Favors and natural charm aside, that ended any possibility of getting a high school diploma, let alone any thoughts of college.

So - - - now what?

Then, like now, you couldn’t get much of a job other than pushing a broom (figurative AND literally) without a high school diploma.  That pretty much left enlisting in one or another military service.

Stanley, my step-father, suggested that I’d be happiest in the Coast Guard - -even going so far as to take me to the C.G. recruiting office in downtown Portland and arranging for me to take the equivalent of today’s ASVAB test.  “So what is he suited for?”  “From these scores, just about anything he wants to try!”

I had read a lot over the years, science fiction, action/detective, westerns, and a lot of military/war as well.  I had a better idea of what life was like in the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force.  But the one that left a lasting impression on me was “Battle Cry”, by Leon Uris.  Marines seemed to be the ones who always faced the toughest odds, (mostly) won what seemed to be hopeless battles, and had by far the best self-esteem - or as the Marines call it, “Esprit” - about themselves and their service.  I’d have to say that’s probably what made me decide on the Marine Corps.

I had to have a parent sign for me since I was only 17, but enlist I did.  Now I was a Marine, complete with serial number, #1910900.  They weren’t using Social Security numbers back then.  I had to report for active duty (read = Boot Camp) about a week after the end of the school year.

There was one detail, however, that I have kept to myself for years.  I regarded enlisting in the Marine Corps as a kind of personal test.  I had always been somewhat overweight, and as a basically quiet person, I felt that if I could make it through Marine Corps Boot Camp, there wasn’t anything I couldn’t accomplish in my life!

I, along with about a dozen other foolish young men were put on a plane (four engine propeller-driven) and were flown to San Diego.  We were met at the Lindbergh Field terminal by a couple of DI’s and herded onto what were referred to as “Cattle Cars” - these can only be described as school bus bodies converted into semi-trailers - and trucked a short distance to the main gates of M.C.R.D. (Marine Corps Recruit Depot), San Diego and delivered to the Recruit Receiving Barracks.  And that’s where the infamous ‘horrors’ of Marine Corps Boot Camp began!

We were literally screamed at non-stop for the next umpteen hours.  “You maggots get off that bus NOW!”  “Not fast enough - get back on!”  Now, get off that bus, NOW!”  “What’s the matter, pansies, not used to doing what you’re told?”  Get back on that bus, and when I say ‘Get off’, I want to see nothing but a blur of assholes and elbows movin’ so fast that your eyes will be watering!”  Now get off that bus and each one of you worthless excuses for human beings stand on a pair of those yellow-painted footprints over there!”

We’re talking about three or four rows of pairs of yellow-painted shoe outlines in the precise position of attention.  Each one of us - and there were others already there - were to stand at rigid attention, one person per pair of outlines, until the DI’s were good and ready to have us do something else.  Needless to say, we were all scared shitless!

“No, asshole, right shoe on the right outline, left shoe on the left outline!”  “What’s the matter; can’t you tell your right from your left?”  “Well let me tell you, you’d better learn REAL fast or I will make you the most miserable turd on the face of the planet!”

I don’t remember how long we stood there.  I do know that from time to time, more of the Cattle Cars would pull up and another ten or a dozen guys would get off, only to be greeted the same way, and found themselves in short order standing in quivering fear on those notorious yellow shoe outlines.

Eventually we were ‘herded’ off to receive what is known as a “Bucket Issue”.  This is a collection of basic needs, soap, toothpaste, razor, shaving lather, official USMC Boot Camp notebook, mechanical pencil, a set of USMC underwear, utility trousers, a tan web belt with a brass buckle, a red sweatshirt with the USMC emblem on the front, a utility cover (hat), a pair of Marine Corps green cushion-sole socks, a pair of boondocker shoes - all kinds of stuff to tide us through the first day.  And oh yes, a galvanized bucket.  We carried all of that stuff in it.

Next we were taken to the barber shop, where our hair all hit the floor in short order - zip, zip, zip, in about 15 or 20 seconds - just like you see it in the movies!  Then to the showers.

Once we were all clean-shaven and had dressed in our uniforms - buttoned all the way up to the neck - we were taken into a kind of auditorium where we were to take everything that we’d brought with us out of our pockets.  And I mean everything.  All pocket knives were confiscated, along with any medications.  (I’d brought along a very nice switchblade knife that I’d just rebuilt with a slightly stronger spring - gone forever.  Tsk, tsk!)

We packed all of our civilian clothes, shoes, etc into boxes and addressed them back to our homes.  The boxes were all collected and mailed off.  Mine was waiting for me when I got home in December for Christmas leave.

Off to the (temporary) recruit barracks where we were issued two sheets, two blankets, a pillow and pillow case, and shown how to make up our ‘racks’ (beds).  You know the story about how a military bed isn’t made up properly until a quarter will bounce on it?  One of the DI’s who was demonstrating how to make up our racks did exactly that - bounced a quarter off of the extremely taught bedclothes.  Of course, he immediately tore the demo bed apart and instructed the recruit to do it himself - no free rides!  And we all had to do it over and over again until his quarter would bounce.  We were at it for at least an hour.  By now it’s probably 3:00 AM - oh three hundred by military time.

We were all exhausted - and scared.  What had we let ourselves in for???

The lights came back on at 0430, accompanied by the DI walking down the length of the squad bay, rapping his swagger stick along the metal bunk frames and screaming at us to get out of the racks, get dressed, and fall in outside.  And oh by the way?  We had two minutes to do it in.  Of course, most of us didn’t make it.  More screaming.  The beginning of how it was going to be for the next twelve weeks, as members of Recruit Platoon 353.

The License Plates

 Dad was into vanity license plates, and a handful of them graced various vehicles over the years.

When he married Grandma Billington, she was already driving a van with the vanity plate 7DWARFS. That got an upgrade, to 9 KIDS, now that Aunt Karen and I were in the mix.  When Uncle Daniel was born, it was promptly upgraded again, to 10 KIDS.  Although I don't know how many of them you met, after the original group of us kids were adults, Grandma and Grandpa Billington eventually adopted five more children from various sources, from the foster system.  15 KIDS.  Lots of looks on the road, no doubt.

There were others of course.  Every Ham Radio call sign Dad went through after he reobtained his license as an adult in the 90s, until he got the highest license rating, he had the plates for, too. KG7HB was his first one. I don't remember the other call signs now, but once he got his Extra Class rating, he filed for a vanity call sign to go with it, W7FJB, and of course got those plates as well.  Those call sign plates were what he kept on his daily driver for probably the last 20+ years.  He loved being a ham radio operator, one of many hobbies that he honestly never made enough time to enjoy for himself.

The plate he had from even before I was born, and kept active on his 1963 Dodge Sedan even after it was undriveable, was FJB 3.  W7FJB had displaced it as his #1, but the FJB 3 plates were dutifully renewed annually, and those new reissue plates would come in sometimes. He wouldn't install the new ones, because no need, but he absolutely was not going to let them go back into the vanity pool, either. Here's one of the pristine, never installed ones.

Another notable plate was DADCAT, which kicked around for quite a while in the 1990s, and I think most of you remember when we got the MOMMY plates put on Mom's car when we lived at the Fire Station House. When Dad and Grandma Crook were first married, vanity plates were really not her thing, but Dad convinced her to put in for some. In those days, nothing about that process was electronic, so you had to write down three choices. Someone somewhere would get the form routed to them, manually check the files to see if anyone already had the plate you wanted.  If so, they'd check your second and then third choice.  If all were taken, you'd get a letter telling you to try again. Grandma Crook put in for PATTY for her first choice, and her initials RPB for her second one. Unsure what to do for option three, she just put down MOMMY.  And that's what showed up, weeks later.  In retrospect, it's amazing that one wasn't already taken, too.  That was in 1974.

After all the kids grew up and moved out, Grandma Crook signed over the MOMMY plates to Aunt Karen, who drove with them for many years, but eventually your cousin David grew up.  Karen decided it was time to let them go, and we had moved back to Washington by then, so they went to us, which was awesome. I remember riding in Grandma Crook's 1963 Pontiac Station wagon, in the back, no seat belts of course, all the time, with those plates on it, and then her other cars she bought later.  There's another story about the Pontiac wagon and fire trucks.... making a note for later.... but having the MOMMY plates at our house, on a car that you guys all got to ride in.... pretty cool full circle for me.

Mom of course moved to California eventually, and couldn't keep them since she no longer lived in Washington. I had those plates transferred to the blue cargo trailer to hold onto them while I was still there.  When I decided to move back to Nebraska, I gifted them to Ashley Domingo, one of the moms from VanWestCC who had six children of her own and who I was sure would treasure them as much as our family did.  Those MOMMY plates were in the family for 47 years!

As an aside, around the time I first got Farley the Dodge Diplomat, I became aware of how license plate numbers were assigned in Washington. Several years before, Washington had rolled out the blue mountain on white background as seen a few paragraphs up, and reset their numbering scheme from XXX000 to 000XXX so they could start over at 001AAA.  Farley's plates were 437DJH, and I kept noticing a bunch of other DJH plates around locally, like more than I expected under the assumption that plates were assigned statewide.  I asked Dad about this, since he bought and sold so many cars through the GSA state auctions (yet another tale) and knew the folks at the DMV on a first name basis.  Turns out, batches of plates are sent to the various county DMV locations, so having a bunch of plates in the same sequence being issued out of one location would of course result in you seeing that sequence often in the general area of that office.  Which makes a lot of sense, of course.

I observed over the next few years, as updated sequences were coming out, that the 000D__ plates had given way to the 000E__ plates, and the 000F__ plates were coming up fast. I mentioned to Dad at some point that the the F-series plates were of course going to come up and cross FJB at some point, and wondered where.

Well, like I said, Dad knew people.

Several months later, Mom and I moved to Nebraska for the first time. It was 1993.

I didn't register Farley in Nebraska right away, because it wasn't clear how long we would be there.  Kept renewing the Washington plates, because we were, after all, college students, not ingrained residents, yet. Turned out that helped make the upcoming surprise possible.

One day, got a thick envelope from the State of Washington.  Huh, what's this?  Opened it up, and could not believe what I was holding.

Standard issue sequence plates, from Washington.  Not vanity plates, but regular serial sequence plates like everyone else gets.

004FJB

Are you SERIOUS??

So, the rest of the story.  Dad went to the DMV and talked to his People, in that friendly disarming way that he did, and inquired about how each office got whichever letter sequences they do.  Turns out they just routinely order batches of plates when they get relatively low, to make sure they have the next ones in before they run out of whatever is on hand.  The letter sequence they'd get when they did this was just whatever was next, no rhyme or reason.  So Dad laid out his plan and explained why it would be so cool, and the ladies at his DMV office there loved it.  From that day forward, they checked daily to see what letter sequences the State was up to and had issued to various offices, and when the FJB plates were included in the next batch to go out, they ordered that batch in even though they didn't really quite need them yet.  Upon arrival, they removed both sets, 003FJB and 004FJB, and gave Dad a call.

Dad pulled off a lot of impossible miracles in his life, no doubt, but this one is right up there with the best of them.  How does anyone manage to get regular series license plates for their car with their initials? There's 1000 plates per letter sequence, so take 1000 random people and maybe you might get a few hits. But if you have a roman numeral after your name and get that plate with the right number?  Inconceivable.  Unless you're Frank Billington III and have lots of People on your team.

The next year we decided we were in Nebraska to stay, for a while anyway, and registered the car there and got Nebraska plates on it. But this event was one of the greatest surprise gifts ever, and I still have those plates, somewhere, they will always be treasured.  I don't know if Dad ever installed the 003FJB plates on anything. He certainly registered them to one of his cars, but I don't know which one.  I'm certain they're still around, and I hope that Grandma Billington does not toss them...