Memorial Day 2021

There are few things in life that bug me more than what happens every year on Memorial Day weekend. Memorial Day is not the unofficial first day of summer. It is not National BBQ Day. It is not an excuse to have a furniture sale, auto sale, or department store sale. It is The Day set aside to remember those that have given their lives in military service for our country. Don't get me wrong, I don't think we need to spend the entire day in quiet mourning and reflection, but people PLEASE!! at least think about what the day really means at some point. It is not to honor past and current service members, ONLY those that have made the ultimate sacrifice! The constant attempt to tie in the "Thank You For Your Service" crap for the day is nauseating. If I am walking around alive then this day is to remember someone else. More recently, the media tries to get it right, but they still fuck it up. 

For the week leading up to Memorial Day I fly the POW/MIA flag below the US flag on my lighted flagpole. On Memorial Day, I remove it so that I can lower the US flag to half-staff from sunrise until noon, when the US flag is raised to full staff and the POW/MIA flag goes back up until the next day and stays up until early June. This method of flying the US flag is spelled out in US Code 4 Section 7 Paragraph (m). The following poem was written at the height of WWI, and should be familiar to any choir members I may be preaching to.

In Flanders Field by John McCrae 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

 

Why is Memorial Day so important to me? PFC Stephen D. Tingley, USMC was a childhood friend that could always crack me up. In elementary school we had tons of fun and got into a lot of trouble together. When I first met him in the 4th grade and until sometime in middle school, he wore braces on his legs because of something wrong with his hips, that he was supposed to outgrow. Sometime in middle school I think it was, the braces came off and he became quite the athlete. In middle school and early high school we played baseball together. In high school he played varsity baseball and soccer. Since we ended up at different high schools, in later years we drifted apart. Apparently Stephen joined the Marines right out of school, where I joined the Army Reserves more than a year after graduation. I was married two months when we got the news about the cowardly savage killing of sleeping Marines in Beirut by jihadi scum. Just about everyone in town that knew Stephen were at his funeral. There was a horse drawn wagon carrying his flag-draped coffin to the cemetery for military honors. He was not buried there. I saw classmates I had not seen since middle school, but no one had a happy reunion, it was the saddest thing you ever saw, and the silence was deafening. It will be 38 years since his passing this year, and I still have the gaping hole in my heart. I asked his father many years later where Stephen was buried. He would only say he was cremated, leading me to believe the family has his ashes. I also know his sister, but can't bring myself to ask her either. There is also some confusion as to his rank. He was definitely a PFC when he died, but I have also seen references to him as Lance Corporal. He may have been posthumously promoted.

KIA October 23, 1983 Beirut, Lebanon

 

 

The Marines were in Lebanon as part of a multi-national peace keeping force, not an offensive combat role. As we know, jihadi scum only relish in death and war, so they had to take out the infidel peace keepers. This is one of the many reasons I hope to kill at least one jihadi (but hopefully more) before I die.

The Ellington, CT Memorial to the war dead

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On my biker vest, which is mostly military themed for The Patriot Guard, I have an "In Memory Of" patch for Stephen on the back.

David Chipman is a Real Piece of Shit

Instead of a confirmation hearing, he should be on trial for 82 counts of first degree murder for the fatal seige on the Branch Davidians. Upon being found guilty, have an immediate death sentence carried out by being burned alive in his house, just like the ATF and the Fibbies dished out in Waco.

Happy Birthday Dad

 

 

 

 

 

Today would have been Dad's 87th birthday. Only my one aunt that was married to my Dad's younger brother remains from that generation of my grandparent's children. Cousins and spouses that were the offspring of both sets of grandparent's siblings remain, but they are passing away rapidly.

Dad served on active duty in the US Navy from 1952 until 1956, then in the Naval Reserves until his Honorable Discharge in 1960. In his day GMM3 stood for "Gunners Mate Mounts 3rd Class" where today it is Gunners Mate Missile. Always on aircraft carriers, he operated the 5 inch guns located in exposed tubs on the starboard side aft under the flight deck. He served on three ships; the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt CVA-42 (Midway Class), the USS Bennington CV-20 (Essex Class), and the USS Lake Champlain CV-39 (Essex Class).

Dad posing at his gun mount aboard the USS Bennington at Port of Call in Cannes, France on 11-23-53

He was aboard the USS Bennington when the hydraulic catapults exploded, setting off secondary explosions from the ammunition magazines located underneath. This occurred while cruising off Narragansett Bay on his 20th birthday, May 26, 1954 and put the Bennington out of commission. 103 crewmen were killed, 201 were injured, and the Bennington made it back to Quonset Point, RI under her own power. Because he still had active duty time to serve, he was re-assigned to the Florida based Lake Champlain.

Dad remembered that day until he died even with his dementia (just not all the details). He was on KP that morning, running the potato peeling machine in an aft galley. He felt the explosions and then the fire alarms sounded. When he tried to get to his damage control station which was forward, he was turned back by what he only described as "guards" but I assume that was Marines. He said it was much later on that he was able to go up onto the flight deck, and he said where the explosions happened it was bent and buckled and badly damaged. Below is a newsreel video about the disaster.

During his time in the Navy, he was quite the photographer. I have his old cameras; an Argus 35mm and a Zeiss Movikon 8 wind up 8mm movie camera. In the early 1950's he was shooting COLOR standard 8mm movies. I have some great footage from his Navy days of Spain, Greece, and Italy. He filmed his ship under way, a refueling from an oiler, as well as flight operations. He also shot a snowball fight that occurred somewhere under way in the North Atlantic. I also have a great collection of still photos. I used that Argus camera myself until I got my first Minolta 35mm back in the late `80's or early `90's. As an aside, I also found and possess my Mom's old cameras from her younger days, a Kodak Brownie and a Pony 135.

He married my Mom in 1959, they had us kids in the early `60's. He worked his entire career in the printing business, until retirement, which he learned in a trade high school before the Navy. After finding retirement boring, he went back to work as a school bus driver which he loved. He quit doing that at age 70, because the state requires anyone over 70 to get an annual DOT medical exam, but the bus company would only pay for one every two years. He and my Mom took care of my maternal grandparent's until their deaths in 2005 and 2009. My parents hit their 50th wedding anniversary and lived in the same house together since 1963. Mom passed in 2010 and Dad lived as a widowed old guy, doing all the normal old guy stuff until 2016 when he fell and broke a hip. After time in a rehab facility he went back home, and it became apparent that he wasn't quite right. He was diagnosed with dementia and when it got to the point he could not be left alone, he ended up with a live in health aide until his death in 2018. He was buried with full military honors in the same grave already occupied by my mother. Since the caskets are stacked in the vault, the big family joke is Dad will be on top of Mom for all eternity.

So Happy Birthday, Dad... I will raise a glass in your honor later today, and try to head over to the cemetery this Memorial Day Weekend.

Making Bobby Flay's Spicy Pickles

From his recipe on the Food Network website. 

My sister-in-law had made a batch of spicy hot pickle chips a few months ago and gave us a jar. I really enjoyed them and wanted more. I came across Bobby Flay's recipe online and finished gathering the fresh ingredients today. It was an excuse to take "The Beast" out for a spin to the grocery store.

The vinegar based pickling brew cooling to room temperature before adding dill and cilantro

Chopping up the dill. Recipe calls for 3 tablespoons. The cilantro waits in the background

Sliced mini cucumber chips in a brand new 1 quart Mason Jar. I sliced them thinner than called for

The finished product ready for four days in the fridge. Ready to eat on Saturday

Since it was a nice warm afternoon I had the house windows open. While I was finishing up I heard gunfire from up in the woods, most likely coming from my good neighbor's range. Funny thing is it is over the hill behind Bitchy McBitchy Bitchface's house, but definitely close enough to hear well and she can't do a fuckin' thing about it. She was home too, and I'll bet seething with anger. I sent a text to see if it was him. The exchange went like this:

Me: "I hear the sounds of FREEDOM!"

Me: "I hope it is pissing off and freaking out my gun hatin' neighbor

Him: "Ha. How do Pal?"

Me: "Good. Thinking about going to the range later this week. Just gonna shoot .22 pistols. Got a few thousand rounds, so plenty."

Him: "Nice. Availability is getting better. Prices still high. Enjoy"

I'm not exactly sure what day I'll go. Supposed to be possibly severe stormy weather tomorrow afternoon and I have a couple of things I want to do beforehand. It's also going to be a scorcher and I don't find shooting pleasant with sweat dripping in my eyes. Thursday or Friday looks more promising and while at the club I need to sign up for working at the annual clambake in July.

Another Post In My "Old School" Series

 I'll start with the photo.

Western Electric Model 500W Black

This is all we originally had in my childhood home for most of the first decade we lived there. It had the standard 3 foot cord and was mounted on the wall in our kitchen. These older phones were hard wired, not the newer modular versions where the phone and the cords were easily unplugged and replaced. They were owned by the phone company and charged for as part of the monthly phone bill. If it needed repair, you had to call the phone company. DIY repairs or mods were VERBOTTEN and parts were next to impossible to get. But I remember my Dad putting a longer cord on the phone. My grandfather was a plant electrician at Monsanto in Springfield, MA and got a longer black cord from one of the Monsanto in-house New England Telephone technicians. He was told to replace the cord wires exactly as they were and how to open the phone unit. My Dad did the replacement successfully, and us kids were instructed to keep quiet about it. He didn't want us to say something to a school chum and end up having the parent working for the phone company. The phone company might check the records and find we weren't paying for a long cord... THE HORROR! No wonder AT&T had to get broken up back in 1984, the freakin' fear they instilled in people!

Anyway, we had an extension phone added in my parent's bedroom after an incident in the middle of the night. My parents were both members of the town volunteer ambulance corps. Mom was on duty during the day when we were in school, and Dad at night once a week or so. Dispatch was done by telephone. One late night, the phone rang, and Dad did a face plant into the living room while running down the hall to get the single phone in the kitchen. On a rotating basis, the ambulance was parked in our driveway, and I remember riding in it after my Mom picked it up for my Dad in the afternoon after she picked us up from school. The photo below is of a privately owned same era ambulance at a car show.

1964 Cadillac Ambulance

 

Anyway, back to the phone. Dialing a rotary phone actually takes some skill and manual dexterity in order to dial accurately. The dial is a spring wound mechanism that operates a make/break set of contacts timed to operate at 10 pulses per second. So a dialed "4" is four open/close cycles of the contacts, an "8" is eight open/close cycles, etc. A "0" was the full 10 cycles. As an aside, a rotary phone would work on a touch-tone enabled line, but a touch-tone phone wouldn't work on a rotary only line. This was back when all anyone had was a landline, and a rotary only line was cheaper and most likely what grandma and grandpa had. I was a landline holdout, but finally got rid of it 3 or 4 years ago. I had the ringers turned off and no answering machine or voicemail, and only used it for calling 911 or for pizza.

I know this will sound dumb to have to explain, but bear with me. To dial a number; you place your dominant index finger in the hole next to the desired digit, spin the dial clockwise all the way to the metal finger stop, and pull your finger straight out and all the way out of the hole allowing the dial to rotate counter-clockwise unimpeded. Repeat the process until the entire phone number is dialed. Not going all the way to the finger stop or allowing your "finger to linger" in the hole on the dial will result in misdialed or wrong numbers. Prior to the country running out of phone numbers in the early 1990's, you did not have to dial the area code for numbers that were local or in the same area code. Farther back than that, 5 digit dialing was allowed within the same exchange office. I remember calling my neighbor up the road about him taking me fishing and just dialing 5-2812, dropping the leading "87". All that convenience went away when Kommiecticut went to statewide 911 and the central offices all got upgraded to digital. Prior to the 911 system, every police/fire/ambulance service had an individual local number listed in the blue pages of the yearly phone book. Most people had the numbers for their emergency services on a hand written note on the refrigerator or near the phone. Some local fire departments would do a printed refrigerator magnet with the numbers on it for their area as a freebie or fundraiser.

I am going to pay closer attention to what people say. Old farts like me will still say "dial the number" when referring to making a phone call, and I believe the younger crowd just says "make a call."