(Mac Showers at the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor this last June on the 70th Anniversary of the Battle of Midway).
I did not know that the Tigers had swept the Yankees, a first for anyone against the titans in Pinstripes in 32 years.
I rose at 0300 on Thursday morning to catch a connecting flight from one place to another, and prepared to drag bags through a couple airports.
The flight from Reagan National was a piece of cake, if one discounts the dull ache from being in a parking structure at 0430. No one else was around and the TSA screeners must change shifts around then to prepare for the rush of early activity when noise abatement rules say the jets can start launching out of Alexandria and into the wide world.
Anyway, no muss and no fuss on the first attempt at air travel since the accident.
The complexities of age occurred to me as I lurched out of my seat from the first leg of the trip at O’Hare in Chicago. There are so many things to think about in the Windy City. I had some great times with my son there, when he was living in Wrigleyville just a couple blocks from the grand old steel-girdered stadium.
I was going to write you a story this morning about Butch O’Hare, the Navy pilot whose heroics inspired a nation in the dark days after Pearl Harbor. An F4F-3 Wildcat pulled from the bottom of Lake Michigan harks back to the days when two converted lake boats served as fresh-water training platforms for Navy pilots far from the prying eyes of enemy U-Boats the lurked under the surface of the big salt water.
The fresh water aircraft carriers were on the lake front when Mac was a Midshipman, and there may be- or have been- a couple hundred Navy fighters on the sandy bottom. A company has entered into a partnership with the Naval Aviation Museum- I could go off on a tanget about the differences between ocean and fresh-water salvage law, but I won’t.
I did take a couple pictures of one of the salvaged Hellcats. It is on the concourse on the long hike between the “B” terminal and the “F” wing where the regional jets fly.
It was interesting- I thought I would send the pictures to Mac and see if they brought back some recollections of the fresh-water aircraft carriers and Butch O’Hare’s heroics in his Pacific.
And I was writing things up that way when Mac’s son called. He took ill on Monday, which is why he did return my email or answer his phone. He was at the Arlington Medical Center ER, and then, according to his son, was transferred to hospice care.
He was having some difficulty breathing, but he was lucid as ever. Naturally, he weighed the options and elected the course that would allow him to sleep.
I asked his son what the doctors were telling him, and wondered for the second time this year, if I could make it across the country in time to beat something final.
His son told me yesterday it was hours or days. Today it appears to be hours. It is Mac’s choice and on Mac’s terms.
Pray for him, won’t you? If this is it, we are all going to be losing a really good pal.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com