There is nothing else I can say this morning.   Photo Copyright Universal. Pain courtesy USMC.   Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com Subscribe to the RSS feed!

I am seated outside the room at the Bay Willows Motor Hotel. I searched for suitable lodging in the region and bounded my search to older places where you can park in front of the room. The Bay Willow met the criterion I have established. Old, low, a little funky, no smoking room, but easy […]

(Amidships superstructure, ex-USS Olympia. Photo Socotra) If you did not party hard for New Year’s last night, the start of the US Government’s Fiscal 2011 spending year, I can understand. Those terrified members of Congress have fled the District without doing their jobs, again, and we will be under a Continuing Resolution until they slink […]

(Black Gang on Protected Cruiser SIX. Photo USN, imaged from a picture in the forward boiler room of ex-USS Olympia.) The rain has been soaking the parched earth since last night. It is welcome, after the weeks of drought, but the gentle sound in the night made me think of all manner of things, you […]

(Five-inch naval rifle on the port side of ex-USS Olympia, facing BB-62 ex-USS New Jersey. Photo Socotra.) I was standing with Captain Harry Burkhadt in the starboard coal bunker of the Protected Cruiser ex-USS Olympia. I looked at my watch. The train back to Washington was going to leave at four; it was clear I […]

(Stokers. Official Navy Picture)   Captain Harry is completely at home in Olympia’s engine room. It is his, after all. If there is a spirit in this magnificent ship, he is the epitome of the life-force.   He has been in her hull, cleaning and polishing, since he was a teenager when he began working […]

(Walnut and Brass-bound steam trunk. Photo Socotra) “See, people think that the ship is built around the engine, the way they do now. Wasn’t true then. The Union Iron Works in San Francisco built the two engines, assembled and tested them ashore and then disassembled them and constructed them again here in the ship. Every […]

(Captain Harry and the paneling on Officer’s Row. Photo Socotra.)   “You know what these are,” he said, fingering a brass ring mounted at the top of each panel. I nodded, though I had no clue and was frankly overwhelmed by the highly polished wooden deck beneath my feet, and the notion that this had […]

(ex-USS New Jersey, one of four Iowa-class Battlewagons BB-62 at her resting place. Photo Socotra).   We walked past the entrance to the indoor Seaport Museum to take in the vista of bedraggled Camden across the Delaware River. There, the Iowa-Class battlewagon ex-USS New Jersey (BB-62)  looms like a long gray mountain across the slate […]

(Classic Olympia Beer label, circa 1914. Legacy Copyright SABMiller Corp.)   I remember the slogan for Olympia-brand beer, from the Great Pacific Northwest. Maybe you do, too. “It’s the water!” they proudly proclaimed in the days when there were three television channels and life made a certain non-ironic sense.   I haven’t seen any Oly […]