Something quite ordinary happened in the wake of the great mobilizations required to ensure victory over the Kaiser and the Fuhrer and the Commissars, and a sad compromise in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam.   Dick Nixon told us that “everything we knew about Vietnam was wrong,” except for the end of it. […]

(A Zumwalt-era Beard on USS Midway sailor) The drive home covered 768 Miles in 11 hours and 20 minutes. I was moderately interested by the pace, once I got the car parked in the garage, since it was the night of the same day I had departed the little town in Michigan, and I had […]

(Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt. Official Navy Photo.) It is colder than shit outside this morning, bone chilling even in the guest apartment where I stay when I am here in Northern Michigan. The wind is still hammering the side of the building and blowing the lake-effect snow around the driveway. It is time to start […]

My sons are roaming around the island where they were born this morning- or better said, they are asleep, six hours behind us in the Midwest, and they will rise, in good time, to gentle breeze and an embracing climate redolent with the smell of blossoms.   There is lakes-effect snow here, and the temperature […]

(The Brand New Ilikai Hotel, Waikiki, 1965)   The crunch of the snowplow outside- a few cursory passes by a man in a dirty white pick-up truck- signals the call to the breakfast table and the start of a new day with the folks. I am not far on Mom’s List, which includes printers and […]

  My sons are leaving for the island of their birth this morning, starting from Dulles and O’Hare, respectively. They intend to poke around the places they knew only as little boys, and I envy them the gentle breezes.   It is bone cold here in Michigan after a Christmas thaw, and the longest night […]

    It is Christmas Day; I am in the Big Top for the moment, which is what we call the little apartment above the garage that I use when I am here in the Northland. It has some great memories and was Dad’s last great project, when he could still do things.   It […]

Gentle Readers,   I am Elyria, Ohio, in a Super 8, since I could not make a credible attempt at finishing the drive in one day on the second shortest of the year.   Dante would have reserved one of the rings of his hell for motels like this, but it has grown on me […]

(Nebraska Avenue in Navy Days) Oh, yes, of course there was now an NSA, the radio equivalent of DIA. The creation of the agency had merged the Girl’s School activities of the Army Security Agency at Arlington Hall and the Naval Security Group at Nebraska Avenue in the NW District.   Both facilities had been […]

(CNO Arliegh Burke (l) is relieved by George Anderson. Photo Life Magazine)   At the height of the Cuban crisis, the new Secretary with his slicked-back hair would stalk past the Marine with only a glance into CNO Flag Plot on the fourth deck of the Pentagon and demand to speak on radiotelephone with the […]