Dierdre – Vic Socotra

18 AUG 78

Standing two watches — both 24 hrs.- sitting here at the Squadron Duty Officer’s desk. Drinking strong Navy coffee. Waiting for the many varieties of hassles, problems & general aggravation which Fridays (after payday & prior to leaving port) can provide for the stalwart Junior Officer.

Busy week. Spent Monday on watch. Tuesday was a recovery day from the ravages of the Fightin’ Vigilantes Mess Night and Dining In up at the O’ Club at NAS Atsugi. A glittering affair, participants á la mode de riguer. Heavily starched dress whites, or bizarre starched mess jackets with miniature medals & cummerbunds for the gentlemen. Formals for the ladies, naturally. Heh. Sorta like a costume prom. Heavy on the ritual… and not at all bad, really.

Six course meal, different vin pedestrian for each and every. Witty repartee regaled the crowd. (I just about died laughing until the fickle finger of J’accuse settled on the beam-ish boy hisself. Me). Port & a series of toasts completed the festivities, or at least the formal variations thereof.

I was escorting Capt. Crown’s daughter Deirdre. She is nice, but very eighteen. Disco style dancing to the Navy band off the Oklahoma City rounded out the program, save the near obligatory skinny-dipping in the O’ Club pool under the glittering Far East stars.

V/R,

Vic

********

That is all there is to the one page letter. But what was amazing to the archivist was that Deirdre’s Story is a Useful Transition that runs across a century and three continents and goes right to our Galley.

Some people drift out of our lives so quietly that we don’t realize they’ve stayed with us until decades later.

The real Deirdre was Captain Crown’s daughter. We met in Japan during my fixed-wing VF-151 years in the Far East and Indian Ocean. One evening I escorted her to a Squadron Dining Out at NAS Atsugi. In my journal I wrote simply, “She is nice, but very eighteen.”

Life, of course, kept moving.

The Crowns rotated back to San Diego when their time was up . Deirdre found her own course, attending UCLA and eventually working around Hollywood—not as a star, but as one of the countless people who make productions happen. Running errands, organizing schedules, learning how creative people actually turn ideas into finished work. It was an education in storytelling.

Marriage followed, along with a daughter, and like so many Americans of her generation, she discovered that life rarely follows the script we imagine at twenty. There were successes, disappointments, changing times, and a marriage that drifted through enough crisis that it failed. The steady work of raising a family amid it while the world reinvented itself around her.

Years later, after her daughter left for college in New Hampshire, Deirdre found herself alone in the condo in Del Mar wondering what came next.

The answer arrived unexpectedly aboard the USS Midway Museum during a VF-151 reunion of old Japan hands.

And there, almost by design, she ran into Vic.
The years disappeared in minutes. Old stories became new conversations, and before long she accepted an invitation to visit Washington, D.C., for “a little while.”

That little while turned into something else.

Watching Vic work reminded her of something she’d seen years before in the squadron ready rooms. The airplanes were important, but the real strength of VF-151 had never been the airplanes. It was the people. They documented everything. They taught one another. They built trust, laughed hard, worked hard, and created a network that endured for decades.

“What if,” she asked one afternoon in the kitchen, “we treated cooking the same way?”

Not as recipes.

As a process.

As stories.

As a way of showing people that ordinary meals become memorable when someone takes the time to explain why things work.

That conversation became Cooking With Oil.

Deirdre became the project’s producer, organizer, and hostess—the person asking the questions readers were already thinking. She helped turn kitchen experiments into lessons, and lessons into stories worth sharing.

In many ways, she discovered that a good kitchen isn’t very different from a good squadron.

People learn together.

They take care of one another.

They laugh.

They make mistakes.

They improve.

And somewhere along the way, they become a family.