Seat Belts, Etc.

When I was a youngster, cars didn't have seat belts. Sometime around 1955, my friend Willie was given an old car, but he was nowhere near old enough to drive on the roads, so he taught himself to drive in a field and former woodlot on his family farm. He'd slide around corners, bounce through a swale that had been cut for drainage, and bounce off stumps. Naturally, that old Dodge got beat up pretty quickly. Finally, the driver's door got so battered that it would neither close tight nor fully open, so Willie took it off, but whizzing through that woodlot with no driver's door got a bit frightening to him, so he improvised. He cut two holes in the floorboard behind the driver's seat and wound a length of heavy farm rope through the holes, leaving the ends pulled up beside the seat. Before he'd fire that old car up, he'd tie himself into his car by knotting the rope in his lap.

He survived.

It took me a while longer to learn about seat belts, but then I didn't have an old woodlot to learn on. In the summer of 1961, I bought a 1950 Chevrolet sedan. The seats were finished with sort of a fuzzy fabric that had seen better days. The seams were pulling apart and that yellowish foam rubber was beginning to show, so I put a nylon seat cover on the front bench seat. It took a couple of hours to get it installed, pulling it tight with little hog ring clips, and tucking it into the crack beneath the seat back. When it was all in place and looking pretty sharp, I hopped in, fired up that 90 horsepower straight six, and zoomed off up Hwy 120 towards town.

At the intersection with Main Street in front of the Baptist Church, I slapped the brake pedal, shifted into second, and floorboarded the gas pedal, palming the steering wheel to turn left, heading into the village. Those brand new nylon seat covers were slippery, so slippery in fact, that I slid completely out from under the steering wheel. If I hadn't had a grip on the wheel, I'd probably have wrapped that old Chevy around one of the giant sugar maples in Con Chellis' yard. Fortunately, my foot slipped off the gas pedal, too, and because the car was in second gear, we slowed enough that I could pull myself back into place and bring my car under control.

Within the next few days, I went to the Western Auto Store and purchased three sets of seat belts, took them home, and installed them.  .

"Why three," you ask.

I needed to protect the various young ladies I anticipated would be sitting next to me on that wide bench seat, so I put one seat belt in the middle, but I wanted anyone else who might ride with me to also be safe, so I put another set on the right hand side.

I've used seat belts ever since, so I've been using them for 48 years, only not using them when I was in Vietnam and needed to be able to get off that jeep or six-by just as fast as possible.   I've also promoted seat belt use in a way that I felt would get attention from the intended audience.  Some readers will know that I spent nearly twenty-eight years in the US Air Force, but unless you were in my sphere of influence, you wouldn't know how I promoted seat belt use.  From the days in 1976 when I became the Squadron Safety NCO, through two stints as a maintenance workcenter supervisor, two tours as a First Sergeant, a position as Vice President of an electronic security company, and a short-lived stint as a Deputy Commander for Cadets in the Civil Air Patrol, I have posted a United States Savings Bond with the offer that I'd cash it and give the money to anyone who could catch me driving a motor vehicle without buckling the seat belt.  I've been stopped on the street in Tucson, Honolulu, Washington, DC and suburban Virginia and Maryland by people in my charge trying to catch me.  I'm certain some reveled in being given the opportunity to stop their Sergeant, and later, Chief, and, to be perfectly honest, I reveled in them doing it.  It was my form of hitting the mule between the eyes with a two-by-four.  It was my attention-getting step.  

During duck season last year, our son and one of his buddies came out to the house to do some hunting down on the lake.  When they were leaving, I noticed that the buddy hadn't buckled the seat belt in his jacked-up four wheel drive pickup, so I shouted at him to buckle up.  

He stopped, rolled down his window, and said, "I don't wear them.  I don't want to get trapped in here if I have an accident."  

I tried arguing with him, but his mind was made up.

What brought this up on a sunny day in February?  In a town nearby this afternoon, an eight year old girl was killed in an accident at an intersection.  The vehicle she was in remained intact, but she wasn't wearing a seat belt and was thrown out of the car.

That little girl might still be alive if her mother had been given some sort of attention-getting step.

Great Expectations

In my high school days at Kimball Union Academy, my teachers often commented that "Jimmy needs to try harder" and "Jimmy is smart enough, he just doesn't apply himself."  Now, mind you, that was sixty-some-odd years ago and I'd like to think that in those interim years I've been able to apply myself with enough vigor to at least merit the diploma that the Headmaster handed me on the sunny day in early June, 1960.

I obviously didn't apply myself at  Northeastern University, or else I'd now have a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Management.  I really didn't apply myself very well in the Air Force schooling, getting by with enough to pass, but even today, I fear I never really understood what happened when you varied the amount of voltage applied to a grid in a vacuum tube or what the real difference was between NPN and PNP transistors.  The Air Force, as an employer, though, saw that while I didn't fully understand why a particular amount of current should be read at a certain test point, I had a real good idea of what the ramifications might be if I didn't replace the circuit board when the reading didn't match that required in the Technical Order.

You see, my first assignment in the Air Force was as a Launch and Checkout Equipment Technician on Titan I intercontinental ballistic missiles.  If Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev had an inkling that I (and others like me) were not smart enough to find failed circuit boards and replace them to keep our Titan I fleet on alert, the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis might have been totally different.  President John F. Kennedy, Secretary Robert Strange McNamara (aka Uncle Bob, no matter that we probably weren't related),  General Maxwell Taylor,  General Curtis LeMay, and Colonel Julius Pickoff all knew that we'd replace those boards, and that gave Mr Kennedy the ability to stand up to Mr Khruschev.

I spent another 25 years or so in the Air Force, and to their credit, my superiors saw that while I'd probably never fully understand electronic theory, I was smart enough to recognize the results of not keeping our equipment operational, so they promoted me and made me a supervisor, effectively taking the soldering iron and screwdrivers away from me.

What brought all that on?  Would you believe an article in Time Magazine about Charles Dickens?  I read the article last week and a saw reference to Great Expectations.  At the aforementioned academy, one Lionel Mosher introduced me to Charles Dickens, the character Pip,  and the theme of internal struggle with one's own conscience.

I have a tool in my little home office that was totally unavailable in my high school days - a personal computer.  After reading the article about Dickens, I sat at my PC and dredged up a digital rendition of his novel, Great Expectations.  I began reading Pip's story.  In the first ten chapters, I've come to realize that I owe Lionel Mosher an apology.  I recognize none of the story except the name Pip, and until I read the first sentence in the book, I had no recollection of where the name came from.  For the uninformed, the lad's real name was Philip Pirrip, but as a child, he had trouble pronouncing his full name and shortened it to Pip and the name stuck.

Not only has my computer enabled me to read Great Expectations, it has given me the ability to click to a search engine and look up words Dickens used to see what in the dickens he was talking about.  In my high school days, that would have entailed putting the book down in such a manner as to not lose my place, pick up my Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (now, fifty-one years later, I still have that very same dictionary, with my name inside the cover in a cursive script that I'd never use today) and look up whatever word I didn't know.   Surely you don't think a teenager who didn't apply himself would have gone to that much trouble.


This afternoon while reading my on-line copy of Great Expectations, I came across a reference to pudding that I didn't understand.  The sentence, in part, read, ". . . one box-tree that had been clipped round long ago, like a pudding, and had a new growth at the top of it. . . "   Surely that wasn't a reference to chocolate or tapioca puddings that I've known which are usually housed in a cup or bowl of some sort and are flat on top.  If you were to look it up in my New Collegiate Dictionary, you'd see, 
"1. A piece of intestine stuffed with seasoned chopped meat, or the like, and boiled.  
2.  A dessert having flour or some other cereal as a foundation, with, added eggs, milk, fruit, sugar, spices, etc."  
neither of which conjure up any vision of what Pip's Box-tree actually resembled, unless he meant it to look like a piece of sausage or a bowl of tapioca pudding.


If you would look pudding up on the Internet in, say, Wikipedia, not only would you get a full page of explanation, you'd get photographs and drawings, and Dickens' intent would immediately become abundantly clear.  He really meant dome shaped, such as one often sees in landscaping treatment of boxwood.  Oh, yeah.  Boxwood.  Box-tree.  I get it.   I applied myself and figured it out.  


See, Mr Mosher?  I applied myself.   Why are you due an apology?  In order to pass your class, I had to read and answer questions about Great Expectations, but in reading it now, I am convinced that I never did read it in high school.  How did I pass your class?  Was there a Classics Illustrated version of Great Expectations?  You bet there was, Issue No. 43.  Did I use it to pass your English class?  To be most honest, I do not remember.  I've found it on line today and checked for the reference to a tree trimmed in a pudding shape, but it wasn't mentioned.


You know, that Dickens fellow sure could write a powerful yarn.  I'm enjoying reading it, especially knowing I've already passed the class that required it.  

Oysters, Western Style

I retired from the United States Air Force in 1989 after nearly 28 years of active duty with two tours in North Dakota. My first assignment there was at Fortuna in Divide County after a year in Vietnam. At the time I got the assignment, I'd never heard of Fortuna AFS, but others in my unit had and always seemed to chuckle when they'd hear where I was going. It was a cool, late August day in 1968 when my wife and I and two children drove north out of Williston on the last leg of our journey to Fortuna. At some point along that stretch of extraordinarily straight road, the immense rotating search radar antenna became visible and I pointed it out to my wife. Moments later, a muffled sob emanated from her side of our two door Ford and I looked over to see that cute little blonde with tears running down her cheeks asking, "Where are you taking me?"

Almost exactly a year later, our marriage had dissolved and I was living in the barracks. In another year, I was gone from the high plains and stationed in the very northern part of Maine. Fast forward to 1972 - my controlled tour in Maine was nearing its end and I was given the opportunity to tell the Air Force where I'd like to go next. By then I was involved in earning a college degree, so I determined that the Minot AFS near Max in McLean County, North Dakota would give me an opportunity to continue. Certainly there were others that had nearby colleges, but I wanted to make certain I got the one I wanted rather than one in the neighborhood. I called a friend in the assignments section at higher headquarters and he laughed, saying if I'd asked for Minot, I'd get it. He was right.

The radar base at Max was sort of an open base, meaning that anyone who drove up to the gate was usually waved on in. The little NCO Club served as a drinking establishment at which we'd wet our whistles, a night club often with live music on Sundays, and a place that harbored a civilian clientele made up of a group of local farmers and ranchers who called themselves, perhaps only somewhat facetiously, the South Prairie Gentlemen's Association.

One Saturday evening, the defacto spokesman for that group, one Larry Erickson, stopped in for a beer or two and some companionship. He and I were sitting at the bar by ourselves when he turned to me a said something to the effect, "Mac, they're having a nut fry over in Makoti. Wanna go?"

Perhaps a bit more information needs to be injected here. I'm originally from a small town in rural New Hampshire where cows are milked and bulls are raised to help increase the size of the milking herd. I guess I'd heard of Rocky Mountain oysters at some point, but I guess I never took the idea seriously, and I certainly never considered eating them, and I told him so. Larry laughed at my ignorance and explained the process, then repeated his initial question, "Wanna Go?"

My "Hell, no, I ain't eating bull's [here, dear reader, I leave it up to you to supply whichever word you think appropriate]." brought more laughter and Larry ordered us another beer. A couple of beers later he asked again and again I told I wasn't interested. More beer, asked again, same response, perhaps with a little less conviction. After a number of Erickson-provided beers and some taunting about being timid,  [I think he actually called me a candy-ass], I finally relented, and we went out into the night, climbed into his big Mercury sedan and rode off to Makoti.

The result of the evening was that in a small, smoky, loud country bar in Makoti, North Dakota, I discovered a delicacy, sliced, pan fried in butter, and served on white loaf bread. To this day, I remember my first taste.  (Note:  I've recently had a conversation with folks who run a bar named K-Bar in Makoti and we've determined it was probably the place I first had that plains delicacy.)

Every fall, Larry and several other local ranchers would do an old fashioned roundup, cutting the young bulls and tossing the cuttings in a bucket. At the end of each day, they'd go to the Air Force NCO club, drink beer and clean them before storing them in the club's freezer. After the roundup process was all done, and hunting season had come and gone, the ranchers and a bunch of us GI's would put on a game feed with donated venison and duck, smoked fish, and of course, Rocky Mountain Oysters. The last winter I was in North Dakota, I took a young lady I'd been dating out to the club for the game feed, but when they brought around a tray of oysters, I didn't explain the origin of the meat. She liked them until someone else asked her what she thought of them and gave them a name.

Women don't like being tricked, something I learned that very evening.

Fine Dining

In the 1940's and 50's, when I was a youngster in New Hampshire, my family didn't have enough money to eat in restaurants very often, and when we did, it was almost always in one of two family-owned places in Lebanon, the next town north. One, called the Nubridge, was near a bridge over the Mascoma River, and the other, the Riverside Grill, was on the banks of that same river several miles upstream, just east of town. No matter which restaurant we chose, my meal would be a plate of fried clams. Both places served them in a heap, next to another heap of french fries, and a small serving of cole slaw, and a fountain coke served with lots of ice in a fluted brownish plastic glass and a straw. Occasionally, we'd eat in a similar place along the Sugar river in Claremont, but their clams were not as good as the ones in the Lebanon restaurants.

Fried clams were Mom's favorite and were not particularly expensive (the latter may explain the former, and most certainly what comes next) and on our way on Route 120, she'd comment on how good those clams were going to taste. By the time we got to the restaurant, probably because of what some scientist called a conditional response to stimuli, all I knew was that I would order fried clams. I have no recollection of ever reading the menu and I certainly don't remember ever having anything else.

To this day, I salivate at the thought of those clams and whenever I travel up to that part of New England, I make sure I get my fill of them, because in the part of Georgia where I live, the only clams you can find have been stripped of the good part, leaving only a deep fried rubbery strip with a faint taste of the sea. I wonder what they do with the bellies stolen from clam strips.

The subject of this jaunt through my memory isn't fried clams, french fries, cole slaw and coke, but rather of my introduction to finer dining.

One Sunday after church, still in our Sunday best, we drove south from home, crossed the longest covered wooden bridge in the USA into Vermont then south along a two-lane blacktop. Finally, we turned right and drove up a hill and parked in front of a large red barn that had been converted into a fancy restaurant. The sign out front even said they sold fine wine and spirits. Our normal places only sold soft drinks and weak iced tea with a slice of lemon, so I immediately knew this place was special.

While I don't remember exactly what time of year it was, it wasn't in the summer, of that I am certain, because we wore overcoats over our Sunday go-to-meeting clothes, and Dad even had on his fedora, the last time I ever remember seeing him wear one. In restaurants we usually went to, we'd just walk in, spot an empty table, and go sit down, but this place had a sign that said, "Please wait to be seated," so we waited until a lady showed us to a table. The restaurant was set up so that tables along the wall were separated by little walls, probably intended to give a feeling of intimacy and privacy, and, at that time of year, a place to hang coats and hats.

As I wrote that last sentence, it dawned on me that many would deem it odd that a man would hang his hat, but in the mid 1950's, gentlemen still tipped their hat to ladies, albeit perhaps just a slight nod and a touch of the finger to the brim. I was taught to take my hat off when I went inside and I wear one a lot, but never in a restaurant where of course there is no place to hang one, but I often see large groups of families seated at a table and all the men are wearing their hats emblazoned with their company, truck, team or saying of choice. I guess their mothers weren’t as insistent at having good manners as mine was.

We all hung our coats and over the top of his, Dad hung his fedora. To this day, I remember that the table was set before we even got to it. At each place there was already an array of forks, knives and spoons, a stemmed glass, and a delicately folded cloth napkin. Unlike in today's restaurants, the waitress didn't tell us her name and that she'd be serving us, she just handed us each a menu, from the left, thank you very much, and asked if she could get us any drinks. Another waitress filled each stemmed glass with water from a glass pitcher that had ice cubes to chill the water before serving.

While we looked at our menu, Dad said something about ordering anything we wanted. I suspect he may have recently received a tax refund, or perhaps a bonus from his job. He'd never, ever said that before. Of course, this place didn't have fried clams on the menu, either.

I think I remember my Mom ordering something like pork chops, but if I had my choice, I certainly wasn't going to waste it on something like that. I scanned the menu, perhaps not fully understanding some of the terms, but my eyes landed on rainbow trout. Now I grew up eating little brook trout we'd catch in Blood's Brook across the road from our house, but I'd never even seen a rainbow trout, and now I was going to eat one.

When the salads were served, the waitress moved around the table which, of course, was fairly close to our overcoats hanging on pegs on the little wall dividing us from the next table. She had the salads on a tray she balanced and served each of us, As she went behind Dad, her tray brushed those hanging coats. I can see it all today, as if it was in slow motion. Dad's fedora was jarred loose when the tray moved against the coats and did a perfect half-gainer, landing upside down on a salad that had well dressed with a thick, creamy roquefort dressing. The waitress gasped, Mom emitted a rather minced "Oh" and my sister and I giggled, and Dad looked around to see what was drawing our attention.

The waitress picked up the hat and immediately began to apologize, but wool felt fedoras and roquefort dressing are not bedfellows and the damage had been done. She tried wiping the dressing off with a napkin, but once the blob was gone, it was apparent that the stain was probably permanent. Dad, always a generous, forgiving soul, told her not to worry about it, or at least something to that effect. She was obviously terribly embarrassed, but regained her composure, told Dad she'd get him another salad and would get his hat cleaned at no expense to him.

She took the hat, tray, and one remaining salad with her, promising to return right away, which she did, accompanied by the manager (maître d’hôtel ?) who was effusive in his effort to ensure us that the restaurant was indeed sorry and that they insisted on paying for cleaning Dad's fedora.

My father was never extraordinarily demonstrative, so his response was something to the effect of, "OK, thank you. It's not terribly important."

Once the drama was over, we returned to our meal.   It's almost anticlimactic now, but the larger surprise was yet to come.  I grew up in the country, our home was on an a small hill completely surrounded by trees.  It has often been said that we had two views: a summer view and a winter view.  In the summer, we could see nothing but forest, but in the winter, we could see the roofs of my grandparents house and the house that was across the street from them.  You see, a lot of our trees were oaks, elms and, of course, sugar maples, so when the short days of winter took off their leaves, we had a little more view.  The two lane highway at the bottom of our driveway separated us from Blood's Brook, a trout fisherman's dream, at least after the state had released a load of hatchery trout upstream.  

Those trout, occasional perch from Mascoma Lake, and lake trout from Crystal Lake were all the fish I'd ever seen.  We cleaned them all the same.  We'd cut off the heads just behind the gills, slice open the belly and clean out the innards, and toss the fish in one bucket and the heads and innards in another.  One bucket would be carried out to the edge of the woods where its contents would be tossed, and the other into the kitchen, where the fish would be dusted with flour and pan fried in butter.  Most of the fish we cooked were less than six inches in length, and were never more than an inch and a half from top to bottom.  It would take several to make up one meal.  

I was a bit unprepared for the rainbow trout I'd ordered.  First of all, it was enormous, measuring well over fourteen inches in length and thicker and deeper than any I'd ever seen.  But it's size wasn't the major shock.  It still had it's head attached, and I'm certain the eye that was visible was focused, not on me, but on the knife and fork I held.  If I was unprepared, Mom was really unprepared.  She almost giggled, then, as if horrified, told me that if it bothered me, I could cover the head with my napkin.  

Now I'm here to tell you, there is no country kid alive, north, south, east or west, that is going to let his mother and little sister know that the staring eye of a dead, pan fried rainbow trout is going to bother him.  I ate that fish, right down to the bone on one side, flipped it over, and ate down to the bone until all that was left was the head, a skeleton, and a tail.  The coup de grace I guess you'd say, came when I deftly snapped off that crisp little tail and ate it.

The trip home had more comments about my fish head than any other subject, including the weather, how the covered bridge had held up for so long, and Dad's fedora.  I don't know if Dad ever got it cleaned, and if he did, if he sent the bill to the restaurant, but, as I said earlier, I don't remember him ever wearing one since that day.  As for me, I do eat fish, no matter where their heads are.