The Boy From Plastic City: 2016

Friday, August 19, 2016

Brother Bones

Prelude

It was the premiere of their yearly minstrel show and the young men of St. John’s parish school were on parade. In keeping with the tradition’s format—one that had not changed appreciably in a century—they danced and pranced their way from the school to the auditorium, shuckin’ and jivin,’ rattling tambourines, whacking at banjos, smeared with greasepaint and singing “When The Saints Go Marching In” to the high heavens. A small marching band provided the music albeit somewhat off-key. An oompah tuba blamed the bottom end and the big bass drum held down the rhythm. This pre-show was for the amusement of the assembled ticket holders—among them Aunt Mag and John McGowan—queued up in the cold, waiting for the signal to enter. It was a peek at the spectacle that they would soon see in full, like when they lead the elephants over to the circus tent. These Irish-Catholic boys were dressed in gaudy costumes down to their handmade top hats. Their make-up was not amber, beige, buff, burnt umber, chestnut, chocolate, cocoa, russet, tan or taupe. It was black, and the garish white greasepaint that outlined their mouths was something out of a nightmare. The fact was, most of them had never seen person-of-color unless you wanted to count Stepin Fetchit or Buckwheat from the movies. They did know Amos ’N’ Andy from radio, but not the fact that they were always voiced my Caucasians. So this was what they supposed the “darkies” looked and acted like. These stereotypes had been passed down from the mid-1840s through the folk-art form of Minstrelsy, born in the year the bricks for the Beoli Mills were being mortared into place.

Rituals

Along with placing poinsettias at my mother’s final resting place after each Christmas, I stop at the family plot of her parents, aunt, uncle and brother. It’s always the end of December and it’s usually bleak and cold—sometimes bitterly so—and blustery enough that it’s a trick to keep a votive candle burning even for a minute. For the sake of survival, I find that a nip of Jameson’s is advisable, and, I like to think, apropos. The monument that marks this family plot is substantial yet without artifice which might also describe those at rest beneath. It’s a double-sized slab of grey granite with a serpentine top. Notches at the top corners are the sole adornments. The epitaph gets efficiently down to business as well inscribed as follows:

1886 JOHN J. McGOWAN
HIS WIFE
1874 MARGARET M. CRONIN
1891 HUGH M. GALLAGHER 1958
HIS WIFE
1891 HANNA M. CRONIN 1975
SON
1915 JOHN V. GALLAGHER 1937

Hugh and Hanna were my grandparents, and their son, John was my namesake. But it’s John McGowan and Aunt Mag that I’m considering today—one specific incident in particular. I observe that their years of death are not etched into the stone, which leads me to believe they were still alive in 1958—the year I’m guessing that this stone was placed with the passing of my grandfather. I’ve spoken of Aunt Mag in previous installments. She and her husband were Irish immigrants from the area of Knockmanagh near Killarney in the Southwest corner of the “Auld Sod.” They were the ones who sponsored my Grandma, Hanna, then a doe-eyed 18-year-old colleen—in the new country. Doing the math that would have been around 1910. Due to the repressive policies of their English colonial overlords, Irish children were kept under-educated (therefore less dangerous I suppose) which made the task of relocating to America and finding a decent job all the more daunting. As with many Irish immigrants, Hanna found work as a domestic in service to Fitchburg’s British Brahmin expatriates.

Once Hanna met and married Hubert Gallagher, they moved into a 10-room farmhouse on Baltic Lane in West Fitchburg provided by his new employer Crocker Burbank: makers of paper. He could easily walk to his job which was in Number Eight mill right next door. They had an extended credit line to buy their necessities from Crocker’s own co-op market up on Ashburnham Street and for all intents and purposes, you owed your soul to the company store, just like in that old saw, “16 Tons.” In fairness, there were to be plenty of those pesky necessities attending the births of the 11 children that followed, and—soul possession aside—there’s something to be said for a steady income. Especially with the Great Depression taking shape on the distant horizon like some worrisome, unknowable beast being born ugly.

Beoli Mills

John McGowan and Aunt Mag lived a mile or so away from the Gallaghers in a compact Mansard-roofed, two-story dwelling at 34 Sprague Street where it wound down at a precarious pitch towards the North Nashua River. As with my grandfather, Mr. McGowan could easily walk to his place of employment at Beoli Mills on Westminster Street, clicking the heels of his spit-shined brogans in the face of the rising sun as he went. That leg of the commute was a breeze; a hundred cement stairs from his back yard; down onto Sanborn and then left on Simonds. Slogging home after his shift might call for some liquid fortification at the British-American Club or the Log Cabin before scaling that slope and facing his frequently feisty better half and her imposing arsenal of Blue Willow china.

Beoli was a textile mill operated by the American Woolen Company and John worked there as a “Finisher.” Architecturally the building could have been part of a Nazi concentration complex with it’s anxiety-inducing brick facade. The assortment of buildings were as varied in form as a capricious child’s grab bag of geometric shapes. At one corner stood a battlement-like tower capped with a giant onion dome which wouldn’t have looked out of place in Moscow. Old photos show an abundance of windows however so some cheer must have filtered down onto those otherwise drab, lanolin-soaked floors. The company provided John with solid employment for 25 years until it went belly-up—yet another Depression casualty in an era of many. The equipment was sold and the jobs were lost. But John McGowan was close enough to retirement age that the two events dovetailed as well as could be expected and he and his Maggie would be okay if they played their cards right—they hoped.

Cakewalk

Once inside the marching musicians joined the piano and drummer in the pit and the show’s Overture began. Snippets of popular songs and chestnuts from the Stephen Foster catalogue wafted through the room. As always, the minstrel show would be divided in three. In the first, the entire troupe would take to the stage warbling “Ain’t She Sweet” as they did a cocky cakewalk on from stages left and right to a thunderous ovation. It was hard for the audience to believe that these were their own sons, relatives and sons of friends as they tried to recognize them under their makeup. Freed of any stage fright by the anonymity afforded by disguise, these often-times shy youth appeared loose-as-geese in the footlights and hammed it up shamelessly. The Interlocutor appeared and instructed his minstrels to take seats in semi-circles to either side of his elevated perch. Also attired in a minstrel-fashioned costume (except for the blackface), the Interlocutor served as Master-Of-Ceremonies as well as somewhat pompous straight man for these mad proceedings. He was flanked by the so-called end men—Brother Tambo and Brother Bones. These two characters (caricatures?) got to set up the gags and deliver the punchlines as the rest of the cast rollicked in exaggerated mirth and jangled their tambourines. The concept of Surrealism was known in the thirties though what they might have called it back at its creation in the 1840s is a mystery, yet the term seems to describe the Minstrel Show experience best. A sampling of the humor is as follows:

Interlocutor: No, Bones, you mean three days previous to her decease.

Brother Bones: No, she had no niece.

Interlocutor: I presume he was a pretty good physician?

Brother Bones: No, he wasn't fishin'; he was home.

Interlocutor: I mean he was a doctor of some standing.

Brother Bones: No, he wasn't standing, he was sitting on a three-legged stool.

At the conclusion of the Part One, the assembled cast along with the Interlocutor cakewalked back off the stage carrying their milking stools to another round of applause. The boys were far from stage frightened, the fact was they hated to leave the spotlight. Given the conditions of the times, this explosion of farce, color and music was a welcome respite from their grey existences and they were elated.

The Auction

In 1932 the physical plant of Beoli Mills—minus the textile producing equipment—went on the auction block. The proceedings would take place in the huge empty plant. Addison Freeman of Boston’s Samuel T. Freeman and Company would serve as auctioneer. His firm had previously announced that the property would be offered in its entirety first and then in four separate parcels. Whichever brought the highest bid would prevail.

Mr. McGowan’s motivation for wanting to purchase his former place of employment is at least partially conjectural and remains part of the lore of this grey Irish enclave of blue-collar labor nestled in amongst the granite hills. The legend would have us believe that a stop at the British-American club with a group of his peers before proceeding to the auction had perhaps impaired his judgment. But even into his cups, he made a cogent case to his former co-workers that it was a sound investment without revealing what he was about to lay on the table lest someone else beat him to it. He was confident that the economic pendulum would swing the other way eventually—wouldn’t it? Then again, what was the satisfaction of owning the place that you once slaved in. Regardless of his motivation he came prepared to buy. What was up for grabs was substantial too: ten mill buildings with 175,150 square feet of floor space and a large power plant located on several acres of land. The assessed value of the complex was $128,000 but during the peak years of the textile industry it was employing 600 souls (1926-1927), and was worth $264,100. After laying out the rules of the auction, Addison Freeman started the bidding with a “clarion” call that echoed off of the brick walls of the cavernous space, “How much am I offered for this property in its entirety?”

The scores of former employees that he’d just been drinking with bated their suspicious breaths and waited for the bid. Then came McGowan’s booming baritone, “ten thousand dollars.” It was the only offer so it was “knocked-down” to him. His former coworkers gaped at him in slack-jawed astonishment, and you could have heard a pin drop. When the newspaper reporter asked him what his intentions were for the property, he replied, “I am ready to sell it to anyone who is ready to pay me my price.” He also declared himself to be acting as sole agent. It was his and he planned to flip it.

But on the dark way home, with the echoes fading in John’s ears with each footfall, the scaling of Sprague seemed to be taking a preternaturally long time. Now was the figurative cold, grey, light of dawn and as he approached the buttery luminescence of his own parlour windows, he began formulating the rationale with which he would present his case to Maggie—all 90 pounds of simmering Irish TNT.

Put gently, she was not pleased. True; they had managed to scrape together $10,000 or so but not much more, and they were getting up there in years. What John hadn’t brought into the equation, Mag reminded him, were things like taxes on the appraised value ($128,000) and such mundane matters as building maintenance. It was clearly time for some damage control. They secured a lawyer and were able to extract themselves from the deal but at a cost of a couple of thousand dollars from their nest egg—money they were counting on. That class-consciousness that their neighbors brought over from the old country was still pervasive and there was a certain amount of self-satisfied blather behind the McGowans’ backs about them and the knives came out, as they will. Who did they think they were, anyway?

The "Olio"

The second act was called the "Stump Speech", a lone dissertation the main purpose of which was to allow the backstage to be set for the elaborate "Afterpiece." On this cold night, the custodian, Mr. James O’Brien, had stoked the coal furnace higher than normal for the comfort of the audience at the show, and between that and the rising body temperatures, the low-ceilinged auditorium became as hot as a Lakota sweat lodge, and the audience began peeling off any unnecessary clothing.

Brother Bones took to the stage and began to pontificate on everything from science, society and politics during which his dim-witted character attempted to speak eloquently, only to deliver countless malapropisms, jokes, and unintentional puns. As he did, he moved about like a clown, standing on his head and often prat-falling off his stump. He delivered salient social criticism with the focus being on sending up unpopular issues and making fun of blacks’ supposed inability to make sense of them. Since local gossip was a fair target, Brother Bones introduced a song that he’d written especially for the occasion entitled: “The Day John McGowan Bought The Beoli Mills.” Although no record of this ditty exists, the imagination can provide a sketch.

With his black greasepaint running grotesquely down his face, Brother Bones delivered his mocking ballad directly towards John and Mag dead center in the audience like a command performance.

Within a peal of laughter, the furious McGowans donned their overcoats and stormed out. They would not be staying for the Afterpiece after all.

Coda:

I actually saw a performance of St. John’s Minstrel Show many years later, long before the term “politically correct" had been coined.

Codetta:
Aunt Mag and John McGowan lived to ripe old ages. They were not rich but they were okay—as he had hoped. Had they stuck with purchase of the Beoli Mills and then sold during the Depression’s end in 1940, they may have enjoyed a truly golden age. But then again…?

Sunday, August 14, 2016

The Boy from Plastic City

Saturday, August 13, 2016

Thats Alright Mama Boston Rockabilly Music Conspirancy Live 1984 Presle...

Friday, August 12, 2016

Hometown Interview

Here is a shot of me being interviewed about my book "The Boy from Plastic City" by the Mayor of Leominster on Aug. 11, 2016. Click the red letters for the link. You'll find me at 40:22.

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

J. Dawson

Alyssa

A few years ago I picked up a copy of A Night to Remember by Walter Lord, from of all places, my toolbox. It’s a well-worn paperback and the torn-off cover now serves as a bookmark. That cover bears the iconic image of the massive stern of the RMS Titanic, raised to a 45° angle as she prepares to slide beneath the surface of a black North Atlantic, so calm that Captain Edward Smith described it as being, “like a millpond.” I absentmindedly began to flip the yellowed pages while standing in my cellar, but had no intention of finishing it again, as I had three times over the years. But the story gaffed me again and I started plowing through it.

The history of the Titanic has fascinated me since childhood and in addition to the book (and other sources), I’ve seen all of the film versions that I know about. At the top of heap is James Cameron’s masterful take on the incident. The director closely follows the events depicted in Lord’s book, but, like most adaptations, he tacks on a fictional story to which we the viewers are invited to relate. In Titanic it is the love story of society brat Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) and artist/grifter Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio). This film has now eclipsed former champ The Godfather for number of repeat viewings on my TV.

It’s an oft-told tale that bears repeating so, in a nutshell; here is what pretty much everybody already knows. The Titanic was built in 1912 at the Harlan-Wolff shipyards in my Grandfather’s birthplace of Belfast, Northern Ireland. She was to be the largest vessel ever to ply the seas. It was the golden age of steamship travel and ships were in great demand, especially fast and regally appointed ones of which the Titanic certainly was. The nouveau riche from America demanded nothing less, but added to the equation was a multi-cultural wave of immigrants pinning their hopes on a fresh start in the New World. For those who barely scraped together the price of passage, accommodations were somewhat less than posh, and this mix of Irish, Finnish, Slavic, Scandinavian and Jewish passengers huddled together in steerage.

The ship set out from Southampton, England but stopped to board passengers in Cherbourg, France and Queenstown (Cobh), Ireland before steaming west for New York City on her maiden voyage. Disregarding iceberg warnings, RMS Titanic plowed along at a record setting pace, hoping for banner headlines for the White Star line upon her arrival. On the fourth day her luck ran out however when she sideswiped an enormous berg shaped like the Rock of Gibraltar. A spur of ice caught the starboard side of the ship’s hull below the water line and ripped it open like a can opener. Immediately the frigid Atlantic started gushing in. It was 11:40 p.m. (ship’s time), Sunday, April 14, 1912.

It was a troubling situation but not ship threatening certainly because the designers at Harlan-Wolff (most notably Thomas Andrews, aboard for this inaugural crossing) had taken such things into consideration and had designed the hull with 16 water tight compartments that ran up to E deck. If a compartment were to flood, doors would slam shut, the water would be isolated and the ship would remain seaworthy. But not one compartment had been breached but five and that weight at the bow began to pull Titanic down by the head. As it did the water began to seek its own level and ran over the tops of compartments at E deck as the vessel angled downward. This was a chain of events that could not be reversed. At their impromptu crew meeting, White Star executive Donald Ismay was incredulous upon hearing that, in the words of the designer himself, it was a “mathematical certainty” that the great ship would founder. Mr. Andrews reported to Captain Smith that the ship had about two and a half hours on the surface, no matter how they sliced it.

Once that reality sank in, attention turned to the matter of evacuation but there were a number of complications to that process. First on the list; there were lifeboats for only about a third of the passengers. Since the ship was unsinkable, went the reasoning, why clutter up the aesthetics of the boat decks with lifeboats that would never be used—and that’s what they went with.

Titanic’s communications crew began tapping out QED and SOS messages over their wireless. “Come at once. We have struck a berg.” The Titanic's radio engineers sent this emergency message and many like it in Morse code wirelessly to anyone listening. The deck crew fired off signal rockets and beamed Morse messages on the Aldis lamp to try to garner the attention of a ship whose lights appeared to be only a few miles away but to no avail. That ship was the Californian and she was stopped in and ice field for the night as a safety measure. Her night crew saw but could not decipher the meaning of the messaging until finally when they no longer saw the stricken ship’s running lights, assumed she had sailed off when in fact she had sunk. The message did get through to the Carpathia and she tested her boilers on a mad dash from Halifax in a valiant attempt to rescue the passengers and crew of the Titanic. But at best, Carpathia would arrive on the scene two hours after the great ship had snapped in half and slid the two miles to the bottom taking 1500 passengers and crew down with her, or left bobbing in their life jackets to die of hypothermia in the subfreezing sea water. These were the ones who could not get into lifeboats.

I brought A Night to Remember with me to finish on our May 2012 vacation in Ireland. The trip entailed renting a car and navigating to lodging in four pre-arranged “castles” scattered across the Emerald Isle. I had a sketchy dream of tying in a drive to Knockmanaugh, Kilarney where my Grandmother hails from but I’d had so many harrowing experiences driving on the left in that unfamiliar country that I wasn’t willing to press my luck further. I felt like I was taking my life in my hands every time I got behind the wheel.

In the town of Donegal we browsed in a bookstore called The Four Masters. Rereading Scott’s book had reminded me that the bulk of Titanic’s casualties had been the Irish from the Third Class, and while in the shop I spotted a tome entitled The Irish Aboard the Titanic by Senan Maloney. The book detailed the lives of every Irish passenger and crewman, something that had been given scant mention in that time. In 1912 the public was not interested in 700 people sharing two toilets, and the focus of the press was on the rich members of society aboard that cursed vessel, they being the rock stars of their day. I purchased the book with the intension of reading it on our upcoming cruise to Nova Scotia, the place where many of the casualties of the accident were taken for burial.

Our cruise was a graduation gift to our Granddaughter, Alyssa, and we would be sailing with her sister Daphne and her parents, Richard and Alyson, on the Carnival Glory with stops at the ports of St. John, NB and Halifax, NS. When I wasn’t on deck sipping watery Bloody Marys to the incongruous accompaniment of Reggae bands, I was in my cabin immersed in my new book. Its format was to address each Irish passenger showing their pictures, names and ages, whether or not they had survived, their ticket number and what they paid for it, where they boarded and where they were heading. Each of them had a sponsor waiting for them in America and nobody got in without one to report to. This was followed by what was known about their background and their experience during the disaster. My Grandparents who did not know each other at the time had crossed the Atlantic in those same times but fortunately, their ships did not collide with icebergs.

All those greyscale Irish faces began to haunt me after a while; women putting on their prettiest expressions; men slightly suspicious of the camera—most breasts bursting with youth and promise. As I turned each page a new life revealed itself to me and my own surging Gallagher blood had me hearing penny whistles and uilleann pipes in my dreams. In St. John we disembarked to have a look around at what turned out to be not much—about what I expected. Jocelyn, Alyson and I used the opportunity buy some wine and smuggle it aboard against ship rules. On the way there we passed a small young man with red curly hair and freckles wearing a green sport coat busking on a curb with a fiddle. At this point I was seeing the Irish everywhere I looked but this little leprechaun scratching away at a jaunty Reel pushed the envelope. I stopped to listen for a moment then dropped a Five into the upside down green top had by his side. “Tank You Sor,” said he in a brogue that only confirmed what I already knew. “Do you know the “Sailor’s Hornpipe,” I asked. He thought for a quick second and then launched into the tune familiar to anyone who has ever seen a Popeye cartoon. He was sawing away at it when we moved on and I had to repress the impulse do a little jig down the sidewalk.

That evening we sailed south out of the Bay of Fundy and rounded the southern cape of Nova Scotia north bound for Halifax. In 1912 we might have crossed paths with the Carpathia off on her rescue mission or the McKay-Bennett on its grim assignment to retrieve the remains of the dead. As Jocelyn lay sleeping I sat on the edge of the bunk having a nightcap of our renegade wine. The cabin was dark and the engines thrummed comfortingly. I drew the drapes apart and looked down. We were on the Starboard side and in a lower level of the ship. The wake seemed close enough to touch and you could hear its splashing. The churning sea was a pale green in the ship’s running lights, but a fog had rolled in and neither the sky nor the horizon were visible. Above the wake only a milky white mist prevailed. So immersed in the story of the Irish aboard the Titanic was I, that their greyscale countenances seemed to form in the fog to peer back at me. It was not lost on me that at this position, I was looking in the direction of the grave of the doomed Titanic. Yes, it was hundreds of miles distant and two miles down, yet these remain her waters. The faces seemed to jockey for position crowding one another, but did they not seem closer than before I thought? I slid the drapes back together a little too quickly, drained my wine and lay back looking at the window and the illumination that spilled in through the cracks. I would not be opening the drapes again on this night.

The following day we would spend in Halifax and an excursion was in order. Looking at the guidebooks we found one of the many that looked promising and bought tickets. While waiting at the terminal we walked through the assortment of booths selling memorabilia, crafts and a lot of T-shirts. I began to see what a cottage industry had sprung up around this worst sea disaster in history. References to the event seemed to be everywhere in the city. We got onto a tour bus that was to take us to the cemetery of many of the victims as well as a trip to quaint Peggy’s Cove (save your money). Our tour guide was a white-haired former school teacher who was direct from a central casting call for “Somebody’s Grandma.” She was wiry and well informed and had a way of quieting the bus passengers when she was doing her narrative that belied her teaching background. I half expected her to go up the aisle to see if anyone was chewing gum. As we drove to the Fairhaven cemetery, she ran though the facts of the disaster and the aftermath, though by this point I could have almost have given a tour myself.

Alyssa sat next to me on the tour bus listening to our guide who sat across the aisle from me. My granddaughter has a way of slipping into “the zone” when her imagination whisks her away. I checked in with her a couple of times to see if she was okay and she always was. No one loves the Titanic Movie more than she. Alyssa has probably watched the tape more than me and one night when we watched it for the umpteenth time, I could see her moving her lips along with the dialog as she sat on the carpet playing with her Barbies. She relates to Rose and loves Jack. Apparently this is not an unusual condition and was common among young girls of this time period. Let’s call it Titanic Syndrome for want of a better term.

We disembarked the bus and made our way through the gate of Fair Haven Cemetery and up the slope to where one hundred and twenty-one of the Titanic casualties are interred. One third of those graves are not identified. Surveyor E. W. Christie laid out three long lines of graves in gentle curves following the contours of the sloping site. By co-incidence, the curved shape suggests the outline of the bow of a ship. Among the stones is one marked J. Dawson. Joseph Dawson was a coal trimmer in the engine room and probably never expected to see the sky until he returned home to Southampton, but the events of April 14 brought him to the boat deck in the last moments of the life of the great ship. The life boats were long gone and the “Black Gang” removed their shoes because they knew they’d soon be going swimming. Dawson had the presence of mind to pocket his National Sailors and Firemen's Union card which would at least identify his body for his family. He was twenty-three years old.

The cable ship McKay-Bennett was dispatched to pick up what casualties they could find while the Carpathia sailed the 713 bedraggled survivors into New York harbor and the attendant media frenzy. McKay-Bennett’s mission was far less glamorous. They were to retrieve and embalm what remains they could locate. Upon reaching the wreck site, it quickly became apparent that there were far more bodies floating in the ocean than anyone had expected. They had not brought enough supplies to prepare this many bodies (306) for burial, so 116 were buried at sea. To put it indelicately, they were plucked out of the ocean and plopped back in. The buried-at-sea were mostly third class passengers but that did not raise the hackles of many because there was a de-facto class system that allowed people to expect such things. J. Dawson was among the lucky cadavers. Because he was carrying his union ID, he would be properly buried and have a dignified headstone that would bear his name. Other ships would find more casualties, but many were never found. After Cameron’s Titanic, word got out that there was a J. Dawson buried in Halifax and girls began to pilgrimage there. There they left offerings of flowers, movie tickets and some intimate articles of apparel. If there was such a thing as the dead looking down at us from a cloud, I can imagine poor Joseph Dawson complaining, “Where were you when I needed you?”

After our excursion to Peggy’s Cove, the bus descended the high ground into Halifax. By this point I may have been the last person paying attention to our guide’s narration. Alyssa was sleeping at my side and the guide was talking into a microphone sitting in a seat to my left. She also was obviously tired by this point but she talked on about the terminal. With eyes that seemed to look inward as she described the scene at which our ship was now docked down below. It was here that the bodies of the Titanic victims were unloaded and organized for interment. The Mackay-Bennett arrived at Flagship Pier at North Coaling Jetty No. 4, HM Dockyard early on the morning of 30 April 1912. She arrived at the pier to unload her cargo around 9:30 a.m. This was where the gaily painted Carnival Glory was now docked, and I could tell by our guide’s eyes that she was in a zone of her own.

Postscript:

After the Titanic disaster no ship ever sailed without adequate life boats for everyone. In addition; Coast Guard boats began to patrol the shipping lanes to report on any iceberg danger. The Titanic had an Olympic Class sister ship; the Britannic. In the wake of the Titanic disaster, the water tight bulkheads of Britannic were raised to B Deck. Although intended to be a passenger ship, she was called into duty as a hospital ship with the advent of World War One. In November of 1916, in the Mediterranean off of Greece, she was struck by an explosion that was either a mine or a torpedo. There were 1,066 souls aboard out of which 30 died. Even with additional reinforcement and the higher bulkheads, she joined her sister at the bottom of the sea in about an hour.

Post-Post-Scriptum:

In researching for this blog, I read A Night to Remember yet again. Now I can put it back into my toolbox…for a while anyway.

Friday, June 10, 2016

Moon

Fort Bragg, NC, 1967

Mooney and I had drawn short straws in 1967—that season of war—and though we didn’t know one another at the time, we had that fact in common. By coincidence we found ourselves in the same National Guard unit drilling in the Plastic City. The deal went like this: six months of active duty training (eight weeks basic soldiering 101 followed by four months of schooling in a discipline specified by your home unit). So after we would learn to take orders without question, how to make beds along with the unsavory craft of sanctioned homicide, we would proceed on to Advanced Individual Training (AIT) to learn the care and feeding the UH-1B helicopter—that most overburdened workhorse of the Army’s war effort in “The Nam.”

As we went through the monotonous rigors of indoctrination into “The Guard” we got acquainted as forced comrades are want to do. The natural cynicism of young men of our age and era coursed through our conversations. This war was all madness…a fact we well understood. It was a great in-joke that this time happened to be on us. We had friends in common and we bonded as we prepared to depart on our journey. “Moon” was a shortish, roly-poly Irishman with a shock of red hair and a cherubic face full of freckles who, despite his size, didn’t shy away from an altercation.

Fort Eustis
After we were disassembled into different platoons at Fort Bragg, I only ran into Moon occasionally during those eight weeks. It wasn’t until we got to Fort Eustis, Virginia (a.k.a. Fort Uterus, Vagina) that we became those two Yankees from Masta-two-shits and figuratively joined-at-the-hip. The first night we got into our new barracks we were approached by a smallish guy with five o’clock shadow, a lugubrious grin and an attitude that matched before we’d even dropped our duffel bags. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if not for the half-dozen sneering cohorts fanning out at his sides O.K. Corral style. Seems this nimrod took issue with the fact that while most of these regular Army soldiers taking AIT would be shipping out to Viet Nam following graduation, Moon and I would be returning to Massachusetts. As we faced-off against this mob, I was getting the distinct feeling that things were about to turn really ugly. Moon’s gift of gab and Irish luck came through for him though when it turned out that he and our torturer were from the same hometown and even had friends in common. Once the confrontation became less confrontational, his goons, relieved of duty, shrugged their shoulders and flopped onto their bunks while Moon and Nimrod chatted away the remains-of-the-day like a pair of debutantes at a white-glove tea.

So those months ran along and we learned all about the workings of the “Huey.” I committed to memory nuggets of technical info such as the contents of the fire extinguisher which is (sound it out) Mono bromo tri flouro methane, knowledge that has served me well in the years since…yeah, right. The instructors nickname for the hardware that attached the main rotor to the aircraft was the "Jesus Nut" for pretty obvious reasons. The tail rotor had a moniker as well, they called it the “Fan.” Why? Because if it comes off you watch that pilot’s ass sweat.” We were in training to be “Crew Chiefs” and, God forbid, not under-the-hood mechanics. The Crew Chief’s job was to get passengers on and off the aircraft and in a combat situation, man one of the M-60s while hanging out of the open cabin doors on monkey straps to strafe the LZ. This position made for a tempting target from below, and without getting into gory details, a new Crew Chief’s frequent first duty when assigned to a Huey in Nam was to clean up after his predecessor.

One of the “Dirty Dozen” of Georgia guardsmen in the billet returned from Christmas leave with an acoustic guitar under his arm. He kept it under his bunk with the intention of improving on the instrument while off-duty. When it caught my eye he offered it to me to try and I sang a few snippets of songs. From then on I gave him what tips I could and eventually my repertoire got to be “Summer Rain” by Johnny Rivers, “I Who Have Nothing” by James Brown and an oldie from Elvis called “Soldier Boy.” Given the situation and the sentiments of the song, “Soldier Boy” was a hit in the barracks. For a time, after lights-out, they would pass me the guitar and I would lullaby the young warriors into the arms of Orpheus perched Buddha-like on my top bunk.

Moon was an entertaining storyteller but I think some of his humor chafed this bunch of rednecks—he was just too much of a damn Yankee. He liked motorcycles and skiing, that much I knew from chatting during the first flight to Fort Bragg, but his greater passion was scuba diving. As a kid he had been so fascinated by it that he had stuck his father’s air-compressor hose into his mouth and jumped into Lake Shirley to sit on the bottom as long as he could stand it. One night as the soldiers broke into snores one-by-one, and while legions of cockroaches swarmed the latrine, Moon, from his bottom bunk, near-whispered a story from his days as a commercial diver.

The Dive
It seems there was a maintenance project going on in Boston, not far from the Museum of Science where the Charles reaches the harbor. The huge pumps along with their enormous inlet/outlet pipes were being updated and restored, and he and his diving partner, Glenn (his boss), had the assignment of assessing the daily progress. It was day and night work although it wouldn’t have made any difference inside the piping with its perpetual darkness. There was of course electric lighting in place but it never seemed quite adequate in its amber glow and seemed less so at night though this was totally psychological. He and Glenn had slipped into the water and made their way into that gaping maw.

At first they swam together but bit-by-bit Glenn dropped back, figiting with something along the way. Moon kept on ahead. As when he was a youngster, as soon as he got underwater a feeling of intense wonder and excitement gripped him and he was in-the-zone again. When he achieved that state time slowed down for him and he became mesmerized by his environment. There were a few places where the pipes intersected so it was imperative to stay together, but that cardinal rule had now been broken, and he’d gotten so far from Glenn that he couldn’t see him any more. He cast his flashlight back to where he’d been. The plankton in the water was so dense that visibility was not more than a few yards. The flashlight proved worthless and shining it only lit up the silt to the blaring level of amber static. It was like putting on your high beams in a snowstorm. He could see the hand in front of his face, but just barely. Kicking over to the inner arc of the pipe wall, he was reminded that he was not alone. The wall was festooned with the usual cast-of-characters. There were barnacles and mussels, dog winkles and whelks, sea squirts and stars, urchins and…crabs…lots and lots of crabs. He was hovering close enough that they raised their claws in warning. A school of mummichogs was orbiting about in curiosity as well which inexplicably brought cave paintings to mind.

Suddenly it hit him, “Shit, what time is it?” In his hubris he hadn’t noted when they went under so his watch wouldn’t help him. He looked at his gauges using his flashlight and the breathing gas was at a concerningly low level. He looked around him again and realized he’d lost his bearings and was not sure where he had come from. He became aware that he was bobbing with the slight push/pull of the tidal forces working against the pumps. Those pumps now seemed to thrum like a giant’s heartbeat, louder and louder. He started swimming in the logical direction but encountered another crusted wall where he didn’t expect one. The Air Pressure Alert (APA) sounded and flashed, making him nearly jump out of his skin. He had no choice, he had to start stroking and kicking in some direction…

…The sensation was like being inside of a huge heart, maybe passing through a valve...(lub-dub)...like riding the current of circulation…shrunken down to the size of a blood cell maybe...(remember to breathe)...like in that stupid movie with Raquel Welch...(push-pull)...she looked so good in that wetsuit on the movie poster...it got me to piss away a sunny Saturday in a dark theater...what was it called? “What was…wait; he thought, is that a shadow?” The sound of his own heartbeat now began to throb in his ears…

…it was, and that shadow grew to be an unmistakably human form: Glenn. A hand thrust towards him from out of the murk and their arms locked at the wrist…God creating Adam. It pulled him in what turned out to be the right direction and then disappeared into the fog of silt and plankton ahead of him, leading the way. After what seemed a million years later Moon breached the surface and grappled himself up onto the staging dock, yanked off his mask and regulator and gulped at the night air like they weren’t making any more of it. Glenn was standing there fully suited-up but dry-as-a-bone. He spit out his regulator and barked, “What in the fuck took you so long? I was just getting ready to go back down looking for you.”

“You...just...pulled...me...out,” Moon gasped the words with just a hint of doubt.

“You’re narcotic dude. I had trouble with my shit and I had to abort my dive. I tried to get your attention but I lost you in the soup. You were swimming solo down there, Cap.”

Coda:
Fantastic Voyage, yeah that was it, Fantastic Voyage.