1955 to 1962: learning the ropes

Life was kind of a blur in the beginning there, I’ll be coming back and adding memories to this page often as they occur to me.

The first thing I really remember is asking “Why am I here?”
I never got what I considered to be an acceptable response. I could remember being somewhere else and I just wanted to know why I was here, now, what I supposed to do? I suppose it was a little too deep coming from a 3 year old, or I didn’t detail my expectations with sufficient lucidity.

Around 1958 I remember diving into a swimming pool from the top of a step ladder. Face first, did I say swimming pool? Let’s make a that a kiddie wading pool. My next memory is that they would not allow me take the stuffed Raccoon that had kept me company in the hospital home with me, I was understandably irate. I hope Rocky found a good home.

We were living in Healdsburg. Looking out our window at the flood, it seemed as if the entire World had sunk into the sea. Somebody came and took us somewhere less flooded and the next thing I knew I was being whisked away from my California home to West Germany, only I was too distracted by the loss of Rocky to remember much. I’m told I had fun, visited castles and was in a car accident. We made the trip over on the USS Goethals.
I must have been on something good judging by our passport photo.

Back to California where I remember lots of family at my Grama Burke’s house in Gurneville and a vicious Chihuahua named Penny at my Granny Fikes’ house in Healdsburg.Granny Fikes took me to church and it was one of the scariest things I’d been subjected to in my young life.

 

The next thing I know I’m being injected with some sort of Horse tranquilizer they called ‘vaccinations’ and shanghaied aboard the USS Patch and hustled off to France. I was reasonably irate and it took three nurses to hold me down. Our passport photo turned out a little better this time.

 I got seasick when the ship came to a dead stop mid Atlantic for a life boat drill. And I got my finger caught in a folding deck chair. (Helen remembers that I “howled like a banshee!”)

USS Admiral R. E. Coontz (AP-122) was laid down under a Maritime Commission contract (MC hull 680) on 15 January 1943 at Alameda, California, by the Bethlehem Steel Corp. After much use in WWII She entered the Todd Shipyard, Brooklyn, NY, on 17 March 1946 and was decommissioned there on the 25th. Stricken from the Navy list in April 1946 and turned over to the War Department, the ship underwent a period of repairs and alterations and was renamed General Alexander M. Patch, honoring General Alexander McCarrell Patch, commander of the 7th Army in the invasion of Southern France in 1944. In the Army Transport Service, General Alexander M. Patch carried troops and cargo between Europe and the United States from 1946 to 1950. Reacquired by the Navy on 3 March 1950, the ship operated for the next two decades as USNS General Alexander M. Patch (T-AP-122) with the Military Sea Transportation Service (MSTS), later renamed the Military Sealift Command(MSC). From 1950 to 1965 the ship conducted 123 round-trip voyages between Bremerhaven and New York, with an additional 16 voyages to the Mediterranean. Among her passengers was Mrs. Alexander M. Patch, the widow of the general for whom the ship had been named.
For the first six months of 1966, General Alexander M. Patch operated between New York and Bremerhaven. The Vietnam War once again compelled MSTS to switch some of its transports to the Pacific. General Alexander M. Patch and her sistership, USNS General William O. Darby (T-AP-127), embarked of the Army’s 196th Light Infantry Brigade at Boston and departed on 15 July. Transiting the Panama Canal, the two transports reached Vung Tau, South Vietnam, on 13 August, ending the longest (12,358 nautical miles) point-to-point troop lift in the 17 years that MSTS had been in operation. Before the year was out, General Alexander M. Patch conducted two troop lifts of Republic of Korea troops from Pusan to South Vietnam.

Placed in reserve in New York's upper bay along with three of her sisterships by the summer of 1967, General Alexander M. Patch was transferred to the custody of the Maritime Administration on 26 May 1970 and placed in reserve in the James River.

France was…French…we lived in a really cool old house across from a huge train yard and I had a friend that I would play with for hours in our small back yard or get into trouble for talking with long after bedtime. Marky, as he became known to the others in the house, had died sometime before we moved there, I never understood why his parents were not there with him. He would occasionally make his presence known to Mom, Dad and Helen but it seemed I was the only one that he ever talked with. His real name was Francois. He taught me how to fly and sit on top of Street Lights. Mom told me I shouldn’t talk to others about my flying around at night.

There were some incidents that made it evident I was not thetched in the head. Dad had a locked cabinet in the garage where he stored paint and stuff he didn’t want me getting into. One night there was a noise and when he went to investigate he found the all of the cans inside the locked locker had been tossed around.

I remember starting school, we seemed to be at odds from the beginning. I came home one day with cuts on my knuckles and Mom asked me what happened. “The teacher hit me with a ruler.” She had indeed, with the little sharp brass edge of the ruler, leaving cuts on my hand. I was left handed and they were going to force me to conform to the right handed world. Seems I was also prone to daydreaming, a crime worthy of corporal punishment at the time, I understand that today they medicate that out of kids.  I had discovered that I could escape the mind numbing boredom of the classroom if I just raised my hand and said I had to go. It seems I might have have over done this escape clause as one day the teacher escorted me to the Boys room and stood right beside me, staring down at my penis while she demanded that I show her how much I had to pee. Mom was on the women’s softball league with some of the other wives at the Poiters, Belguiane Family Housing area. She grabbed me, her softball bat and the next thing I hear is her running around the Principles office and people screaming. I heard later that after a circuit of the office the teacher hid in the closet while the Principle fended off mother. I don’t know what they did with the teacher but she never hit me with a ruler or watched me while I peed again.

The Gypsies stole my bike. They would come around and set up a camp down in the valley and have a circus, and run around the rich American neighborhood at night soliciting donations under the cover of darkness. Dad and a few of his Army buddies went down to the Gypsy camp and got my bike back. We found a small puppy in a bird cage at a market and Snoopy came to live with us for the next decade or so. Smartest dog I ever knew.

Uncle Bill came to visit while we were in France, he was stationed in West Germany with the ASA, Army Security Agency, and he was in the teletype room where the flash message from the US would come in if we went to war.

Around the same time that the Aliens brought my little sister Susan to live with us.

A cute Asian girl decided I was her boyfriend. I did not object. She was flirting with me backstage during a school play where I was performing “I’m a little Tea Pot”. She was sitting across from and hiked her skirt to give me a peek. When I came to the part “This is my handle and this is my spout” I was most certainly showing off my spout. She was the first girl I got to see naked and I liked what I saw, and liked her liking what she saw.

As we were escaping France we flew out of Orly Field, driving around Paris for a while and stopping at the Louvre where Uncle Bill hung a drawing of his on the wall with a bit of tape. “I’ve had a picture hanging in the Louvre!” he would exclaim at opportune times for years to come.

We landed somewhere on the East coast and drove across country to Ft Huachuca Arizona. I became a Cowboy.
Next chapter-> 1962 to 1965 Cowboy Billy