Memoir 10: I defend the Free World

 Not me.  Wrong war.

I was just the right age for the Korean War but, like so many of my contemporaries, I avoided the draft by going to college.  (That was not the main reason I went to college, of course, but it helped.  At that time nobody decided to take a year off, grab a backpack, and tour Europe.  If you tried that, and you were male, chances were that you found yourself with a backpack – and a rifle – touring the mountains of Korea.)  Also, many of my contemporaries who finished college at that time avoided the army by (a) getting married, and (b) going to graduate school.   I was married, yes, but – having graduated in a subject I had no desire to pursue,  there was no graduate program in my immediate future   Thus I was dismayed to find  myself a private in the U.S. Army in September of 1955.  I served until early summer of 1957, when they let me out to return to Stanford to study geology.  My serial number was (is) US 56 264 356 – seared into my memory.  I will forget my SS#, my home address, even where to find the nearest toilet - before that number disappears from my brain.

When I was called up for my physical I had high hopes of being classified 4F – which meant: “we don’t want you”.  No such luck.  Even though my left ear didn’t work and my eyesight was crappy, I qualified.  So, that very day, I found myself at Fort Ord, near Monterey, California.  And then it really got weird.

It seems that the army was planning an “experiment”.  They were investigating whether it was possible to cram all the stuff you were supposed to learn in the regular eight-weeks of basic training, into four weeks.  For the opening round of this experiment they assembled a full company of college boys, supplemented by a few high school kids who had scored exceptionally well on their army “I.Q. test”.  Some of the guys in my company had been sitting around for three or four weeks, pulling details like hoeing weeds, while waiting for the company to fill.  I wasted almost two weeks that way myself.  Then we got started.

They had picked a special “faculty” for us, I believe.  First of all, behind every bush there was a major or light colonel in the medical corps – psychologists, I suppose.  Also, our drill sergeant was certainly handpicked –he was the most mellow drill sergeant the world has ever known.  They messed up with the company top sergeant, however – he was smart, omnipresent, and mildly sadistic.  I assume the company officers were similarly special, but they were august creatures that we hardly ever saw.  So we attacked the curriculum. 

Well, hell, there was a little stuff you might call “academic”, meaning it required you to use part of your brain, but it was trivial – totally no sweat.  But then there was the rest of the “curriculum”, which required things like good conditioning, reasonable hand-to-eye coordination, the quick recognition of which foot was “left” and which “right” – that sort of thing.  At this, I guess, we were terrible.  I will give you some examples.

One day at the rifle range we were prone, preparing to shoot at targets 200 yards away.  The targets were set up on a tall sand dune (Ord was essentially on the beach.)  Suddenly a jack rabbit broke from the brush at the bottom of the dune and ran diagonally upwards across it toward the top.  The thing must have had a death wish, because it ran right through the cluster of targets. Or, maybe it just knew its enemy.  All 40-50 of us (my company) immediately fired all our 20 rounds each at that rabbit. That’s a minimum of 800 shots, maybe 1000.  The rabbit survived.  It didn’t thumb its nose at us when it reached the top, but if it had had a thumb it might have done so.  For wasting all that ammunition we got to trot about ten miles in the hot sun, with full pack.

A personal story:  I am not what you would call a crack shot.  In fact, at shooting I am undeniably terrible.  So when the day came that we all needed to “Qualify” on the M1 rifle, I was bound to be a disgrace to the unit.  Not only can’t I hold a rifle very still, but I couldn’t even see the damned target!  They (the army) had taken away my civilian glasses and furnished me with a standard-issue pair, which were harder to break, I guess.  The only problem was that the prescription was wrong: I couldn’t see jack s---  beyond about 100 ft.  (They later straightened this out, of course.)  On one exercise I hit my target about 10 times out of 20 – but the guy next to me scored 22.  I had shot at his target part of the time, being unable to read the numbers designating which target was which.  Well, anyway, after a while it became apparent that everybody in the unit was going to qualify, except me.  That’s when the old, mellow drill sergeant rolled up to me (he was pretty fat) and said “Beck, do you want me to shoot this last target for you.”  You can guess my reply.  Well, when the signal sounded old sarge slowly lowered himself to the ground, got comfortable, fiddled with the rifle and then, only a few seconds before time was up, put 20 holes in my bulls eye.  So I got the marksman medal and old sarge was spared the humiliation of having an unsatisfactory platoon.  Thank God there are people like him in the U.S. Army.

So, the unofficial verdict on my company was that it was the worst in living memory.  As one RA (Regular Army – not draftees) soldier explained it: When the army tells you to do something, you are supposed to do it immediately, without thinking.  You guys wrinkle your brow and ask “Why?”

Then after that I was sent to Ft. Sam Houston, Texas, near San Antonio, for my second eight weeks of training.  That wasn’t much fun, either.

At Ft. Sam I was trained to be a corpsman.  Corpsman sweep out hospital wards, make beds, and empty bed pans.  Because of my rock-bottom “physical profile” (remember the bad hearing and the glasses) it turned out that there were only two things that I could become in the army – corpsman, or supply handler*.  I might have chosen the latter but they didn’t give me a chance: I was ordered to Ft. Sam, to learn which side of a bedpan needs to be up.  I also learned how to unroll bandages, spoon-feed wounded soldiers – and even give shots.  They showed us some of the things an aid man would do in battle (these are the guys that go out to treat the wounded), but we were considered too dumb to actually learn these things. 

*Actually, this isn’t precisely correct.  I was offered the opportunity to go to OCS (Officer Candidate School) and become a 2^ND Lieutenant.  This always has struck me as strange:  I was too blind and deaf to be a regular soldier, but I could command a bunch of regular soldiers, maybe even in combat.  I might have gone to OCS were it not for the stipulation that I would have to give the army a full four years.   Forget it!

Well, some glimpses of life at Ft. Sam.

Mostly we had to learn a lot of really dumb stuff.  We did have some field exercises: Once I was sent out to pretend to be a forward observer, looking for tanks.  When I saw one I was supposed to radio in – and then get severally wounded.  I fell in my tracks, and sure enough a pair of aid men found me, put me on a stretcher, and hauled me back to a tent hospital, where I was spoon fed, had my “wounds” wrapped and re-wrapped – and narrowly avoided being given a shot – I threatened the guy who was supposed to give it with instant death, and we squirted the sterile water out on the ground. 

There is little positive that I can say about Ft. Sam Houston, except that the food was good.  However, once I was carrying my tray to a table, tripped, and spilled the whole thing on the dress uniform of an officer.  I expected death, or at least prison – but he merely glanced at me as if I was too contemptible to notice, spooned most of the mashed potatoes and gravy off his jacket, and went back to talking to his friends.  I got a rag and tried to clean him off, but he waved me away.  I suspect that he was looking forward to the day when he could leave Ft. Sam and get into some nice clean combat zone, SE Asia perhaps.

The only good thing about Ft. Sam was that we got a pass nearly every weekend, and my friend Sam Sims was going to college in Austin, which was not very far away.  We went to movies, drank a little beer – and even went to see some geology.  We didn’t pursue the local women: I was married, and Sims was shy.  Sam was getting his M.S. in geology there at U. Texas.  I believe that it was there in Austin that I began to realize that I might enjoy doing geology, too.  If you have read my bit on Caltech you already know Sam.  He was one of my lifelong best friends.

So, anyway, the eight weeks passed in what seemed like – well, fifteen  weeks – and at last it was time to be informed of our permanent duty-stations.  Recall that this was just at the tag end of the Korean War: an armistice of sorts had been signed and nobody was getting shot – but the army still wanted lots of “boots on the ground” in South Korea, Given that, probably 80-90% of my “graduating class” went to Korea.  God must have been on my side, however – I was detailed to the 2^nd General Hospital, Landstuhl, Germany!  Oh, joy, undeserved!   

That piece of luck made the difference between 18 very unpleasant months – and a lengthy adventure.  My wife, Virginia, joined me when her school year ended, after which we traveled a lot, cheerfully endured rotten housing conditions as only the young can do – and, generally had a ball.  It’s funny: When I think back over my years in the army all I remember is a general feeling of misery, boredom, and gloom – but all the vignettes that pop into my brain were fun!   I will now tell you about some of them.

However, before I go into life at Landstuhl Army Hospital, I ought to tell you about getting there.  From Ft. Sam we were put on a train and transported to Ft. Dix, New Jersey.  (Best institutional food in the world!)  Then, when a troop ship came in, was unloaded, and fumigated, we were marched on board – Class A uniforms, gear in a duffle bag.  The ship was at dock, the sea like glass, no breeze at all.  As we marched on board and felt the ship, not dock, under foot – about 20% of my fellow warriors broke ranks and ran to the rail!  And that gives you an idea about how the next ten days went.

The North Atlantic in February is not a pleasure voyage, especially in a big floating cavern of a troop ship.  We were given “berths” – hammocks, really, in stacks of four.  By day two more than half of my fellow “passengers” were near death.  Fortunately, I seem to be immune to motion sickness – and I was in a top bunk.  (You can imagine what it must have been like to be in a bottom bunk – at least until the soldiers above you were completely emptied out.  Some of those guys, I swear, never once left their hammocks.  When we reached Bremerhaven I imagine they just carted the corpses away.)

This being the army, we had to be assigned to some duty station.  I was lucky and ended up in the “vegetable room”, where the Philippine cooks prepared parts of lunch and dinner – and scrambled eggs for breakfast.  There were about ten of us assigned to help them, but all except me were near death.  That meant that I was given the duty of assembling the emptied crates and boxes, hauling them on deck – and throwing them overboard.   (Normally we weren’t allowed on deck, but – as I said – I was lucky.)  The cooks didn’t give a damn where I was, so I would just snuggle down in a coil of rope somewhere out of the wind and spray – and watch the boxes recede into the distance.  When I couldn’t see them anymore I would go back below, gather some more detritus, and do it again.  That way I avoided watching my fellow soldiers struggle with nausea while cracking eggs. 

There are many more vivid scenes of this time of life that flash unbidden across my mind, but I will spare you.  For instance, you don’t want to know what it is like to sit at the breakfast table eating eggs and bacon – and watching the guy across from you attempt his first meal in, maybe, three days – with a fork in one hand, and a paper bag in the other.  No, you really don’t want to know.

But, we got there at last.  Now to return to the main narrative.

I will start with some of my misadventures before Virginia arrived.  I thought of myself (at age 23) as a hardened beer drinker, but I had not reckoned with German beer.  It was available only in one liter bottles, it seemed. These cost one mark – about 25 cents.  Unless we had screwed up monumentally, every weekend we were off from Saturday noon until Monday morning.  Thus, on Saturday evenings a bunch of us would walk down toward the town (the hospital was on top of a hill), past houses filled with loudly accommodating women – and into a “Gast Haus”.  These places featured German beer in liter bottles, an “om pa” band, and a few women looking for company.  I would invariably tell myself that one bottle would be enough - but it tasted so good, and I was having so much fun, that I would order another, and sometimes even a third.    Thus it was that about midnight we would stagger back up the hill, through the M.P. gate, and into our barracks.  I would get into bed, close my eyes – and then, of course, the damned bed would begin to sway back and forth and perform acrobatic tricks.  Three or so minutes of that and I was down the hall, my arms around a toilet – where I would spend most of the night.  Then I would keep to my bed most all day Sunday, trying to get over my head ache and persuade myself that I could make it to the mess hall.  Invariably I swore that I would not do that again, but the next weekend, of course – I did.  Virginia’s arrival got me out of the barracks and saved me from a sure death from alcohol poisoning.

One time several of us somehow acquired use of a vehicle and took off Saturday noon for Heidelberg.  We split up: I think they were looking for girls, but I was trying to study Heidelberg culture or history, or something like that.  However, I drank my share of beer, and I can’t remember much of what happened into the evening.  However, I do remember being part of a wedding celebration, sitting at a long table, linking arms with two German guys on either side – and singing what might have been traditional wedding songs – in fluent German!  I don’t have any idea how this came about.  All I remember is the bride smiling at me.  I thought she looked like and angel!  We got back to base about sunup, drove through the gate, flipping off the M.P. in charge, and got into bed.  You can guess where I was three minutes later. 

Finally, Virginia arrived, and I was saved. 

We lived in the archetypal “cold-water flat”, in this case the basement of a modest house along a main street of Landstuhl.  The owners spoke precisely no English, and my German was even worse than that.  I can’t remember how I found the place, or how I managed to get it rented, but I did.  Communication eased up a little when Virginia arrived: her parents had spoken a lot of German, and she recognized a few phrases.  Still, we got by on sign language and facial expressions for most of the time we lived there.

So, this “apartment” had – if I remember correctly – a coal stove for heat, room for a bed, a table, and a few chairs – and a bathroom containing a toilet, and a sink.  The sink, however, emitted only cold water.  We heated water on the coal stove – and took “sponge baths”.  For cooking I seem to recall a sort-of hot plate.  It was amazing how content we were in that primitive dump.

Somehow, before Virginia arrived, I had managed to buy an automobile.  It was a 1954 Volkswagen bug.  (We took it home with us and had it for quite a few years.  It was a good car.)  It was quite unlike any VW bug most of you will ever have seen.  For instance:  it had no gas gauge.  There was a “reserve tank” of a few liters.  You simply drove until the car gave signs of running out of gas, and then you kicked over a lever to access the reserve.  This worked fine – so long as you remembered to kick the lever back after your next fill.  If you didn’t, you did quite a little walking.  I can’t tell you how many times I made this mistake, but it was more than once.   Another peculiarity of that machine was its turn-signal mechanism.  If you wanted to make a turn you toggled the appropriate lever – and an arrow-like object about eight inches long popped out from the side of the car, pointing in the correct direction.  They weren’t lighted, but they did have reflectors.  We G.I.s called them “machs nix sticks”, implying that they were highly unreliable indicators of the driver’s intentions.  Amazingly, the U.S. let that car into the country.  When we were repatriated we picked up our VW in NY City, drove it through Manhattan, and across the country.  It was our only wheels for several years thereafter.  It got maybe 25 miles to the gallon, which I considered amazing at the time.

Before I get into our various adventures I should tell you about the general “geo-political” situation.  The Cold War was in full swing, and the Russians had an enormous army just across the border.  While we were in Landstuhl the Hungarian people revolted against their Moscow-imposed Commie leaders, fought bravely, radioed the “Free World” repeatedly for help – and got stomped.  We (America, mainly) had been urging the Soviet-dominated states of Eastern Europe to “rise up against their oppressors”.  When they did, we chickened out and let them die.  The painful fact was that we didn’t have the necessary resources in place to take on Moscow, and also that the American people were sick and tired of war.  I have to admit that, fundamentally, I was glad this was the case; I had no desire to get my butt shot off!

To give you a feel for the situation:  About once each month we had things called “alerts”.  Alerts were make-believe invasions.  They were declared randomly, and theoretically nobody knew they were coming.  The way I would learn that an alert was on was, first, by hearing the jet fighters from Ramstein Airbase (a few miles to the west), heading for the eastern border,  roaring so low over the hospital that the windows  would quiver, and, second, watching and hearing all our med-evac helicopters take off and head east.  The field hospital people responded to an alert by loading their gear on trucks, to await deployment.  As I will explain later, I was assigned to the Personnel Department.  Our job was to load all records on some trucks – and skedaddle to western France!  There was no question that, if the Russians attacked, we were going to retreat.  Oddly enough, this didn’t bother us (young folks) at all.  The officers may have worried, but not us. 

So, now – how did I end up in Personnel?  Well, the times then were quite different than I’m told they are now.  Your average soldier was – let’s face it – not very bright.  Many (most?) hadn’t finished high school, and I suspect that a lot of them had never even started.  For instance – on the troop train from Bremerhaven to Landstuhl I spent a long time and considerable effort explaining to some of the guys that they didn’t use dollars in Germany, and that what they did use (the mark) was worth about 25 cents.  This one kid kept saying: “I don’t get it!  You mean in this country a dolla ain’t worth a dolla?”

So, anyway, it happened that when I got to the Landstuhl base they were in need of someone to be the Officers Pay and Allotments clerk.  I may have been the only person in the bunch who was comfortable with reading, let alone arithmetic.  They actually ASKED me if I wanted to work in Personnel, rather than on a ward, sweeping and emptying bed pans.  Naturally, I said “yes”.  My only regret from that decision was that I had to wear my Class A (dress) uniform to work, instead of the comfortable smock-like- things that everybody else got to wear. 

As officer’s pay clerk I helped a lot of young doctors with their pay problems.  Most of our doctors were captains; they were just out of medical school and using the army as their internship, or something like that.  The RA (regular army) docs were majors and above; the base commander was a full colonel.  The base commander’s wife was head of nursing – she was a lieutenant colonel.  We called her Mrs. Colonel Hays.  She took a liking to me after I fixed some problems for her; she used to pay me social visits in the office!  This may have helped preserve me from the wrath of my superiors- and wrath, truth to tell, sometimes would have been justified.  Mrs. Colonel Hays was a nice, sweet, grandmotherly type.  Her husband, however, was an austere and dignified, unapproachable old gentleman, with whom one did not screw. 

One benefit of my job was that I got to know so many of these young captains.  Most of them were married, some with kids.  They lived in on-base housing which had, amongst other marvelous things, showers and genuine kitchens!  Virginia and I baby-sat quite a few times, while they toured Europe.  We probably would have done it for nothing.

Okay, then – we went on trips ourselves.   That VW rolled over many of the roads of Western Europe.  We went to numerous interesting places in Germany on week-end passes.  (Being in Personnel I could almost always score a three-day pass.)  We also saw bits of France, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy.  Belgium, too, I believe – but never Spain, Holland or Denmark, to my current sorrow.  As a G.I., I could buy gasoline at any army base we went near, for next to nothing, which was very useful – the price of gasoline on the European economy was horrible.  We usually stayed in cheap but clean hotels, and ate in good but inexpensive restaurants.  The economic disruption at that time was such that people were happy to accept a pack of cigarettes as a substantial tip.  I could buy them for $1/case (or 10 cents/pack) at the P.X.  A German or Austrian would have paid at least a dollar for that same pack – and a dollar was a lot of money.  If they didn’t smoke, they could sell them.

Now for a few incidents from that time, related truthfully to the best of my ability to remember:

I remember one trip to some town in Germany when I produced a bottle of some kind of Teutonic fire-water.  We consumed it in our room overlooking a busy street – two busy streets, in fact – we were in a corner room – several stories up, fortunately.  My shy and modest wife – lacking my experience with fire-water – became, shall we say – somewhat disoriented - and began to lean out the window, accosting male passers-by.  (She had seen some real pros in action.)  I managed to get her under control before anybody took her up on her implied proposal!  (She will deny this, because she doesn’t remember.  But I do!)

We took one whopping big trip down to the south of France, then over into Italy.  I know we got as far as Florence, but I’m not sure about Rome.  We did visit Venice, and Milan – I remember seeing the Last Supper.  We went through Monte Carlo, and thus also must have passed through Genoa.  I know we went to Pisa, because we bought some gasoline there.  But our greatest adventure occurred in Nice, on the French Rivera.  

On that trip we went through southern France and over the Maritime Alps, heading for the Mediterranean.  On the way down the other side of the mountains the road went through a spectacular series of hairpin turns.  The sun was shining, the air clear and fresh, and I was maybe 23 – so I sailed down that road at top speed, down-shifting at each turn.  One particularly exuberant down-shift near the bottom did something fatal to our poor little engine – blew out the timing gear, I think it was.  We found ourselves about 50 miles from Nice, dead in the water.  Somehow – I marvel at it now – we managed to contact a VW dealership in Nice and get a tow.  The tow itself was one of the more frightening experiences of my life.  We were being pulled by a truck to which we were attached by about 20 ft. of rope.  When the truck slowed, I had to hit the breaks – very quickly.  And, of course, I had to steer.  It was sheer terror, but at last we reached the garage in downtown Nice.  And there our troubles took an unexpected lurch.

We were in France, and all parts for VWs were, of course, made somewhere in Germany.  This was about 40 years before the Common Market – and the French didn’t much like the Germans, to boot.  Consequently, the part had to be ordered from a German supplier, via Paris.  Transportation must have been by goat caravan.  We stayed in Nice for at least a week, probably more.  As a bad joke you might say “Nice was a nice place to be stranded”.  Not if you were nearly broke.

This was even before the day of “Europe for Five Dollars a Day”, and so playing tourist must have been very inexpensive.  But I was a damned private in the U.S. Army!  We found a clean but rudimentary hotel somewhere in the middle of town.  It had hot water for only a few hours per day, but the door locked and it had a bed.  We ate lots of bread and cheese, and drank cheap wine.  We spent a lot of time at the beach – I saw my first bikini there.  Nice might be a great place to stay if you had plenty of money, but we didn’t.  Finally, the part arrived, and we departed.  East through Monte Carlo (no gambling), and on into Italy.  Back through Austria, I think – we spent time in Vienna (boring) and Insbrook (mountainous and exhilarating) .   Did we do Switzerland that trip?  I can’t remember   Switzerland was close to Landstuhl, so we probably went there on another trip.  When did we go up to Belgium and Luxemburg?  Can’t recall.  We took pictures, but they are long lost.  One thing is certain: I wished I had stayed awake during all those History of Western Civilization lectures they had forced on us at Stanford.  Especially the ones on art.  I guess travel is wasted on the young.

So, anyway, life went on like that until it was time to go home and rejoin the real world.  Because I was married they flew me (and my wife, of course) home, in a prop airplane that had to refuel three times between Frankfort and New York – Shannon, Ireland; Thule, Greenland;  and Gannon AFB.  Newfoundland.  That may have been the longest air journey I have ever experienced, in point of time.  But we were young.  When we arrived they took all day to process my discharge papers, and had the effrontery to hand me a hoe and send me out to chop weeds!  I remember as a powerful liberating moment when, as the hour of my release approached, I pitched that hoe into the woods and walked away.  And the rest is history, most of which I have already recorded, have forgotten, or don’t want to talk about.

Memoir 9: More college

Stanford

Memoir 9:  Stanford

In this section I’m going to write about my experiences in college -1951 to 1955.  I went to college a lot more years than that, but as a graduate student – this will come later.  I attended Caltech in Pasadena for one year, 1951-51, and Stanford 1952-1955.  I already have written a summary of some of the weird goings on at Tech and have posted it separately.

I had blamed “Science” for my unhappiness at Caltech, and had somehow persuaded myself that I wanted to go to law school, and then become a politician.  (I was a rabid Taft Republican in those days; I thought people like Eisenhower were practically Commies!)  Therefore, I became a political science major, later transferring to economics.  One of my classmates was the current senior (VERY senior) senator from California, The Honorable Diane Feinstein.  She was Diane Goldman then and was constantly involved in campus politics.  She was a fairly good student, but easy to fluster during the debates that always developed out of our Thursday discussion sections.  Together with Jerry Goldberg – center on the football team – I did my best to piss her off.  She could be a bit self-righteous. 

Anyway, after Caltech, Stanford was very easy.  After calculus, physics and chemistry in the same quarter, three quarters in a row, a few courses in “social science” and a unit of band were a vacation.  I tried to get into as many intramural sports as I could.  I played a lot of tennis.  And, of course, I spent a lot of time trying to meet girls.

 

At Stanford, meeting girls was hard.  I think the male/female ratio at that time was about three to one, and those scarce females held out for dates with fraternity boys who had nice, clean, shiny cars, and dressed well.  I had a 1951 Dodge something-or-other at the time, which I rarely washed and never polished.  That, plus my Beaumont High School yokel personality, doomed my efforts in the social line.   I had a Jewish friend who used to date girls from a Jewish sorority at San Jose State.  I persuaded him to take me there, although he warned it wouldn’t be fun – I was not MOT (Member of the Tribe).  He was right.  I did manage to get a date one year for the Big Game prom (Big Game is the football contest with Cal Berkeley).  It went badly.  My social problems ended when Virginia, my high school girl friend, entered San Jose State.

Now maybe I can dredge up some interesting events at Stanford. 

Well, one involved Ralph Buckwalter.  My first year at Stanford was spent rooming with three other guys at Stanford Village, which was a converted WW2 naval hospital in Menlo Park, a few miles from campus.  Ralph was a freshman, and Ralph was in love.  He had a huge, gold tinted picture-frame with the smiling image of his high school girlfriend inside.  Nothing wrong there, except that he talked about her all the time.  “She’ll make such a wonderful mother” was one of the least nauseating things he would say.  We took it for a couple of weeks and then, one day, we hid the damned thing.  Ralph, of course, went berserk – threatened to kill us all.  He even cried.  But he couldn’t find the picture (we had hidden it in another guy’s room down the hall.)  When he finally calmed down, after at least a week, we put the picture frame back – but with the visage of a particularly ugly gorilla inside.  This set him off again, of course.  Maybe two weeks later the gorilla disappeared and the girl reappeared.  Made no difference – Ralph hated us all.  Poor guy: she dumped him toward the end of the year.

Okay, then, my John Brodie story.  When I started taking economics classes I did well (elementary economics is a bit like bone-head calculus, but with a lot more words), so I was asked to be a student “reader”.  Econ 1 was always a very large lecture section, and the exams always consisted of a few short essays.  The professor dreamed up the questions, then handed the whole thing off to a teaching assistant.  The T.A. administered the exam, and then farmed out grading of the questions to us readers.  We each had one question to grade, which meant reading upwards of 50 essays on the same topic.  The professor told us the points he was fishing for, and then turned us lose.  Jesus!  Was that ever boring!  The worst part was that any student who disagreed with our grading had the right to meet with us and complain.  We met these irate students in a big room at the top of Economics Corner; the T.A. was there to protect us if things got out of hand.  My technique was to re-read the whole answer, then maybe give a few points on the basis of the student’s complaint, but subtract a few for other “errors” I had suddenly encountered.  It was a hard job, for which we were paid $1.25/hour.  (We submitted our hours”honor system”.)    By my senior year I was making nearer $3.00/hour by virtue of reporting more hours than I had worked.  I figured that, with all my experience, I was worth it. 

Anyway, about John Brodie:  Brodie was Stanford’s star quarterback.  He may not have been dumb, but he certainly never learned much about economics.  (Or much else, I suspect.)  We (the T.A. and I) did our best to keep him eligible, by inflating his scores.  Yes, I know – you always wondered if that sort of thing went on.  It does; or at least it did, in the 1950s. 

Oh, yeah – this is funny.  I became a good friend of the head T.A., a Ph.D. candidate who later because a very successful academic.  Paul was a horny bachelor at the time.  All econ courses had Thursday discussion section, led by T.A.s.  When the class list arrived at the beginning of the quarter, Paul and I would sit down with the list and the latest Yearbook – and; put all the pretty girls into Paul’s sessions!  We would add a few hopeless males, of course, to make it look legit.

But in the end: Brodie never led Stanford to the Rose Bowl, and Paul never scored with his students.  I may be wrong, but I think he later married another econ grad student and lived happily forever after.

 

I took Band two quarters per year; I skipped fall quarter because the band was expected to perform at half time in football games, which took too much practice.  I played bass clarinet, which is a big, cumbersome wooden thing shaped like a double gooseneck.  Stanford’s band had two bass clarinets: me, and an earnest woman who was a music major.  I showed up for practice my first time just ahead of her, so the band director made me first chair.  Bass clarinets don’t make much noise, so the director was unaware of how much better she was than me.  I never practiced.  When we were rehearsing and the music got too tough I would play “Mary Had a Little Lamb”.  In between breaths she would glare at me and whisper “Shut Up!”  During actual concerts I just faked anything I couldn’t actually play.  And, by golly, I (and every other band member) got an A, every quarter! 

So, all in all, Stanford was relatively dull.  I played a lot of tennis (mainly with Paul, the T.A.), had a date with Virginia nearly every week end, studied a few hours most nights, and drank quite a bit of beer at Rossotti’s, a real dive of a tavern in the hills west of campus.  I was admitted to Stanford law school after my junior year but, thankfully, decided not to go.  If I had become a lawyer I suspect that I would have made a lot of money, but that – by now – I would have been long since dead!  I graduated in June of 1955, and got married to Virginia the same day.  My old Caltech wrestling buddy Sam was the Best Man.

And then – it was off to the army!

.

Memoir 8: The Caltech experience

After high school I attended Caltech, in Pasadena - briefly.  Tech is one of the most prestigious universities in the world, and possibly the most demanding.  I had some bizarre experiences there; here is a sampling.

The Caltech experience (1951-52)

I should never have attempted Caltech.  I had excelled academically at Beaumont Union High School, and I thought I liked science.  No way, however, was I ready for the scholastic meat-grinder that was Tech at that time (& certainly remains).  I was used to getting top grades with minimal effort; at Tech I busted my butt, for B’s.  Most of my contemporaries were from large high schools, with top-of-the-line lab equipment and excellent, well-paid teachers.  I was from Beaumont.  As I wasn’t used to being mediocre, I responded by being a first-class cut-up.  More about that later.

I was only there my freshman year.  Each quarter we took math (calculus), physics, and chemistry.  We also had small courses in English, history, and something called Air Science – Tech was experimenting with Air ROTC. (It was a bust, I’m pretty sure.)  We went round to our classes in “sections” – about 20 guys (no girls at Tech then).  Most of the real teaching was done by senior graduate students who had been admitted because of their research abilities, certainly not their teaching proficiency.  Once or twice each week we (the entire freshman class) would have a lecture from one of the professors – Linus Pauling, for instance.  They were generally a waste of time; most of the real learning was accomplished in problem sessions, with the grad students.  I estimate that we went to class five or six hours each day.  We also studied at least four hours every day, and sometimes a lot more.  Study was intense, believe me.  We were all competing for the best grades.  Caltech computed its grades to the third decimal place; a 2.965 (about my overall average) was WAY better than a 2.890!

There were no girls, and most of us were classic nerds, so dating was nearly nonexistent.  Every so often we had an “exchange” with some nearby girls’ school, such as Scripps in Pomona.  We tended to think the girls at these events were strange and unattractive, and I’m certain that they felt the same about us.  Exchanges don’t work; any guy sufficiently self-confident to have fun at such an event would have a girlfriend already.

So what did we do for fun?  Well, in my case, we dabbled in sports, and goofed off.  Caltech has four “houses” (or did, 50 years ago).  We played one-another in 7-man flag football.  I was a big star – I had played high school football, I could run, and I could throw.  We had fantastically complicated plays, which were ingeniously designed but rarely worked because we were such a bunch of klutzes.  My house was Dabney, and we won the title that year.  I also played basketball; I tried out for the varsity but got cut; thereafter I played on the JV team – possibly the worst basketball team ever assembled, except for one – we beat somebody that year.   I had my glasses broken several times, and it was near the end of that season that I decided I would give up the game – it was costing my family too damned much to replace my glasses.  (Contact lenses were decades in the future.)  In the spring I played tennis with anybody I could find; I don’t think Tech had a tennis team, but it did have some good courts.  

Goofing off required great amounts of time and energy.  Goofing off at Tech was a major activity; nerds have to be able to let off steam somehow.  We engaged in numerous inter-house water fights, using water balloons, fire hoses, stirrup pumps, and anything else that would work.  My main task was to provoke a fight; I was a freshman, dumb, fairly fast, and fearless.  When we decided to provoke a fight with another house, I would strip to my shorts, fill two water balloons, then run through the lounge area of the enemy house, screaming inflammatory challenges – and I would break the balloons over the heads of whoever was sitting there.  Then I would run like hell for Dabney.  Once I got caught.  I got the “whirlpool treatment”.  I won’t describe it, but it involved a toilet.

One water fight, between all four houses, got so out of hand that the Pasadena police were called in.  We would throw water balloons at them, then lock our (massive) doors, go out on the sleeping porch, and prepare to drop to the next floor if they came in.  That night we did quite a bit of water damage to the Tech accounting machines, which were in the basement below one of the houses.  All hell broke loose, and we didn’t have quite so much fun for the rest of the year.

I had three roommates.  The room was plenty big enough for our desks, books, clothes, etc., because we slept on the porch.  This “sleeping porch” was long enough to accommodate about a dozen beds.  I don’t remember having any trouble with this arrangement, although sometimes people would have to be shut up.  (We were freshman; we were rarely drunk.)  I guess the Pasadena weather is as good as they advertise.  I think the bathroom was “down the hall” somewhere; I can’t remember.

Oh, yes – Dabney House.  It was quite comfortable, almost elegant.  It wasn’t a fraternity, but it had some of the trappings.  (The other houses were the same.)  Once you had “selected” your house, and they had agreed to take you (everyone got in somewhere), they “initiated” you – made you perform some task, at the peril of am uncomfortable punishment.  I was told to locate three bricks carved with line integral signs among  the thousands of bricks that at that time made up most of the campus walkways, as well as some of the buildings.  I found two, but not the third.  I decided to brazen it out; I went before the assembled House and announced that there were four such signs (I had just scratched one the day before, in an out-of-the-way place.)  Unfortunately for me, the next day the seniors went out and inspected my effort – and judged it a fake!  I was sentenced to the dreaded “egg treatment”.

Here’s how the egg treatment worked.  Someone went to a second-story window, measured outward exactly 18 inches from a designated spot – and lowered a plum bob.  The spot the plum bob indicated was marked with an X.  The victim was then stripped to his shorts and required to lay with his mouth directly over the X.  One of the victim’s roommates was sent to the proper window and ordered to measure out exactly 18 inches – and break a raw egg.  Ideally the egg falls directly into the victim’s open mouth.  If you closed either eyes or mouth, they did it again.  If your roommate missed, they did it to him.  Fortunately, I got by with only a single egg.  You were not required to swallow.

Some of the initiation tasks were more pleasant than others.  One of my fellow Dabney freshmen was Frank Capra, Jr., son of the famous movie director.  He had gone to studio school (with Elizabeth Taylor, no less).  His “task”, if you could call it that, was to bring a starlet to dinner, which he did.  Naturally, we were mostly too shy to talk to her, but plenty of us dumped food on our shirts while watching her.  I think her name was Pier Angelie.

My best friend at Tech was a guy named Sam Sims.  He was from Indio and had played high school football against me, although I didn’t know him at the time.  He was in another house – I believe it was called “Ricketts”.  Sam was on the Caltech varsity football team, which at that period was not so bad.  Unfortunately, he had a trick shoulder, which limited his playing time.  Pretty much every evening after dinner I would go over to Ricketts, burst into his room, and attack him.  We would wrestle, slamming each other around the room and making a God-awful racket for about ten minutes.  People from all over would come to watch.  Then we would start our nightly academic labors.  It was an effective way to blow off steam, I guess.  The funny thing is that Sam’s roommate studied right through it – he had earplugs and only appeared to notice when one or the other of us crashed into him.

I should write about several other things – the exams, and the phenomenon of “snakes”.

For the “big three” – math, physics, chemistry – our exams were taken together – the entire freshman class (180 souls, I believe) in a big auditorium.  They were designed to take four hours.  However, for some of us could forever would have been too short – and for a few, only an hour or two were needed.  There were about a half-dozen guys in the class that were extremely smart; they seemed to solve problems by intuition, and had a hard time helping the rest of us.  These despicable creatures would compete to see who could finish first.  When one of them did finish he would stand up, yawn, grab his stuff and, going down front, toss his exam paper (blue book) on the table.  All the while a chorus of hissing and booing would grow.  As the object of all this hatred and wrath exited the room, he would invariably turn, smile, and flip the rest of us the finger.  It was all in good fun; I doubt if any of these guys were ever actually killed, although there were numerous death threats.

In addition to these ultra-smart guys there were a similar number of kids who also got near-perfect grades, by dint of studying virtually all the time.  They were called “snakes”, because they would go into their holes (their rooms) and never come out, no matter what was going on outside.  A favorite activity during water fights was to smoke out the snakes and toss them in the shower – or worse. 

I will record one instructive example of Caltech humor, with regard to a snake.  As I said earlier, we all took our exams together, in one big room.  Tech had a rigid honor system; there were no faculty anywhere around during exams.  (Grades were so important that – if you cheated and anybody found out – the students themselves would expel you from school  That sort of thing happened every so often.)  So, during an exam, if you had to go to the bathroom, you simply left your bluebook at your seat, and went.  One time a guy sitting next to a snake happened to have an extra bluebook.  When the poor reptile in question got up to go to the john, his neighbor hid his bluebook, put the blank one on his desk and, when the snake came back, lit it afire!  The poor guy screamed, began to cry, beat out the flames with his bare hands, and then attacked his persecutor – who was twice his size.  When he got his real exam paper back he was too upset to continue.  There was hell to pay, naturally, but at Tech this was considered the height of fun.  (I didn’t see this; it was a Caltech legend.  I don’t doubt that it happened.)  

So why did I leave?  Well, I wasn’t happy there, and I blamed it on science, not myself.  I decided I wanted to be a politician (!), not a physicist.  Thus I decamped to Stanford to go to law school.  (The change of schools nearly put me in the army, in the middle of the Korean War.)  As you know, I did return to science. but not for a long time.  However, I think I was better off leaving Tech and getting my unorthodox science training the way I did.  But who knows?

Memoirs, 7: The Cabin

Lake City, Colorado

Our "cabin" was at the top, right side

LAKE CITY RECOLLECTIONS

The "Cabin".  A cabin it was not.  It had two stories, the bottom made of large pine logs, the top of shiplap siding.  It sat on the NE shore of Lake San Cristobal, Colorado (hereafter, the "Lake"), with a stupendous view across the water to mines and miners shacks on the other side, with a mountain range in the background.  There was a garage, and off the garage a storage room.  Heating was entirely from firewood, as was cooking.  There was a gas-driven electrical generator for lights.  No phone, no TV, even no radio.  However, there was a wonderful wind-up "Victrola", which played heavy 78 rpm records, most of them from the early 1900's.  More about that later.  The toilet was a one-holer off the storage room, which adjoined the huge kitchen.  It was liberally supplied with lime, hence stunk only slightly; however, it was not a place to linger and read the newspaper.  (Of course, we had no newspaper).  All the rooms had names; this "outhouse" was called "This is the Place".  More about that later, too.  The Cabin burned to the ground the year after we sold it, probably in 1958.

We acquire the Cabin.  The Bebee clan was Colorado-based until the late 1940s.  Fly fishing was the outdoor recreation of choice, and naturally it had to be performed on Colorado waters.  Dad tried fishing in the Sierra Nevada (near Bishop, I remember), but it just wasn't the same.  During WW II there was no access to tires, and gas was rationed, so trips to Colorado were out of the question.  However, by 1947 things had eased up, so we (Becks:  Mom, Dad, Susannah, me) traveled to Grand Junction, Colorado - to fish.  Some other of our Beaumont relatives may have made the trip: I don’t remember .

Grand Junction was the first destination, because that was where "the Folks" - Grandma, Ruth, Florence, Dale - were living at the time.  To fish, we went to Lake City, which was hard to reach in those days (more below).  We stayed in some little cabins on the main street - they still exist - and we fished the lake, and several of the rivers.  It must have been at this time that my elders spotted the Cabin and started proceedings to buy it.  In my mind there sticks some numbers, probably fallacious - they got the house, garage and 10 acres, for $5,000! 

Why Lake City?  This was Ruth's call.  For those family members who never met her, she was the second oldest of the Bebee brood, probably born about 1896.  Her last name was Crowder because, although all my life I knew her as a single lady, she had been married once, to Charlie Crowder, whom nobody of my generation ever met.  Charlie was a Cripple Creek miner, and perhaps also something of a cowboy.  Ruth married Charlie, I know not when (probably just after WW I - let's say, 1919, when she would have been ~23).  On their honeymoon they rode horses into Lake City, and went fishing.  That must have been one of Ruth’s fondest memories.

Although Lake City had been nearly inaccessible in the early 20th century, by 1947 it could be laboriously reached by car, over a truly rotten road from the Gunnison River.  There also was a road in from the other side - from Creed and Pagosa Springs - but it went over two passes (Spring Creek and Slumgullion), and was if anything worse than the road we used.  Naturally both roads were dirt - as were all roads in Hinsdale County - and they were downright dangerous when wet.  Needless to say, all this inaccessibility, plus an incredible abundance of water, led to fantastic fishing. 

I know next to nothing about Charlie Crowder, except that he had been in WW I, had probably been gassed, worked as a miner briefly after that war, was a crack fisherman - and died very young.  I have his Brunton (geologist's) compass at home; it is identical to the beautiful antique that belonged to my grandfather, Eben Bebee, now in a display case at Western Washington University.

Fishing.  That's what we did when we were at the Cabin.  Everybody fished.  Men fished with flies; women and little boys fished with worms (or salmon eggs).  It was a male rite of passage to obtain your first fly rod; I got mine at about age 13.  (Bill is the only other (Lake City) male in my male-impoverished generation; I wonder when he got his).  In the 1940s and early 1950s there was almost no limit to the number of trout one could catch in the Lake City area; the legal limit was 25 at first, then reduced to 20.  The primary fish-harvest was done in the evening.  My involvement was primarily as a boat-rower.  A typical evening would go as follows.  We would go down to the boat about 1 to 2 hrs before sunset.  Often there were three of us; Dad, a male guest, and me.  (Susannah often went along for the ride).  We would motor to the upper end of the lake; this was where the Lake Fork emptied in, and where the principal rise of trout occurred at sunset.  Then the two adults would begin to fish.  Often the mosquitoes were terrible; both adults smoked like mad to drive them away (it didn't work).  After an hour or so one or the other would "limit out".  Then it was my turn.  Sometimes I also limited out, but often I didn't.  Also, it was common for one of the adults (with a limit already in his creel) to continue fishing, but using flies with barbless hooks.  That way you could release the fish with no damage.  As I recall, my uncle Lynn sometimes fished with flies with no hooks at all!  (You just counted the strikes). 

There were some problems with this routine.  One involved thunderstorms.  In early summer, thunderstorms will come up quickly and dump cubic miles of water on you in the space of a few minutes.  Thunderstorms came at us from "up-river".  Thus, we kept an eye out in that direction, and at the first sign of a dark cloud we fired up the little one-lunger of an outboard and headed for home.    We rarely got there in time; mostly we arrived soaked to the skin.  A few times we could see that we hadn't a prayer of getting home in time, so pulled to the bank and took shelter in one of the numerous little "prospects" - short tunnels dug by miners - along the lakeshore.  Late summer was best; no thunderstorms, few bugs, but still plenty of hungry fish.

Another problem, as far as I was concerned, arose from the fact that, if you caught fish, you were expected to clean them!  Susannah came in handy here; it almost seemed that she LIKED to jerk the guts out of the slimy little buggers!  But if she wasn't along, or if she hadn't finished by the time we got back to the Cabin - you cleaned your own fish, at the cove where the boat was docked.  I was a conspicuous slacker; I did as quick-and-dirty a job as a thought I could get away with.  My mother, or the other ladies, would often let me know how useless I was - but I don't remember ever having to do them over again.  (Who says crime doesn't pay?). 

We also fished some of the streams, but not often.  The Lake Fork (of the Gunnison River) was best, although many of the best stretches were "posted" - owned by, usually, the Texas Cattlemen's' Association.  I frequently ignored the postings and fished there anyway.  The other main stream was/is Henson Creek, which was not very productive.  However, I looked forward to Henson Creek because of the abandoned mines (more below).

There are other lakes in the area, several very productive.  Crystal Lake (site of my first back-pack trip) had large trout, although they could be difficult to catch.  (It was a hard five-mile uphill hike to Crystal Lake).  Another excellent lake was Waterdog Lake, owned by the Vickers family.  (They still own it, and will take you up there to fish - for a price).  We went up there once that I can recall; I spent the day rowing the boat for various Texans who were too busy slaughtering fish to propel themselves around.  More on Texans below.

 Lake City.  The town of Lake City (population ~100 then) was/is the capital of Hinsdale County, in population the smallest county in Colorado.  It was a beautifully preserved example of Victorian architecture - three streets of historically important houses and shops.  Lake City was a big silver-mining boom-town in the late 1800s.  Several of the mines were extremely productive, and the area must have grown to 10,000 people or more.  Then the mines got deep, the price of silver fell - and the town went flat bust.  By the time that Ruth and Charlie rode in there was almost nothing left of the mining.  However, some old-timers hung on, hence the beautiful homes remained in good repair.  In the 1940s and early 1950s we knew two such old-timers.  One was a man named Steinbeck, whom we hired to look after the Cabin when we were gone.  Another was an elegant lady named Wupperman, not from a mining family, who had settled in Lake City with her husband many years before.  He was dead, and she lived on in one of the beautiful Victorian homes.  Dad in particular liked to visit her; she was from Europe (Germany, probably) and dripped culture. 

By the time we came on the scene there were a few businesses in Lake City.  There were two grocery stores; one run by a man named Hoffman (who was certainly honest), and the other by Mike Pavich, who probably wasn't.  Mike had a slot machine in his store, which I frequented.  There was also a little bowling alley, a laundry, several saloons, and the City Armory, where they had dances.  (These were a real kick).  There must also have been at least one gas station.  Susannah remembers the post office, but I don't.  Lake City had electricity at that time; probably from a hydro generator on Henson Creek.  Vicker's Ranch was there, and already a dude ranch - they had some run-down-looking cabins, a small store, and the all-important ice house.  Their ice kept our fish (and other food) cold, all summer long.

The mines.  On the west side of the continental divide, Hinsdale County is half dug away by mining.  One of the most prosperous groups of mines, at the NW corner of Lake San Cristobal, is visible from where the Cabin used to be.  Another profitable district is located a few miles up Henson Creek from Lake City.  However, there were mines, little towns, prospect pits, saloons, houses of ill repute, etc., etc., located all over the place.  There are even some mines near the summit of Engineer Pass, at nearly 12,000' above sea level.  Two ghost-towns exist: Capital City, up Henson Creek, which had several thousand inhabitants but now - being easily accessed by car - is almost gone, and Carson, which still has many standing buildings (reachable only by a nasty jeep road).  In our early days there it was possible to find mining equipment, mineral specimens, relicts of old households, etc., almost everywhere.  Now most of that is gone, although the holes and some of the buildings are still there.  A good popular history of the Hinsdale mining excitement needs to be written.

The mountains.  Colorado mountains are tall but, in general, not particularly hard to climb.  There are five 14,000 ft peaks in the LakeCity area that I can think of; only one is much more than a very long hike.  There are also many 13,000 ft peaks in the area, some of which require technical climbing.  Most of the peaks in the area (the San Juan Mtns) are rock pyramids that rise from a rolling grassy plateau with a mean elevation of perhaps 12,000 ft.  Frequently there are herds of sheep, with Basque shepherds, up there on the plateau.  It is a pleasure to watch them and their dogs work the sheep.  Most of these guys speak not a word of English.  I have tried my Spanish on them, too, and got nowhere - either they speak only Basque, or my Spanish needs a lot of work.  Everyone who has the chance should climb the tallest of the San Juan peaks - Uncompagre, at about 14,300'.  It is a long (a very long) walk through a meadow, with ten minutes of scrambling at the very end.  The cliffs on Uncompagre are spectacular, as is the view.

"The Place".  Brigham Young is said to have uttered these words (This is the Place) when he first saw the Salt Lake valley.   (Actually, he had scouts out in front, and knew all about where he was going).  Be that as it may, Uncle Dunham (Dunham Taylor, husband of Martha, youngest of the Bebee siblings) gave that name to our outhouse.  This may have been because, as Dean of the (Episcopal) Cathedral in Salt Lake City, Rev. Taylor had had more than enough of Mormonism.  As described above, "the Place" was functional, but not pretty.  A large negative was the presence of large, buzzing flies.  The first Myrl, my father, wrote a poem to urge people sitting in the Place to use the fly swatter that hung nearby.  The poem was lost in the sale and subsequent burning of the Cabin:  I wish I could resurrect it.  It consisted of several (perhaps four) quatrains.  Here is the best I can do.  Can anybody fill in the blanks?

                        How swiftly speed the sands of time

                        How short our span of life

                        . . . . . . . . . .

                        With misery and strife

                        (Probably another quatrain, which I have lost completely.)

                        As round your head the blue flies buzz

                        You cannot concentrate

                        And 'complish what you might, because

                        Your heart is filled with hate

                        So if you indeed you would be great

                        Your destiny fulfill

                        These pests you must eradicate

                        These blue flies you must kill!

USE THE FLY SWATTER!

I also remember a perfectly horrible picture hanging in "the Place".  It was black and white and showed a snowy mountain scene, with a lake in the foreground.  Standing on the near bank of the lake was a large stag - I think it was meant to be an elk.  It was buggling.  In the middle of the lake, swimming toward our foreground elk, was another male of his species, blood in his eye.  A battle was imminent.  The title of this picture was "The Challenge".  On a cold morning it got you out of "the Place" in a hurry.

Firewood.  Darned tootin I was in charge of gathering firewood.  Sometimes it seemed that was all I did.  I would go up the hill behind the cabin, find dried limbs, and hurl them down.  I would also scrounge up and down the rudimentary road that ran past our cabin.  The Cabin devoured firewood.  All cooking and heating originated with me; I found, transported, sometimes cut and split, and ultimately stacked - all the fuel.  Even now, nearly 50 years later, my mother's words "Myrl Jr., you need to fill the wood box", sometimes pops into my head.  Yeah, sure - sometimes the adult men would play at helping me, especially if we had some big logs to haul.  (To our eternal shame, we destroyed the remnants of a log cabin just up the road from our place).  No doubt Bill carried his share of wood.  It was a sexist age; guys carried, girls cooked.  I don't know how the Lynn's (with two daughters)  kept warm.

Smoking (and eating) fish.  Somebody, years earlier, had built a miniature smoke house just north of the Cabin.  It was tiny - it took at most a dozen large trout at a time.  Some summers, when I wasn't rowing or gathering wood, it seemed that all I did was tend that smokehouse.  It took a type of juniper - a low shrub that grows all over the place.  You had to keep the fire just right: not enough and the fish rotted before they smoked, too much and you caught the smoke house on fire.  (I did that at least once).  Our smoked trout were much prized back home in Beaumont; they went well with bourbon whiskey.

Only trout that were not "needed" for day-to-day feeding were smoked.  We ate trout nearly every day, sometimes twice.  They were pan-fried, in corn meal:  We smoked the bigger ones; the little ones tended to drop into the fire.  In a typical week we (say, the Beck family of four) would eat perhaps 50 trout.  However, we could easily catch 180!  I am sure that my mother and aunts were the best trout cooks in the world, but to this day I cannot stand the thought of eating one.  Thank God the world has gone to "catch and release"! 

Texans.  During the tourist season there were (and probably still are) very few Colorado residents in Lake City.  Texas is fairly close to Colorado, most Texans like to travel, and any sane Texan who can will get out of Texas during the summer.  The upshot of all this is that most people in Lake City during our time there were - Texans.  This may still be true.  We passed the Texan Motel on our way to town.  I think one of the saloons was called the Lone Star.  The dance music, and any music in the bars, was country. 

Now, Texans are good people.  However, there isn't a lot of fly fishing going on in Texas at any given time.  Thus, Texans tended then (I can't speak for now) to use artificial lures or, more horribly, bait when they fished.  As noted above, in the Bebee clan, fishing meant fly fishing - unless you had the misfortune to be a kid, or female.   It shouldn't be hard, then, to guess what our attitude toward Texan fishermen was.  Fly fishermen move around; bait fishermen sit still.  One of the least offensive things we called Texan fishermen was "rock squatters".

The Victrola.  We had a wonderful Victrola in the cabin.  It was a wind-up one, driven by a spring.  It played 78 rpm records, the heavy, one-sided, old fashioned kind.  It was made entirely of rich, reddish wood - mahogany, perhaps - and it had the Victrola picture of the listening dog, with the caption "His Master's Voice".   (If you don't have any idea what I am talking about here, you are too young).  There were perhaps a dozen or so records.  My favorites included "The Preacher and the Bear" (Oh, Lord, if you can't help me, for goodness sake don't you help that Bear), and "Oh, it's nice to get up in the morning".  I was an early riser, so I often went down to the living room, cranked up the Victrola, and let fly with this second song.  It got people downstairs in a hurry.  Of all the things I miss about the Cabin, I miss that Victrola most.

The sale.  Lord, why didn't I have $10,000 in 1958?  If I had, I would still own the cabin and the land it stood on - because, I seem to recollect - that's what they sold it for.  They (Dad, Mom, uncles and aunts) must have been feeling the march of time.  In 1958 Ruth, the oldest of them, could hardly have been much over 60, and the rest were younger.  However, it was a long trip from Beaumont, California, to Lake City, and maybe they were tired of it.  Also, my father, at least, was not too healthy.  My sister tells the story of his inability to start the generator; I arrived (fresh home from the army) and started it easily.  My father had always been so much stronger than me that I felt very peculiar after that experience; it was as if the torch had been passed - and I didn't want it!  The next year the Cabin was sold, and that very winter it burned to the ground (mysteriously), thus making way for a "modern" home.  If I'd had that $10,000 the cabin would still be there; modern inside, maybe, but logs and shiplap outside.  The boat would have a much more powerful motor, and I would own a jeep so I could get into the back country more easily.  I wouldn't have to live on trout, and I probably would gather wood only for a cozy fire in the fireplace.  It would be nice to own it today, and lots of fun.  But it wouldn't be the same.