50 years ago this summer.....

This summer marks 50 years since St. Matthias 8th grade baseball team won the City Championship. I'll list the names of the players, some of you may want to know who is who:
Top Row L to R: Coach Tom Watson, Don Pilson, Bob Tabler, Bill Ralston, George Pearl, Larry Hunter, Mike Sills. Bottom L to R: John Bray, Ernie 'Junior' Wallace, Ray Demonbrum, Jerry Blandford, Duke Corey, Mike Baum. Two that I know were missing from this photo but were a big part of the team were Dub Jansing and Steve Weismueller.
I played a lot of baseball from age 12 to 18 years old. I was lucky to have good coaches and played with a lot of good ballplayers. These guys were the core of a good Flaget High School team that came in 3rd in the State tournament in 1963. A Tournament to this day is one of the big regrets that I have. We should have won that thing. We lost a close semi-final game that we should have won and the team we lost to went on to win the Championship game in a route.
When I was a kid, we played a lot of ball. We didn't just play when we had games or practice. We met at fields, chose up sides and played most every day. Those were the days. It was never "to" hot to go outside. It was to hot to stay inside. No air conditioning. My air conditioning back then was going out on the front porch in the morning, when the porch was shaded, and laying on the cool concrete. Oh well, 50 years ago. Wow! Congratulations Team! The first 8th Grade City Championship ever won by a St. Matthias Crusaders Team!

Teaching an Old Dog new Tricks

..................About a week ago Mary Lynn and I were watching Erin and Jill for awhile and Erin taught me how to finger knit. She was a very good and patient teacher. I really was amazed at how well she could show me how to do this, especially how to tie it off at the end. At the right is my first ever finger knitted piece. Pretty good, eh?

While looking through old pictures....

..........I was looking through old pictures today and found this one of Mark and Kevin in the tub. I thought 'I bet I could find one of Erin and Jill in close to the same pose'. Well, I looked and looked, but couldn't find one similar. But I did find one of my favorite pictures. This is a picture of Erin when I was asking her if I could come to her 2nd Birthday Party. She looked like she really gave it some thought but decided that "No, I don't think so".

More Olden Days

I know these are poor quality pictures. They are copies of a copy. I'm sure I've got the original picture, at the bottom, someplace. But this is a picture of me and Jean in our new Hopalong Cassidy outfits we got for Christmas, along with our very fast stick horses. Hoppy was my favorite cowboy. I even had a Hoppy watch at one time. The watch came in a box draped over a little cardboard saddle. You can tell by the picture we were cold, at least Jean was, so I know it was taken very near Christmas. Probably 1950-51. By the way, Hopalong Cassidy's horses name? Topper. I know you can't tell the difference, but that's really me on the right in the bottom picture, not Hoppy.

Bad Weather, Not much activities...Let's talk about the past

I was in the Navy, but when I was in Vietnam I was assigned to "Defense Communications Agency - Southeast Asia Mainland", or as the military liked to call it, "DCA - SAM". This was a Joint Service outfit, meaning it was supplied with people from all four services, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. You would think we belonged to all four services, but the fact was, we belonged to none of them. Therefore, we had no military base, no barracks, no chow hall...no anything. Everything we had was attained by begging, borrowing, or stealing. Yes, stealing. We did a lot of that.We made arrangements with the Navy for me to stay with the Navy people in their billet, which was about 2 miles from the base in downtown NhaTrang. When I tell people I stayed in a hotel while in Vietnam they think it must have been a nice one. Well, here it is, painted Navy grey. The rooms were quiet luxurious, too. Here I am eating my dinner. Room service sucked! You'll also notice the mosquito net over my bunk behind me. It was very necessary. As a matter of fact, I know this sounds healthy, but I sprayed bug spray all over my net before retiring for the evening to kill all the mosquitoes inside the net, then crawled in quickly. This was a typical dinner. Some can of stew or soup from the canteen heated up over a sterno stove in your room. If you were the first one to take your shower in the evening, the water was fairly warm from the tank on the roof heated by the sun. That was if there WAS water. Not only was there very often not any water, but sometimes when you were in the shower, all soaped up, the water went off. Well, at those times you ran over to the other rooms to see if you could use their shower. No they didn't have water either, but you could turn on the tap and get a little water to drain out of the lines. Sometimes that was enough to get the soap off! Sometimes there were 3 or 4 guys running all over the place trying to find enough water to rinse off. Yep, a luxery establishment. Notice how clean the streets are? By the way, my room was on the bottom floor, far right.

Happy Velentine's Day!!!

What do you do when you're in Vietnam and your wife sends you a pair of Valentine boxer shorts? You have your picture taken.

Snowfall in the Lower Highlands

Once again I had to get out my High Tech Dopler Snow measuring device. The official total here was 5 - 3/4 inches. This measurement was taken at 10:20 a.m., and additional snow fell, but I believe as much melted as fell, so I don't think it got any deeper than that. The other picture is the snow below our deck chairs. I thought the cones it made was kinda neat.