Sic Semper Apparatchiks…


SJS note: Aircraft, like cars, stoves, televisions and Tickle-Me-Elmo ®, are products of assembly lines some more massive than others, but the premise is still the same. Build a lot of something to set standards with common assemblies and a uniform product results. Except when it doesn’t. Every one of us who have slipped the…
I have not crossed so far into these “seasoned” years that I don’t remember a time when traditions in college football meant something. I grew up in the Big 8, where every single conference member’s home field was no more than a day’s drive (at the national mandatory speed limit of 55 mph) from one…
I remember, a sky so blue it burned your eyes to look up . . .and smoke that scarred your lungs; I remember shipmates . . . and a piece of notebook paper listing for whom the bell had tolled; We remember that for one brief moment it wasn’t New Yorkers, or Washingtonians, or businessmen…
Call this one – “Generations.” From the left — my Grandpa (father’s side), first generation American of German descent who left his home in Illinois to join the Army and head off to the War to End All Wars, serving in France with the AEF. Next my Grandpa Jack – Army, Signal Corps who served…
Every so often, we as seagoers are reminded that the mundane may rapidly transform into the perilous, even without a human enemy. Such moments can bring out the best and worst in our nature. Twenty-one years ago today routine operations onboard the USS Bonefish (SS-582) and USS Carr (FFG 52) uderwent such a change. A…
Much has been going within and outside the household these past several weeks – and that explains a lot of the paucity of posts of late. Foremost amongst these was the passing of my wife’s father, a Korean War vet, railroad worker and longtime sufferer of Alzheimer’s. Word to the wise — if you haven’t…