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| 05 November 2013 ©smck |
Army Days
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| @1958 or so |
Once a year we had to re-qualify at the rifle range which was strange because all we had back at Bushy Park were 45s and Tommy Guns (and every time I cleaned one of them I felt like Dillinger). This meant a jaunt to some English army base where I could hear the instructors giving the grunts the same wild commands that we had received in basic except these guys were louder and scarier. I constantly was amazed at how as a draftee that I had fallen into such a strange and cushy 'sleep-in-a-bed' and spend nights at the Pub kind of job in the army - and no 'white-walls' required, mustache optional.
Be It Ever So Humble
This is the home that I lived in from the fifth grade until I graduated from high school. My father, mother, brother and I lived in this little (about half the size of my kitchen now) travel size trailer. There was no electricity or running water and at the back of the lot there was an old outhouse - which my father keep extremely clean but still an outhouse. I took what showers I could at the high school 'Boy's Room', otherwise it was a PTA bath out of a basin when no one was around. Luckily I was given a free ride to college where I took at least two showers a day luxuriating in the decadence of a prince.
The second photo shows me in my boy scout attire (only the shirt and the neckerchief were official as these were all I could afford from my paper route). Long live the Crow Patrol! I made the flag for our Patrol - a comic strip type crow smoking a cigar that I crayoned in in black with the words CROW PATROL above onto a pennant shaped piece of white cloth. After the drawing and words were complete I used a hot iron (the old time heat on a stove type that I now have on my wood stove as a souvenir of my past) to meld this permanently into the pennant. Our scout leaders at the time were really nice men that gave a lot of young boys like myself the right to express ourselves a little out of the strait-laced mode of the conservative late 40s and early 50s. Thanks.
Bushy Park, England 1957
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| My new flannel suit ready to head down to London in our trusty old army chev |
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