January 2011

Early in the summer of 1961 I was between jobs and camped on the outskirts of Fairbanks, Alaska, killing time, waiting for a forest fire to start. Emergency firefighters get paid only when they work, so I wanted to stick by the telephone. Gerry Miller had the answer as to how we could make some money until the fire season began. He had snagged a short job at Eielson Air Force Base and needed a pump operator/hose handler, and since this gig would take only a couple of days, I agreed to help him.

The job consisted of Gerry’s cleaning and repairing a device that cleared the water intake on a power plant’s cooling pond. One morning I drove up to the main gate and, after our foreman showed some papers to the guard, we were authorized to go inside. This place was (and still is) a Strategic Air Command base, a taking-off .md landing place for bombers destined for Eastern Russia should World War III become reality. There were “weather planes” with dull black paint jobs hidden away in the hangars.

Scarcely three months after the Gulf War ended, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, still clad in his desert fatigues, returned to a hero’s welcome at West Point. After reviewing the corps of cadets as we marched by on the plain, the general gave a fine lecture to students and faculty concerning the importance of having “competence and character.”

At the time of General Schwarzkopf’s visit to his alma mater, I was one of the hosts of a weekly radio comedy program titled “The Long Strange Trip.” When I found out that the academy was to receive such an exalted alumnus, I knew what I had to do. Borrowing a tape recorder from the radio station, I set out to have the general record a promotional message for my show. However, I was told by the first captain (the ranking cadet at West Point) that it was not proper protocol for a general, especially one of Schwarzkopf’s stature, to take part in such a trivial matter.

In 1959 I was a journalism student at the University of Minnesota, where I worked as a reporter for the school newspaper, the Minnesota Daily .

That September Nikita Khrushchev was touring the United States and was scheduled to visit an agriculture class at the not-too-distant University of Iowa at Ames.

One evening another reporter and I were sitting around the newspaper office when we started talking about driving to Ames to get an interview with the Communist leader. We were seniors, restless to be a part of the real world, and we asked ourselves, “Why not try? If it doesn’t work out, at least we’ll have had an interesting escapade.”

After a round of permission-seeking phone calls to the offices of the Minnesota governor, U.S. congressmen, State Department, and the FBI, we received two press passes by special delivery, courtesy of Lincoln White, chief of the News Division, Department of State.

Louis Armstrong created a dilemma for me in the middle of Africa in 1960. I was the director of the United States Information Service in the three-state Federation of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland.

One morning I received an unexpected message marked “urgent” from the State Department’s Cultural Exchange Program in Washington: “Louis Armstrong and All Stars currently in West Africa. Department planning to extend Armstrong tour to additional countries in Africa. Advise soonest if you wish performances.”

Who wouldn’t want Armstrong? He was world-acclaimed, and I knew that both whites and blacks in the Rhodesias and Nyasaland listened to his jazz on the Voice of America.

The telegram went to American embassies in seven other African countries, where my colleagues could respond like gangbusters to its offer. They didn’t have to cope with our situation—at that time the Rhodesias and Nyasaland composed one of the most racially segregated areas on earth.

The Lewis R. French (P.O. Box 992, Camden, ME 04843/ Tel: 1-800-469-4635) offers three-, four-, and six-day cruises from Memorial Day through the beginning of October. The schooner can accommodate twenty-two guests in single or double cabins that are cozy but comfortable; there are two heads and one hot shower. Every cruise includes a lobster cookout on a secluded beach. The Maine Windjammer Association (P.O. Box 1144, Blue Hill, ME 04614/Tel: 1-800-807-WIND) represents the French and nine other schooners and can send information on all of them if you want to shop around.

I am lying on my back looking up not just at a wide blue sky but also at sails taut with wind, oaken masts, rigging that creaks and vibrates. Beneath me an ocean swells and yields, and the air sings with the sound of water rushing past the hull. I feel the power of being propelled through the sea on nothing but wind and canvas and wood. It’s not a sensation I’m familiar with.

I’ve been on a sailboat perhaps three hours in my life before and certainly never on a craft like this—a Maine coasting schooner, sixty-five feet long, built in 1871. Not only am I discovering the timeless pleasure of sailing, but I’m tasting it exactly as it felt a century ago, on a boat that has plied these waters since Grant was president.

In the Roman army, the soldiers’ regular rations were principally in the form of large loaves of bread, each one enough for two soldiers for a day. This presented a big problem. As with every standing army before and since, life in the legions was largely a matter of hurry up and wait, and soldiers have a bad habit of fighting among themselves when they’re bored. And, with the exception of women and gambling, nothing makes so convenient a casus belli among idle troops as food.

But, while the Romans had a genius for military matters, they also had a genius for law. By no means, the least of its manifestations was a nifty regulation to prevent quarrels over the daily bread ration. When a pair of soldiers was issued a loaf, the rule called for one soldier to divide it and the other soldier to take his choice of halves.

Once again, it’s merger-mania time in the United States as a new century draws nigh. Headlines proclaim the impending or actual union of Capital Cities/ABC and Disney; of Turner and Time Warner; of Chase and Chemical; of USAir and United—or perhaps American. Others doubtless wait in the wings. As the consolidators line up to woo the stockholders’ votes, I find myself looking for explanatory perspectives. The words that leap to mind are: “So what’s new?”