Long before there was theboondork, long before there was a blog, and even before there was a computer there was a lowly Air Force Airman a long long way from home.
| Not much going on today, my truck was at the Big O tire store all morning having various expensive things done to it so I haven't had a chance to put the two new solar panels on the little bronco yet. I finally decided to leave the Bronco on the truck while the tire store had it. I think I would've taken it off had it been a full size slide in truck camper, but since its not very tall with the top down I figured there was less chance the tire store could damage it some way. One of the things I wanted to accomplish this summer was to transfer a bunch of pictures that I took while I was in the Air Force from the slides that their on now to the computer, and I finally finished that project. Out of the couple of hundred slides I had I only transferred about 50 because the rest of them were in various states of awful. These slides were taken in the late 1960s and in less you were a professional photographer with a dark room, whatever came out of the camera was what you got, and what came out of my camera was never very good. Way underexposed, seriously overexposed, out of focus, everything I could do wrong, I did. I hadn't looked at those slides in many years, mostly because I never owned a slide projector I just had a little handheld light thingy that you could put a slide in and sort of see it. So putting them on the computer was a revelation even to me since I'd never seen any of them that clear before. It was, to say the very least, weird to see myself back then and how much I've changed. The most obvious difference is I weigh about 40 pounds more than I did when those pictures were taken, I also smoked which I stopped doing in my late 20s. I no longer play the guitar, constant threats on my life convinced me to give that up. I remember I wasn't very happy about being in the military, being away from home, my friends and my family, a lot of us felt that way. But looking at the pictures I can see that I had a home, even though it wasn't one that I chose. And I had friends, even though we were just random guys from all over the country thrown together in a situation none of us asked for, but after a while we all became a family to the point that when one of us shipped out we were happy for them because they were getting to go home, but we were sad knowing how much we would miss them. theboondork |
back in the late 1960s an American in Japan attracted a crowd. I was just sitting on the beach on my G.I. blanket minding my own business, strumming my guitar when the locals started coming around asking me if I knew any "folksongs". Of course at the time I knew every song Peter Paul and Mary ever made so before you know it all of us are singing "If I Had A Hammer", and "Blowin' in the Wind". I was singing in English and they were singing in Japanese, but it didn't matter because none of us could sing.
Me walking around in a Japanese train station. I'm the one that doesn't look Japanese,
Clowning it up in the barracks. That's me in the middle holding the book. We were living in a World War II Japanese Air Force barracks and all six of us lived in the same room and worked Three different shifts, a few are sleeping, a few are going to work, and a few are coming back to the barracks after work. Dealing with that for two years is one of the reasons I can sleep like a baby in a Walmart parking lot
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