V 1 N. 15 How To Buy A Bicycle In Beijing

 

How to Buy a Bicycle in Beijing (1988)

George Brose

            Without a car, moving around in Beijing was possible based on one’s ability and willingness to pay foreign currency for taxis, patience, and pushiness to ride buses and subways, or with a moderate sense of adventure to use the most popular mode of transport, the bicycle.  Throughout his stay in China, Edwards depended on all of the above, but the order of importance in his list was ascending from taxi to bicycle.  To go where he wanted,  when he wanted, the bicycle was the fastest, most convenient method of moving through the city via the bike lanes of the north-south and east-west grand roads or the hutongs,  the network of small streets and alleys.  They were a remnant of the previous dynasties of China.

A Hutong Rider

            Early in Edwards' China experience,  Liu Xiao Hue had become his guide for buying a bike.  They left one weekday afternoon from in front of the university on Bus #22 and rode south for two miles on Xinjiekouwai Street.  At the university where they boarded the bus it was a wide avenue at least six lanes for cars, buses, and trucks, and a lane on each side for bicycles.  As they crossed the Second Ring Road at Deshengmenxi the street narrowed down to two lanes for everyone.  It was tree shaded and lined by old, one story buildings all lower than the walls of the Forbidden City.   In the last emperors’ time it had not been permitted to build more than one story.  It was in deference to the emperor and a way to keep people from seeing into the Imperial Palaces and places of authority.  Now many of these buildings were receiving a cosmetic upgrade.  New fronts were being added, breaking up the old architectural lines.  The grey block construction and grey tile roofs were disappearing behind brightly colored sheet metal facades, larger windows, and neon signs.  They got off the bus several blocks above Chang’an Avenue, at twenty-five lanes one of the widest in the world.  It ran east and west out of the north end of Tiananmen Square At this point Xinjiekouwai Street was now called Xidanbei Street.  On the east side of Xidanbei a flourishing used bicycle market had squeezed itself onto the sidewalk.  Sellers, all men, were gathered in small groups in front of a large bicycle repair shop.  Any bicycle parked near to one of these groups of was obviously for sale.  If you looked at one for more than a few seconds, someone would break away from his colleagues and begin touting the virtues of his particular mount.  His companions quickly followed to form an audience for the sales pitch.  If a buyer showed interest, the audience would gather  more closely siding with the buyer or the seller, and everyone seemed to be involved in the repartee between the players in the transaction.  The air was heavy with the smell of garlic shoots that came from the breathing of a hundred people gathered round the participants.

            The whole scene reminded Edwards of a gypsy horse market in northern England he had once seen in a National Geographic , except this time the currency offered was not gold sovereigns but would perhaps be Foreign Exchange Certificates, FEC, the much sought after bills that gave someone possessing them access to many foreign made products in the Friendship Stores or a variety of other uses for things like travelling abroad, bribing an administrator for an apartment, enrolling one’s child into a better school, or securing a business license.  Sellers were always willing to take a lower numerical price if, FEC were being spent.  The black market exchange rate for Renminbi  RMB or people’s money was about two for one.  Somedays it fluctuated downward a little but never lower than 1.65 to one.  He did not  really know what drove the market up or down.  Was it police pressure on the traders or true market demand hidden somewhere in the system? 

            Edwards was hoping to buy one of the famous Flying Pigeon bicycles, so popular for their sturdiness and reliability.  Most bicycles in China were still Henry Ford black, although a few colors were  starting to appear on locally manufactured bikes.  Unfortunately no Pigeons were for sale that day.  It took a good connection to buy a Flying Pigeon new.   Most brands sold new in stores tended to fall apart as the purchaser wheeled it out of the door.  They were poorly assembled by the clerks.  It normally meant a long series of visits to the street repair stands for adjustments and tightening on the bike.  For this reason there were thousands of bike repairmen and women on the streets of Beijing.  At the strictly controlled wages of workers, the bike mechanics earned as much as a medical doctor in a local hospital and on a good day even more.  This day he found a Shanghai bicycle that suited his needs.  The seller insisted that Edwards  take a test drive, and they all made jokes about whether he would return with the bicycle .  The seller said he would keep Liu Xiao Hue as a hostage until Edwards came back with the bike.

            A quick tour of the block indicated everything worked at the moment.  The bike as well as most others on the street was a design rip off of a turn of the century British Raleigh similar to the one on display in the Forbidden City.  That one had belonged to Pu Yi, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty.

            He rode the bike back to the market and dove into  the serious bargaining while the crowd regrouped around him and the seller.  They exchanged comments, through Liu Xiao Hue’s interpretations, on the qualities of the bike.  He  thought the tires were too old for the three hundred RMB the seller was asking.  The seller replied that  they were imported and would last longer than Chinese tires.  They both  hoped for the seller’s  sake that  the secret police were not listening to that statement.  He then asked the seller the age of the bike.

            The seller pushed his cap back on his head and scratched his brow, reached into the pockets of his black suit, took out a few scraps of paper, looked at them as if studying the pedigree of a thoroughbred race horse.  He looked at some of his friends and exchanged comments with the movement of his eyes, then looked back at Edwards,  and finally at Liu Xiao Hue and spoke to her.

            She blushed a little then grinned at the seller.  She turned to Edwards.  “He says.  ‘Do you ask a beautiful woman her age when you first meet her?’ “

            Edwards replied that it seemed to be all right in China to ask such questions.  She translated to the seller, and the spectators roared with laughter.  He claimed it was three years old.  Edwards said it looked more like ten.  The seller  absorbed that jab and and being a part-time t’ai chi practitioner rebutted that there were not better bicycles on the street, and age has more respect in China than in Edwards’  country.  Edwards then offered him two hundred RMB knowing that a local would not pay more than one hundred fifty, but it was also important for the seller not to lose face dealing with a foreigner.  He countered  two hundred and fifty.  Edwards then indicated that he might be able to pay in FEC bills, and the crowd surged forward again, just as the bargaining appeared ready to break down.  Finally they agreed on one hundred and twenty-five FEC which was the equivalent of two hundred and thirty RMB at the current black market rate.  Edwards  got his  bike, and the seller  got access to the outside world with foreign currency, and the crowd got its amusement.  His Chinese had not been good enough to deal in the subtleties, but Liu Xiao Hue made some of the comments clearer to him, and she seemed to be laughing with the onlookers and at their comments.  They left the informal market, Edwards pushing the bike and Liu Xiao Hue walking beside him.

            “Next time you make a big purchase, let me buy it for you by myself.  With a foreigner present, the price doubles.”  She handed him a small red, plastic card holder with a Beijing bicycle license inside.  “Foreigners are never asked for an ownership and license certificate, but Chinese are stopped regularly by the police and must have these with them.  Also, here is the key to lock it.  It has a built on lock over the rear wheel.  Don’t trust Beijingers not to steal an unlocked bike.  There are lots of stories of honesty  with foreign tourists, but notice that most people carry a large ring full of keys with them to lock all of their possessions.”

            “If you do all my shopping for me, I’ll never learn much about the Chinese.”  Edwards replied.

            “But when you overpay, by what to us is a month’s salary, it hurts us who are your friends.  And it will disgust some who are having a hard time feeding their families while you waste your money.  If you want to waste your money, you should waste it in some more practical way.”

            “If I offered to take you to a great restaurant, would I be wasting my money?” he asked in a teasing manner.

            “You might, depending on your motives.”  She tried to look stern when she said that, but she was almost laughing.  “First you must learn to ride a bicycle in Beijing traffic.  When you master that I will go with you to a restaurant that I think you might enjoy.  Now for your riding lesson.”

After note:  I had heard that with the advent of E powered cars, Beijing had turned more and more to that form of transport.  Indeed initially it did, but now the bicycle is regaining momentum.  Indeed several hundred kilometers of new bikeways are being built every year in the city.  This reading is a chapter from a book I attempted or am still attempting to write about my family's year in Beijing  August, 1988 through June, 1989 when we were evacuated after the Tiananmen Massacre.

V 1 N. 14 America's Tiananmen Square, When? Where?

 

America’s Tiananmen Square When?  Where?

George Brose

First there were a small number of National Guard troops in the streets of Los Angeles.  They were few and unarmed.  They served mainly as a show of force and intent by Donald Trump in his faceoff with illegal immigration.  The Guard were approachable, willing to talk, willing to ask themselves why they were in the streets of L.A.  The ICE agents in the background, faces hidden were doing the dirty work of rounding up brown skinned people who looked like they might be illegals.  Since I began writing this a few months ago, ICE has shown its willingness to step in where the Army fears to tread.

 

            Now there are more Guard troops in the streets of Washington D.C. said to be there to help local citizens feel more secure, because the DC police can’t do their job.  Threats of putting troops in Chicago and New York are also being made.  News last night was some of the Guard troops were seen picking up trash.  Nothing was said as to who or what that trash might be.   It was also said that they might be riding public transit vehicles to put law abiding citizens more at ease in their day to day lives.  Regarding trash pick up, I think that may be a good duty.  If anything a young army recruit does get put on trash detail several times during basic training.  Experience matters.  I even remember hearing of a very far-sighted NCO (No Civilian Occupation) who had his lads cut the buds off rose bushes on an Army base before they bloomed  and  the petals dropped on the ground.  His rationale was it would take a lot more time and manpower to pick up the petals off the ground than to cut the flowers before they bloomed.  I’m not sure if that story got up to the brass or what their reaction might have been. 

 

            Now we are being told that the Guard will get weapons to carry on their person.  So we will now be on the proverbial powder keg just waiting for an accidental discharge in a subway, or even an involuntary celibate soldier taking out his sexual frustrations on innocent civilians.  I can personally look back 36 years to China in 1989 when people began demonstrating against corruption in the Chinese Communist Party.  The demonstrations began on university campuses on April 15 sparked by the death of Hu Yaobang, a disgraced Party leader admired by the students.   A trickle of students began placing posters on campuses denouncing the corruption going on in the cities around the country, and denouncing the favoritism  given to members of the Party.  The posters led to gatherings and discussions about the corruption.   Hu Yaobang died unexpectedly, and the students demanded that his reputation be restored post mortem.  Momentum gathered and people began marching in the streets.  The citizens were almost in shock that the students got away with those demonstrations and the momentum continued to build to where students and citizens together began gathering in Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing, where Chairman Mao was entombed, where headquarters of the Party at Zhong Nan Hai lay just to the west of the Square, where the Chinese History Museum was located, where visiting dignitaries were received at the Great Hall of the People.  The Party looked at these efforts to confront their power as blasphemy, but they were unable to respond, as they were not sure the Army would go along with the Party Leadership.  Each day in April and then May, the demonstrations continued to grow.  In the evenings after work we would go down to Tiananmen to see how the demonstrations were going.  We were not the only ones who were curious.  Soon all of Beijing wanted to know, and a million people flooded into the Square.

The people, the students and the police and Army began to confront each other face to face, but at that point the Army and Police were not carrying weapons.   I witnessed them getting shoved backwards by students so that marches could continue around the Square.   In the wings, the Party leadership was in a panic and trying to organize units based in other provinces to come in and quell the disorder.  Then a scheduled visit by the Soviet leader Mikail Gorbachev had to be greatly reduced, and he could only get into the Great Hall of the People by the back door.  The students and citizens had blocked the front entrance by their presence in the Square.  This was too much for the Party leadership to swallow.  By the night of June 3- 4, loyal army units had been brought to the outskirts of Beijing, ready to attack the students and anyone else who stood in the way. Signal flares went up west of the Square on Chang An Road.  We thought they were fireworks celebrating stopping the Army once more, but we were so wrong.  It was the signal to attack.   At that point citizens began counter attacking police and then we could hear the sound of heavy vehicles coming our way.  We got off the main road into a hutong or alleyway out of the direct line of fire.  We could hear shooting and the noise probably of tanks and APCs in the streets.  We high tailed it back to campus on our bikes staying in the hutongs where large vehicles would have had difficulty maneuvering.   When we got back to our campus at Beijing Normal University, our once peaceful students were seen making Molotov cocktails and heading for the Square.  Many of them did not come back.  Innocent civilians were shot by the Army along the way going into the Square and many of the students were killed thus ending the movement.   “

 

            Today, the Chinese Communist Party has all but denied the existence of that student movement, that open resistance to their authority.   Is that what we mean today about the word ‘authoritarian’?   You write your own version of history, you write your own rules. As a leader you do not have to obey the laws of the nation to maintain or expand your power?

 

            Is this our nation now?   When will America’s Tiananmen Square come to be? Will it take place on the Mall in DC or Central Park in New York City in Milwaukee or Nashville, Atlanta or Keeokuk?  What will this regime’s plan be for the Los Angeles Olympics if they take place in 2028, the last scheduled year of the New Authoritarians?  Perhaps we will get that answer much sooner in this Fall's elections after the votes get counted.  If they get counted.

George, 

Interesting account of your experience in Beijing.  A few observations on your political take:

The Chinese people have been governed by totalitarian regimes for five millenia.  Real dictatorships do not allow their subjects weapons, for obvious reasons.   President Trump is the most pro-gun, pro-Second Amendment president since Theodore Roosevelt.  His administration has actively worked to reduce firearm restrictions on law-abiding Americans.  This hardly squares with the characterization of him as a dictator by the unhinged left.

The presence of armed National Guard troops in Washington D.C. has drastically reduced the homicide rate in that city to record lows.  One of the reasons they carry weapons was recently demonstrated when one of them was killed and another severely wounded by an unvetted Afghan national let in by the Biden administration (Obama 2.0). 

In the thirteen months since Trump was sworn in the national homicide rate dropped to the lowest rate in a century.  No doubt the securing of our borders and the ongoing deportation of criminal illegal invaders has made a large contribution.  Despite the orchestrated chaos perpetrated by leftist agitators funded by George Soros and American expatriate billionaire Roy Neville Singham in Shanghai, People's Republic of China, and the government shutdown authored by the Democrat Party the Department of Homeland Security continues to protect our national sovereignty.  If you're not a Bolshevik terrorist assaulting DHS officers with a vehicle or firearm you have nothing to worry about.

On a side note it's encouraging to see that Canadian provincial governments have largely told Ottawa and Carney to take their latest gun confiscation scheme and shove it.

Have an awesome day,

Jim

Thanks for your comments, Jim.  

I'm also appalled by a story that came out yesterday about an 86 year old French woman in the US arrested while waiting for her Green card to be processed.  She had married an American GI she had met in Europe in the 1950's.  They both had married others, but when their marriages ended, they re-united and she came to the US and they married here.  After her husband died this tragic event of her ICE arrest  occurred.  It would seem that ICE is unable to differentiate dangerous people from useful and nonthreatening people. I think ICE may also be working on a bonus system for however many arrests legal or illegal that they can make.  I don't think a three year old child is a threat to anyone, but there are some in detention camps.   On a personal note my grandmother came to the US from LIthuania (Russia) in 1885, and she never got citizenship.  Although her father did and her husband.  She went on to produce 9 children several who served valiantly in WWII in Europe and the Pacific.  None of them carried guns as civilians. As far as I know she never took a dime of public assistance after she was a widow at age 42 with nine children.  She worked in the court system as a translator as she spoke, Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, Czech, German, and English.   I'm okay with allowing guns in the hands of trained, responsible people and severe penalties to adults whose children shoot up schools or commit other crimes with firearms.  I also wish that the national guard or military had been called out in greater numbers to protect the capital when the mob tried to takeover and nullify the election.  As for Canada and guns, anyone can get a gun here.  It just takes more legal processing.  Canadians who have guns, love them and drool over them as much as any American gun nut, and they keep them locked up at home.     And cases people can also shoot up schools with legally obtained guns.    Look at the events in Tumbler Ridge, BC earlier this year.  My wife was at the U. of Montreal many years ago (1990?) the night that a a guy shot up a class of engineering students singling out women as his victims.   I haven't got any statistics to compare homicide rates between Canada and the US.  I can say that I've lived in a town of 30,000 in BC the last 13 years and the two or three homicides that have occurred in this town were not with guns.  Compare that to any town in the US.  There is just as much personal violence, and drugs here, but the death rate  , due to violence is much lower would be my guess.  I have a hard time trying to find truth in statistical comparisons as statistics can be manipulated in many ways to produce 'truth'.  ref. the book,  "How to Lie with Statistics".   I can shoot my mouth off as much as I want to here, and maybe get beaten up for it, but I'm pretty certain I won't get shot for doing so.      George 

V1 N. 13 Transitioning from Peace Corps to the Army or FTA (Fug The Army), Baseball and Burials

 

From this:  June, 1967

                                                                     On Kilimanjaro 

To This:   June, 1968

 Setting the Stage

I grew up in Dayton, Ohio and attended the U. of Oklahoma from  1961-65 on a track and field scholarship.  My father and a number of uncles were WWII veterans, but  I had heard very little of their stories of war.  Since the U. of Oklahoma was a land grant school male students were obliged to do two years of Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC).  It consisted of two hours each week of classroom time and two hours of marching around a parking lot.  This would help me to get through Army basic training  years later.  I learned to march, break down and reassemble an M 1 rifle and know that you saluted officers and called them ‘sir’.  However I could never figure out where on the maps to place my machine guns.  I got two hours of D in that first semester.   Figured I would get a lot of people killed as an officer and did not go into advanced ROTC to become one.  A bit of chagrin for my dad, but I absorbed it and he did too.  He had been a non-commissioned officer (NCO) but always told me as an officer I would have it better in the military.  When I graduated in June, 1965 there were not many options for a single male with no physical defects other than being drafted into the Army.  Well, there was one option, the Peace Corps was there,  and I jumped for it thinking the Viet Nam war would be over within two years.  So I went to Tanzania, and taught business subjects at the Tanzania Cooperative College on the south slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro.  We were tremendously overstaffed, and I only taught about 6 classes a week and was bored with the work, but on weekends I climbed the mountain from various trails on all sides and played rugby and drank a lot with all the ex-pats in town.  We travelled to Nairobi some weekends to play rugby up there.   After a year of debauchery, I learned that there was an opening for an instructor at the Outward Bound Mountain School of East Africa on the north side of the mountain in Loitokitok, Kenya.  I applied for the job, was accepted, and the Peace Corps okayed my transfer.  It was a wonderful second year although there was almost no social life like there had been on the south side of the mountain.  Hardly anyone lived in Loitokitok.  Two out of every three weeks, I was on the mountain, and the third week I was on the plains below trekking between Tsavo  and Amboseli parks with our students trying to keep them alive and not too lost.    It was from this life that I would go home to be in the US Army.  I got my draft notice while still in Kenya and asked for a few months extension to travel home after my PC termination.  I arrived back in Ohio in January, 1968 and was inducted into the army on April 18, 1968.  Everyone remembers their induction date for some reason.  

 How Not to Beat the Draft

Thinking I could 'beat' the draft, I volunteered but had to  spend three years in the service instead of two, but the kicker was by enlisting I could choose my training.  The word 'thinking'  in the first sentence is the giveaway to my stupidity.    Later I found there were better ways to beat the draft but I was a slow learner. *See better ways below.  I asked for French, German, or Spanish language training.  My wife to be was a French Canadian, and I thought that choice would smooth the cultural bumps.  Instead I got German, and instead of going to the Army Language School in Monterrey, CA,  I was sent to a newer school in Arlington, VA, the loss  a cozy seaside setting to an armpit on the East Coast.   We had to memorize twenty lines of  German dialog every day, but it really helped us to learn the language.  I still remember a few of those lines.  Zwei Viertel Schinken bitte, aber scheiden Sie nicht zu dick, meine Schwiegermutter macht ein Besuch heute Abend.   

*Better ways to beat the draft.

1. Later I learned from a well known distance runner that he beat the draft by running twenty miles just before his scheduled Army physical.  That way, he had so much blood in his urine, that he flunked the exam.

2. Another acquaintance told me his brother was going to inform them at the induction physical that he was gay in order not to be inducted.  Not true but it should work.  His brother advised him,  "Why don't you just tell them the truth, that you are a heroin addict?"

3. The Quakers could avoid military service by being members of that faith.  But the alternative service might have been  two years working in a mental institution.  The Army would provide you with that milieu. Some Quakers in WWII were still taken in and trained to be medics and put on the front lines.  Not so good.  

4. Refusing to be sworn in might have meant some prison time.  Not good.  Muhammed Ali took this route and only lost his world heavyweight championship.  But he won it back. No jail time.  

5. Fleeing to Canada, the path that  many of my current neighbors in British Columbia took.

That First Night in the Army

That first night in the Army was memorable.   We were inducted ie. sworn in to defend the country, in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio.  In my history books, no one had ever attacked Cincinnati.   I was to be sent to Ft. Jackson South Carolina for Basic Training where for 8 weeks the army would teach me to be a soldier before sending me to the language school.   But we could not make it out of Cincy that day, so we were told we would be put up in the Netherlands Hilton Hotel in the center of town.  Wow, not bad for your first night away from home.  The venerable Hilton was the top hotel in town.  Not so if you're an army recruit.  Because I was a bit older than the other recruits and I'd been to college, I was put in charge of five or six kids just out of high school.  They were from Hamilton, Ohio and it turned out they had been students of one of my high school classmates in her first year of teaching.  We walked over to the Netherlands Hilton.  I won't say I made them march.  We didn't even have uniforms yet.  I wasn't about to humiliate them right away.  We strolled into the lobby and the doorman said in a rather gruff tone,  "Over there," pointing to the registration desk like he had been expecting us.  They told us we would be sleeping in the grand ballroom on the top floor.  Nothing like travelling in style when you're soon going to be living on $55 a month in an army barracks.   Up we went on the elevator and such a sight when the door opened.  It looked like a barn from across the Ohio River in Kentucky.  Only thing missing were cows to be milked and chickens to be plucked.  It was the unfinished attic of the hotel.  There were about twenty chain link bunks scattered about the dusty room.  Old dirty sheets and blankets that  had been slept in more than once were strewn around the room.  It could have been a homeless shelter in today's world.  Only one thing to do.......

And that was......Find a bar and start drinking and then go to see the Cincinnati Reds play the St. Louis Cardinals that night.   That's how I spent my first night in the army.  The Reds won that game 4-3 in 12 innings.  Pete Rose went 2 for 5 and drove in 2 runs.  Interestingly, ironically if I might, a youngster for the Cardinals, Tim McCarver pinch hit but did not get on base that night.  Three years earlier, Mr. McCarver had sat in the row ahead of me in a management class at the U. of Oklahoma.  He had come to the university after catching Bob Gibson in the 1964 World Series. He was there because he had a girlfriend attending the same university. The Series ended on October 16 that year, so he was at least six weeks late when he came into the class, but the prof welcomed him with open arms.  I never had the nerve to speak to him during that term.  He had a couple of frat buddies on either side of him in the class, and I was a GDI (God Damned Independent).  In other words, I had no connections, money, or interest in joining a fraternity.   After the game I didn't have a chance to go down on the field and ask Tim what grade he'd gotten after that late arrival to the management class.  And I needed to get back to my 'suite' at the Netherlands Hilton.  Tim McCarver went on to a long career behind the plate and as a broadcaster.  In  that 1964 series at the age of 22 he hit for an average of .471 and had a game winning homer in the 12th inning of game five.  Looking up his record, there is no indication that he ever went to college, but I swear on all that is sacred, he was in that management class.

 The next day, a bit hung over we found our way to the Cincinnati airport across that Ohio River and into Kentucky, and we were on our way to Ft. Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina to become soldiers.  

Welcome to Ft. Jackson

We were warmly greeted by a polite sergeant at the base.  He was very nice and introduced himself to us.  "My name is Buck and I don't give a fuck."   Actually he was very cordial, because he was going to be through with us in a matter of hours.  He led us to a barbershop and we coughed up a dollar or so while a 'barber' buzzed our heads.  They said this was necessary so the drill sergeants would not be prejudiced toward guys who had been long haired hippies a few minutes prior.   

Then we were led through a series of rooms where we were measured for and issued uniforms by a bunch of South Carolina civilians who were marginal at best in South Carolina society.  They definitely were bottom feeders judged by the way they dressed and talked about things like who had been banned from the base.  

On to Our Barracks

We were now 'marched' over to our barracks and chose our bunks. We were fifty men/boys in double bunks downstairs and the same upstairs.   A sergeant had a private room at the end of each floor.  On each support pillar in the room where we were to sleep, a red tin bucket was hung.  It held water.  It was a butt can where cigarettes were to be disposed.  That was about it for decorating.  The latrine at the end of the great room had eight or nine toilets, no walls around them.  About ten feet in front of the toilets, a row of sinks and mirrors lined the opposite wall.  There was no allowance for privacy in the system.  

And Into the Fold

 For the next eight weeks, I had it pretty easy thanks to the ROTC training I had done in college.  I was made a platoon guide fairly quickly, and got out of a lot of Guard Duty and Kitchen Police (KP) duty except for one time.  We were a mixed race company, primarily white drill instructors (DI's).  Some were good, but one North Carolina redneck was pretty bad.  He was not a Viet Nam veteran, so maybe he felt he had to exceed the levels of personal humiliation that the other DI's perpetrated on the recruits.  He also was not very literate, and at mail call if he could not pronounce a poly-syllabic last name of a recruit he would just say 'alphabet' and hope the guy asked for his mail.  He really had trouble with Italian names.  There was some racist taunting but not much that was evident every day.  

The black recruits were mainly East Coast, NYC area.  The biggest and seemingly toughest was mad at me because of my exemption from KP, I think.  It was known by all, and when we had the pugil stick training, the DI's had him pitted against me. Pugil sticks looked like a broom handle with a boxing glove on each end.   Somehow we both managed to defend ourselves.  I was in pure survival mode and couldn't really strike a blow, just fend off his wild assaults.  The whole company was watching.  At the end, he was pissed, and I was relieved.  In his frustration he cried out that he wanted to see a social worker.  Another black recruit who was very personable with everyone, had been a groom at Belmont Park race track near Baltimore.  He was making money hand over fist phoning in bets to the bookies at the track.  He had the inside dope, from his community of peers, on most of the races.   

In an adjoining company, a former high school classmate, Jim Dooley, like me,  an overaged recruit was doing quite well financially  teaching the youngsters how to play poker.  Jim would serve as a cook in the army based on his Kentucky Fried Chicken experience and move up in the KFC world after his military service.  

 I Screw Up

One of my first of several major mistakes was volunteering to drive a two and a half ton truck around the battalion and collect the soda acid fire extinguishers from the barracks and take them to a fire station to be recharged.  You set the extinguisher into action by turning it upside down causing the soda and acid in it to mix and create a chemical reaction that would shoot water or a mix of chemicals out at high pressure and put out a fire. It looked like foam on the top of a draft beer.  One problem.  The truck I was driving had airbrakes.  Never having driven a vehicle with airbrakes I wasn't aware how fast they would stop it you tapped the brake pedal with a bit of force.  Well, we loaded up the back of the truck with about 100 extinguishers and I backed it out of its parking place and tapped the brakes.  The sudden stop knocked over those extinguishers and set them off.  It was an incredibly beautiful site very reminiscent of Niagara Falls as all that gunk came flying out of the bed of that truck.  It was right in front of Battalion HQ.  Nice going, Pvt. Brose.  I don't recall being severely reprimanded, but we eventually hosed off the truck and let the foam find its way to a drainage ditch.  And off we went to the fire station for recharging.  I felt if I could get away with that I could get away with almost anything in this system.

Dining Out

Our First Sergeant was African American.  Sgt. Lucky.  The one day I was on KP was a Sunday, and at lunch all the meals had been served when First Sgt. Lucky came into the mess hall  knowing steaks were on the menu.  Normally the recruits were pushed through the dining area being told to put the meal in their mouths and to chew it outside.   All the left over food was then dumped in the trash after each meal.  There was no cold storage in those kitchens.  The cook told me to go out in the dumpster and retrieve one of those steaks.  May, South Carolina,  it was steaming hot and humid.   I went out back, climbed in the dumpster and found a fresh steak.  The Springtime heat was more than oppressive that Sunday afternoon.  I swatted the flies off the steak and brought it into the kitchen.  It was seared by the cook and served rare as ordered, and First Sgt Lucky enjoyed his dinner and even complimented the chef.

 Running With Nowhere to Go

The rest of my basic training was fairly routine.  (I'll have another story about grenade throwing later.)  After that second year of Peace Corps climbing the mountain and living in the bush, I actually got out of shape in Basic training.  Having been a miler in college track, I lapped the field in the mile run. We wore our fatigues and combat boots to run that mile, but I still ran it just under five minutes.   When I finished, the DI's thought I had only done three laps, not the required four, so they made me run a fifth lap.    A running acquaintance of mine had a similar experience, but his captain recognized his talent and the two of them made a lot of money by running match races against the best runners in neighboring training companies.  His Capitan  would set up the race, make the bets, and my friend would sandbag and just barely win the race, and no one realized they were getting hosed by those two guys.  

A Soldier's Burial

 The saddest day for me was the day seven of us were told that we would be on a burial detail of a soldier who had died in Viet Nam.  The seven of us would provide the 21 gun salute to the fallen soldier.  For a day we were drilled in the routine.  Each of us would fire three rounds in unison.  It was important that we didn't screw it up.  We were packed into a van and driven up to Darlington, South Carolina about two hours away from Ft. Jackson.  We arrived at a church and soon realized it was a Black congregation.  We were an integrated team of two black soldiers and five white.   Remember this was May of 1968.  It was the deep South.  The civil rights movement was heavy in the minds of everyone.  Martin Luther King had been assassinated on April 4, 1968.  Bobby Kennedy was also assassinated in this time, leaving his son to grow up without a father to guide him.  My hometown Dayton was on fire with riots as was Detroit and other cities.  And the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City were being held just after the Mexican army had killed hundreds of protesters, and the Soviet Union had invaded Czechoslovakia.   American soldiers' bodies were being stuffed with Vietnamese heroin and shipped home where the heroin was removed for distribution in the ghettoes.  The Tet Offensive had been in January and February of 1968 followed by a Mini Tet in May.  This soldier had probably been killed in that Mini Tet.  When I looked into the open casket in the church I saw there was a wound on his neck. I also remember he was a staff sergeant.   Through research I've determined that he was one of only three black non-commissioned officers from South Carolina who had been killed in that period.  Only one of them had been a staff sergeant, but I will not disclose his name in this writing.  The firing drill went off perfectly, taps was played, the flag was folded and presented to his family and we marched off immediately.  We missed dinner when we got back to base and chose not to be fed with any 'left overs' on my advice.  

On My Way to Washington, D.C.

After Basic, I rode a Greyhound with a couple of New York City guys, Dan Fryda and Romero Medina, from Ft. Jackson to Washington, DC, arriving there on July 3, my 25th birthday.  Man, I was an old recruit.  I think that is also what made it easy for me in Basic.  I knew what was expected and what you could and couldn't do without serious recrimination.  In Washington, I would spend eight months studying German.  I met at least two other ex Peace Corps Volunteers while there.  One had been raising chickens in India and the other doing community development work in Turkey.  The Turk and I ended up in the same unit in Boeblingen,Germany with the 5^th  Psychological Operations Battalion (5PSYOPS).  Together we learned the meaning of ‘FTA’l (Fuck the Army).  We had a lot of good times there and a lot of good stories to tell.  You will hear more of them in the weeks coming.

 

George Brose

Vancouver Island, British Columbia

Comments:

Found this fascinating.  I am envious because the further down life's road I travel, the more I realize I took the wrong path after high school.  The military would have shaped my lazy, irresponsible ass up, teaching skills that I still haven't mastered.  Try as I may, I still can't make my bed sheets so tight that I can bounce a quarter off them.  I didn't have the potential military skill you had but the rest of my life would have flowed more easily simply because of the discipline I would have gained.

On the other hand, you took the ball and ran with it, with one opportunity opening the door to another.  Thoroughly enjoyed this posting and am looking forward to getting another.  Roy

Hi, I was a PCV in Ethiopia (1962-64) after being in the Air National Guard (Training in San Diego)...I have  written and published a few books, now up to 27, fiction and nonfiction, and just finished my Peace Corps story, that I am self publishing. 

When is your book coming out? Who is publishing it? Great focus. 

John

Hi, George,

I just read your recent blog.  

I remember the times in DC or Arlington when Catherine and I visited you or vice versa, and I had forgotten your varied PCV experiences.

Re: your 5 ways to avoid the draft.  You’ll recall I was a CO (Conscientious Objector) even though I was not a Quaker.  I was, in fact drafted, as all COs were, but I was lucky to be accepted in the AFSC (American Friends Service Committee) program.  In those days, when one declared one’s objection, one could claim objection to war in general or just to killing.  Those opposed just to killing were classified 1AO as opposed to 1O, and the 1AOs were often assigned as battlefield medics.

My road to being classified 1O wasn’t easy.  I had to write what amounted to essays to describe my position with regard to a “Supreme Being”, and I had to jump through many hoops, meeting deadlines- a lot for a 21-yr-old who’d just flunked out of college b/c he couldn’t make it to class.  I was also sincere that I would have gone to prison for 2 yrs rather than the military.

In the end, it was an experience that probably made an adult out of me.  Getting married and having a kid while a Tanzanian volunteer had a lot to do with it too.   Tom V.  

V 1 N. 12 Dayton, Ohio 1955

                                                                        Dayton, Ohio 1955

                                                                          by George Brose

This story takes place over sixty years ago when a child’s life was ever so much simpler, learning grammar and punctuation, letter writing, hitting a baseball, following a coach’s instructions, honoring a father and mother who lived in the same house, fearing hell fire and damnation from a Baptist pulpit and with any luck discovering sex by the time you got to college.

Our fathers had been to war, but they never confided to us what that meant. In their lives what came before the war was an economic crisis that had battered them for most of their early youth. By 1955 they had survived a post war housing shortage, begun raising their families and in a time of relative prosperity were steadily employed in factories where they had every reason to believe their lives were stable and would remain that way for the rest of their working days. 

I knew only one classmate who was an orphan of war, only a few children whose parents were divorced. I knew no one who was openly gay, yet ‘queer’ and ‘cocksucker’ were commonly used in our pre adolescent speech. I had no idea what those words meant or implied. The parent of one of my classmates was imprisoned during the McCarthy era for falsely signing a non-communist affidavit.  He indeed had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930's and was still a strong union man.  To keep his job in that McCarthy era he was required to sign the affidavit, and when it was proven that he had indeed been a member, he was imprisoned for six years.  The meaning of those words was never explained to us.  Somehow his wife was able to keep the family intact.  The daughter would go to college and earn a doctorate in chemistry from Johns Hopkins and the son would become a watchmaker.  In school we practiced 'ducking and covering'  under our desks if a blinding flash from a nuclear weapon ever occurred. It was the fear of a Russian A-Bomb that far outweighed the promise of burning in Hell if I didn’t believe in Jesus. 

My parents never attended church, but by the time I was five years old, they sent me to Sunday school at the church nearest our house.  It happened to be Baptist.  The first pastor I knew was a fairly liberal guy for a Baptist.  He and his wife lived across the street in an upstairs apartment.   When he left to be the pastor at a church near the Ohio State University campus, we got a hellfire and damnation pastor from the hills of West Virginia as a replacement.  That's when I got to have a healthy fear of God drummed in me.   When I was twelve, I chose to be baptized, because I had a crush on a girl in my Sunday school class who was getting baptized.   The  week after I was baptized, a deacon came to our home and persuaded my parents to make a donation to the church. My father committed to giving a week’s pay to the place. When I was told that God would speak to me, I never heard a voice, so I gradually drifted away from the mundane promises of those men who were to be addressed as ‘Reverend’.  The last straw was when I found myself kneeling on the church steps one night with my basketball team, praying to win a game.  Somehow I did not equate that with doing the Lord's work.   We did win the game however.   I was completely out the door of the church by the time I was sixteen, but the thought had been rolling in my brain for several years. It took some time to overcome the fear of what might be the price of leaving. In the end the price was nil.    A good friend in high school ended up marrying that girl and left his wayward life to become a 'good Baptist'.  

In my own readings I learned something about evolution, and brought up the subject in my fourth grade class. My teacher screamed back at me that Christians don’t believe such nonsense and then sent me into the hall. I endured a year of that woman who was responsible for teaching arithmetic and homeroom each day. On another occasion while looking for fossils which had been mentioned in a general science text, I found a 300 million years old horn coral in an Ordovician streambed.   I brought it in to show and tell. We had a woman of about 60 years of age as a substitute that day. She incorrectly identified it as “an object with which heathens pierced Christians’ hearts”. This was in a public school system. Most of the teachers taught us to think, weigh, and reason, and  they had the most lasting effects on my education.  Miss Whitesell, Miss Shannon, Miss Derrington, Miss Kelbe, Miss Markus,  Miss Green, Miss Slaght, Miss Charch, Mrs. Arnovitz, and Mr. Helmbold,  you all did your job well.  

In the attic of our home were stored several years of National Geographic magazines.  I saw my first bare breasts in an article about the island of Yap in the South Pacific.   The magazines had been passed on to me by an elderly man who had been a patient of my aunt who was his visiting nurse during a lengthy convalescence. His name was Edwin D. Smith, an engineer with the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, OH. He had been a friend of Branch Rickey the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers when they were both young men.  Mr. Smith  told me stories about Mr. Rickey and his bringing Jackie Robinson into the majors, thus integrating the National League. At the age of nine, I didn’t understand the significance of those acts, because I think I had never met a black person face to face. Our city was segregated in a de facto sense and in a de jure sense as well. If you look at Dayton newspapers from those times, in the housing ads, the terms ‘whites only’ or ‘colored only’ are quite common. 

For me the mixing point began when my parents bought me a membership to the YMCA. The classes at the Y were still very segregated, because there was a YMCA branch in West Dayton where ‘Negroes’ were mainly confined. But in  the YMCA summer camps, whites and blacks came in contact. The first black person I ever talked to was a 10 year old boy named Claude Jones. If I made even a brief friendship at camp it was with Claude. I  asked him about playing together when we got home from camp. Where could I find him? He told me the address on Germantown Street and that he would most likely be playing in his front yard if I came that way. I never thought of asking him to come to my house. I could have easily travelled by bus to go to his home. Unfortunately our friendship at camp did not go beyond our camp experience. I probably got re-involved with my friends as soon as I got home. I was not at that time an adventurous kid in terms of relationships. But in those days a ten year old had a huge radius in which to play without supervision by his parents. I could go downtown on the bus, if I asked permission. In fact to go to the Y on Saturday mornings did not require permission. I was shooed out of the house. We knew the city bus drivers by name.  My favorite was Mac McClanahan.  When the Y gym classes and swimming were done by noon, I usually stayed downtown, had lunch at Morty's 5 Cents Hamburgers,  and went to a movie, double feature, and got back in time for supper. Once and only once, my companion of the day, Billy Strader, and I stayed down to see ‘Blackbeard the Pirate’ a second time and neglected to call our parents to inform them. By 8:00PM our Dads were downtown looking for us. That kept us at home for a few weekends, but it was more for not reporting in than our parents’ fear of molesters and kidnappers.

By the time I got a bicycle the radius had expanded even more.  We could pedal out to the countryside, build fires along streams, look for arrowheads, go fishing.  It was almost like living in the country.  It developed a sense of adventure.   The unwritten rule was be home by supper time, which at my house was early,  4:30PM.  The upside was it left many hours to play after supper.  

My friends and I did a lot of things I'm not particularly proud of, but it was how we learned right from wrong.  How we learned anything without social media is not a mystery.  We could go to the library and read the encyclopedia.  My parents even bought me a World Book Encyclopedia when I was about 12 years old and we were starting to do research papers.  By the time I stopped going to the YMCA on Saturdays,  the city library became almost a social center and a place to meet kids from other parts of town.  The index card catalogue was our Google Docs in those times.  If our library didn't have a particular book we could order it from an out of town library that had the book.  It wasn't instantaneous but it was still effective.  The grading of those papers must have been excruciating for teachers as they were all handwritten.  That's why learning to have legible handwriting was so important.

This is far from everything I want to say.  I've barely touched on sport and said nothing about sex, nothing about death, but I'll leave that for another story.    I leave you with a fun little song by Randy Newman  and sung by Harry Nilsson called "Dayton, Ohio 1903" a bit before the time I've tried to describe, but it let's you downshift into a slower more thoughtful era.  See the link below:

Dayton, Ohio 1903

COMMENTS

Hi George,  I really enjoy reading your posts.  This one is very different from my youth, where the small number of students, about 30 for all 6 elementary grades had 2 teachers, one being replaced in the last year or two of my time.  We did not know about human sex until high school, in spite of the obvious animal sex around us.  And the attraction of girls was their appearance and friendliness did not result in anything.  There was no YMCA.  We would swim in farm ponds or sometimes streams if the water got warm enough.  Swimming meant moving in the water, keeping ones face above the water.

Finally, the one comment in the story warned you about the hell to come.  Don’t worry.  We will be dead by that time!

Thanks for including me in your mailing list.  Harvey,  Yellow Springs, OH

George

How similar our lives were!!  I’ve tried to write memoirs of the era, but haven’t done as good a job as you have. Thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed it.

George-what a beautifully written story about growing up in the 1950s. Please take the time, when time is available, to let us share the next chapter of your life. Thanks for keeping me on your list!  Darryl T

Dave C.   Muncie, IN

George,  

How the hell did Mrs. Arnovitz get mixed up with that crowd?  Must have been recruiting for the Communists. 

Dave H.  Boston, MA

George,

If I had a nickel for every guy who got baptized because a girl he liked was also getting baptised, I'd have a nickel.

Laurel R.  Courtenay, BC

"You need a financial advisor.   Jesus saves,  Moses invests."   lGeorge

V 1 N. 11 Gettin' Along With Aimé Beaubien

 

Many years ago I wrote this essay about a friend of my wife Marie's family in Northwest Quebec.  I was an outsider, a city boy from the US, emigrated to the far north country 400 miles above Montreal and Toronto. Winters could see temperatures of -40F.  The plastic steering wheel of your car could break off in that cold.  You had to have an engine block heater plugged in at night on your car, or the engine would not turn over in the morning. In the summer, the black flies would feast on you in the day and the mosquitoes at night.   Few people spoke English,  but one I clearly recall who did was an old trapper, named Amie Beaubien.   Aimé  meant 'loved' in French.   Aimé was a great raconteur of folk history and a dispenser of bush savvy to me.  He was a person who had endured a very hard life like many of the prospectors and miners loggers, and farmers.  They built something from nothing, using only hand axes, common sense, endurance, and strong family ties.  This is what I remember about Aimé Beaubien.

 

Aimé Beaubien was sitting hobbled in a wheelchair when I visited him in his nursing home last summer (1981). His blue-grey eyes still gleamed as they had ten years before when he was busy cutting wood at his trapping camp.  He was in his mid-seventies then. He measured about five feet six, and still had a lot of muscle in that aged old body.  Bare chested, black flies crawling  on his grizzled back. The lines in the skin told of seventy years living and working in the northern Ontario and Quebec bush. There were blood streaks running down his back where the black flies were able to penetrate that toughened hide. "You just got to imagine they’re not there, if ya wanna get along out here." I don’t think the word ‘survival’ could be found in Aimé’s vocabulary, but ‘gettin’ along’ was definitely in the realm of his phrasing.

Aimé was born near the turn of the century in Sudbury, Ontario. He is Franco-Ontarian, meaning he is of French Quebec origin but lived in Ontario.  He speaks English as well as French, but cannot read or write either language. Don’t ask him his phone number, he won’t be able to tell you or even dial it. But ask him how to operate a diamond drill for a mining company, how to trap beaver, set charges of dynamite, or take a moose out of season under the nose of the game warden, and Aimé can put you through a grad school commando course on ‘gettin’ along’. "You get a cut and no doctor around, you put some spruce gum on the wound and sew it up yourself. Pretend it don’t hurt and it won’t".  He had financial wisdom as well.  "As long as I have a thousand dollars in the bank, I'm okay."

In the early 1920’s Aimé and some of his buddies walked the three hundred miles from Sudbury into Northwest Quebec where gold and copper mines were opening.    They could have taken a train part way, but they didn’t have the money.  Apparently he hadn't yet developed financial savoie faire.  He had a team of horses then and often contracted hauling jobs with merchants until one day the horses went through the ice on a river in early spring. He lost a second team another time in a sadder, crueler way. He was working in winter with a drilling company, and they hauled a rig over a frozen lake. Not arriving at their destination before nightfall, they pitched camp on the lake even though slush had formed on the surface. The men slept on cots, slush beneath them, but most of the horses’ feet froze while standing in the slush overnight. "We had to shoot those poor animals next morning", Aimé lamented. "They were as crippled as I am now."

Aimé had plenty of close calls in the winter. He was once with his brother when he stepped on thin ice and went through. Fortunately his brother fished him out. "Then he kicked me in the backside every time I slowed down, just to keep me moving. Had a long way back to the cabin that time before I could get warm."

Another time he wasn’t so lucky about getting back to camp. He was hunting in winter when he and a friend both shot moose. They decided to camp on the spot and carry the meat back the next morning. They gutted the beasts, put pine boughs in the gaping abdomens and crawled inside to spend the night.

Well, Aime forgot some of his hard won bush knowledge and when confronted with rigor mortis (that of the moose) and freezing weather in those  carcasses, he and his partner soon realized they could not get out of the moose bellies.  They were stuck.  Fortunately his buddy was able to reach his hunting knife strapped on his belt and managed to free himself and then Aime. Talk about a rough Caesarean delivery.

On another sortie into the bush in winter, Aime sought out a trapper’s cabin to spend the night.  No one left a cabin in the bush locked just for that reason, or they were likely to find a broken door when they came out to the cabin the following Spring.  Anyway, Aime used someone’s camp to stay warm one night and built a fire in the stove and warmed up the room, had his supper, and went to bed.   In the middle of the night he suddenly found that a frozen cadaver that had been sequestered in the rafters had thawed and  fallen on top of him in the bunk.  Talk about a ‘dark and stormy night’ story for his repertoire.  Turns out that a guy had died a few weeks before and the RCMP had investigated, and since it would be too hard to haul the body into town until Spring, they stashed it in the rafters.  That led to Aime Beaubien’s surprise visitor. 

One other story of bushwackiness.   Aime once was recruited to help a friend move his cabin across a lake during the winter.  The prep work was done in the Fall with a ramp built to slide it down to the lake shore once the water was frozen and thick enough to hold the weight.  How do you know when it is thick enough?  Do you consult engineering manuals, lake currents, wind velocities or just spit on your finger and hold it up in the wind?  Well, late into winter when the lads thought conditions were good,  they got the team of horses out of their shed and rigged them up to pull that cabin to a better location where a new foundation of logs had been built.  When they would get to the shore they would rig ‘come alongs’  and winches to pull it up on shore.  Halfway across the lake, to their chagrin, they found that their calculations about ice thickness and lake currents were a bit off.  Hell, this was a mistake any well educated engineer from the University of Toronto  could have made.   Their route to the new site was blocked by cracking ice.  What to do?   They changed course and pulled the house to the nearest shoreline  which looked like low ground only to realize it was a swamp.   But that was their only option.  That cabin remained in the swamp until it crumbled of natural causes. 

Aime’s own lakefront property was on a low outcrop of the Canadian shield on Lac Duprat a few miles north of Rouyn-Noranda near the old Waite Mine.  To walk that last two miles into the site, you would think that you would need a four-wheel drive pickup with a winch on the front end in case you got stuck.  Not Aime.  He drove a two door Ford Mavrick with low clearance in and out of there.  ‘You just got to go slow.  You’ll make it.”  was Aime’s advice and he was right. 

Another piece of Aime’s wisdom passed on to me was,  “Don’t ever get in a fair fight.  If you want to get along up here,  make sure you don’t give the other guy a chance.  And be ready to use both feet as well as your fists.”  Fortunately I never had to put that advice to good use.

I  remember Aime’s last days.  He was dying in the hospital in Rouyn-Noranda.  We went to visit him and he still had a bit of a twinkle in his eye.  We all knew he was dying as did Aimé .  My wife Marie asked him if there was anything she could get him, any last meal he would like.  “Yes” he replied.  “If I could just have a nice bowl of soupe de la queue de castor.  Beaver tail soup was a woodsman’s delicacy.   Well, we weren’t as bush savvy as Aimé, but Marie went home and cooked up a strong chicken broth and brought it to him.   Aimé took a few sips and died that evening.  I don’t know if the cause of death was listed as old age or Marie’s cooking.  But the gift of comforting people in their last days, hours, and minutes eventually led  Marie from the profession of teaching to the profession of chaplaincy and end of life care and counseling.   Thank you, Monsieur Aimé Beaubien.

Below, the drawings are not really Aime but they are a good visual of those times.

COMMENTS:    

George

I would have lasted a week at most.

I remember your taking us fishing and then across some body of water for a fancy dinner.

Then, on the way back to Pittsfield, the car lost an axle or something like that. Fortunately for us it happened in Montréal. Lynda had an aunt (with 2 kids about our age) who took us in for the night. Isn't every Québecoise equipped with relatives in Montréal?  Bob

Bob

  

Aime would have taken some barbed wire and wrapped it around the axle and reinforced with some moose sinew,  and you would still be driving that car.

George