Good evening, 919 Gang. It was a blessing today when five 919ers I have known for so long visited me for lunch in Ramona. Since Mary died, my days have been vacant, but visits like this are wonderful. We laughed and told stories, and when I got too emotional, they consoled and comforted me. These are what real friends look like. From left, Gina Lubrano, Alison DaRosa, Susan White, Susan Gembrowski and Anne Krueger.
After lunch, they came to the house, and we enjoyed some of those ice cream bars I wrote about recently. I don’t know who is sending me so much food, but you can see we enjoyed them. From left, Gina Lubrano, Alison DaRosa, Ane Krueger and Susan Gembrowski.
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REBER: At lunch it was suggested it would be great to publish old newsroom photos. I have a lot of photos I can share, but this is the oldest. This is the Union newsroom in the downtown building. And, no, I can’t identify anyone.
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MICHAEL BURGE writes:
One year into my Peace Corps service in Kenya, I flew home to attend my brother’s wedding. This was not something that Peace Corps encouraged, as they preferred that volunteers not go home until their two-year service ended. Nonetheless, after some back and forth with the Peace Corps director in Kenya, permission was granted. Then it was on me to arrange travel. A couple volunteers gave me the address for a travel agent, and off I went.
Nairobi’s River Road was the demarcation line between the city’s European and African sides, and Crocodile Travel was located in a two-story walkup on the African side. The agent was a jovial, streetwise Kenyan whose name I wish I could remember. When I walked out I had a ticket from Nairobi to London, with stops in Cairo and Odessa and a layover in Moscow, on Aeroflot. This was September 1979. Relations between the US and the USSR were not friendly, but there was no ban on traveling through Russia.
I don’t recall the aircraft we flew, but it was a standard jet with a single aisle. I was surprised to see it had a first class, despite the communist tenet that everyone is equal. In 1979 the USSR was courting African countries, and our flight included a group of young Kenyans on a junket. When some of them realized there were empty seats in first class, they raced forward and took over the compartment. A flight attendant attempted to stop them, but once seated, they were difficult to dislodge. They didn’t return to coach.
My first taste of life behind the Iron Curtain was our stop in Odessa. The flight attendant announced that we were to remain on board while the plane refueled. Then she opened the door and everyone got off. I got it. The state tells you to do one thing, and everyone does what they please. The Odessa air terminal was nothing to write home about. It was very late, maybe midnight, and the only available service was a vending machine featuring green apples. Not even a Snickers. I’ve seen Omaha truck stops that had better amenities.
After we reboarded I was seated across the aisle from a middle-aged lady who fit every stereotype you can conjure about Russian babushkas. On the seat next to her she had placed a large bag, as if she had just finished her local shopping and was taking a bus home. The flight attendant appeared and instructed her to remove the bag from the seat. Our babushka held firm and refused to give in to such an unreasonable demand. This all occurred in Russian, of course, but I did not need a translator to figure out their interaction. Eventually the flight attendant left and the bag, containing beets, dirty laundry, or high-tech spy gear, whatever, made it all the way to Moscow unmolested, in the middle seat.
When we landed in Moscow those of us continuing to London were relieved of our passports and cordoned off in a pen. Our layover was a few hours, and our Soviet hosts watched over us as if we were unruly eighth graders on a field trip to the Kremlin. Our mere presence made them nervous. Our stay in our pen was long enough that I befriended a couple of British chaps and a mysterious American who seemed to do nothing but travel, like a well-heeled vagabond. He said he was returning from a trip down the length of the Congo River on a passenger boat, a journey that took seven days. He said that just before he boarded someone told him, “You will see one death on this voyage.” That person had gotten it wrong, he said. He witnessed three.
My overriding memory of Moscow airport was the number of people, mostly men, wearing ill-fitting gray uniforms and standing around doing nothing. They wore high-peaked hats that you could see from anywhere in the terminal. This was how the state achieved full employment, apparently.
Another thing that struck me was a collection of passenger jets, mostly TU-154s, lined up on the tarmac, completely idle. They had no place to go.
Our chief minder was a woman, young but stern. Lacking anything better to do, I decided to charm her and devised an excuse to talk to her. Her English was good. She maintained her officious manner, barely making eye contact. Then I noticed she was wearing a pretty ring, with a jewel like a small cameo, I think, and I commented on it. She smiled. Success.
My destination was Philadelphia but my ticket took me only as far as London. My plan, when I reached London, was to book a flight to New York on Laker Airways, an original low-cost, no-frills carrier. It flew out of Gatwick Airport. From New York I would find my way to Philly. When I reached London and stepped up to the counter, the Laker agent told me the wait for a flight to New York was four days.
“Four days!” I said. “Where else do you fly?”
The agent looked surprised. “Excuse me?”
“I said where else do you fly?”
“Los Angeles.”
“And how soon can I fly?”
“Two days.”
“Okay, book me.”
But that is a separate story
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CHRIS COOK writes:
I’m on Longboat Key in Florida, where for more than a decade, Kathy and I have spent January to March. Over time, we’ve watched families come here from the north with little kids. Now those kids are grown, and they come with the grandchildren. The only annoyance here was early on when the now-adults were little, they spent hours on end in the pool playing that stupid, inane and annoying Marco Polo pool game. Over and over and over. So now, it’s revenge time. I’m organizing a group of us 70 and 80-year-olds to get in the pool and play Senior Marco Polo for about two hours every afternoon. Fun, eh?
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REBER: Apologies to Valery Scher. I had a typo in my birthday log that means I am tardy wishing her a Happy Birthday on Jan. 31. More timely are warm birthday wishes for Arline Smith on Feb. 1.
