MY LIFE AND OTHER HARD TIMES ... : 無料・フリー素材/写真
MY LIFE AND OTHER HARD TIMES ... / mrbill78636
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示 2.1 |
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| 説明 | ... the early years. The Joseph Conrad and the Tusitala were two of the ships I was assigned to while at the U. S. Maritime Training Station in St. Petersburg, Florida. The station was closed in 1950. I purchased the photograph of the Joseph Conrad from Mystic Sea Port in Connecticut and the Tusitala is photograph that appeared in the New York Times in 1925; the "Tusie" is being towed into New York Harbor in what looks like a dead calm.My best friend, Frank Clark, says I'm the kind of person who when asked for time, gives you a history of watchmaking and I'm sure this essay will seem that way. Sorry, I just have to do it my way, but first let me give you a little background.My mother was a staunch fundamentalist Christian who was convinced Catholics worshiped Idols and Methodists didn't believe in Jesus. Before I was born, I had attended church one hundred and seventy times, which is probably not the record, but a good showing anyway. This fundamentalist sect believed they and they alone were the only people God would take into heaven on the day of judgment. By the time I was twelve years old I had a conflict in my mind between a God who Jesus said was all-loving as well as all-powerful and yet in a fit of anger would turn a poor frightened woman into a pillar of salt and condemn millions of people to burn in hell simply because nobody ever told them about Jesus and asked them to repent, come forward and be baptized, which is what I did at age nine simply because it was expected of me. Did I mention, my Dad sold cars, smoked cigars and drank a lot of beer, wine and whiskey. His credo was that these three things materially helped in the movement of automobiles from one owner to another.When I was in high school and had been reading about the war in Europe between the two classical enemies, strong central government (Fascism) and populist controlled government (Communism) it all seemed very far away and happening to somebody else. One Sunday morning we came home from church and heard on the radio the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I had no idea where Pearl Harbor was, but visualized an exotic lagoon where tons of pearls could be harvested from an abundant oyster bed bottom. Everything changed.They quit making cars for my Dad to sell. You had to have red stamps to buy meat. You had to have gasoline stamps to buy gasoline, shoe stamps to buy shoes, stamps for canned goods, stamps for almost everything. We also began saving tin cans, toothpaste tubes and other metal objects for the war effort. In my senior year of High School I was offered a job in a machine shop making universal joints of PT boats. At 16 years old I ran a turret lathe and made all of the parts of the universal joint except the pin that held the parts together. I rode a bicycle to school each morning and at 2.30 P M rode to the Texas Star Iron Works and began making universal joints. I would work an eight hour shift and go home, soaking wet with the white cooling oil used to keep the metal cool as it was being drilled and machined. If we had a shipment ready to send to New Orleans, I'd stay often until after 2 A M to help pack the universal joints in wooden boxes. The pay was phenomenal and overtime was time and a half. One interesting incident I remember was a good English teacher asked me to stay after class one day and explained I had not turned in any written work since the class began. I explained to him what I was doing and the hours I worked. He asked me how much I was paid to do this work and when I told him, he smiled and said, “That's more money than I make as a teacher.” He never asked for written work again and at the end of the semester I got a C- which was passing. I graduated in 1944.When I graduated from High School, I had three choices, continue working at the machine shop, sack groceries at a supermarket or go to junior college. I was tired of the machine shop, not inspired to sack groceries and frankly had enough of school for now. Then deep down there was that fear that the war would be over before I had a chance to “do my part.” That's the way we thought back then. A guy at the machine shop worked only a couple of weeks, then shipped out, was gone a month or two and came back to work another couple of weeks. He told me you could join the Merchant Marine at age sixteen, which I still was and that information put my future in high gear. The next two years rushed by.There were eighteen weeks at the U. S. Maritime Academy at St. Petersburg, Florida where I was trained to be a deck hand, sailed a weekend on the S. S. Joseph Conrad, sailed a week on a freighter whose name I believe was the USMSTS American Sailor, and caught the crabs on the S. S. Tusitala. Almost two years later after trips to England, Belgium and up and down the U.S. East Coast, carrying food, ammunition, oil and other manufactured goods, the war ended and it became obvious merchant seamen would not be included in the GI Bill of Rights being passed through Congress. So I did the only sensible thing a young man could do at that time. I went to my draft board, announced I was eighteen years of age and wanted to be drafted into the army. They complied and I was drafted, served in the Eighth Service Command and the Twentieth Army Air Force on Guam and earned enough GI Bill to almost finish college.I couldn't find adequate images on the internet of the American Sailor, American Seaman or the S. S. Vigil, all of which were at one time or another at the training station in Florida. The training station was closed in 1950.Having no idea what I wanted to be when I got big, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and enrolled in a small religious college founded by members of my mother's church. That way I could take courses to decide what I was interested in, what I was good at and I could check out this God business at the same time. I wanted to see if God was actually at my mother's church or not. My final discovery was that he was there, but NOT exclusively. When the four years were up I found I firmly believed there was a God, but not matching the exact description of the one subscribed to by my college and by my mother. I also found I enjoyed and was better at art than any other subject I took, so I graduated with a major in art and a minor in Education and became an art teacher in public schools.You know, the more I think about it, Frank Clark may be right.Thanks to the New York Times for the photograph of the S. S. Tusitala. I thought they'd want you to see the ship where I caught the crabs.Stay tuned, the search for God and Truth continue. |
| 撮影日 | 2009-06-28 23:44:44 |
| 撮影者 | mrbill78636 , PFLUGERVILLE TEXAS, USA |
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