An old acquaintance mentioned he’d been looking for friends for some years, and had only managed to find a few. Another said that he’d come to feel that he’d just as soon not see his old friends. He preferred to remember them as he’d known them, young and vital, and not showing the inroads of advancing years.

It made me wonder about my own ‘Boys of Summer’, to steal a phrase. I’ve been contacted by several of them, thanks to my web site. I didn’t recognize quite a few of them, not having seen some of them for over forty years. Others I talked to on the phone, or corresponded with without seeing a current picture. It’s funny, faces change, but voices don’t seem to change that much.

One did demand to know what ‘Minnesota accent’ I was talking about when I mentioned that he still had one. Of course, that’s not surprising since he was born, raised, and still lives in Minnesota. Except that he doesn’t think he has an accent.

I suppose it is a little hard to reconcile balding, paunchy middle-agers and senior citizens with the slim, muscular youths I used to ‘run the alleys’ with back in those fondly remembered ‘good old days’ when we were all still immortal. I’ve wandered through ‘Pig Alley’ in more than one country, in my time. We could drink half the night, still get up on time to go to work, and be just about fully recovered by lunch time.

I fondly remember all the times we called a taxi and made a run for the 'Alleys' over in Figueras, Spain late at night, whether we had to work the next day or not. Mercy Snakes!! And those sudden, impulsive trips to Barcelona on the spur of the moment.

I recall one impromptu trip when my friend, Hooker, was piloting his Volkswagen Bug while I manipulated the gear shift. I'm not sure why I was shifting - maybe Hooker couldn't remember where the gears were. Quite possibly, he was steering with one hand and needed the other to hold his bottle of champagne. Somebody had to change gears. Ah, Youth.

Speaking of youth, it’s really stunning to see how some of my old buddies have aged while I've managed to retain that aura of youthful vigor. I do occasionally wonder why I think I'm shaving my father when I look in the mirror, though. And all that wavy black hair has definitely thinned out and changed color.

So what if I find it necessary to walk with a cane from time to time? I can still run up a flight of stairs. I just don’t make it to the top as quickly as I used to, like when I was responding to a trouble call from Operations in Spain. The radar maintenance rooms were on the ground floor, and Ops was on the second floor. We had to go down a hallway, outside, and then up an exterior flight of stairs to get to Ops. No, I don’t remember why the stairs were outside, but they were covered.

Naturally, I need glasses to see what I’m typing now, and I can’t write with those tiny little letters like I used to do. I enjoyed seeing how small I could write and still keep the words legible. Of course, I had 20-15 vision then. I don’t think I’ve got 20-20 now, even with the glasses. However, I’m told that they make me look rather professorial, so it’s a trade-off.

After I departed Spain for Montana there were a couple of times I took leave and drove from Lewistown to DC - and back, of course. I usually took a short sleep break at a truck stop somewhere in Wisconsin. When I arrived back at the radar site after one such trip, a bunch of the guys wanted to go to Billings.

I had the only car in the group at the time, and since I wasn't all that tired,  I obligingly drove them to Billings and back. What was another couple hundred miles or so after the trip I’d just taken? I finally went to bed about four that morning. I’d like to see me try that now. I probably couldn’t get from here to Ohio without a quick nap. Like I said: Ah, Youth!

Hooker and Gary Carter; Hooker is the sleepy-eyed gent on the left.

 © T.P. Woodfork

02/10/2007

Tony Pahl of the IWVPA dug this story up; I had forgotten I’d written it. As I told him, I wasn’t intentionally writing a story; I was just sort of reminiscing in print, which I often do. That’s why I forgot I’d written it. The picture was taken, I think, in a place called ‘Granny’s Bar’ in the little town of Rosas at the foot of the mountain where I was stationed. ‘Granny’ was a rather large Englishman.

Rosas now looks more like downtown Manhattan than the sleepy little fishing village I remember. Rosas is right on the Mediterranean, with picturesque hills and mountains behind it. Now that I think about it, it couldn’t exactly be described as ‘sleepy’ during the tourist season.

Hooker, I believe, was last reported tooling his VW Bug around the Pearly Gates, and no one has been able to locate Carter, so far. The last time I saw Hooker, I was leaving Spain back in 1963, and I last saw Carter in Billings, Montana, around 1965. We were stationed at different sites, he was at Kalispell, I think. I left Montana for Vietnam in 1966.

I ran into a couple of other cohorts from Rosas while I was in Montana. The state must have been NORAD’s dumping grounds for returnees from Spain around that time.--TPW 27/04/2008