Boot Camp San Diego

Now that I have discovered how to create jpeg's from my old slide collection I have decided to print some of them here. I'm going to take some of the slides from each event and tell a bit of a story about the event thereby forcing you to view my slide collection. It is kind of sad, as I go through the slide collection which represents thousands of slides from all over the world, that I am selecting a few and the rest will be destroyed. We have decided that it is time to start simplifying our lives and photographs are one of the items that need to be simplified. Dale's parents and my parents are long gone and we are left with the photo collections and no one really cares about the photo's anymore. As we sort we will create photo albums for out daughter and grandson and those that we can identify subjects, will be forwarded on to those people. My first project is of Boot camp, San Diego circa 1962. As I go through the slide I notice that most of them are of views around the area showing buildings such as my barracks,
battalion headquarters and a lot of people I can only vaguely identify or remember. I saved 4 photos out of 95 and these 4 will be saved as jpegs.

Chapter one, as I said previously, is boot camp at San Diego, California. The first photo is a pride photo of out company flags. We were good and we got lots of awards. The sailor on the left is my friend Dennis Dalby and I joined the Navy with him. I remember that they took everything from us and we led a very restricted life. Very few Playboy magazines around. We had some free time to ourselves and we spent that telling stories, smoking, playing poker with smuggled cards, some even wrote letters home. The Cuban missile Crisis was at its height and Viet Nam was cranking along. Marilyn Monroe died as did Elanor Roosevelt and John Glen orbited the earth 3 times.

In the Navy we did things a little bit different than the rest and we found out how to wash clothes the Navy way. Photo two shows the scrub tables we used along with a bucket, scrub brush, soap and a lot of elbow grease. Hope this photo brings back a lot of good memories to you San Diego boot campers out there. Wonder if they still do it that way.

The third photo shows all of those, just washed whites, dungarees, skives, skive-shirts and white hats hanging on the clothes lines with the aid of tie-ties. A member of our company stood guard, on the clothes line all night. All of this scrubbing, washing and guarding would culminate in a white hat and skive shirt inspection the following morning. We would take our thumb an place it under the deck band of our skive shirts so that the inside of the band was displayed. We held our white hats so that the inside and the sweat band was exposed to the inspector. All of this showed how well we were washing our bodies as well as our clothes. Before that I always thought that smell was the test you employed but now I look for rings on their T-shirts of people I meet.

The final photo is of one of the guys polishing his "boon dockers" for inspection. They were our everyday shoes, were ankle high. and had soft toes so they took a lousy polishing no matter what you did. They were comfortable though. I think I could use a pair of those now. Nowhere else in the service did we wear them.

Just so you know we did get a little Liberty now and then, the last photo is from the old Hollywood Theater where we attended one of the last Burlesque shows. This photo is G rated but the x rated I shot with a telephoto lens and there was to much movement. Darn!