Reborn . . .

When I was twenty-five, my mom gave me a unicycle for my birthday.  That was in 1973, still three years before I went to Clown College.  I still have it.  It will be thirty-nine tomorrow, same age as Jack Benny . . . 

It spent the last ten years or so in my garage, quietly pining away to be ridden, its tears causing an accumulation of rust to accrue on all its metal surfaces, its tire flat and dry-rotted, it's pedals loose and floppy.  Neglect, pure and simple, not even benign.  Before we moved here, it spent years in our other garage, quietly suffering the same fate.  It never complained, just suffered . . . 

This is how bad the seat had gotten.  The post, and fork, and pedal arms looked the same.  The rim was pitted and scarred, and the one missing spoke had caused the wheel to get out of round.  Fortunately, I can't show you what the rest of it looked like, because it doesn't look like that anymore.

This year, on Spring Break, we went to GrammaLand (Ft. Lauderdale, where gramma lives).  Also in GrammaLand is a place called "the Swap Shop," which is where gramma and grampa work.  They have a business selling hats of all kinds, shapes and prices.  They've been there for what seems like forever.  I met them in 1994 when I went to the Swap Shop to work for the George Hanneford Family Circus.  I would only have been there for the winter, but when spring came in 1995, and I called to find out when Bentley Bros Circus was opening,  I  was informed that my services would no longer be required . . .

So, thanks to the good graces of the Hanneford family, I spent an entire year at the Swap Shop, and I also met my wife (we'll be married 16 years in June) and her sister, and her brother, who is also known at the Swap Shop as "the Bike Man."  His name is Airton, but everyone calls him "Junior," perhaps because his dad (grampa) is also named Airton . . .

This is his card . . .

  

So, this time when we went to GrammaLand, I brought my unicycle with me.  Junior restored it to pristine condition.  He put on a new seat and post, and pedals, new tube and tire, replaced the missing spoke, and trued the wheel.  Then he removed all the accumulated rust.  Years of neglect disappeared in just one day!  And to the amazement of all around me when we got home, I didn't get killed when I tried to ride it!  In fact, I rode it as competently as I did the first time, thirty-nine years ago.  In a straight line, all the way to the end of the parking lot.  I never really mastered turning . . . but hey-- I'll be 64 in the morning, and I can still ride a unicycle!  Or I can again ride a unicycle.  And it's the same unicycle!  This is what it looks like now . . .

Note the flash reflection in the chrome!  That's the part that was covered in rust.  One day with a master "Bike Man," and my near death unicycle is reborn, renewed, cleansed from years of physical neglect, made new, without spot or blemish.  Kind of like what happened to me, after one day with the Master on Halloween, 1988.  I emerged from that experience reborn, renewed, cleansed from years of spiritual neglect, also made new, also without spot or blemish.  Jesus said "I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through Me  (John 14:6 NKJV)."   Now, if that's not true, I haven't lost anything by believing it .  But if it is true, then, by believing it, I've gained eternal life.   I came to the Father, through Jesus, on October 31, 1988 at First Assembly of God Church in Shreveport, LA, when my unicycle was fifteen years old.  I was forty.  And nothing has ever been the same, since I let Jesus into my life.  If you find this interesting enough to make you curious, then check out this LINK . 

If not . . . think about what happens if what Jesus said is true, and you choose to not believe . . .

And if you're in Ft. Lauderdale, and you need bike work, or a hat, go to the Swap Shop and meet my inlaws . . . tell them Bruce the Clown sent you.                                     

Unless, of course . . .

  

. . . it was 1971.  Which would make more sense.  It was over 40 years ago, either way.  But I think I saw Gunther, and he was on the Red Unit, and Mitch Freddes tells me that the Red Unit played New Haven in the odd number years . . .
That's Mitch, over there  >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>



And this is Gunther. Mitch is still alive and kicking, and making people laugh. Gunther, unfortunately, is not. This is a link to an article about Gunther . . . Circopedia- Gunther Gebel-Williams   Mitch was on the Red Unit as well, but I'm not sure if he was there that early on (in 1971).

And this is Ron Jarvis . . .  Of all the clown photos I've seen in all the places I've seen them,

he reminds me the most of the Dylan looking clown that caught my eye that first time at the Greatest  Show on Earth.  But it can't be him, because he didn't go to Clown College until 1973 . . . and while I think he was on the Red Unit, I'm not sure.  And now I probably owe him $5.00 anyway, even though he couldn't have been the one. 

But whoever it was, and whenever it was, I'll always be grateful. Because from that day on, up to and including today, I've still always wanted to be a clown . . .

I always wanted to be . . .

When I was little, I wanted to be a cowboy.  But even when I was little, I knew that the kind of cowboy I wanted to be wasn't hiring anymore.   Then, I wanted to be a priest,but that kind of faded over the years.

In the year after I got out of the Navy, I traveled back and forth between Connecticut and California several times, finally ending up in Connecticut and getting a job in the West Haven Veteran's Administration Hospital.  I remember that my first paycheck came exactly two weeks after my last unemployment check.

I was a nursing assistant.  It wasn't that I'd always wanted to be a nursing assistant, or even that I wanted to be one then.  It was that I had been a Hospital Corpsman in the Navy, and I already knew how to be a nursing assistant.  After being a corpsman, it really wasn't that difficult . . .

I had a job!  I had money (such as it was)!  So, to celebrate, I took my god-daughter to the circus.  It was November, 1972.  She was four (she was born while I was at LaSalette in Altamont.  Her mom was Shush's step daughter (her name is Maureen, and she's about as Irish as you can get and still be American).  We rode the bus to the New Haven Coliseum because I didn't have  a car.  It was the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Combined Shows Inc. Blue Unit.  This is a picture of the program . . .

That's as big as I can make it and still have it fit.  But it was way bigger for me.  I had never seen anything like  the Greatest Show on Earth.  Never.  And that's what it was.  No matter where you looked, there was something astounding going on!  There was a clown who reminded me of Bob Dylan.  At one point, he was walking in a line of clowns on the ring curb, and he made eye contact with me.The other clowns stopped, and he crashed into them and did a fall.  Seems like such a little thing now.

But it got me to thinking.  For the rest of the show, I watched the clowns, and it occurred to me that there wasn't one of them doing anything I didn't think I wouldn't be able to learn . . .

When intermission came, I remembered that I was with Maureen.  And she was gone.  Fortunately, I found her almost immediately.  She was following the toy butcher because something caught her eye, which, I of course, guiltily bought.  We went to the circus annually for a few years after that, and each time it became more special for me.  We about froze to death on the bus on the way home. 

Something in me changed that night.  I think it was because a dream was born . . .

Miscellaneous . . .

O.K., so some other stuff happened during the Navy years that sort of got blown past . . . not necessarily in the following order.

I hitch-hiked across America twice. The first time, I was on 30 days leave, and I made it as far as Milwaukee before I got sidetracked.  Somehow, I became convinced that going to Canada was a good idea, so I did.  But just as I was realizing that Toronto was going to be freezing really soon, and that I had left no way open to return home, my mom rang the doorbell at the house where I was staying.  Somehow she found out where I had gone, and she came after me.  She took me home, bought me a new uniform (I had given mine away), and put me on a plane back to the Navy before I was even AWOL. 

A month later, I was transferred to Hospital Corpsman A School in San Diego, and got another 30 days leave (which put me in a hole I had to buy my way out of when I finally got discharged).  I went to Milwaukee again, and this time I got married.  We separated after six months, and were divorced shortly after my active duty ended. 

When I finally did get out of the Navy, I hitch-hiked to Milwaukee one more time, and this time ended up in the hospital with some sort of massive upper-respiratory infection.  But, I got better, and continued uneventfully to Connecticut, where I filed for and then collected unemployment benefits for fifty-two consecutive weeks.  I understand that now, one can collect for over two hundred!  (How does that work?)

The other major thing that occurs during this four to five year period happened so slowly that it doesn't really have a definite time reference in my memory.  The influence, and the presence of God in my life seemed to gradually erode until it became not much more than a vague memory of a way of life I used to have.  Church became a wedding and funeral event, no longer even part of Christmas. 

2 Timothy 4: 3 says this: For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.

Pretty much describes what happened to me during this period of my life.  And I'd be lying if I tried to tell you I didn't have a pretty itchy pair of ears.  I was now pretty much full swing into listening to anybody but God.  Carlos Castenada, Khalil Gibran, Herman Hesse, Arthur Janov, et al-- anyone who could posit a reason for being the way we wanted to be that justified us in that pursuit became "guru" for a day for my newly liberated friends and I.  Did I mention the Maharishi?  We didn't need God anymore.  God was dead.  Nietzsche said so.    That's Nietzsche over there >>>>>>
Great mustache, huh?

The moon was in the seventh house!  Harmony and understanding!  Sympathy and trust abounding!  No more falsehoods or derisions.  Golden living dreams of visions.  Mystic crystal revelation, and the mind's true liberation-- oh yeah!!!!   Hair, down to where it stopped by itself!  That's what it was all about! 

There was no more need for God.  And there was no more room for God. 

And I never even noticed that He wasn't there, when I drove off on my life without Him . . .

A Year at Sea . . .

The minute I applied for conscientious objector status, I got dropped from FT "A" school and moved to a transient barracks to await orders . . . go figure . . .

That's where I was the night Bobby Kennedy got assassinated (June 6, 1968).  He was the Attorney General when his brother was president, and for a while under LBJ, until he resigned to run for the Senate from New York (the same seat Hillary Clinton resigned from to become Secretary of State).  I got in trouble because I was watching the coverage on TV, and I forgot to make the morning coffee. This was two months after Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.  Seemed like the world was ending . . .

But it wasn't.  Shortly after that, I got transferred to Hawaii, to the USS Walker.  It seemed a little strange to me that the Navy would send me to a destroyer, right after I told them I didn't want to kill anyone, but what did I know?  First thing I did was have an interview with the captain.  When he found out how I came to be there, he wasn't exactly happy about it, but he made the best of it.  I remember him telling me that I was a very idealistic young man, and that he'd once been the same, but that over time, his ideals "had been tempered with experience . . ."

At the time, I felt sad for him.  I didn't understand how anyone could let circumstances influence their belief in truth.  I can see his point of view much more clearly now.  I think its because my ideals have been tempered with experience . . .

This is a picture of the USS Walker, a Fletcher-class destroyer, and the second ship of the United States Navy to be named for Admiral John Grimes Walker (1835–1907). 

The Walker was built by the Bath Iron Works Corp., Bath, Maine.  She was launched on 31 January 1943, sponsored by Miss Sarah C. Walker; and commissioned on 3 April 1943, Commander O. F. Gregor in command.

Walker spent the first seven months of 1968 in her home port (Pearl Harbor) conducting type training and preparing for a final western Pacific deployment. I went on board in June.  Right after I got there, we sailed to  San Diego and back.  On August 4, I got transferred.  On August 5, the Walker got underway on the fourth western Pacific deployment since the beginning of the Vietnam War. She arrived at Subic Bay, Philippines, via Midway Atoll and Guam on 18 August, then proceeded to Vietnam.  After the last WestPac cruise, the ship was sold to Italy, where she was renamed Fante (D-561). Fante was retired from Italian Navy service in 1977, and broken up for scrap.

I went to San Diego, to the USS Prairie.   On the Walker, I was a mess cook.  On the Prairie too.  And a janitor.  The Prairie was a Dixie-class destroyer tender built just before the start of World War II. In layman's terms (I don't remember how to say it in Navy talk), the Prairie was the big boat that would sit in port and the little boats would park along side for replenishment and maintenance.

The Prairie departed for WestPac cruise shortly after I came on board. 

But right before we left, we had to load up on all the stuff the little boats would need when they came along side.  Like bullets.  One morning while I was  cleaning the bathroom (head), I got sent on a work detail loading 5 inch shells.  They lowered pallets of bullets down a shaft to where a line of us moved them into the magazine (that's a Navy term that means "roomful of bullets"), kind of like a bucket brigade.  You took the bullet from the guy behind you and handed it to the guy in front of you.  Except, one time only, the guy in front of me wasn't there when I handed him the bullet.  It was the longest time I ever watched something I had dropped before it hit the floor (deck). The noise it made gave new meaning to the word "CLANG!" And it remains the loudest noise I've ever caused and lived to tell about.

And the last bullet I loaded.  I got replaced in the bullet line and sent back to the bathroom (head).

While the Walker would actually go out and shoot at North Vietnam, or selected enemy targets in South Vietnam, the Prairie just sat in port, waiting until the destroyers ran out of stuff.  Or broke something.  On the Prairie, I went to the Philippines, to Taiwan, to Hong Kong, to Yokosuka, Japan, then back to Taiwan, then back to San Diego.  I also got a feel for how big the Pacific Ocean is.  We sailed out of San Diego, and for most of the first day, we could see land behind us.  For the next seventeen days, all we could see was water, no matter what direction we looked. 

By the time we got back to San Diego, the Navy decided that I wasn't making it up about not wanting to kill anyone, and they sent me to Hospital Corpsman School. 

 (The Prairie was decommissioned on 26 March 1993 at Long Beach, California, and was later towed to Singapore and sold for scrap.)

I spent the rest of my enlistment in San Diego, first at school, then at Balboa Naval Hospital, and finally, at the San Diego Naval Training Center where I spent my days giving injections to recruits.  And because I hadn't ever gone on to the extra training for the submarine missile fire-control systems, the extra two year enlistment extension went away!  I got out of the Navy on August 6, 1971.

The next day, I got a tattoo.

*The information and photos of the Walker and Prairie comes from Wikipedia . . .



LBJ . . .

Lyndon Johnson became president when John Kennedy was assassinated.  Then he beat Barry Goldwater for his own term in 1964.  In March of 1968, when it seemed like Vietnam would never end and the bodies continued to pile up, Johnson announced that he would not be seeking re-election. 

I was in Fire Control Technician A School when that happened.  Milwaukee, Wisconsin was just an hour away on the train, and I found another LaSalette alumnus who was attending Marquette University.  And I started hanging out at college on the weekends, where I met and talked with numerous individuals who had many opinions about the legality and morality of the United States presence in Vietnam.  Which got me to thinking . . .

And while I was mulling this over, President Johnson made the announcement that he wouldn't be running again, and he did it in such a way that I felt compelled to write to him, and thank him for putting the good of the country above his own personal ambitions.  Or something like that. 

And I got a response!


I still have it.  It was typewritten, not mass-produced, and personally signed by Mr. Whitney Shoemaker, not a facsimile stamp.  I felt pretty special.  I found out recently that Whitney's office answered some 30,000 letters related to that one event . . .



But the coolest thing was the envelope.



One day, during mail call, after all the other mail had been passed out, I was invited to report to the FT A School office to pick up my mail.



When I got there, the chief petty officer on duty handed me this letter, but of course, since it wasn't opened, he couldn't tell what was inside. 


He had no idea who I was , or why I would be that important, or even if I was that important, but he was decidedly curious, since all he saw was this:

He looked at the return address, and asked me, "so what's this about?"

"It's a letter, chief," I replied.

"I can see that, you moron," he answered, "but why are you getting mail from the White House?"

"I don't know, chief, I haven't opened it yet . . ." I answered, and went back to class.

My navy track would have eventually had me working on Polaris Submarines, in guided missile fire-control radar.  And it occurred to me, I could be sitting some day on my submarine at my fire-control station when the order came to fire, and I could be the one whose duty would be to push the button that would initiate global thermonuclear war (that's a great phrase, isn't it?).  And I knew that I didn't want to ever get to that point, because I knew that I wouldn't push the button.  Shortly after the letter, I requested a change of status to "conscientious objector" and reassignment as a Hospital Corpsman . . . which I eventually got, but not before I spent a year at sea washing dishes (trays) and cleaning bathrooms (heads, we called them in the U.S.N.)