In 1968, the Navy taught me to write for the weekly base newspaper, The Flying K. I also acted as a host for recruits that joined us each week. We'd ride on a bus all over the base with me at the front with a microphone, telling them where everything was at NAS Kingsville.”
(The photo shows a current issue of The Flying K newspaper.)
My experience in radio let me work off-base, 7:00 to
midnight, at KSIX Radio in Corpus Christi, forty miles from Kingsville. I was allowed to live off base in a
ramshackle house that my two roommates and I called Shady Grove,
after the 1969 album by a popular San Francisco band
called Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Grass and Lone
Star Beer were my only drugs at the time; LSD scared me.
A notice in the Kingsville newspaper reported that people were creating a Little Theater of Kingsville. Since I had acted in It’s a Groovy Time the previous summer in the Poconos, I decided to audition.
I was cast as the lead, Johnny, in the show and was selected to direct the play. Cast as my love interest, Eadie, was a married woman, 11 years older than me, Carol Robinson.
There was a popular 1967 movie called The Graduate.
It starred Dustin Hoffman as 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock,
a recent college graduate with no well-defined aim in life, who is seduced
by an older woman, Mrs. Robinson, played by Anne Bancroft.
I mentioned the movie even though my Mrs. Robinson did
not seduce me. She was married and I knew her teenage son. However,
I saw her as a mother image, and she saw me as a
young man who appreciated her, something her husband didn’t.
I drove a 1969 Ford Cortina at the time, and I
spent most of my money at the Day and Night Café where I could get two
tacos, an enchilada, refried beans, and a Lone Star beer for $1.25. That
started my lifelong interest in Tex-Mex cuisine.
One thing I remember so well was walking into the base bar
and watching Apollo 11 blasting off in July 1969.
Four days later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
landed on the moon in the Lunar Module Eagle. Later, all
three astronauts came back to Earth safely.
In January 1970, I was transferred to Training Squadron 21 on the base. I was now the only journalist in the office and my boss was a striking WAVE officer, Janet Wentworth.
