Greetings fellow U.S.S. Long Beach gobs,
It has been many years since I walked my last time down the aft brow. I was aboard the ship for only a short time during her early history and much water passed under her keel after I left her and before she completed her final voyage.

I find myself in a reflective mood from reading the comments and recollections of you who went before and after me. Now that my working career is nearly done, I ask, "How was my life affected by my association with this ship near the beginning of my adulthood?"

For one thing, it was on Long Beach that I learned to read. I'm a second generation native. My grandparents on both sides were in their teens when they emigrated from Russia. My father was an eight grade graduate and my mother made it through high school. Farming was what was known and that didn't require book learning. I got good grades in public school but not a lot of encouragement to continue learning. Without a good prospect of success by continuing the tradition of farming - most of the extended family was only just getting by - I opted to join the Navy when I was no longer welcome in the nest.

I managed acceptance into the Nuke program and so I spent my first two years of enlistment going to ET and Nuke schools. Then, aboard ship, not all my time was filled with watch duty and work. Time was left over for other pursuits. I remember card games that would last from pay day to pay day. That wasn't my cup of tea but it seems like it was for the majority. There was the swapping of sea stories; the making of music; writing and reading letters; making jewelry from scrap metal. I'm sure you are thinking now of other activities that you had, but for me, this was the start of my career in reading. Being under age while at ET school (Treasure Island), I didn't spend a lot of time on the beach. I recall going to the EM club at the Army base at the Persidio once and renting a hotel room in SF one weekend with a couple classmates to do some illegal recreational drinking. Mostly, life consisted of school, study and boredom. I read Fielding's Tom Jones while there. School phase (Bainbridge, MD) and Applied (West Milton, NY) Nuke school provided no time for reading other than text books. Free time was spent driving to Washington, DC, during School phase, where one could consume 3.2 beer at 18. Then in New York we had to fend for ourselves because there wasn't a base; we rented apartments and did our own cooking. There wasn't public or military transportation so we (the Navy) relied on cars with which to commute to the duty site. Of course this meant that we did a lot of studying in the bars of Saratoga Springs and other nearby towns. Beer and Slim Jims were staples in our diets. This was the first real test of one's mettle. If you could maintain your focus on studies in this environment and manage to graduate from the program, you were indeed capable of functioning in a Navy nuclear engineering space and you were simultaneously qualified as a binge drinking sailor. I had my 21st birthday in New York - legal drinking age of 18. Not much time for reading here.

It wasn't until I boarded Long Beach that my reading became a practice. I remember reading many "Travis McGee" stories. I read Home from the Hill by William Humphrey and several years later named my son after one of the characters. There were always periodicals available; Time, Newsweek and of course Playboy. Playboy, I recall, always was filled with informative and thought provoking articles. Through the news magazines I learned of the wonderful Philippino patriot, war hero and US ally Ferdinand Marcos. It wasn't for a few more years that we learned what a despot he was.

Manila was our first port of call (or was it Naha, Okinawa?) during our first West Pac deployment. It was a good way to prepare us for Olangapo City; it was third world but not bottom-of-the-barrel. If only we had been more politically sophisticated at the time; perhaps we would not have been the weapons of cultural assault that we were. But then we probably wouldn't have been aiding and abetting our own political leadership in its meddling in Viet Nam's civil war either. I don't believe that many of us were drafted into the Navy. Many of us were there, though, to avoid the draft. I was there because it was a way to get some education while avoiding the decision to get a job or go to college. It was my "Peter Pan ploy". My father trained to be a tail-gunner on B-17s during WW II. It is my good fortune that he never managed to get to the "front line". I understand that the mortality rate for that profession was very high. I had uncles who served in the Army and Navy. One was wounded in the D-day invasion and lived for 50 more years before pain and chronic infection finally took his life. He sustained a bullet wound to a leg and he refused amputation. He used a brace to get around and spent his remaining life tending the wound that never healed. Coming from a rural, conservative environment and having models like my father and uncles, it was no leap of faith to look on service in the military as honorable and a citizenly duty.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated during my 'service week' in boot camp. I was in the bowels of the mess hall sanding the skins off potatoes when I learned of the shooting. Within five years, Martin Luther King and Kennedy's brother Robert were also assassinated. The Watts riots happened while I was enlisted and Nixon resigned shortly after I was discharged. Throughout this time I faithfully pulled the lever for the Republicans. My father never registered or voted because he didn't want to serve on jury duty. Looking back I can say, "At least he did no harm." I didn't know why I was doing what I was doing and there was no concern for examining my actions. I just knew I was right. (How's that for a double entendre?) Back home in Colorado, in my first civilian job after the Navy I was working for Woodward Governor Co. This was a company with an interesting blend of extremely conservative political and progressive social views. It told us how to vote (Republican) and provided in-house medical, dental and barber services. It told us how to dress and provided a retirement investment program before 401(k) s came into being. My wife at the time made a friendship with another woman. They both were green card holders (the wife: Australian and she: Korean). This woman's husband was ex-Air Force and attending Colorado State University. We were getting along well socially until the problems of the Nixon administration were discussed. I just couldn't see it from his view. That was an insurmountable barrier which caused our friendship to cease as fast as it had started. It's taken me decades but now I can see his point. Sorry, (name forgotten), some of us are just slow learners.

One of my early preferences was for Fords. At that time you either liked Fords or Chevys. If you had a minority view, you liked Plymouths. Then there was the super minority that liked AMC products. One of my first 'car' memories is of the dark blue '49 Nash Ambassador that was the family car. What a boat! My father's clan drove Fords while my mother's side tended toward Chevys. Dad seemed to have no fashion sense. He thought a car was just transportation and that minimal expense was the major criterion. I grew up impatient to be the pilot of a 'real' car; something like what my dad's younger brothers drove - nice, shiny Ford V-8s. When it came time to buy my first car, my dad tried to steer me to a '52 Studebaker. He had no idea how impossible it would have been for me to convey myself in that to school. I settled for a '55, 265ci V-8, Chevy sedan with an automatic; the engine of which soon required a rebuild. While in Nuke school at Bainbridge, MD, I bought a VW bug. That car got me through school there; to Colorado for leave; back to NY and through the 'lab' phase of Nuke school and back to Colorado again. I gave it to my dad because I was going on board Long Beach and wouldn't have a place for it. My dad used it long enough to change his mind about 'foreign' cars and bought his own. I've owned MGs, Hondas, Datsuns, VWs, Chevys and Subarus. It wasn't until a decade after my discharge from the Navy that I bought my first Ford - a used F150 Econoline van with which to pull around my Hobie Cat. What a dog! A few years later, at the start of the SUV mania, I bought a used Bronco II. Another dog! So now I'm getting around in about my dozenth Subaru. I haven't bought but two new cars in my life. I see that my dad was right except for me its Subarus rather than Ramblers. It seems to me that if you're buying a car to stroke your ego then you are wasting your money. So how about all these nuclear cruisers that our nation bought; who's ego was being stroked? How much did they cost us and in whose back yards are the radioactive hulks now disintegrating?

I met the girl who would become my first wife in a hotel bar in Sydney. Our visit to Australia was a reward for our performance on PIRAZ and in order to participate in memorials for WW II naval battles. Unlike one girl, my future wife managed to actually gain entry into the US of A. Even though I grew up with three sisters and no brothers, I was totally lacking in self confidence and social skills required to deal with the opposite sex. I was easy prey for a girl desperate to escape an unhappy family situation. I paid her fare and she came to be with me after the ship returned to home port. We were soon married and we managed to remain so for about ten years. We produced two children, a son and a daughter, but were unable to make each other happy. We parted with great animosity. I lost custody of my daughter through a court fight. I had been living the life of a perpetual adolescent; first, tied to my mother's apron strings; later, in Uncle Sam's Navy and then in the care of my wife. The problem was that she needed a father. The divorce was the trauma that I needed to complete the process of maturation into adulthood.

My first wife was no slouch when it came to reading. She tended toward 'gothic crotch novels'. She picked up my mom's addiction to Reader's Digest and she succumbed to the door-to-door magazine salespeople so there was always something to read lying around the house. The National Geographic was one that I particularly enjoyed. After she left I had a lot more time for reading. Before long I had subscriptions to AMNH's Nature, The Smithsonian and The Wilson Quarterly to compliment The Geographic. For several years I had books and mags at my bedside, in the bathrooms, the living room and at the kitchen table. I was as addicted to reading as others are to exercising. The Reader's Digest was never renewed - insufficient depth to content. Then I saw that much that appeared in "NG" also was covered in The Smithsonian. Since The "S" had significantly less advertising and covered sociology and anthropology better than "NG", the "Geographic" also disappeared from my reading list. "Nature" was my drug of choice for over two decades. The articles were always interesting. They were generally written by PhD students in the various scientific specialties. Regular monthly features were written by people such as Stephen J. Gould and Jared Diamond. Book reviews provided me with more titles than my dyslexic reading speed could possibly manage in ten lifetimes. Through the "Smithsonian" I learned of "The Wilson Quarterly". Now there is a readers digest that is worthy of the classification. But again, too many more book suggestions.

So, how did we get here and what should we do about the fact of our presence? Does the explanation from the Ivory tower or the one from the Pulpit ring true? Should we listen to Madison Avenue and Wall Street or should we spend more time on Main Street? Is our raison de etre to be a dutiful consumer; to toil away at a meaningless job and to strive to acquire all that Madison Avenue tells us we want or should we find our contentment in family and friends? Your answers to these questions will help you to understand why you ended up a crewman on U.S.S. Long Beach. Given your youth at the time of your service, the answers were most likely in your subconscious as they were in mine. I didn't spend a lot of time in churches while growing up. I was spared that indoctrination by my father. For whatever his reasons, he chose to lead a moral life undirected by a professional man of faith. I sampled several different Christian sects while growing up by attending Sunday services and vacation Bible schools as the guest of my various childhood friends. I saw a lot of fixation on death and laundry lists of don'ts. As a result, about the only times I spent in church in the Navy were the few services I was required to attend in boot camp. And during my Navy career there was never any pressure from lay or professional religionists to 'get with the program'. This recent news of problems at the Air Force Academy around hazing of individuals who wouldn't adopt a certain religious viewpoint disturbs me greatly. I can't expect that it isn't also happening in the Navy and so I'm troubled. I want my country to continue to practice a policy of religious freedom; to continue to be a place where common ground is sought. I am worried for my country's future because I see religion infiltrating the machinery of state; I see politicians practicing policies of division and I see our military leaders unable to resist the misuse of our forces.

With hind-sight I can see that I was merely a small cog in a large machine of capitalism/individualism opposing a similarly large machine of cronyism/communalism. I am comfortable in my opinion that the machine of which I was a part was the better designed in that it distributed the load more evenly on its parts. I can see that someone drafted into the Army from a poor inner-city school district and sprayed with Agent Orange might disagree with me and someone that obtained a comfortable, state-side billet in a National Guard unit through help from his father's friends would congratulate me for my solid reasoning. At least there was a draft. The idea that it was a citizen's military and not a mercenary army was real; one had to take positive action to opt out. I am proud of my Navy service. I gave my time and attention and my country in turn gave me education and it was careful with my life. Today, however, I could not recommend to anyone to join the military.

I've rambled on; probably over shared. My hope is for smooth sailing for all my fellow shipmates; may you never meet with Davy Jones.