The streets in "Po" were mud. Plain red mud so potent that to this day it's still stained in to my whites. It always rained in Olongopo. The streets flooded continuously and were not paved. The sidewalks were boards, rotted, broken, or even sometimes just not there. When you left the base to go into town you had walk across S _ _ t River. Every native kid in town had a wire seign wrapped around a bent coathanger and yelled from the filthy sluge while they swam among the waste, "Hey Joe, give me dollar, throw me peso sailor." I believe those kids made more than the sailors who went to town. The river the children swam in as they begged was full of raw sewage. That's how the river got it's name. There have been cases when some sailors would take a pocket full of washers and throw them as they crossed. You could really tick off a little filipino in a hurry by doing that. You had to make sure you were fast enough to out run the slimmy waste they threw your way after cussing you for a long while. I had on occassion done that also but, never got hit with the sludge. I also threw alot of pesos too, however. Sounds cruel but once on the beach you were fair game for any kid or sly young girl to steal anything they could get their hands on. It sometimes became quite nasty as a few sailors paid dearly for a good-time on "The Beach" in Olongopo. These same kids had moms or sisters who were making money a different way. Town was always full of bright eyed, often very pretty girls, trying to make a few dollars, and they did too. It was just a nasty little town built around a U.S. Navy Base. The population there could go from one or two thousand to eight or ten thousand in one or two days. It depended on the seriousness of the gun line and how many ships could be afforded the priveledge of pulling in to a work port. Some ships rebarreled the big guns, like when the U.S.S. New Port News' number two gun turrent blew up, but, most took on ocean stores, food shipped from the states. Also the expensive supply parts were stored in Subic. There's tales that could be told for years and never gone over twice about Olongopo.
Any sailor who knew about Hotel St., Shitt St., Won Chia, or Oceans 11 can also tell you about how stupid it feels to buy a baby chick and throw it to an alligator that hadn't moved since the Japanese surrendered. It seems this little guy in Olongopo got the idea if he could put up a wrought iron fence around an alligator, feed it everyday, keep it wet and happy, he could make a lot of money selling baby chickens to drunk sailors that would just love to see a baby chicken between those massive yellow teeth. What a HOOT! Well, you know when someone is drunk, their attention span is nil, so, they'd watch about two minutes then say, "P _ _ _ on it.", and try to walk away. Then, this wonderful smell would stop you 'cause anybody drunk in Po had not eaten in hours. This little filipino fellow also know this and sold what he called sweet and sour pork on a stick for two pesos. He would cook this stuff on a little rusty habatchi under a big yellow umbrella rain or shine, day or night. It tasted so good and and when you're drunk and hungrier than twelve hounds you'd buy a whole handful and start eating like there was no tomorrow. But, who cared?, because pesos were meant to be whizzed away anyhow. I'm sure there was more money changed there than the market itself. I would also bet pig meat is not as stringy nor covered with enough spices to disguise that difference. I'd even bet that pig swung from branches and barked like a dog until they trapped it, knocked it in the head, skinned it and cut off that long, skinny, curly, furry little tail. There wasn't no squeal in that pig. I don't know which is worst, telling somebody you've handled a monkey or eat one!