Neal Witwer was born in 1947, the youngest of three siblings. My sister, Tommie Lou is 15 years my senior, and Joseph, rest his soul, was 12 years older.  My father, Clairon Fankhauser "Tommy" Wittwer Was born in Nebraska in 1903, of German-Swiss Immigrants from Bern, Switzerland. His gene pool was awesome, having had several aunts & uncles who lived past the age of 100 in the late 19th century when average life expectancy was around 36 or so.  The Wittwer family established cattle farms in Nebraska and were farmers and lawyers and doctors and such in the early 1900's.  My father actually had eighty (80) first cousins, and we weren't even Catholic!  Dad liked to boast that he was "older than the airplane".  Neal can boast, at least, that he's older than the Porsche company!

Mary Catherine Christine Reeves Wittwer, my Mother, born in 1911, was known as Mary Lou. They were married in Fort Worth, Texas in 1932, while Dad was working for an established photographer, C.A. Taylor.  Dad learned the business well enough to make his own way, and, with Taylor's encouragement, the C.F.Wittwers moved to Galveston Texas in 1933 and started a professional photography Studio located at 2112-1/2 Postoffice Street during the depths of the Great Depression. One of the stories Tommy was fond of telling is one of the simplest but cleverest cash flow solutions I’ve ever heard of.:
 
It was customary to charge a fifty-cent deposit to have a portrait made in those days.  Photography was at that time an art & craft that was not for the inept. Witwer Studio was located at 2211-1/2 Postoffice street then.  When Dad was too poor to afford film, he’d get the deposit, make the customer’s portrait with an empty camera (they had nothing but black & white sheet film in those days) and instruct the customer to return that afternoon for his photos. He would then rush out with the money & purchase the necessary film, and when the customer returned to see his proofs that afternoon, Dad would (mis)inform the customer that there had been a lab accident, apologize profusely, have the customer resit, then did a "rush" job, still getting the proofs to the customer that same day. His work was so good, though, that the minor inconvenience caused to the customer was soon forgotten! Not totally honest, perhaps, just entrepreneurship.

Dad always had trouble in Texas with our last name.  In frustration, he dropped one of the "T"'s, going from Wittwer to Witwer.  "Texans just cant spell Wittwer!", he exclaimed.  Hell, as far as I'm concerned, they can't spell Witwer, either.  I've lived in Texas for 57 years, almost as long as Tommy (also know as CFW) did, and Texans still can't spell it!  They still spell Neal as Neil, too!

Mary Lou was the managerial brains behind the Studio as it grew in the 1930's.  Dad was a great P.R. man, gregarious as hell, and one of the greatest portrait photographers of his time. He was an artist.  He was very gregarious, and was loved by just about everyone he met.  Downside: not a good businessman.  He would give away pictures, reduce a price that was already agreed upon when there wasn't even a dispute, and the Studio receptionists really dreaded it when he came into the front office when a customer was to to pay for services.  When money worries were brought up, Tommy was fond of saying:  don't worry;  when this money's all gone, we'll just get some more!".

Mary Lou was the yin to his yang.  She was a sharp bookkeeper, fiscally astute, and kept the Artist from giving away the Farm!  During World War II, she secretly saved enough money to purchase the old  1845 Mott House at 1119 Tremont for cash!  Tommy didn't even know about it until she bought the property.  The Studio was relocated there.  It was a Victorian mansion, 8500 square feet, that had been divided into 5 or 6 apartments, and was named The Oaks because of the many trees that you can see.

He got smarter in later years.  I was in business with him in The Studio from 1976-1986, a professional son!  He still cut the prices just like in the old days, but when I'd lament that our creditors were paying us too slowly, he said:  "Son, money never comes in too late, it always comes in just in time."  That actually was true. It really helped.  One of his other favorites:  "Worry is just interest paid on something that never happens".  I use that one on apprehensive hospital patients that are unduly worried, and it often works!

The family lived on Avenue P, one of a series of rent houses they lived in, as my older sibs were growing up.  The Studio was doing well.  Then came home ownership: 4808 Sherman, in the then-new Denver Court subdivision, was  Purchased August 5th, 1941.  The house and lot cost  $5400.00!  At 4.5% interest, the 25-year mortgage payments were $30.02, ending in August 1966.  I live there now.  During World War II, the Studio had around 32 employees!  Only ANICO, the huge national insurance company, had a higher volume of mail!  With three large army bases in Galveston County, business just boomed.

Then, Neal came along on 6-8-47, born healthy.  Dad was 45!  Mom was  38!  I wasn't expected, and Tommy got a vasectomy soon afterward; he was fond of telling people that Neal was "the last button on the shirt".  4808 Sherman was a 3-bedroom 1-bath of only 1200 square feet, and things got a little crowded. 

In early 1948, I contracted laryngotracheobronchitis, which was known also as "the croup" in later years.  The disease was a minor endemic, and lots of children died of the disease in Texas.  I landed in the hospital, and Dr McReynolds, an ENT resident at UTMB, inserted a silver tracheostomy tube in my neck which couldn't be removed for six months.  I spent about 3-4 months in John Sealy Hospital, and, according to my sometimes melodromatic mother, I "died five times".  Read: respiratory arrest.  I have no vivid memories of the ordeal, but my folks sure did.  I couldn't' talk, cry, or make any sounds except choking ones!  (Anybody who's known me can surely attest that I'm still making up for lost time).  The resulting brain anoxia was thought to have done some permanent damage:  it screwed up the then presumed "activity regulating center" of my brain, which made me hyperactive.  I can actually recall the ethereal bright light that so many people recall from their near-death experiences!  After the trach came out around June of '48, I was a bundle of energy, to say the least.  I was a research project unto myself at UTMB.  I probably had a dozen EEG's among other tests by the medical researchers.  The Galveston Poster Child for Hyperactive child syndrome.

My illness induced my parents to move to 1119 Tremont in the North side apartment that was above the Studio.  The huge Victorian mansion had 19-foot ceilings on the first floor, 27 steps to the second floor, 13-foot ceilings there, and bedrooms that measured 25 by 25 feet!  There was a third floor attic with one room finished for occupancy, and the Grand entrance hallway had an Italian Terrazo tile floor that would cost upward of $100,000 to replace today. 8500 square feet compared to 1200; what a great place to grow up!

 My parents both loved music.  I started out playing at age 3 when the folks bought me a plastic ukelele. I learned how to play it well enough to motivate them to, age 5, buy me a real mahogany ukelele made by Harmony. I became somewhat of a showoff, and although I wasn't really that good, my youth & moxie got people's attention. I learned to play several instruments through the years that friends brought over, and we had a piano at home. My folks enrolled me in piano, voice, and guitar lessons, which gave me a shaky foundation; I don't think we got our money's worth.  For one thing, my piano teacher was gay, and when he made an inappropriate comment to me that I didn't understand, I casually mentioned it to my parents, and the piano lessons were history. Ironically, his last name is the same as my first! Voice lessons that I took a couple of years later were not really helpful to me in my mind.  I learned how to "sing for my supper" on my own in the summer of 1965, and most of the tecniques that the vocal instructor taught me were useless in that genre. Rock & Roll came from the gut!  I made more money from singing in my life than the teachers did.  Let them teach Opera.  On the other hand, singing in school choir in later years was more to my liking, and I actually learned something. 

When I went to Alamo Elementary school, I took violin. That gave me access to the Band Hall, and I snuck in after hours to play everything I could get my hands on. Tympani, clarinet, cello, bells, you name it. By the time it was all over, I could play at least a semblance of one song on about twenty instruments. I loved this stuff!  Our house was big enough that I could go off someplace remote to practice.  I did have lots of other interests, though.  I loved stuff like balsa airpalne gliders, any kind of gadget, electronics, whatever.  I took everything apart to see how it worked.  My friends & I built forts, dug holes, made secret rooms in the old house, built Go-carts, and had a rollicking good time!  Unfortunately, My brother Joseph was off at military schools when I was young, and my sister Tommie Lou got married in 1953, so I was an only child much of the time.

The family vacationed for two or three weeks most every summer in Nebraska with my uncle Lyle Wittwer on his very successful 1000-plus acre cattle feeding spread.  Located in Richardson County on the Southeastern tip of the state, the closest burg is Falls City.  The feed lot was a small part of Lyle's farm; the rest grew corn, alfalfa, and other cattle fodder crops.  There was a five-story grain elevator by the feed lot!  Tractors to drive, combines, a road grader.  It was great! My cousin Joseph (Josie) Wittwer, Lyle's son, was only two years older than me, and he manged to put up with hyper Neal pretty well. I loved the farm life there; chickens, pigs, farm dogs, great stuff for a city kid! I bellyached so much about going back to Galveston every summer that my dad asked his Uncle Chris Fankhauser if he would keep me for that school year.  So, age ten, I spent a winter on a working farm in Nebraska with my Great Uncle Chris's family. He and his wonderful wife, Rose agreed to keep me for the experience to learn how my father and his family grew up. Chris's bachelor brother, Hans, also lived there.  We had pigs, sheep, cattle, corn crops, alfalfa,  even tractors that I could drive.  I had a pet lamb, there were dogs and cats and calves, and I had a lot of assigned chores, one of which was to ride the horse Star out to the pasture, about a mile, to bring the milk cows home, every afternoon. 
 
Star, as I recall, was part Quarter horse and draft horse. I was ten. She was seventeen years old, and big. I rode bareback with a bridle that didn't have a very radical/punishing bit. She was really the boss. When I pointed her out to the pasture, it was pretty much autopilot all the way. Star knew where the cows would hang out better than I did. Star would need a little guidance to get behind the cows, but once we were there, she'd herd the four or five cows back to the barn with very little input from me. Once I decided to ride her to the very edge of the pasture that was close to my schoolhouse, and she fought me all the way! I had to kick her and yell at her to go on, but that was off the beaten path to go get the cows! She reluctantly went to the far corner of the property where I talked to some friends that were by the school. Once I turned Star around towards home, it was on! This horse accelerated and ran ran so friggin fast that I heard nightmare sounds in my ears from the air rush. I vividly remember that to this day! Don't forget, we're bareback! She was going so fast that I was barely able to hang on. We then approached a really deep dry creek bed! JESUS! I bailed! I must've rolled over fifteen times, but I was wearing overalls and a big-ass parka coat that kept me from injury! The next day, I worked Star over really good with a bullwhip while she was trapped in her stall. After about forty lashes she was more compliant and conciliatory! Just kidding! The next day we both were back to business as usual.  But I didn't ride her much for pleasure after that.

 I had to walk to a one-room schoolhouse which had one teacher for grades 1-7 (I was in Second), and yes, I actually had to walk one mile to school uphill in the snow in 20-degree-below-zero weather! Truth be known, the high school school bus would let me hitch a ride when it was that cold, but they would pass me up in milder weather.

 That Christmas, my parents bought me a mail-order Sears Silvertone acoustic guitar per my request.  At first, I removed the two lower strings and played it like a ukelele, but when I got back to Galveston I got a bit more serious about guitar.  I found out in my web research that the acoustic Silvertone guitars marketed by Sears were actually manufactured by Harmony back then.

I was a geek even in 1959.  Back in Galveston when Nebraska school was out, I cannibalized earphones, a 12" speaker from an old Magnavox TV that we threw away after we won a Zenith color TV from Christie Mitchell's fishing rodeo, and appropriated my brother Joseph's Olsen Hi-Fi mono amplifier to build a guitar amplifier from scratch.  I removed the coils from the cheap earphone headsets and glued them to that acoustic guitar, and damned if it didn't work! I Had actually electrified an acoustic guitar and built an amp that worked.  The box was 1/4" plywood, but the sound was adequate for an 11 year old!

The following summer, I wanted a sailboat.  Badly.  Dad wouldn't buy me one, but he was very encouraging of enterprise.  He actually bought me the materials to build a ten foot sailboat from scratch plans that we had in a book that was published in the late '40s.  Marine plywood had been invented since the book was published, so I changed the design from a round-bottomed planked boat to a v-bottomed plywood type.  I had a Skilsaw, a saber saw, a great big electric drill that I also used as a screwdriver, and damned if I didn't complete the project successfully.  Dad helped, but not a lot.  The boat took about three months to build, and I did all of the woodworking except for the oak stem (the piece that joins the boat's sides together in the front).  That was a compound curve that was cut at a lumber mill, Gulf Lumber Co. I was a good customer of theirs at a young age.  It would have been cheaper to buy a boat, but Dad wanted me to have the hands-on building experience.  Mr Walters, who ran the Galveston Yatch Basin at the time, was a kindly man, and rented me a stall for a reasonable price.  I sailed that boat in the Galveston Ship Channel for three summers.  I fiberglassed the boat the second summer to cut down on the leaks.

I was playing guitar all along, and eventually convinced the folks that I was really motivated to play electric guitar.  Memory's hazy, but my first real electric was a Kay, red, Ca. 1959.  It came with a ten-watt Kay amplifier with tremolo.  When I played it for the first time for the family, and demonstrated the tremolo, my brother Joseph, rest his soul, said:  See? It's a trashy instrument!  That really hurt me for years, but my brother used to say that the saxophone was a trashy instrument, too.  Whatever.  My Sister, Tommie Lou, was, and is, a lot more tolerant.  She practically raised me, and we've always been very close.   As time passed, Joseph mellowed a bit regarding my music; although he liked the music that my bands played, he would still complain that we were too loud.  "If it's too loud, you're too old!", I always say!  Hell, I'm 57 years old now, and I drive a red Mustang GT with a Killer six-amplifier, 1500-watt music system.  Bass rules!  And I'm only partially deaf.

My close friend growing up, Sterling Blocker, was the son of the eminent plastic surgeon Truman Blocker, a Brigadier Army General, and the Executive Director of University of Texas Medical Branch.  Dr Blocker was a major influence in my life, and was truly the greatest person I have ever known. The Blockers lived a block away from the Witwer-Mott house;  Virginia, his mother, was also an MD.  His parents and siblings, Ann, Bo, and Gordon, grew close to me in the '50's and '60s.  His folks were pretty busy, so to keep us entertained, Sterling could ride anywhere he wanted with the Busy Bee Taxi Co. on a charge account!  I could come along anytime, because it only cost a quarter extra for me to come along, no matter what the length of the ride.  What a life!  The Blockers moved to Harbor View Circle in Lindale around 1961.  Sterling's parents bought him a Sears Silvertone bass and one of his neighbors, Warren Potter, the son of a successful ophthalmologist, was a talented guitar player.  We formed a band called The Impalas, which later came to be known as the Surflighters; Elroy Bishop was the drummer, and he lived across the street from Sterling's girlfriend Jeannie Nelson.  Jeannie's parents were nice enough to let us practice in their living room.  The first gig I remember playing for money was Judy Fagan's birthday party.  She was a local Rabbi's daughter, and we played at her house for the tidy sum of ten dollars.  $2.50 each went a long way in 1961!

The electric guitar that Dad & I bought in 1961 is worth mentioning.  It was a 1959 sunburst Stratocaster that I bought used from Phil Nevelow, a local benevolent music merchant.  Three Humbuckers!  I foolishly tried to stain the maple fingerboard to look like the more expensive rosewood, but it didn't work!  We had a drummer, Elroy Bishop, that was an airbrush artist that repainted the Strat Candy Apple Plum; it looked great.  My lead playing days, though were soon to be over.

In the summer of 1961, I was building file boxes for Witwer Studio when I cut the two middle fingers off of my left hand with a Skilsaw.  Ironically, Dr A.E. Minyard, a hand surgeon, was our tenant on the property, and was only yards away when I had the accident.  Microsurgery wasn't advanced then, and only the index finger and the little finger survived.  That kinda screwed up things for the band, and Warren Potter was especially upset.  After a few months of healing, I tried in earnest to switch to being a left-handed lead player, but since I'd been playing since age two or three, I really couldn't do it.  Don't get me wrong, when you're 16 years old, and as hyper and motivated as I was, just about anything is possible.  Try as I did, I discovered this to be the exception. I decided to switch to bass.

As always, my dad, Tommy, was very supportive; we bought a cheap Harmony bass for me to start.  Fortuitously, kind of like a blind man whose hearing becomes more acute because of the handicap, my left hand actually became faster than my right over time.  Since bass involves only one note at a time, my two fingers, fortunately spaced the farthest they could be, became fast enough to keep up with the bass players of that era.  Bass was a bit simpler back then, but as music progressed,  I had to improve to keep up.  Somehow, I did.

The early '60's music scene in Galveston was fascinating to me.  I went to see every local Rock & Roll band play that I could.  One of them, the Sonics, formed around 1959. This is the earliest band picture I was able to get, from Mike Loomis, who played guitar; Johnny Maisel was also on guitar, and Phillip Ochoa was the drummer.  Rocky Pelosi played keyboards, and the young squirt on the right was George Bolton. They didn't even have a bass player. John Hall and Freddie Amburn were involved, too.  I really looked up to these guys.  Johnny was nice enough to help out our less experienced band, the Impalas, by coming to a few of our practices.  Jerry & the Rialtos was another good local group.

I've recently spoken to Phillip, Johnny, and Mike in an attempt to dredge up these memories of our high school rock & roll band days, but everybody is a little hazy!  Best we can recall, the Sonics evolved into a band called the Tempests, with Johnny on guitar & keys, Phillip on drums, George Bolton on guitar, and Robbie Johnigan on bass.  He was the funniest guy I had ever met, really goofy, but cool. Around 1962, Robbie had to leave to join the military, and I joined the Tempests as bassist with Johnny, Phil, and George.

I remember playing at sock hops and teen clubs, but the Ball High School Auditorium was better exposure.  Battle of the Bands was always a happening thing, and the competition was friendly.  We played for school dances, but the best gig was playing own Senior Picnic.  My first real high school girlfriend was Cheri Pace;  We went together for about three or four months,  and she was my first. She was the winner of the 1965 Ball High School Beauty Pageant.  I later went steady with a pretty twin named Joan Wallace. Being a rock musician paid off, no?

The Tempests played the entire summer of '65 at a new upstart club on Stewart beach called The College Inn, a direct competitor to the established, well-known Bamboo Hut.  There was a house band at the Hut called The Countdown Five that sort of modeled themselves after Paul Revere and the Raiders, and they also did lots of Dave Clark Five songs. The colonial-type uniforms, crushed velvet pants, flash and jive, the works.  They had been regulars there for about two years, a really top-notch, entertaining show band.  Then, the Tempests arrived on the beach.

Phillip, George, Neal, and Johnny started playing at the College Inn in early June 1965, all having just graduated. The Beatles were happening, we had The Animals, and Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones was just released.  Woolly Bully!  You get the picture.  It was a golden time for music.  Our music was fresh, our vocals were tight, and I learned how to really sing lead that summer.  We played seven days a week, sometimes nine gigs a week, four to five hours per gig!  We got a discount on beer (even though we were all underage) and got 75% of the door admission.  No serious band today would play for a percentage without a guarantee, but we packed the place all the time!  I remember several times looking at our parking lots and see only 5 or 6 cars at the Hut but upwards of 70-100 at our place!  The Countdown Five were older, more seasoned musicians, but I guess our songlist was better or something.  I really loved their band, but we were different.  The competition was friendly, though, and we got their attention.  The two bands later ended up being good friends and collaborators.  Back then, garage bands weren't prolific; Joe Blow couldnt afford to be in a band, because guitars and sound gear were prohibitively expensive.  If you were a popular musician, you were a god, really respected.  What a great summer!

hen I went off to Austin College in Sherman, Texas for premed, class of '69, at my parent's insistence.  I did OK the first semester, although I failed at my weakest subject, math.  The neatest thing I did in college was to sneak into the computer lab through a secret underground tunnel that few people knew about, and dick around with the school's IBM 1620 computer!  I also had unauthorized access to a ham radio, and frequently broke into the dorm elevators and rode on the top, messing with the people below.  In my dorm room I actually built a high-voltage (350,000) Tesla coil that threw an electrical spark six feet, and it fully illuminated flourescent lights by just holding them close to the coil.  My classmates called me "The Wizard".    I pulled a lot of stunts with that device. I failed the second semester, from homesickness and lack of being in a decent band. When I was at college, my parents retired.  My father had taken on a partner, Don Dupre, in The Witwer Studio a few years earlier, and while I was off at school, Don managed to coerce Dad to sell the Studio to him.  It didn't last too long, though.  Dad, retire?  Too much energy.  Kinda like Neal.  He soon regretted it, and went to work at other things.

Back home, when I was at college, Phillip Ochoa had a girlfirend, Cheryl "Cher" Comeaux, a pretty and talented Chick Singer that had practiced before with the Tempests at Johnny Maisel's house.  Philip wanted Cheryl in the band, and he approached his older brother, Robert, to manage them.  Johnny Maisel had also left the band for college, and George Bolton recruited Jim Milan to play bass.  Jim joined, and bought a Vox amplifier and bass, and Robert bought a Vox P.A. system and a Vox Super Beatle amp that George used, beacuse he was too poor to afford good equipment.  That was top-of-the-line equipment in its day.  Warren Potter joined as rhythm guitar.  The new name was The Proper Circle.  Robert even bought an expensive Rickenbacker 12-string guitar to add to the band's sound.

In England, rock music fans were sort of divided into two groups, the Mods and the Rockers.  We had a nameless loose parallel to that in the U.S.  Some fans were more hard-core, listening to the Rolling Stones and the like, and the mellower kids were Beatles fans.  The Proper Circle was obviously in the Beatles camp, where it was "hip to be square" to quote Huey Lewis from a later time.  The band was straight as an arrow, good kids.

I returned from college in June 1966.  I was so excited and homesick, that when I got back, I stayed up for six days straight without sleep, hanging out with my sorely missed friends, without benefit of drugs or alcohol!  Just partying!  I was actually hallucinating during the last day, but it was a good trip!  I crashed for over 50 hours before I emerged back into life.  Although I felt badly about it, Robert let Jimbo go and hired me as bass player for The Proper Circle, because Jim's father wouldn't let him play in night clubs at sixteen.  Robert felt that the money was in clubs. The band didn't actually end up playing adult clubs at the time, but did Menard Park shows like Battle of the Bands,  Kirwin (later O'Connell) High school dances.  While playing at one of those dances, I met a young stand-up singer for a band called Just-Us-4 named Tommy Hinton.  We would become more than aquaintances around 1992.  We played at some teen clubs, and lots of Med school frat parties. The biggest & best was Phi Chi.  We were busy, and I laid out one semester of college, but went to Alvin Jr. College in spring of 1967, remaining in the band.  I took speech and a computer course. 

A few of my good friends back then were A.R. Lucas, who had worked as a roadie for the band, and was also a bass player; Brian Walker, a Galveston cop, Paul Picone, and Lance Rutan, who ran the Local Hi-Lo Auto Supply.  We had actually bought a boat (all but Paul) and attempted without success to rebuild it; named The Baisurds Four (private joke), it berthed at Lance's pier on the water at the Crash Boat Basin in Galveston, where Lance, a great mechanic, was rebuilding the engines. 

Warren Potter later left for college, and we we hired Jim Milan back, now as a guitar player.  The band had 5 members At the time; like most bands, we simply stood in front of the mics and performed.  As Jimbo got more comfortable with playing guitar, he started clowning around, dancing around the stage, and the audience loved it; it became our "thing", and our popularity grew.

Bruce Ware, a good friend of Robert's, was a friend and fan, and wrote a song for us, "Take a look at Yourself"; Jimbo Had written a song, "Wait for Me", and we recorded the single at Gold Star Studios in Houston.  George sang lead on both songs; the record was released January 1967. Huey P. Meaux, the infamous record producer and band promoter, had a few acts recording at Goldstar, and we heard the original takes of "She's About a Mover" by the band that Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers had formed, the Sir Douglas Quintet.  They were touted as an English band, but that cover was blown when they opened their mouths to talk in Texas accents.  Doug and Augie went on to be Texas music legends.  They later were the Texas Tornadoes.  Doug died in 1999.

I recall that our record went to number fourteen on the local station KILE, and we became very minor celebrities.  Musicians still ruled in those halcyon days!

George Bolton could be really hard to get along with (I'm being nice).  He left the band after we all had a pretty heated argument, and we auditioned maybe three guys.  Roy Crawford won out.  He played keyboards and guitar, and was a very impressive lead vocalist.  He had been the front man for Soul, Inc. It was then that we scrapped the name Proper Circle;  Jimbo thought up the name 1900 Storm if for no other reason than it identified us with Galveston.  Our versatility and harmonies really blossomed and we started playing the Houson area.  We finally started performing Houston night clubs, like the Dome Shadows on South Main, and the Catacombs on South Post Oak.

Robert worked full time at Todd Shipyards; we became a bit of a strain for him, and a KILE deejay Rusty Draper took over as manager for a few months.  Being in radio, he of course was well connected in the music biz.

Not to be unkind, but Rusty wasn't the most honest of managers.  I'll leave it at that.  The Countdown Five's sax and keyboard player, Steve Long, had gotten into booking talent, and he officed at Andrus Productions, a Houston booking agency and recording studio.  We were practicing at my house on 23rd, and Steve somehow showed up.  We were playing "Peace of Mind" by Paul Revere & the Raiders, a song that had difficult kick-ass harmonies.  Steve later told me that he was literally blown away! He was sold on the band.  He took Rusty's place, and we were now considered a Houston Band.  It was on.  We played clubs, proms for wealthy Houston high schools, and lots of shows and dances at the Moody Center in Galveston.  We were there so often that the custodian, who had to come out from his home to let us in to load out the sound gear actually gave me a key to the huge overhead backstage door where we entered to load in the sound gear.  We played O'Connell's Treasure Ball there at least twice, which was a major Galveston event.

Bands like The Clique, Fever Tree, Thursday's Children (Ezra Charles was in that one), The Sixpence (later the Fun & Games Commission), Neil Ford & the Fanatics,  were our peers.  The Moving Sidewalks, Billy Gibbon's first recording band, actually opened for us once at the Moody Center.  The Clique opened for us at the Westbury senior prom around 1969.  We played on The Larry Kane TV Show,  the Houston version of American Bandstand, about five or six times.  We even played the Houston Coliseum and The Music Hall, the two largest venues.

The Storms's instrumental skill was about average for those times; but most bands couldn't touch our vocals and harmonies.  Vocal arrangement was my most valuable talent, and was put to good use with five competent voices. We could actually pull off songs like "Aquarius" and "Hair".  We played a gig with The Cowsills, a national family recording group, and were actually on a par with them.  The Partridge Family was modeled after them.  "The Rain, the Park, and Other Things was their biggest hit. 

It was time to cut another record.  We recorded "A Beautiful Day", with Roy's silky lead vocal, and Cher sang short solo refrains.  We overdubbed harmonies;  my backup vocals are on the record four or five times; it had a "Mamas & the Papas" sound. The B side was harder-edged; I sang lead; this one had a Mitch Ryder feel; titled "Lila", it was written by John Balzer, the Countdown Five's lead player.  It was released on Cinema Records, Walt Andrus' label.  He was the sound engineer.  Although we got no Houston radio airplay, the record went to number 34 at KILE.  The Clique and the 13th Floor Elevators recorded there;  Andrus owned their record label, International Artists.  The agency was affiliated with a local music tabloid that featured the band.

We blossomed out to play a lot of gigs in the Golden Triangle.  Port Arthur, Bridge City, Groves and so on.  Clubs that we played in Louisiana close to Texas like the Circle club were big. Drinking age was eighteen there, so they were great venues for us.  We played Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and several smaller Louisiana towns, and played lots of Texas towns like Brenham, Boerne, Richmond.  Those small towns regarded us a big time Houston band, and although we only played weekends,  The money was great.  We had two roadies, so we just tuned up & played.  No heavy lifting.  What a life!  The roadies had it pretty good, though; they scored most of the women, because they had more time to work on the audience than we did!  They weren't in it for the money!

In September 1968, I started nursing school at Galveston Community College in their new ADN program.  Luckily, the teachers liked to party on the weekends, so we got out early on Friday, and started late on Monday. Being on the road almost every weekend was rewarding but rough.  I had a 1968 Plymouth Barracuda, and my dad bought a van that we rented from him to haul the equipment.  We had a lot of it, and it was good stuff: Shure Vocal Master P.A with four columns.  My bass stack was taller than I was, and we were pretty loud.  Floor monitors weren't widely used then, and we had to generate all of or sound on stage.  Phil had to really pound the drums to be heard, and my hearing suffers to this day.  When I joined the Proper Circle, my father got me a great Fender Jazz bass.  That bass was stolen about a year later, and good old Dad took me to Evans Music where I bought a Hofner Beatle bass.  $550.00 withiut a case!  Remember, you coulld buy a new car for less than $3000.00 in 1967.  Gas was about 30 cents a gallon.  Cheeseburger were 19 cents at Burger Chef.  That was my only bass for seventeen years.  It was a minor sensation to the musicians, and was used as a recording studio instrument by Tommy Murphy, the bassist in the Countdown Five, and others.

In august of 1969, Roy Crawford was getting ready to leave for college.  Jimbo knew a young musician, Danny Kristensen, and he introduced us over a year earlier when the Storm was playing at Menard Park.  I really liked Danny, and recognized in him a really good young talent.  He was a Major fan of the 1900 Storm, and was at almost every local gig we played at the time.  We always got to know our fans, and Danny was the best.  Sometimes in 1968 Danny had somehow coerced me to manage his fledgling band named Cross Town Traffic.  James Rourke, Daryl Hendricks, and Joe Lombardi were in the band, and they were young, inexperienced, but good!  I was a good stage/gig/event manger, but a lousy booking agent, and I told them so.  They still wanted me anyway, so I reluctantly agreed.  In reality, it was a conflict of interest, because I really wanted Danny to replace Roy in the band.  Cross Town Traffic didn't last, undoubtedly due to poor management, but I eventually persuaded Steve Long, our manager, to let Danny in.  Roy was nice enough to help train his successor, and we all played together for a short while.

It took over six months of urging; Roy's parents didn't want him playing in clubs, and Danny was only thirteen!  Club owners weren't really too picky about one or two underage  musicians playing for them, but Steve was worried about Danny's mother restricting him the same way that Roy's parents did.  But it was no frigging problem!  Danny's Mother Jimmie just loved me to death!  Jimmie was just as cool as my parents were, and she knew them.  She thought that Neal Witwer hung the moon, and she trusted me implicitly to look after Danny, a duty that I took very seriously.  Danny was young, but very responsible; Jimmie was fine with Danny's joining, but it was Steve Long who really needed convincing.  I wheedled, cajoled, coerced, bribed, sucked up, and did whatever it took to get Danny into The 1900 Storm.  Neal the Hyperactive Kid finally ground Steve down, and he agreed to give Danny an audition.  As a keyboard player.  That's what Steve wanted.  Keyboard player.  Danny was a guitar player!  He had a piano at home, and could play a little, but, a keyboard player?  NOT!

Dammit, we were not to be shot down!  I worked with Danny for about three or four weeks to get the keyboard thing nailed well enough for the audition, and he passed!  It was on!  Danny was a moldable sponge!  He learned everything in record time, and was a really good singer!  He had a great talent for harmony, which I recognized way before he joined, and we put it to good use.  James Rourke had  joined the band, and he had a bent for harmony, too!  James was the lead player, and Danny played keys and rhythm.  Phil and Cher were the steady veteran members who sang their asses off already, and it was ON!  We usually practiced at my house, but carrying equipment up 27 steps kinda sucks, even for the Young and Strong.  We relocated practice to Danny's house on 57th & Fraser, and Jimmie Kristensen (Graber) couldn't have been happier!

The band's transportation thing was wired.  I had a Ford Econoline van that held all the sound gear, and James had a Rambler Rebel.  I usually drove the van, with the two roadies, to gigs, because everybody except Phillip was underage.  He didn't like to drive the van.  It was green, and affectionately named "Mr. Turtle".  My Dad bought it for the band.  After my parents retired, they worked at a big bait camp on Galveston's South Jetty called Tuffy's.  George Yeomans, who had worked for dad at Witwer Studio when he was young, was the owner.  They loved working there.  Tuffy had a company van, painted with the bait camp logos, similar in size to Mr. Turtle, and we used it a few times. Somebody once asked us:  Is the name of the band "Live Bait"?  Cat of Live Bait. That was a running inside joke for years!  Like "Wah-wah in the battr'y/battr'y in the wah-wah."  You had to be there.  Ask me about it next time you see me.  I's funny, but doesn't relate well in print.  Trust me.

On the road to a Brenham gig one Friday in 1969, the U-joint went out on Mr. Turtle.  We were stuck.  No repair prospects were forthcoming in the area, so we managed to find a 20-foot kinked peice of half-inch wire cable which we affixed to James' Rambler & Mr. Turtle.  James towed us to Brenham (I drove the van), we played that Friday night, then he towed us to Baton Rouge, where we played Saturday, then he towed us back home to Galveston.  The kink in the cable absorbed the shock of my braking both of the vehicles when it was time!  Need a tow?  We're still experts.  The van got great gas mileage on that long trip.

Jimmie Kristensen, rest her soul, was great!  We took over her living room, no problem!  She was like a second mother to me.  She had a toy poodle that I dearly loved.  We were family.  I was actually a pretty responsible 20-year-old, and she knew that.  Danny was like a little brother, but I wasn't very bossy.  He had girlfriends, and we all got along.  We spent what leisure time we had at his and my house with our great parents, and played every weekend.  Life was sweet!  I was attending nursing school, and my grades were fine.  The schedules meshed well.  It helped to be Mr. Hyper, though!  I didn't sleep a lot.

Our harmonies with Roy were great; when James and Danny joined the Storm, there was an additional voice, and it just got better: Five Part Harmony!  Three Dog Night?  Arguably the best three-part harmony band in history.  We actually performed 10 out of 12 of their Greatest Hits record before it was released.  No step for several Steppers!  Fifth Dimension.  Cowsills. Crosby, Stills & Nash.  We were touring the region far & wide:  Brenham;  Baton Rouge; Bridge City;  Groves;  Laredo;  Beeville; Victoria; Beaumont;  Houston; Lafayette;  Silsbee; Richmond; Rosenburg; Katy;  Wharton;  College Station; Austin: lots of smaller towns like Boerne.  The band was getting really popular, and the money was getting better.

We played at frat parties at UT Austin, where Roy was.  He caught one or two of our gigs, and was nice enough to send me some pictures I never saw until April 2004.

It was time to put out another record!

Steve Long found a song written by a brother of one of the members of The Association ("Cherish", among many others), and he wanted us to record & release the song:  Sympathy Stone.  As mentioned above, our strong point was vocals; when we recorded  "A Beautiful Day" and "Lila", it took several takes for us to nail down the instrumental parts.  We were great live performers, but not polished Studio Musicians.  No sin;  it's just a different animal.  Without consulting the band, Steve used studio musicians to record the instrument tracks of the record.  Pragmatically, it just used less of the expensive studio time than we would have taken if we had recorded the instruments.  Simply economics.  Danny, James, and I didn't like it, but what the hell;  We could play the song just fine on stage!  Phillip and Cheryl were not amused.  They quit!  Phillip was insulted that we didn't record our own instruments, like the Monkees!  Cheryl agreed with Phillip, and they were history!  The B-side of the record was again, "Lila".  Steve really saved money on that B-side.  He just used the same B-side from our previous record!  I didn't agree with that move, even though I was the lead singer of Lila.  I didn't see eye to eye with Steve after the first year of our association, but this made things worse.  We later discovered that Steve was not the most honest of managers, exploiting our young talent.  That was a factor in my leaving the band in September 1970.

After Phillip's departure, we recruited David Hunt, a singing drummer that was really talented, and he even played jazz!  The changeup didn't seem to hurt the group's popularity, and now that we were a band of boys, we could really let our hair down.  Phillip was really straight, and he protected Cheryl from the profanity of the younger "boys in the band" with his disapproval.  But now, we didn't have to watch our language!  We were free to be guys.  Rock & roll by it's very nature really is a macho club. We could actually tell somebody to go fuck off without being admonished.  It was very liberating.

Sympathy Stone, with Danny on lead vocal, got up to number 14 on the local Galveston AM Radio station KILE.  Even though we were considered to be a Houston band, it got no airplay in the Houston market.  No Matter.  It reached number one in smaller markets:  Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Victoria.  We were a big-time Houston band as far as they were concerned.  Victoria was was pretty special.

We had played in Victoria at their smaller venues, five or six times in 1968-69, and were very popular.  When Sympathy Stone was released, the local radio station jumped on it.  Went to number one!  They booked us soon thereafter at their large Community Center, named after a local dignitary whose name I forget.  When we drove into town, we went to a local gas station to ask directions to the place.  The attendant was an old black man with the approriate accent.  We asked him for directions.  He gave them to us, then saw equipment through the van's windows..  He asked: "You da Stohm?" (pronounced: Stome)!  Geez, we were expected!  too funny. That's Danny Kristensen's favorite 1900 Storm story.

The Victoria gig was great!  They loved us.  The next night we played in a gymnasium in Groves, by Beaumont.  Remember, we were admonished for bad language when Phil & Cher were in the band, and we were feeling our oats!  We just needed to cuss.  I had recently bought a Sony Cassette Recorder that I could hook up to the P.A sound system to record the band.  Musicians always make up lewd lyrics to the standard songs as sport, but propriety dictated at the time to keep that shit to ourselves.  But this was a Gym.  The words were so garbled from 3 or more feet from the speakers that you couldn't understand a friggin' Word! : "Jumpin' Jack Flash, it's a F***ing gas; Jumpin' Jack Flash, you can Kiss my ass"! We were being real Dirty White Boys,, but who knew?  We bastardized at least thirty songs, and the teeny boppers and parents in the audience were none the wiser.  The recording, however, caught everything. James & I were laughing our asses off on stage.  If confiscated, that tape would have surely sent us all to prison, given the mores of the day. The mice will play.  We listened to that tape with relish.  It was terrible!  We got it out of our systems with that gig, and we pretty much cooled that stuff afterwards.

One of our favorite gigs was the Laredo Air Force Base Officer's Club.  Young Hippie Musicians on the loose in a foreign country! We did that gig three or four times, and had a blast!  You'll have to ask me in person for the details of some of our 'cross-the-border antics!  We also played in the Officer's club of the Kingsville Naval Air Station.  I took good care of Danny, though.

In 1969 and 1970, we had become very popular with high schools, and only the wealthy schools could afford us.  Westbury high and River Oaks High scheduled their 1970 senior proms on the same date, and they got into a bidding war at our booking agency to hire us.  Westbury won out, and paid us $1800.00.  That would be over eight THOUSAND dollars today!  And that was a private party.  The Storm could easily command $800.00 or more per night, depending on the venue. 

In the summer of 1970, Steve Long had somehow managed to book 1900 Storm for two weeks in a club in Latham, New York.  It's upstate, at the foot of the Adirondack Mountains. Mark Davis, Danny's 13-year-old cousin, and our roadie, went with us.  We nicknamed him Hornmir Lippschitz, and swore to everybody that it was actually his name.  My Barracuda was a fastback, and had a bed mattress in back.  James, Danny, Mark, and I all took the 'Cuda.   I shared driving duties with James, and since two at a time could sleep, we drove straghit through.  Steve towed the eqiupment up in a trailer, with drummer David Hunt riding.

The gig itself wasn't very remarkable, except that we suspected that the club had Mafia ties.  Mark swears that he saw two shady characters talking in a corner booth.  One of them wrote something on a matchbook cover, tore the cover off, and handed it to the other guy who studied it for a bit.  Then the guy chewed the cover up & swallowed it.  We noticed a that in the restroom there was a piece of plywood on the wall with a bunch of graffiti on it, positioned in such a way that it almost begged to be written upon.  The club manager told us that bathroom graffiti was then considered to be art in New York, and that he removed it after 2 or 3 months, sold it as art, and then put up another blank piece of wood to start over.

After the gig was done, Mark, James, & I drove back.  Danny flew.  The three of us went back via Manhatten, NYC.  We couldn't go to the Statue of Liberty, having gotten there too late, but we really took in the sights.  Great trip for young guys.

Great summer for the band, but it was time to get serious about my nursing carreer.  I had a really beautiful blonde girlfriend in 1965, Patty Horn.  She had been a 1900 Storm Go-Go dancer along with Cathy Heffernan.  We were pretty wise for being so young, and although we really loved each other, we both recognized the futility of a long-distance romance.  We broke up amiably when I went off to college in the fall of '65, but remained friends.  I gave great parent even in hgh school, and her folks were close to me and remained so for years.  She had enrolled in the first ADN program offered by Galveston Community College, January '68, and talked me into enrolling the following fall.  I had come to a crossroad in my life:  music, or medicine?  Did I really want to be a starving career musician?  Medicine won out.  I saw Patty briefly in the Studio around 1979, and she was still Gorgeous!  The One That Got Away!  Oh, well!

My GPA was so bad the second semester of Austin College that it dashed all reasonable hopes of continuing on to Medical School, a goal that my mother sorely wanted me to reach.  Nurse Anesthetists made great money even then and that was one of the prospects that me lured me to the profession.  Dr. Blocker encouraged it, too.  I was an average student, and my hyperactive drive to learn kind of cancelled out the attention defecit disorder that went along with it.  It was difficult for me to study and focus, but my obsessiveness won out.  I graduated without failing a single subject, August 21st, 1970.  State Boards were a major pain in those days. We had to go to Austin, and they lasted for two days!  The previous nursing class didn't fare very well percentagewise in passing the boards, and my class was worried sick!  Somehow, I got really good at absorbing material in class, and didn't really have to study heavily at home.  I never crammed for major tests;  quite the oppisite:  I literally never studied for final exams.  My attitude: "If I didn't learn it right in the first place, it's too late now."  It worked!  The vast majority of my class was all stressed out, saying that the absolutely knew that they were going to fail!  That fatalistic attitude really pissed me off!  I had a lot of peer respect, since I was especially talented in the lab stuff we had to do, and was considered a reliable resource.  I kept preaching to all my worried classmates that a bad attitude about passing Boards would just turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Quit It!  They didn't listen.  We had a dismal pass rate percentage, maybe 35-40, I forget.  The program actually went on probation for low passrates in later years.  My score?  95%!  Almost everybody failed the Psychiatry section, because our training wasn't very top-notch in that area.  It was my lowest-scoring section, but I still passed it.

I stayed in the band until I was hired for my first nursing job that started about September 24th.  My farewell gig was at The Moody Center in front of about 1,200 people!  The band went on without me.  David Hunt left then, and Rick VerSoy, a good friend and band roadie, became the drummer.  Our families were close. Danny became the leader of the band, and soon recruited "Butter" Bailey as a lead player & vocalist after James Rourke had to leave for college. James and Roy actually teamed up in Austin later to form a group called Orion. 

Danny tells me that he quit the 1900 Storm about a year later, and that they survived under the name for maybe another year, having moved to New Orleans.

Dead?  Only perhaps!

I was pretty balls-to-the-wall in my last year of nursing school, and elected to start my career at UTMB's 18-month-old Coronary Care Unit. I did my homework, checked out the unit, applied, and got hired immediately.   Intensive care nursing was in it's infancy, and was really, well, Intensive!  ICU nurses weren't frigging handmaidens.  They did stuff that other nurses at the time couldn't even think about.  Even RN's at UTMB weren't allowed to insert IV's unless they worked ICU. That was for me!  Before I was allowed to work in CCU, it was required that I complete an 80 hour course in CCU nursing.  Eighty!  I was allowed to work in the CCU's sister unit, the Medical Intensive Care Unit, or MICU, without specialized training.  Jesus Christ, what an awakening.

This place was a fargin' ZOO!  UTMB was at the time unique in the country for being the only referral hospital in the large state of Texas.  If you were a poor Texas resident, or you were too sick for your local hospital to handle, you came to UTMB,even if you lived as far off as El Paso.  We got everything!  Wierd, rare diseases; people who almost died but managed to get transferred to MICU before they did.  It was a friggin War Zone!  An open six-bed unit tucked away in the back of a 39-bed open ward for internal medicine patients.  Four out of six patients were on ventilators. Respiratory therapists didn't exist yet.  We maintained and set all the ventilators, among other things.

I worked there in MICU for about 8 weeks until the CCU class started.  I was so green when I went there, I thought that I really didn't get the hang of stuff. Nursing these extremely ill patients was really challenging. Most of them were on the very edge of death!  Lynette Klages, the pretty head nurse of MICU and one of my mentors, actually asked me at the end of the two months, to reconsider going to CCU; stay in MICU.  Your'e new, but I like your work.  Wow!  What a compliment for such a fledging.  I really thought about it, but I stuck to my original decision to work the CCU.

Dan Allensworth was the cardiologist medical director for CCU. He was a geat guy and a wonderful teacher.  Millie Wooldridge was the head nurse, and she liked me.  She was a really good-looking woman, married to Joe, and we all became good friends.  Nettie Veal, Ron Kiker, Mrs. Watson, Mattie, several medical students who worked as nurses, all my coworkers.  The CCU course that Dr. Allensworth taught was awesome.  ACLS wasn't invented yet, but it would today comprise only a small percentage of what we learned in those two weeks! The course was unbeleivably comprehensive and informative.  I got a Coronary Care Nurse Certifacate.  I was Certified! 

Not long after I was hired at UTMB, I wanted a new car.  After all, I did make $770.00 a month!  I was living at home on 23rd street, happy, with my parents' blessing. I had a private, separate entrance to my bedroom, and my parents were the coolest.  They left me alone, not interfering with my midnight liaisons, but were there if needed.  I had a refrigerator with a keg of beer in the room!  My band gear became my stereo and recording studio.  Lots of people hung out at my house all the time;  my parents were so hospitable and accepting of my friends that the Mott house was a real magnet for everyone.  We had frequent Gulf seafood feasts in the kitchen; my parents always mixed Manhattans for everyone, and they're really strong, resulting in lots of unplanned overnight guests.  We had lots of jam sessions in my bedroom; microphones on stands were left set up all the time, and I was a bad boy on a couple of occasions; I recorded two "midnight liasons", and played them back for a few select friends, but I didn't reveal the girl's identity.  Hey, after all, the microphones weren't hidden!  I worked my ass off, lots of overtime, but I wasn't paid time-and-a-half.  It didn't exist then.  I wasn't playing music professionally because of the weekend work requirements of nursing, and I needed an outlet.  So I bought a Jaguar XKE. 

The Barracuda wasn't really that old, but I traded it in anyway.  My father was against the purchase of an expensive, undependable English sports car, but I could be really persuasive!  Dad wasn't an easy touch, but he was blinded by my logical rationalizations.  Overseas Motors on Kirby Drive in Houston was a Jaguar dealer, and I found a really clean 1968 yellow XKE coupe.  I took Danny Kristensen up there to trade in the Barracuda and finalize the deal.  They couldnt give me the car until the next day, and when Danny & I were driving back to Galveston, the Gulf Freeway was under construction, as usual, and the main highway was detoured to the service road without shoulders, just a two-lane road with a curb on either side.  There was a CB antenna rattling by my left side, and when I got distracted while trying to reposition the antenna, i steered into the curb on the right side of the road, which whipped me into a fence doing considerable damage to the Barracuda.  I got out, and Danny remembers my lament:  "There goes my friggin' Jag!"  I traded the 'Cuda in anyway, and they really screwed me on the trade. 

The Jag cost $3500.00.  The payments were $135.00 a month.  But, God, it was a sexy, good-looking car!  Leather seats, Cool wooden steering wheel, great powerful engine.  145 MPH!  & I drove it that fast!  A powerful, but horrendously  undependable engine.  It stalled out when driving in 1 inch of standing water!  The fuel pump was shit! When I drove to Overseas Motors in early 1971 to purchase a new distributor cap, on the way, the car developed a loud knocking noise.  I deduced that it was a sticking valve, but whe I got to the Overseas Motors Service Department, the Scottish assistant service manager listened to the car and informed me that if I drove the car back to Galveston with that knock, that the valve could fall into the engine, necessitating a $1000.00 rebuild! I was of course concerned, and he talked me into doing the job.  I left the car, got a ride home from Houston, and returned about three weeks later, with Dad, to retrieve the car.  The bill was $480.00 The Scotsman pulled me aside and said, quote: "I didn't want to tell you this in front of your father, but there was no oil in the car when we went in to fix it."  Bullshit!  The sevice manager, who I knew from before, had checked the oil with me when I brought in the car, and he saw that the oil level was fine.  He confirmed that when I confronted the Scotsman with it.  Dad must have been pretty disgusted with the whole thing, but he decided not to fight with this pack of cheating assholes.  We towed the Jag back to Galveston and gave it to an old friend mechanic, John Ayers.  He was charged with ripping out the old Jaguar engine and putting in a Chevy engine.  By that time I had repainted the car silver gray, an improvement over the original yellow.  I had bought a BSA 750 motorcycycle from a medical student, so I could get to work on that.  It was a prety cool bike.  It came with a custom Cafe racer tank & seat, along with the standard ones, and had a megaphone exhaust!  It could be configured as an all-out racing bike, or a street bike.  It had been bored out to 850 cc, and it was a monster!  Real accelleration.  My first bike.

The CCU at UTMB was sometimes boring, but at other times coluld be like a MASH scene.  It was quieter than MICU, but the death rate was really high.  Heart attacks were really lethal in those days, because we didn't have the tools we have today to save the victims.  As I mentioned above, we really got the sickest patients at UTMB and they died all the time.

Strange thing was, at first, they didn't die when Neal was at work!

Seriously, when I worked, nobody died for the first three months!  The death rate was something like one out of four patients that were sick and unfortunate enough to be admitted to the CCU, but not when Neal was there.  It became a running joke:  "Neal's here! There won't be any Codes today!"  Codes, of course, meaning emergencies requiring patient resuscititation:  CPR, ventilation, countershock.  Happened there all the time when I was off.

Three months into the job, I was in training to be the Charge Nurse, and on my first day in that capacity, I worked 16 hours.  One patient coded and subsequently died, and a second coded and lived.  The spell was broken.  I was in CCU for about 2-1/2 years, and had had over fifty deaths of patients under my direct care, considered the norm.  I was destined to take a hiatus from that job, though.

May 19th, 1971:  asleep after working a sixteen hour shift ending at 7 am, I got an 11:00 AM call from Joyce Neilsen, a secretary at Galveston College, informing me about a job opportunity to be a Ship's Nurse aboard the Texas Clipper, the local Texas Maritime Academy's training ship.  For a few years now, the ship sailed to foreign ports every summer as a hands-on training exercise for the Marine Transportantion and Marine Engineering students attending the Academy on Pelican Island, where the ship was berthed during the school year. It functioned as a dormitory.  Traditionally, the medical crew consisted of a Public Health Physician, and three male medical students from UTMB.  That year, though, because of a curriculum change, only one Med student was allowed to go, and since the program wasn't coeducational until the following year, TAMUG needed two male nurses.  I told Joyce thanks anyway, but I already had a job that I could'nt leave.  I went back to sleep.

I was living at home with my parents then, and when I told Mom about the call, she wisely stated that this was a great opportunity to see the world and get paid for it.  In the cold light of day, I realized that she was right.  I called Joyce back, contacted TAMUG, interviewed with Admiral Craik, the honcho, and got hired for the cruise on the spot!  Some older dignitaries were to be aboard ship, and Coronary Care experience made me a shoo-in.  Only one problem:  I had to ask for a leave of absence from CCU.  It was denied by administration.  No leaves were granted during the summer.  It was hard, but I quit, even after I was told that my job might not be waiting for me when I came back.  This was too good to pass up.  Since my Jag was still in the shop for the engine changeover, that was another good reason to go.

My first working day on The Texas Clipper was 6-3-71.  I kept a diary.  Orlando C. Clark, a black retired Public Health Physician, was the ships' doctor.  George Talley was the Jr. Medical Student, and Admiral Craik had hired Al Pintor, an LVN, as the 4th member of the medical crew.

Dr Clark & I set up the clinic and hospital aboard ship, which was just two doors down from my stateroom.  We stocked medications, vaccines, all the usual stuff.  He'd been on two Clipper cruises before, and really knew the ropes.  Al & George arrived three days later; Al's car was had been wrecked, and he had to get a ride from a friend. George had totaled his Chevy in a bad accident two months before, and was still recovering, having sustained a broken collarbone, and being unconscious for two days. These three guys were really interesting, and as different as any medical professionals could be.  Dr Clark had been in Washington, D.C. for much of his carreer, George was a real died-in-the wool Texas Country Boy from Tyler, and Alphonse was a hispanic gay guy.  Wow!  Diversity, before it was even politically correct!  George, Neal & Al were the medical team under Dr Clark. 

We all got along great, and I really liked hanging out with the cadets.  I was close to their age, but I also built good rapport with the older ship's officers who were maritime  instructors and the like.  A few of the cadets were musicians, and we gravitated.  It was cool.  I could go up to the bridge at night, and they would let me steer the ship, play with the radar and the other navigation equipment.  It was also OK to go to the engine room and operate the boiler and steam turbine controls!  With reasonable limitations, the Texas Clipper became my great big toy.

I actually got paid to be on this cruise.  Only $600.00 for the 10 weeks, but check it out:  My laundry was done for free.  My stateroom was made up most of the time.  I got served in the officer's mess, and had unlimited access, being an officer, to the kitchen late at night.  There's more:  while we were at sea, the only regularly scheduled work for the medical officers was Sick Call. We had to be in the clinic for one hour after each meal.  I was with Dr Clark, and George conducted the clinic with Al on alternating days.  That meant that we worked three hours a day, every other day, while we were at sea.  Again, what a life!  We did extra duties like teaching classes, physicals, immunizations and such, but these were usually one-day projects.

The Texas Clipper left the Port of Galveston June 7th at 3:00 PM, sailing for Dry Tortugas Islands off the southern tip of Florida by the Keys.  On the way, a very tame cormorant we named Fred was discovered hitching a ride perched on the rail of the fantail.  I could even hold the big bird.  He stayed for about 36 hours & flew off.  Arrived Dry Tortugas Wednesday June 9th at 3 PM; anchored about a mile off the island on which Fort Jefferson had been built.  It had been the prison of Dr Mudd, the physician who treated Johm Wilkes Booth after he assassinated Lincoln. We were there for 2-1/2 days while the cadets did lifeboat drills.  It was hot; the Texas Clipper I was over thirty years old, and the air conditioning didn't really keep up very well when we weren't under way.

We left Dry Tortugas at 6 AM, Friday June 11th, arriving in the South Atlantic by 3 PM.  The ship started rolling.  The crew started getting seasick.  My motion sickness didn't produce the usual symptoms; instead, I got a headache.  Aspirin didn't help, but Antivert did.  I had to take it only twice, then got accustomed to the sea, and didn't get seasick the rest of the trip.  I was very fortunate; about 25% of my shipmates weren't.   The medical crew got busy giving Dramamine and Antivert in both IM shots and pill form.  God, those poor guys were miserable!  Remember, this was the SOUTH Atlantic.  It was going to get much worse. 

Next port of call:  Mayport Naval Station Florida: fire training for the cadets that lasted five days.  The highlight of the trip was with a few officers driving to the Sears in nearby Jacksonville to get a part to repair a reefer in the galley. Hey, I did get to see the Gator bowl from the road; we also got to utilize the Navy's PX.  I smoked then, and cigarettes were only about 45 cents a pack, they were less than half that on the base.  We were allowed in the Officer's club; drinks were cheap, and we finally got to party.  It was just getting started.

Left Mayport Thursday June 17th at 3 PM heading north in the Gulf Stream, parralel to the Eastern Seaboard, Georgia coast, then the South Carolina coast.  We then changed course, heading east for Rotterdam, Holland, a 12-day crossing. During that time, The medical officers taught health-related courses to the cadets and preps on the  At Sea days. 

Total aboard: 195.  TAMUG students were in Marine Transportation or Marine Engineering, about half the total.  The preps were new high school graduates in the "Summer School at Sea program", and took formal courses in freshman level English & math.  The officers were  almost all teachers, and there were about 25 other crew members, ordinary and able bodied seamen, cooks, stewards, and the like. I was 24 years old, a good age to enjoy the company of everybody aboard.  We all really had fun, and movies were shown every night on the Prom deck.  I did a lecture on heat stroke & heat exhaustion June 20th.

By June 24th, we were in the North Atlantic, and the rolling of the ship made it difficult to sleep.  We lost an hour with each time zone crossing, but that occured only every other day.  Guys were really gulping the Dramamine!  The seas were running "abaft the beam", a relative direction of the waves to the ship which makes it roll a lot.  Steep 20-degree rolls were common now.  Books and stuff were falling on the deck.  I had an overhead bunk that had to be closed to about 30 degrees to keep stuff in it.  It got worse the next day.  Medicine bottles fell over;  Dr Clark's typewriter ended up in bed with him! Both his & Al's desks went. The top drawer of the file cabinet where we kept medical and immunization records was ripped out of its mountings, record spille everywhere.  The operating room lights and tables fell over.  It was a major mess.  Salt & pepper shakers were removed from the mess hall tables.  Plates slid around when we tried to eat.  I was climbing the stairs up to the bridge when the Clipper took a record 30-degree roll!  The stairs went vertical, but I held on.  The Captain then ordered a course change to calm the rolling, but it didn't help a whole lot.

The pitching and rolling got a bit more bearable by Saturday June 26th, but Sunday brought lousy weather: fog, drizzling rain, etc.  I taught the cadets how to give injections to each other that day, then autoclaved surgical instruments for Dr Clark.  By Monday, the weather was great, and we could see the English & French coasts; one of the seamen pointed out Normandy beach.  Losts of marine traffic: tankers, freighters, British Royal Navy cruisers.  Morale was really high.  We reached Rotterdam on schedule, at 8 AM Tuesday June 29th.  Galveston to Rotterdam in 23 days.

Being a merchant training vessel, we didn't always dock at cruise terminals, just the plain old waterfront.  George and Frank, the ship's chaplain who had become a friend, disembarked with me and we went to tour downtown.  The dock was a ways from town, ad a nice Dutch Customs Official gave us a ride.  You could buy that great dutch beer anywhere on the street.  Amstel & Heineken's was really cheap, but I actually preferred a local brew called Oranjeboom.  Electric trams were good, inexpensive transportation, and the city was great.  Having been mostly destroyed in WWII, the city was rebuilt with wide streets.  Lots of traffic, but no stop signs, and few traffic lights.  I bought a really nice heavy winter coat at a store called Gebr. Coster, and the price was right; Frank almost bought a loose diamond for his girlfriend at Heetman's, a large gem trading house with ties to DeBeers diamond mines in Africa.  Rotterdam is a major gem trading center.  Just about everybody spoke accented English.  I discovered Dutch to be a lot closer to English than I ever knew, more than German or French.  We ate really good food from the ubiquitous street vendors, and got back on board after midnight, having walked many miles.  No expensive hotels needed.

When we were in port, only one medical officer had to be on board at a time.  Sick call was reduced from three one-hour shifts to one, after supper.  My duty day wasn't until the last of four days on Rotterdam, so the same three of us took the train from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, stopping off in Gouda, the famous cheese place; Americans don't pronounce it right. Amsterdam, more upscale & genteel than the port city of Rotterdam, was everything I had imagined.  I wasn't into drugs, but the permissiveness of Amsterdam was amazing.  Being a rock musician, I wasn't exactly unhip to the scene, I just didn't participate.  George was straight, too, and Frank, after all, was the chaplain!  Just go on in the coffee house & buy & smoke a joint.  Smack & coke wasn't as out in the open, but freely avilable.  There aren't any poor people in Holland, though, and derelict, burned-out junkies weren't seen there.  Everybody's educated, and access to healthcare was really good.

Amsterdam is touted as "The Venice of the North";  their canals are awesome. The tourboats were really a class act, and our pretty tourguide was really fluent in English, German, & French; that's George sitting behind me.  The water must be really calm, because you don't see bulkheads like you do here in the states like on Tiki Island.  The house walls just butted right up to the water.  Ethnic food in Texas, is, of course, Mexican.  Italian & Chinese food are ethnic in many countries; England's  most popular is Indian; Holland's is Indonesian.  What a memorable lunch!  The traditional  17-course feast served in Dutch restaraunts is called "Rijstaffel", literally, "Rice Table". It was absolutely succulent, and reasonably priced.  We were full, but prodded ourselves on to Rembrandt's house where we viewed a few of his originals.  I bought a sword at the Waterlooplein flea market.  Went to a diamond cutting factory where Frank shopped again.  The Dutch women were gorgeous.

The next day we went on two bus tours; to Delft, where the famous china is made, and saw some great examples in the factory there.  Went to The Hague, and to Scheveningen.  The Dutch countryside is green & gorgeous, and yes, we saw great windmills.  Drank more of that great Dutch beer.  What a blast; and this was just the second of eight ports of call.  I was on duty the following day, which was the last in Rotterdam.  Luckily, George was aboard sleeping off a hangover, so I went ashore for about five hours & just knocked around the streets of Rotterdam before returning for my one hour of sick call duty after supper.

One reason that normal travel is so stressful is the packing & unpacking necessary when travelling conventionally.  Cruises are different; no matter what country you wake up in, your socks are still in the same drawer.  The familiar surroundings of the ship kind of grounded me, offsetting the giddiness that accompanies world travel.  Positive stress, but stress nonetheless.  And no jet lag!  I flew to England many years later, and jet lag really sucks, right up there with seasickness.  Although the official A&M position was no alcohol aboard,  we had some anyway; that of course further lowered our stress levels!  We didn't drink heavily while on board; that was saved for shore leave.

3rd of July, Saturday:  sailed out of  Rotterdam at 8 AM, bound for Copenhagen, Denmark.  Sleep came a lot easier now that the North Alantic was behind us, and I was sleeping like a baby, especially when we were in port.  At 4:30 that afternoon, one of the cadets fell out of a lifeboat, breaking his arm.  We had an ancient  Keleket 1940's-era x-ray machine on board that they had stashed below in a hold, and the engineers had to run special wiring to get it fired up.  We had some outdated x-ray film, and a photographic lab was on board, but none of the school photographers were aboard to operate it, and it was locked up.  It took over an hour just to find the key to the lab, and there  was no x-ray specific processing equipment or chemicals at all, just standard photographic stuff.  How the hell could we develop x-rays?  Well, I grew up in a photography studio!  Film is still film.  Carl Fanning, a ship's officer, knew that the galley had pans big enough to accomodate the  big 14X17 inch film, and I knew how to mix the chemicals.  We had no documentation on exposure times, developer temperature, or times.  I did it totally by the seat of my pants, and we took only three films, and they were almost perfect, especially considering the age of the machine.  The fracture was hairline, and we casted it; the cadet went to ship's hospital and later to a hospital in Copenhagen to get the fracture attended to.

One of the AB seamen aboard kept telling Dr Clark that he thought that he had broken off a drill bit while working, and that it lodged in his arm.  Neither George nor Clark could feel the bit, and they weren't convinced that it was even in there.  He insisted, now that we had set up the machine, to please x-ray the arm.  Another good film was produced, and sure enough, the drill bit was lodged in his arm!  It took George almost two hours of surgery to remove the stubborn bit, but the seaman came out fine.  We had to hospitalize another cadet for a kidney stone, and he got hospilaized later in Copenhagen, too.  The sick bay and hospital had become a mess, given all the activity.  Mike Krider, one of the sophomores assigned to meting out discipline for misbehaving cadets, nicely assigned several to help us out in the cleanup. That was by the suggestion of Ship's officer Jack Lane, a really nice guy that was one of a few people that remained friends with me after the cruise.  Jack was later a Galveston Pilot for years, one of the most coveted and prestigious jobs in the maritime industry.

We arrived Copenhagen 8 AM Monday July 5th.  We berthed close to Langelinie, the area that holds the National Symbol of Denmark, The Little Mermaid.  It's a small bronze statue perched on a rock, and is visited by over a million people a year.  She's a character in a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale that has reached legend status, what with his being Danish.  The poor little thing has been vandalized eight times in 40 years.  George & I visited a theme park, Tivoli Gardens, and were not impressed.  I went to a rental car firm, Autourist, on Halmtorvet Street, and rented an Opel Rekord station wagon, $5.50 a day, 6 cents a mile, American. It was the only car available that day. We did the tourist thing, and having a car was great.  I found out the hard way how to read European street signs, enduring a lot of honking horns and dirty looks!  There were a lot of pornography & sex clubs in Copenhagen; the Danes are really permissive, not at all uptight about sex & nudity. We did a lot more clubbing there than we had in Holland, and George & I hooked up with a couple of local girls later that night.  Got back to the ship rather late.

I think that the Captain was the only other crew member who rented a car there, oddly enough.  I was imposed upon to give quite a few rides into town.  I traded the unhip station wagon in for a Volkswagen, and thankfully the cars got good mileage given the high price of European petrol.  I took three young preps up the coast, toured the National Museum, went to the beach.  The Danish beer, like Lystop, Tuborg, & Carlsberg kinda sucked compared to the Dutch, but the food was okay.  We partook of the wild night life, and took some young preps to a sex club where porn stars performed quite perverted acts live & on stage.  The kids kinda freaked; Danish porn is the best, but it's pretty hardcore. Surprisingly, the audience was pretty upscale, not just a bunch of perverts in raincoats; lots of couples. 

First class working girls were all over the streets.  The nightlife was dazzling; one could buy beer on the street from hot dog vendors. I actually got a beer out of a vending machine in the National Museum!  Miraculously, nobody in any of my entourages got into trouble unless you call getting knee-walking-commode-hugging drunk trouble. I didn't get in that predicament, but those young kids weren't experienced drinkers.  I had to drive, after all.  Good, clean fun?  Not even.

On the third day, I drove a couple of officers up the coast, where we saw Kronborg castle, the one that inspired Shakespeare's setting for Hamlet, in Helsingor.  The Swedish coast was visible, only a 20 minute hydrofoil ferryboat ride away.  We came back, and I picked up another officer, Richard plant, and we had a couple of beers at the "Easy" bar.  If you had money, it was plenty easy.  There was a good German band at the Disc club, and another good band at the Exalon.  That night there was a party thrown for the crew, and we met lots of locals.  There was a pretty nurse named Ase (pronounced "Olsa") that worked in a large hospital nearby, and we hit it off.  Interesting talking to a Danish Native.  She had a Swedish friend that taught me what SAAB stands for.  Ask me the next time you see me.  We didn't hook up afterwards.  Nurses aren't the wild sex kittens that most americans stereotype them to be.  I gave Jack Lane a ride back to the ship.

The last day in port, I was on duty.  I managed to return the car and stock up on some great gourmet Danish cheese & other fancy food, but spent little time ashore.  We sailed for Cork, Ireland at 8 AM July 9th.  The seas got pretty rough on the way, and we were giving more Dramamine.  Even Frank got sick.  Four days at sea, we arrived Cork at 10 AM Monday, July 12th. We had a broken foot and a broken nose that Dr Clark had to arrange hospital treatment for.  We went ashore and I found something in a shop that I couln't resist buying.  When I was about thirteen, Dr. John Morris, a radiologist friend of our family, made a grand entrance in our lower hallway, Playing Bagpipes!  I'd always loved 'em, being half Scotch and half soda, and I even had a bagpipe record.  He stayed with us for three days, and I learned to play them, and pretty well!  I was a quick study.   I bought a couple of practice chanters from a Pipe Major mail order from Nova Scotia.  The chanter is the small horn that the Piper fingers, and it's where all the real playing skill is used.  I learned well, but never could afford a full set of pipes stateside.  I bought a set of pipes in Ireland, complete with spare reeds, for 20 pounds sterling, about $50 US!  I had an awesome set of lungs, being a rock singer, and they were really put to good use.  These pipes weren't the best quality, and required almost twice the wind as John's expensive set.  Treating the kangaroo-skin pouch with Hide Food helped the leaks some, but they were still hard to blow.  I could play three or four songs before collapsing, but nobody else that tried to play them on board could even coax more than half a song out of the buggers.  Bagpipes are one of the few instruments that I can actually utilize my short amputated finger stubs to play. 

We toured Cork on foot that day, and Ireland is really beautiful.  We drank a few pints of warm Irish Ale at The Bodega that evening & had a great time.  George came in so wasted that he couldn't remember how he got back to the ship.  Lots of cadets had their bicycles aboard, and I borrowed one & rode all over Cork with three cadets the next day.  Drinks were really cheap, and we certainly enjoyed ourselves.  That night, the town threw a party/dance for the crew & cadets, where we mingled with the locals.  There was an all-girl pipe band there, and they even let me play.  Gave me a lot of great bagpipe tips.  Cork has been a traditional port of call for the Texas Clipper for years, then and now.  It stopped there in 2004.

I was on duty the next day but didn't manage to get ashore.  George took a local Cork bus tour that impressed him because of the great tourguide.  We were'nt so lucky the next day: about 40 of us took an all-day bus tour around the Ring of Kerry, County Kerry being adjacent to County Cork, westward.  It surrounded the lakes and town of Killarney.  If Ireland was beautiful, Kerry was absolutely breathtaking!  This is 33 years ago now, and I still haven't ever been to a more georgeous place.  Our driver was no tourguide at all, and even needed a frigging map!  Dr Clark had done the same tour with a good guide the day before, and he ended up being ours, with my help! Damned the luck, I failed to properly thread the roll of film that I took on that tour, and didn't get a single shot!  Oh, well.  That night a few of us went to the Bodega, then to an after-hours club called the Carousel, picked up some Irish women and actually brought them back aboard ship to the Cheif's room, partying into the wee hours.

We sailed for Cadiz, Spain at 10 AM on Friday July 16th, arriving Monday at 1:00.  This dock was really happening; the Estacion de Maritima (sailor's station), a really nice, big, bar & restaurant, was really close, as was the town.  Beer, food, and merchandise was really cheap, and the Spaniards were quite friendly.  They were very light-skinned, and many were blonde.  When we disembarked, we were dissapointed that it was siesta time; most of the shops were closed from 2-5:00.  When everybody woke up, we found that the Spaniards, especially the girls, were very tolerant of Americans who didn't speak their language well, quite unlike the Danes.  In my case, I was quite surprised that they understood my Spanish so well.  I took Spanish in the 7th grade, but I couldnt really communicate well with the Mexican folks in Galveston.  Duh!  I didn't realize how different that Tex-Mex was from the Castilian Spanish that I learned in school until I got to Spain.  We could communicate a lot better!  My bar and street Spanish was a real asset to my shipmates who weren't fluent, because English wasn't widely spoken on the street.  The native girls were actually quite eager to teach me the language;  I learned a lot while in Spain.  They called me "muy simpatico".

The Plaza de San Juan de Dios was a hot spot for bars.  A major task in each port we visited was currency conversion.  Nobody had credit cards, but they weren't widely accepted internationally anyway in 1971.  American dollars weren't universally accepted, and the Kronen, Pounds, Guilders, Pesetas, etc., were hard to keep up with. The catch-all slang for foreign currency was "Gazoonies".  We usually had to go to a "Gazoonie-changer"; the best bet was usually a bank, but they weren't always close by, and some smaller currency exchange places were a ripoff, and young Americans could be an easy mark.  Spain was better, in that all the bigger bars, although they didn't accept American currency directly, would provide currency exchange as an independent transaction at a reasonable rate.  Made things easier.

Cadiz was by far our best, most fun port-of-call.  I wasn't as blatantly wild as Denmark or Holland, just somehow better.  The kids went ape-shit.  We tried to find the Casas De Putas, (houses of ill repute), but some of the taxi drivers told us there weren't any!  We pushed the issue, and they conceded that the Copacabana Club had available women.  We went there, but everybody chickened out, probably because of the price.  So they got drunk instead, just "like all tough sailors do when they're far away at sea".  We bar hopped, shopped, and had a great day ashore.  I managed to stay pretty sober, unlike the majority or our now rather large entourage; after all, I was the interpreter.

The second day in Cadiz was more of the same, touring on foot in the morning.  Dacor was a major SCUBA/skin diving gear manufacturer with factories in Spain, and I bought a mask, snorkel & fins for the amazing price of $7.00 American; I then signed up for a Trafalgar beach snorkeling expedition for 2 days hence.  We ate lunch on board, and when we went back ashore, we made it no farther than the Estacion de Maritima.  The food was great, and their big specialty was Calamares Fritas, or fried squid.  I grew up with my brother Joseph's exotic foreign cooking, and wasn't afraid to try anything, even having had my brother's version of this dish.  Sorry, Joseph, but no comparison.  Their Calamari were absolutely the best!   We told everybody, and even brought it back to the ship; remember, many of these are young kids, not very open to eating exotic foods.  We told some of them that it was onion rings.  They loved the taste, but wondered why onions were so chewy.  Hey, these are Spanish onions, we said.  They ate more, then we let the cat out of the bag.  Two of the preps actually threw up when we convinced then they had eaten fried squid!  What wussies.

A bunch of us went back to the Estacion and pigged out on more Spanish food, and hung out with the locals.  Again, the kids went wild, along with the more mature crew members.  I boarded before midnight since I had duty in the morning.

Sick call while we were docked had been really quiet in the other ports, but not in Spain.  The cheap Spanish booze produced major Spanish hangovers.  Sunburns, gastritis, flu, lots of action.  I stayed aboard most of the day, but George let me go ashore for about two hours to find a model Spanish Galleon.  Unsuccessful.

The next day I & large group of officers, preps, & cadets took a tour bus to the Trafalgar Beach snorkel excursion, which was awesome.  Clear water, great reef, but cold;  I could only last an hour, but it was enough.  Several in our party had spear guns, but nobody speared anything. I got slightly sunburned. When we left, a few of the officers & I went by the U.S. Naval base nearby & bought 6 cases of Bud.  We got back to the ship about 5:00, and I was done in, but managed to get back ashore.   Senior Marine Transportation cadet Tim Nelick and his roommate Pat Flanagan and I had become fast friends, and we stopped by The Estacion, then went to the Square downtown.  We saw Al Pintor with George, Gary Miller, and Emile Lapeyrouse at the bar.  I wondered why Al was out, because it was his day on duty.  George told me he had asked Dr Clark to cover duties for Al for about two hours so Al, fluent in Spanish,  could to help George "barter with the natives" for some purchases.  Dr Clark agreed, but would later regret it.

Al was a little buzzed, but George was on a mission.  He got totally smashed, and Al just blew off returning to duty.  They came aboard at a very late hour, and George was so plowed that he had to be carried aboard on the gangplank.  Dr Clark was on deck waiting for them and was majorly pissed!  I arrived, sober, a little later, and saw how angry Dr Clark was; he was usually very even-tempered.  George was conscious now, walking around the ship in his underwear with his socks on over his shoes; I tried to get him to go to bed to no avail.  He shot the rod to Richard plant, an officer who ordered him not to leave the ship in his underwear. Then Cadet Davis Hency was carried aboard.  He was so trashed that he tried to jump out of a porthole, and it took four of us to restrain him.  He became so combative that we had to sedate him with injections. What a night.  Dr Clark was not amused.

We sailed for the Canary Islands at 8:00 the next day, Friday, July 23.  We treated more hangovers that day than in the whole trip, and George was one of them.  Dr Clark was even less amused.  There were Student Meetings about the direction of TAMUG, serious stuff, and I attended.

The Canary Islands are a volcnic achipelago off the coast of Africa that was colonized by Spain centuries ago.  We arrived at Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, on Sunday, July 25th.  We docked that the Dique de Genaeralissomo Francisco Franco just behind a Russian merchant vessel; Las Palmas has a stable population of 300,000, and Spanish is spoken, much as in Cadiz.  Nelick, Flanagan, and I went to ther El Pacifico bar and drank for free; a seismograph vessel crew member kept ringing the bell & setting up the bar.  Tim Nelick and I remained friends after the cruse; he became, at age 31, one of the youngest Merchant Marine Captains ever to get his Unlimited Master's license.  We later went to the Terazzo restaurant and stuffed ouselves on Smorgasbord for $4.00.

Snorkeling was great on the second day in port.  I ate more Smorgasbord but paid fot it the next day in the form of gastritis.  I had to treat myself along with the usual hangover vicims since I was on duty.  The last day we shopped at a flea market, but the prices were steep.  The next day we sailed for Charlotte Amalie, US Virgin Islands.

Boredom finally set in on this long cruise leg.  I treated one crew member for clap, a few guys got seasick, and the only fun thing we did was to steer the ship from a remote location near the stern called the afterhouse.  Arrived Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, on Thursday August 5th.  The Virgins are volcanic islands first settled by Denmark in the 1600's, and are a major cruise ship port.  The gorgeous blue waters of the Caribbean were awesome, and several of us dove the underwater park at Chunk Bay at nearby St. John's Island.  In 3 hours of diving, we observed coral reefs, sea urchins, even a moray eel.  Later that evening we heard an awesome band called Sun Country from Washington D.C. with a chick singer that sounded just like Carole King. Ate more Smorgasborg, this time with no ill effects.

Ashore the next day was a hassle. About eight of us went ashore & tried to rent Honda Mopeds only to find that the first rental place we reached with some difficulty was sold out.  We found another company & rented a Honda 90, but it ran like shit.  A cadet named Menard was my rental partner, both of us on the same bike.  We went to a beach that was too crowded, and instead decided to climb a local mountain.  The bike stalled, but luckily we got rescued by Blackie Blackwelder & Tony Rose, who had rented a car.  We returned the P.O.S bike, then went bar hopping; we went to an all-black restaurant called the Grass Shack that was very hosile to  whites.  One of our alcoholic seamen got into a fight with the cook, and we had to take him back to the ship to treat his wounds.

The next day I was on duty, and George brought back a bunch of sea life that he collected while snorkeling.  Sea fans, sea urchins, & coral.  Cool stuff, but it was dead, & of course smelled like crap! In my room!  The next day he relocated that stuff to the sick bay, but Dr Clark made him throw it out.  We left on the last leg of the cruise on Sunday August 8th, headed for Galveston.  We passed Puerto Rico, Haiti/D.R., & Cuba & could see the islands on deck.  I had smuggled a few bottles of bargain-priced quality booze aboard from Charlotte Amalie, and shared the wealth.  I could finally sleep, even in the rough seas.  Everybody was ready to go home.  Those last days I didn't write in the diary, but I think they arrived in Galveston on August 15th.  We stopped off in the Port of Houston two days before, and Dr Clark let me go home from there since he was so pleased with my performance on the job; I had also arrived on the job two days earlier than the other two.  He expected George and Al to help him with the task of shutting down the ship's clinic & sick bay, but they both jumped ship at Houston without permission.  Again, Dr Clark was not amused.  Since George was in medical school at UTMB, this actually counted as a class for him.  Clark graded him Unsatisfactory, and certainly would not have given Al Pintor a favorable job reference.  I came back aboard and helped Dr Clark shut down the operation when the Clipper came home.  I didn't mind;  Clark was a great guy that played a positive part in a major chapter in my life.  Wonderful memories.

I was jobless!  I went back to UTMB & applied to CCU & was immediately hired back & greeted with open arms!  Millie was still head nurse, and my coworkers were great.  UTMB had actually hired respiratory therapists!  Work was fun, but stressful, and I still worked lots of overtime, succumbing to the pleas of the Staffing Office, manned by the most persuasive women on the face of this earth.  UTMB was chronically understaffed, and I was a real sucker for their requests to work extra shifts; I was really flexible & worked all over the hospital.  If you could do ICU, you could do anything.

The Jaguar was still in John Ayers' shop:  he didn't do anything to the car while I was off on the cruise; after all, he was old; I had to prod & beg & plead to light a fire under his ass to get the job done, but it finally happened.  He removed the old engine and, after months of machining, welding, & modifying, managed to put in a dependable 250-cubic-inch Chevy truck engine that had only a 1-barrel carburetor; not exactly high-performance, but the car still screamed!  135 MPH!  Come October, I was back on four wheels; I usually rode the BSA motorcycle to work.  Life was good; I was single, hung out with friends like Brian Walker, Larry Russell, Lance Rutan, and Mike Annweiler.  Cops, motorcyclists, Auto part store owners. I dated some nurses and unit clerks, and, even though I wasn't in a band, I hosted lots of jam sessions at the Mott House that often attracted almost a hundred people throughout a given night.  I remember when two uniformed policemen knocked at the door, entered my bedroom where we were playing, and  listened to three or four songs.  When we stopped playing, I asked them what was up; they said: "We got a complaint from a neighbor that the music was too loud.; but it sounds really good!  Keep on playing!"  They left, and we didn't get any more complaints.  We had these great parties about every 6 weeks or so.

I was a likely candidate for becoming a Ham/amatuer radio operator, but doing business on the ham channels was verboten.  I was always playing music, selling something, or whatever, but I wanted a car phone; after all, I had a Jaguar!  The definitive car phone system available in the day was the Southwestern Bell IMTS Wide Area Roaming unit built by Motorola.  That mobilephone cost about $3500.00 new, but that wasn't the only hurdle: the waiting list to get on that system was ten years in Galveston, and twelve years in Houston! The system was only 14 channels, and the mobiles were 25 watts;  they could talk to the high-powered, tall base station towers at a range of about 25 miles, but that technology limited the number of serveable subscribers to only 200, no matter if you were in Houston, Los Angeles, or NYC.  Only the wealthy doctors & lawyers & such had IMTS phones.

I discovered an alternative in the RCC system.  The FCC allowed smaller companies (than Ma Bell) to provide what was called MTS service.  IMTS stood for Improved Mobile Telephone Service, while MTS was more primitive, but locally available.  Answer Incorporated in Galveston was an MTS provider, and they were great.  I bought a used Motorola T-Power 2-way radio from them that was basically police radio that was vacuum tube powered.  Manufactured in 1955, it was a bulletproof radio, and could be had for the then affordable price of $350.00. Sid Carson, the local Motorola radio serviceman in Galveston, had the radio in his shop, and he installed it in the Jag.  Sid was the engineer that maintained the Answer, Inc. mobilephone system,  which was all Motorola.

Sid & I really hit it off:  we were geeks way before the term was coined, and he was a really nice guy.  The mobilephone was basically a push-to-talk two-way radio, and if you wanted to receive calls, you had to listen to all the phone conversations (called traffic) on the single channel phone system.  I could hear everything people were saying to the mobile units, but couldn't hear the other mobile's response.  No privacy at all.  Anybody with a cheap scanner could hear both sides of the conversation.  To make a call, you came on with: "Unit Eight".  The operator would respond with: "go ahead, unit eight".  "Call 762-8091".  She then dialed the number manually, and when the connection was made, she threw a switch, and said:  "Go ahead, unit Eight."  Then, although it was push-to-talk, the transmission was crystal clear, and remained so all the way to Dickinson, Port bolivar, LaMarque, Texas City, etc: great local coverage.  The cost: $60.00 per month, which included 60 minutes of airtime;  60 cents per minute over that.  No weekend, night, or holiday rates, just a straight rate.  I didn't go over the 60 minute limit after the first month.  There were only about 50 subscribers on the system, mostly physicians.  I knew, because I could hear them.

Voice pagers were just coming into use at UTMB; they cost about $300.00, and Answer, Inc. provided paging service for about $30.00 per month.  I bought a Motorola pager on the street cheap from a junkie, and Sid Carson rigged it up so I could interface it with my carphone service for free.  Sid of course knew thatMotorola offered a selective call unit for carphones called Quick-Call that utilized the same system as the pagers; by adding it to your car's radiophone, you didn't have to listen all the time to the radio conversations to receive a call; the operator keyed in a signal specific to the Quick-Call, and it then came on to alert you to the call to be answered.  Answer, Inc. didn't charge extra for that add-on service, and their pagers were on the same frequency as the mobilephones.  So, not only did I not have to listen to all the garbage on the airways to get a call when driving, I could take the pager with me & it would go off whenever anybody would call me on the mobile.  Cool thing was, the operators would always take a message if I didn't answer, and there was no airtime charge for calling in to retrieve those messages that the pager alerted me to.  Free paging service; Sid was great.

The Jag was a fastback two-seater with plenty of room under the rear glass.  I put my big Vox Foundation bass amp in the back, powered by a 110-volt inverter, and used a Sony 8-track home recorder/player as a sound source. Cassetes weren't widely available yet, but that system really rocked: 120 watts through an 18" Goodmans speaker/enclosure that put out incredible treble as well as bass.  I repainted the Jag "Thunderball Silver-Gray" and visited my first cousin Josie Wittwer in Nebraska, via the Kansas turnpike.  No speed limits!  I went through the whole state in less than two hours, at 135 MPH!  Josie was impressed. 

Time Warp!  Shift to 9-7-2004;  I just got back from Colorado, having visited Brian & Adele Walker to do a recording session for Brian's forthcoming album on the Plane Music label.  I was only five years old when my father took me up in the luggage compartment of a Piper Cub during one of his many aerial photo shoots; I guess I got a mild bite from the Aviation bug then, but Brian got a worse bite than I did when he was older. Brian's referenced below in the biography; he married Adele Petitfils, his high school sweetheart, and they're still together.  They moved to Florissant, Colorado, close to Colorado Springs, about ten years ago, and I drove up for a visit with Rhonda about a year after they moved there.

Brian was a sax player when I met him in the mid-60's, and he soon became a Galveston Cop.  He was in bands, but wasn't as serious about music as I was at the time.  That changed over the years; his band is playing a lot in Colorado these days, and Brian's recently taken to songwriting about airplanes, private pilot stuff. 

Brian was instrumental in getting me into the Confederate Air Force in February 1978.  Brian, Larry Russell & I were on the crew of the B-17 Texas Raiders, a vintage WWII bomber that was in great shape.  I was the Gulf Coast Wing photographer as well, since I had a Studio amd a color processing lab.  The plane was hangared at Scholes Field, the Galveston airport, along with eight other smaller WWII fighter aircraft.  I had the privelege of lying prone on the cushions just behind the plexiglas forward dome of the B-17, making pictures from the open 4-inch porthole during simulated bombimg runs that we performed during several airshows.  Wind in my face, diving down and pulling out hard;  I also had to crank the left landing gear up manually for the staged one-wheel-landing that we performed in the airshows.  The plane would touch down on one wheel without actually landing, and the crowd loved it!

Another time warp:  I'm going to another 1900 Storm reunion tonight (9-18-04) at Johnny Maisel's house in Friendswood; Danny Kristensen was hired as a solo act, but we'll also set up & jam.  Phillip Ochoa, Roy Crawford, John Macrini, and Mark Lee are invited, and they all confirmed tentatively at least.  What a blast from the past this'll be!  I'll keep you posted.

OK, you're posted.  Mark Lee didn't make it, but Macrini, Crawford, Ochoa, and even Bobby Fossier made the scene.  Phillip Ochoa hadn't played in public for 28 years, but did great!  John Macrini, Roy Crawford, & Danny Kristensen were consummate professionals as always, and Neal was just a friggin showoff!  We played lots of Beatles, and there were a few moments of absolutely brilliant harmones.  Roy sang the Orbison song "Crying", and it made me cry!  It was informal, but totally "Pro Combo", as Danny would put it.  If we were hired for $800.00 for the night, the crowd would certainly get their money's worth.  Too bad the cops shut us down at about 10:20 for being too loud.

The party cleared out pretty fast, but Bobby Fossier & Anita Jo stayed with Johnny, Barbie & me, and Bobby & Johnny played keyboards while I sang.  I don't need a P.A. with my loud-ass voice!  More moments of brilliance followed; Johnny's keyboard playing is awesome, as is Bobby's.  We then retired to the kitchen where I told tasteless jokes, as usual.  I didn't leave until after 3:00!  What a great night!

           To Be Continued!