The next morning after I put my stuff away the evening before and getting settled in I was once again in my office looking through stuff and found I had inherited a Mamiya camera. At least that’s what it said on the emblem. As I sat there pondering on how it worked I looked up to see someone standing in my doorway. He had on his black horned rimmed BCGs. He was slightly overweight and not much older than myself. He was a Specialist 4. When he saw me look up he said hi. Military has an unspoken way of calling people by their last name. His name was Kennedy. He called me Rowe. It’s kind of a backwards name game, I suppose. He walked into my office and he commented on the camera and I said something about having to learn to use this thing. He then told me back in “The World” as we called home that he was an amateur photographer and sold his photos free lance to magazines. I said “Oh?” I asked him where he was from. He told me La Mirada, California. Not knowing where this was he explained that it was in Los Angeles County, CA. Oh, so that explained the ability to sell photos free lance. I asked what kind of pictures he took. He told me he took pictures of motorcycles for different motorcycle magazines. He then offered to teach me black and white photography. The Service Club had a dark room with all the chemicals and paper to get the job done and since I would be the command news guy I would have free reign of the place.
After work that day Kennedy and I went to the club where he introduced me to his friend who I understood did excellent color photography. I was told black and white photography was all I needed to do news work. It was during this visit I brought the camera and found out it was a very versatile camera. It was a double reflex lense camera with the view finder on the top. It took pictures on 120 film, but was convertible to 35mm film. The 120 film was much more versatile in production so I was told to use it over 35mm. That evening I learned how easy it was to put film into the can and mix the chemicals into it to process the negatives in the dark room. Leaving the negatives to dry I came back the next night and we burned the negatives on photo paper and I made my first pictures. The rest was practice and experimentation. I began to feel like I was living someone else’s life. Being a country boy with little experience at not much more than working the farm or driving a school bus seemed a long ways behind me as I kind of saw myself from outside myself if you can understand that.
With all this newness going on around me I forgot where I was for a few days but I had mailed my address home to Julie and my parents and told them I was safely there and everything was fine. I hadn’t missed home yet. I just hadn’t been gone long enough. When the day came I got my first mail I found that twinge of homesickness, but the letters were sufficient enough to stave off the absolute homesick state I could have carried myself to.
Julie told me in her first letter things at home went downhill quickly after I left. There were race riots in the city and school was a focal point of the rioting and the blacks had burned some businesses. One I remember her mention was Lum’s Restaurant. I remember it for being a place where you could get your hot dogs steamed in beer. Things were quite tense around the area for a while, but it was calming down now. It seems the police had arrested nine black men and one white woman in what became known as the Wilmington 10. They were convicted of firebombing a downtown grocery store and shooting at emergency workers. It turns out many outside influences got involved with this incident such as Amnesty International. Even 60 Minutes ran a piece on it later on. They’re convictions were overturned in the eighties. But in all the rioting Julie said she and her mom were fine and staying out of the way.
My family was getting on with life as usual. Since I had paid off my car repairs and the insurance was through my dad’s insurance company you can guess that my car wasn’t sitting in the yard wasting away. Danny had his driver’s license now. My only issue was that they would continue to report on Vickie’s antics. I knew it was probably true, but I still hurt from that lost relationship. I just knew though that the strength of the new relationship was going to put this behind me once and for all. Especially with the distance between home and myself knowing I couldn’t just jump up and go home was enough. I had not heard from Vickie either.
It seems a girl Dwight, Danny and myself had met at a basketball game in Bath got my address, some way, and sent me a letter. She was thinking we might be able to start something. I wrote her back and told her I remembered her, but I wasn’t interested in a relationship of any kind. Actually there were a couple of other girls with her that evening. We had never seen these girls before and I never heard from her any more.
About this time as well, my mom had called Lawrence’s mom and she told me she had good news. Lawrence had gotten through his training at North Fort and of all places to be stationed, he was sent to Germany in an Infantry Unit. The scoundrel had lucked out. I know he was relieved. He was in another part of Germany and my travels never led me there to find him. I never saw Lawrence again, but I was glad to know he was able to avoid Vietnam.
Okay, back to Emory Barracks. One day shortly after I got there this portly looking Specialist 5 or 6 came to my office from the 69th Artillery Group on the other side of the entrance from our Headquarters building. Turns out he was their PIO. He had been sent over to give me some pointers and teach me how to get articles printed in the 32nd Army Air Defense Command, both our higher headquarters. He also introduced me to the Stars and Stripes. This is the newspaper of the Department of Defense. I didn’t know the military had its own news service. It also had its own TV and radio news and such for American families all over the world. Things were opening up to me of the extent of military’s nature to see that the troops were informed and entertained.
I began to get the lay of the land or how this battalion was organized and how extensive it was. I learned that I was a part of the Headquarters and there were four anti-aircraft batteries scattered over the German country side several miles outside of Wurzburg. Let me iterate this quickly. I’ve seen Wurzburg spelled two ways. One as noted and the other spelled as Wuerzburg. The German spelling spells is as Wurzburg with two dots over the u. Just to give you some idea of how big this city is I would compare it to something the size of Atlanta perhaps. The batteries were places in smaller towns much the size of say New Bern or Jacksonville, NC. They have small to medium populations. I visited a couple of them and the other two I don’t ever remember going out to. Most all of the military installations I was with were behind small walled in areas. The barracks were former WWII German Army barracks. They were thick walled buildings that resisted the cold and heat of the seasons. Most of the building in Emory were three story I believe. The mess hall was in the 69th Arty Grp’s building if I remember correctly. I had developed this thing about mess halls. I didn’t eat in them very often. I think I may have eaten in the one at Emory maybe twice. This is where I had met some kin folk, so to speak. To this point I had been in the military for about five to six months and had not seen another Rowe anywhere. Then one day I was standing in line in the mess hall on one of those two times I ate there and standing in front of me was this black guy advancing in line along with the rest to get our food. He turned around to me and I caught his name tag. It said Rowe. I was flabbergasted. My old feelings of wanting to be a member of the Klan faded completely away. Here was a black guy with the same last name as me. He saw my name and grinned as I did also. I think we both knew what the other was thinking. This was about the era of race riots and bigotry and stuff, but all that melted right there. We had something in common. The first thing out of my mouth was “Do you reckon we’re related?” He said he was wondering the same thing. He hadn’t seen another Rowe anywhere since he came in the military either and we hit it right off. The funny thing is we ate lunch together and I never saw him again. He could have been visiting our kaserne. Just in case, here, kaserne is the German spelling and the English changed the K to a C so don’t be scratching your head if you see me spelling it different.
Okay, I’m getting off track here with “words”. You see, I love to dig into words and find their true meaning and I can get way off into studying their true meaning and origins.
One day when I went in I was summoned to S-4. I thought, what the heck is S-4? This was the office to the left just before going into the personnel office on the left end of my office building on the second floor from the Colonel’s office. Why did I tell you this? I don’t know. Anyway, I went up there to be greeted by a Staff Sergeant who informed me I had to have a clearance. I’m going to say what I had now only because it isn’t worth the background check that was done on it forty years later. I was given a Top Secret. For the life of me I didn’t know why. I didn’t know anything about anything. So what were they going to give me? That’s for later. Suffice to say I was not hot property to the military, at least on that small scale.
The guy from over at 69th came over one morning and told me I was his for the day. So I went with him. He took me to his office and he showed me his setup and let me follow him through his day. It was interesting. We talked to people, got perspectives on things and covered a couple of his stories. I learned a lot from that. Then when I got back Kennedy was waiting for me. He told me he wanted to be a contributing reporter for the paper. I asked him what he wanted to cover. He told me I was invited over to his home off base to eat dinner with him and his wife and he would give me the scoop. Little did I know this would cost me something. When he picked me up we traveled across town to where he lived. It was in a neat little neighborhood. He and his wife lived in an upstairs apartment with a little balcony. We entered on a side street from the main one and parked around back and walked up through the stairs on the side. His wife had a nice little dinner ready. She was pregnant at about six or seven months. During dinner I learned that Kennedy was getting out in about four or five months and his wife was leaving to go back to California within the month. After we ate came the payback. Kennedy had an old VW bus out back he was working on and he was rebuilding the motor in it. He had ordered all his performance parts from back in California for the little four cylinder engine. The problem was he had nowhere to work on the engine except his balcony patio. He wanted me to help him carry the engine up the stairs, through the apartment to the balcony and set it on a table he had set up out there. I was hesitant, but he assured me we could do it. And he was right. These little engines are made of aluminum and are quite light. It was really easy once we got started and the engine was left sitting on the table ready for him to tear apart and rebuild. I helped with this project and I learned a lot from it. Oh, one other thing. His car he bought when he got to Germany was a 1954 VW. It was before gas gauges, so when you filled the tank it had a smaller reserve tank you filled too. There was a lever inside the car that you turned to shut off flow from this smaller tank before filling. When you would be driving down the road one day and the engine started sputtering, you knew the gas tank was empty so you would turn the little lever and you had about another gallon to get you to a gas station to fill up. Kind of neat, huh? Kennedy paid only $50 for the car and he sold it for $50 when he left later on. It was a word of mouth agreement between owners. Whoever bought it had to sell it for the same price to another soldier. For all I know this car is still running somewhere in Germany. . .for $50 dollars.
