The World of Fast Food

In ads and on TV, fast food items look so good. However, the Big Mac, which looks to be about three inches high, is only about two inches high when you get it. After a few bites, the sandwich with all the “special” dressing, wet tomatoes and sagging cheese becomes a dripping mess. Usually you wind up with “special” dressing and everything except the hamburger patty on your shirt or pants.

One time when I drove my sister back from San Bernardino after visiting our brother there, we arrived in Half Moon Bay. We were getting hungry and I asked her if she wanted to go to dinner at a place we had gone to on Hwy 1 south of town and she agreed. When we got there, it was closed and she said she had forgotten it was closed. I asked her if she had something at home. She told me that she had a loaf of bread and some milk. I told her to make a list and I went to the store to get her some food for the next day. By that time I had been driving for around nine hours and I was hungry.

I went into town to Burger King, got a big hamburger, fries and milkshake and took off up the twisting, turning road to Hwy 280 trying to keep with a Porsche. I was trying to drive with one hand while drinking the shake, eating the fries and eating the hamburger. After just a few bites, the hamburger turned to “mush” in my hand, so when I checked in the rear view and no one was behind me, I threw it out of the window. Unfortunately, since I had forgotten it was raining, the window was closed and it dripped down the window, across the door panel and made a big mess which had to clean up the next day. By the time, I got home I had been driving fifteen hours and I was pooped.

Back to fast food. Have you seen what KFC is trying to sell, and, I heard quite successfully? They are using two chicken breasts instead of a bun for their burger. They have named it the “Double Down”. It appears to be a “Tour de Force” of everything a person should not have. Very high in calories, more salt and more fat than the biggest Wendy’s or Burger King. It even has more of these items than three Big Mac’s.

In this day of industrial spying with the “popularity” of the Double Down, McDonald’s have known of the plan from a “mole” in KFC for a while. They are planning a new campaign on a sandwich which will have the two chicken breasts, like the Double Down, between two sesame seed buns. The advertising gurus are now trying for a new name after one of them suggested the name McDoubleDown. Anybody have any suggestions?

Secret Agent 009

When most kids my age were playing cowboys and Indians, I was playing spies and counteragents. I was so good I could hide in plain sight .When I graduated from college with a BA in criminal procedures and a minor in karate, I was approached by the OSS near the end of World War II. They wanted me to go behind the Iron Curtain, get recruited by the KGB and become a double agent. After doing several jobs to convince them of my abilities, they ordered me to the United States to join the newly formed CIA and report back to them on a regular basis. This I did and was awarded a nice medal and a brand new ZIV limousine when I got back to Russia. I was able to “out” several Russian agents without give the KGB a clue that I had done it.

One of the cases I was on involved Mossad’s quest for Carlos the Jackal and I pinned him down after extensive research found out the Carlos was a sucker for a Big Mac. We went to a McDonalds in Jerusalem and I slipped a slow acting drug in his and the Mossad captured him with no problem.

Sometimes, it is difficult to remember which of the quadruple agencies I was working with at the time. I decided to offer my services to the British MI 5 and was given the name Robert Bond and give a license to kill as Agent 009. I had a long talk with “M” about my duties and he sent me to see “Q” who had disguised himself as Dame Judy Dench which I thought was very clever. “Q” gave me access and instructions to several weapons I would have at my disposal. Using Stealth technology, I was shown a heavy armored invisible car. Also, a taser with a telescope that had a 100 yard (90 meter) range with no wires.

I was sent back to the U. S. to meet with Agent 008 who had been a mole working with the California Department of Transportation where we secretly met with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to try and prevent him from totally screwing up California’s economy. We had to invoke the fact that he still had relatives in Germany, to make him back down and listen to reason. He signed the bill the next day. We were disguised as reporters and were there to make sure it was signed. I was always good at disguises as you can see in the attached photo.

I had several other clandestine jobs to perform before retirement. I wanted to get back to England and marry Miss Moneypenny who always winked at me as I left “M” ‘s office. By the time our children are old enough, the secret agent numbers would probably be up to 15 or 20.

It's A Small World

Isn’t it odd how two people from different parts of the world at one point have a common person they knew or have met. This is a short article about Eric Lappoehn and Gerry Pennington. The first, a friend of mine from CalTrans, the latter, from Live Oak High School.

Gerry, or as we knew him in high school, Lloyd, and I graduated the same year.
He joined the Air Force and was, at one time, was in the Air Force Band. He had played the tuba in our high school band. After he got out of the Air Force, he went to work at the San Carlos, CA, airport and worked his way up to the position of airport manager. When Governor Jerry Brown started his ill fated Mediterranean fruit fly campaign, he put Gerry in charge of it. The program didn’t last too long as people didn’t like have the helicopter spray come into their backyards where they were having their BBQ’s. The program was stopped and Gerry was released. He had always thought it was a stupid idea and it inspired him to write his first short book on why it was a stupid idea. It was not a best seller but it did get him into a writing mode, something his high school English teacher had never thought could have happened.

He got interested in looking up information on his father’s trip to the Alaskan gold rush in 1898 and he got started contacting people, getting their stories and pictures, etc. He, his brother and wife and his two sisters went to Alaska and actually found the claim their father had made. There is a picture in the book of the four of them. The book has 450 pages and is full of stories and pictures of the very interesting travel up to the Yukon Territory and then up the Chilcoot Trail. The miners went up to stake a claim and stayed on the claim until the spring thaw. Gerry was aided in proof reading and editing by a good friend of both of us, Don Kilmer, who graduated from Lassen College in Journalism. Also, Don was an English teacher in a Florida high school and later a publicist for the Churchill Downs race track.

I’m going to leave Gerry until later and tell you about Eric. Eric was a German soldier and was a POW in a British concentration camp. When the war was over, he went home to Berlin. At that time, my brother, George, had left flying status and had become a “plain clothes” man in the Office of Special Investigations in Berlin investigating black market activities and needed a good translator. Eric applied and was quickly hired. They were together for a month and George also hired Eric’s brother. When he was sent home, he gave good letters of commendation to both of them.

George had worked at CalTrans in Marysville before the war and one time when he visited us, I took him to the CalTrans office where worked to see some of his prewar buddies. He was dressed in his uniform and was a captain at the time. Eric came by and said “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”. In no time, they were talking about the times in Berlin and what Eric had done here in the US. He had gone to UNLV in Las Vegas majoring in engineering. He applied for and was accepted as an associate engineer in charge of a design squad. He was there for a year or two and resigned to work in Saudi Arabia. He was in charge of building the airport at Riyadh, the largest in the world. When he came back from there, he lived in Yuba City for a while and then decided to move to Las Vegas. His first wife had died and he married a very nice German lady. He liked to run and at age 75 he was third in the USA and fourth in the world in triathlons. He died a few years ago of a heart problem.

George stayed on in the Air Force and retired as a Lt.Col. in charge of the flight test division at Kirtland AFB at Albuquerque New Mexico. He had worked at CalTrans before the war and was hired again. He decided to work in the San Bernardino district.

Now, back to Gerry. He was involved in the Civil Air Patrol and always liked to fly a plane. The California CAP got word in 1947 that a bunch of Stinson L-5 med evac planes were coming back on an aircraft carrier. He and several other pilots hopped a flight from Sacramento to Hill Field in Salt Lake City. There they got a flight to Ft. Dix, New Jersey where the L-5’s were stored. After the flight got underway, the pilot turned the controls over to his co-pilot and came back to see how the CAP fliers were getting along. He asked each one where they were from. Gerry answered Live Oak, California and found out that the pilot was my brother! Small world, huh!

George stayed there at Ft. Dix to make sure that everything was OK before he left them. Gerry later told me that the five planes had to come down every few hundred miles to repair one thing or another, but all five planes got back to California OK.

Eric and his wife had lived in the beautiful Red Rock west of Las Vegas and Las Vegas was Gerry’s winter home going to Skagway, Alaska every summer. Eric died there and Gerry also died there. I would really have liked to introduce each of them and show them how their lives came together from Berlin to Las Vegas. As Paul Harvey would say “…..and that’s the rest of the story!”

One Man Can Make a Difference

As the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan approached, the networks had their reporters there showing the preparation for the games, getting the ice rinks ready for the skating. Outside, the down hill and cross country skiing and the bobsled courses.

In each report, the reporters repeatedly referred this city of 380,000 as “NAHG - a - no” with emphasis on the first symbol. I was in the Far East on Okinawa in 1951 and 52 during the Korean War, and knew that the proper pronunciation was “Nah - GAH - no”, emphasis on the second syllable. On Okinawa, I used to listen to Armed Forces Radio where a Japanese woman gave lessons in how to speak phrases to Okinawan citizens, such as, Ohio meant Good Morning and Konnichiwa meant Good Afternoon along with asking questions, directions and other phrases.

This mispronunciation probably meant that everyone who spoke an Asian language were laughing at the Americans. At the time, there were approximately four billion people n the Asiatic countries and countless millions in other countries.

I decided to write a letter to the four TV networks to tell them about my theory.
I actually got a call from CBS about the letter. They asked how I knew this, I told them about the items mentioned above and told them to check it out with a Japanese speaking employee. He thanked me for bringing it to his attention.

A couple of days later, I was listening to the CBS Evening News and Dan Rather pronounced it properly. Most of the other reporters changed there way of saying Nagano.
So, I suppose, I helped maintain better relations for that international situation.

Live Oak Basketball - GO LIONS!

Live Oak High School Basketball
GO LIONS!

There many excellent remembrances of the good old days at Live Oak High School especially of the sports teams. We were playing six man football at the time. Tom Galbreath was all League. Bob Pierce placed at the Modesto state track meet. Jim McElroy always topped the pole vault.

One of the highlights of the basket ball team was a practice game with a team not in our league. It was Yuba City of the Sacramento Valley League playing against Sacramento High and Chico League. They were the team to win that year, 1947 as I remember. They had a league MVP, Jack Nordt, and Johnny Warren, a tough competitor. Jack Nordt later played for Yuba College and BYU.

It was a tighter came for Yuba City than expected, but amazingly, we beat them 41to 40 in two overtime periods. The team is pictured above from my annual.

In another game, we were playing Colusa High in the gym in Live Oak where you could either sit in the floor level bleachers or up stairs in the upper bleachers. It was a fairly close game at halftime. In the second period, as a Colusa player would come toward the basket, Bill Baggett and I would give him the “evil eye” which would consist of holding one eye open with the left finger and pointing with the right finger at the player as he came close to the basket.

This is the total truth. Colusa did not score a point in the second half at that basket and we won the game. Too bad they didn’t give letter sweaters for “evil eyeing”!

Finally, in one of the C Team games, Charlie Flowers was dribbling up for a try at a basket, his gym shorts fell down and tripped him before he got to the basket!