CODE TALKERS


"At the same time I was hearing about Navajo code talkers for the first time I was also hearing about their neighbors, the Zuni. As the story came down to me was that the Marines were able to use the Navajo as code talkers but not the Zuni because the Zuni spoke Japanese."

PARAGRAPH NINE BELOW


the Wanderling


Toward the end of the First World War the commander of the U.S. Army's 142nd Infantry Regiment overheard two Native Americans, both members of the Choctaw tribe, speaking between themselves in their native language. Noticing how different the tones, inflections and rhythm were compared to any other language he had heard, but how the two of them were totally able to understand each other, telling jokes and laughing and discussing the issues of the day, the commander decided to split the two of them up and have them talk to each other using radios instead. After some training the commander put the two Choctaws and their separated radios into use under actual battlefield conditions. On October 26, 1918, in northern France's Argonne Forest, the radio communication between the two Choctaws resulted in a completely successful surprise attack against the Germans, thus the two Native Americans becoming the first code talkers.

The war ended less than three weeks later. Even in that short space of time, the scuttlebutt surrounding the successful use of the code talkers had not only gone to the top of both sides of the action, but had filtered down through to even the lowest ranks, especially those on the front lines. An otherwise rather non-descript Lance Corporal in the Bavarian Army laying on his back in a military hospital recuperating and gasping for air after having been caught in a blistering mustard gas attack a few weeks before, was, as others were along the front lines, eventually a recipient of some of that scuttlebutt. That Lance Corporal would come to play a huge role in World War II. His name, Adolf Hitler.

After rising to the top of the NAZI totem pole as well as the whole country of Germany by the mid 1930s, Hitler, prior to the outbreak of World War II, discretely sent a team of German anthropologists, said to number as many as thirty, to the U.S. to learn Native American languages. The U.S. Army, having caught wind to those attempts, was thereafter reluctant to use Native American code talkers to any extent in the European Theater, although fourteen Commanches code talkers did take part in the D-day invasion. Not only that, the Commanche code talkers continued to serve with distinction right up until the end of European operations.

The Marine Corps, however, lacking the full concerns of the Army regarding what Hitler's anthropologists may or may not have learned because of the Corps central focus of operations being almost exclusively in the Pacific Theater, fully embraced the prospect of using Native Americans as code talkers --- more specifically the Navajo. The following is what has been written in a number of places regarding the Marines stance on their use as code talkers:


"The Marine Corps felt the Navajo language would be more secure for several reasons: the language was virtually unknown outside the Navajo nation, it was unwritten, and it was so complex, involving tonal inflections, that it was difficult to learn as an adult. The original 29 recruits began training in May 1942. Over the course of the war, approximately 400 Navajos (and one Caucasian) became part of this very successful code talking program. In campaigns against the enemy on many fronts, the Native American Code Talkers never made a mistake in transmission nor were their codes ever broken."


During the opening stages of the Second World War and well into it I was a young boy growing up in a small beach town situated along the eastern rim of the Pacific Ocean in southern California, the same Pacific Ocean the Marines were fighting, but for sure, thousands of miles away. Still, although thousands of miles away, where I lived we were still constantly impacted adversely by Japanese submarines prowling up and down off the coast sinking ships and shelling oil refineries. People of Japanese descent from all around the area were being uprooted from their homes and livelihoods and carted off to relocation camps, with reports of some even being shot or hanged.[1] A Japanese Navy two-man midget submarine, as found in the link below, after being bombed from the air even washed up on shore just a few blocks from my house and said to have two dead officers onboard.



TWO-MAN JAPANESE- MIDGET SUBMARINE MOUNTED
ADJACENT TO THE MOTHER SHIP'S CONNING TOWER

(please click image)


It was during that strong anti-Japanese fervent I was raised, after which I carried an ingrained knowledge of the Japanese being the chief belligerents we faced during the Pacific war for several years. Most of the adult men younger than my dad and uncle had been in the Army or Navy. Many of my teachers right on through high school, including some of the women teachers, had been in the military, not the least of which was my high school journalism teacher Miss Helen Sinsabaugh (U.S. Navy 1943-1946).

Not long after the war I ran away from home and stayed with an ex-Marine taxi driver that had fought in every major battle in the Pacific from Guadalcanal northward and, although he was mostly silent on any level of his participation, on occasion he would regale me with a story or two if they underlined an important point that needed to be supported in some fashion.[2]

Growing up as I did as a young boy in the milieu of World War II the war was always big for me. Even though I played cowboys a lot as a kid I also spent a lot of time playing army as well. Surplus stores were all over after the war and I had every imaginable piece of infantry garb and military gear I could get my hands on including steel helmets, pistol belts, hand held signaling mirrors, and even lace-up leggings like they used to wear in the Pacific back when the war first broke out.


(please click image)

But, it wasn't always simply play, much of what I did as play was seeped with history. Even though my home was thousands of miles away from the raging turmoil of the battlefronts during World War II, living practically on the beach along the Pacific coast we were constant hostage to attack. Although most people don't know it or they don't remember it, the hostilities of the war visited our shores more than once, and sometimes so close it was like it was in our front yard. Japanese submarines prowled the waters all up and down the coast with shipping being hit, torpedoed, damaged and sunk. The mainland being hit with shells, bombs, and by air attacks. [3]

My whole life it seems I have been fascinated with and by secret codes. People who knew me as a young boy recount that after I got my first Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph, which I sort of misappropriated from my older brother without his approval or knowledge and after which not only I wouldn't give up, but for years, once getting my hands on they seldom saw me without. They say me listening to Captain Midnight and deciphering his Secret Squadron messages all the while coveting the decoder for myself raised a huge inter-sibling calamity and fuss in the family. But my mother, seeing that using the decoder required dealing with letters and numbers, and me willingly learning them at such an early age, bought a bunch of Ovaltine and sent for another decoder so both my brother and I would have one. Even as a draftee in the military in my early twenties, no sooner had I finished basic than the Army sent me to attend weeks and weeks of fairly intense training as a cryptographer. After which, having a school trained MOS, it was put to use throughout my military service, a MOS that required a top secret security clearance and a whole bunch of time learning to send and receive Morse code --- all of which is covered more thoroughly one way or the other in:


THE CODE MAKER, THE ZEN MAKER
SHANGRI-LA, SHAMBHALA, GYANGANJ, BUDDHISM AND ZEN


1942 CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT DECODER BADGE


Except for an incident that happened in the desert southwest in the early to mid 1940s that involved me and a tribal spiritual elder mentioned in a footnote further down the page, it was, for the most part right after the war with me still a young boy that I started traveling around the desert southwest with my Uncle and began interacting with Native Americans, with more than one of those interactions ending up being highly spiritual in nature. It was during those same early travels that I first heard about and actually met Navajo code talkers. As the nearly ten year old boy I was I thought it was the coolest thing, Native Americans, the Navajo, being placed on the war front and speaking their own language back and forth between themselves and the whole of the Japanese war machine from Hirohito and Tojo to the lowest private not being able to decode or make heads or tails out of what was being said.

At the same time I was hearing about Navajo code talkers for the first time I was also hearing about their neighbors, the Zuni. How the story came down to me was that the Marines were able to use the Navajo as code talkers with no problem, but NOT the Zuni because the Zuni spoke Japanese.[4]

The Zuni native tongue supposedly being closely similar to that of the Japanese language in many respects has always been accepted on the ground in local lore, rumor, and legend. However, rising above the lore, rumor, and legend, it has been suggested there is strong evidence of rather substantial physical contact having existed between the two cultures, an inter-connection that occurred in the not-so-distant past. An anthropologist, Nancy Yaw Davis PhD, has promulgated just such a theory, backing up her theory with reams of research. Although I always thought of it as common knowledge, the idea first came to her in the 1960s, nearly two decades following the end of the war and long after I was made aware of suspected strong Zuni-Japanese similarities through my interaction with the code talkers. She breeched the subject publicly for the first time in 1991 at a brown-bag lunch presentation at the University of New Mexico under the title "The Zuni Enigma: 13th Century AD Asian Influence?"

The contents of that presentation turned into a paper titled "The Zuni Enigma," published in the Summer/Fall 1992 issue of the NEARA JOURNAL. From there it was picked-up and reprinted in "Across before Columbus? Evidence for Transoceanic Contacts with the Americas prior to 1492," Donald Y. Gilmore and Linda S. McElroy editors (1998). In 2001 Davis expanded all her research and data together in a stand alone book under the title The Zuni Enigma.

Davis, in her presentations and various publications, cites as evidence in support of her theory what she describes as a number of striking parallels in language, religion and crafts between the Zuni and Japanese. Not only does she present convincing similarities in the tradition of both, but which are, in relation to the Zunis, totally distinct from other Native American cultures. A few examples of close correlations existing between the Japanese and Zuni languages as reported by Davis are:



As well, according to her research, Davis has found strong biological links through blood type, tooth shape, skull configuration as well as a not very widespread kidney ailment (mesangiopathic glomerulonephritis) both prominent in the Zuni and the Japanese but rare otherwise. The Zuni Sacred Rosette and the Imperial Seal of Japan as cited by Davis in her book, is just one more of those things that add to the enigma. Davis writes in a section called Zuni Prehistory:


"This period, the late thirteenth century A.D., is proposed as the probable time for the arrival of Japanese pilgrims with new language, religion, and genes. If a freeze-frame could capture that event, I believe it would reveal an entourage of people from many backgrounds arriving and deciding this was the exact middle of the universe, and then commencing to build large pueblos, drawing in straggling survivors of the Anasazi civilization.

"Of course we have neither a photograph nor a written record of what happened and why such a consolidation occurred. But this is an unusually thoroughly studied area: Sophisticated tree-ring dating, dendrochronology, provides a rich record of when structures were built, and the timing, severity, and length of droughts; skeletal remains indicate significant physical changes in the population; measurements and excavations of ruins reveal major changes in settlement patterns; glaze on pottery suddenly appears."(see)


Although strong connections and similarities may exist between the two languages as suggested by Davis, truth be told, the Zuni really didn't speak Japanese per se' as I had heard as a young boy. However, for me coming out of the World War II fervent, hearing they spoke Japanese was something I didn't forget. See also:


BUDDHISM IN AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS


Just around the time I finished the 8th grade there occurred a breakdown in the relationship and marriage between my dad and Stepmother ending in divorce --- as well as ending the summers of travels and adventures with my uncle throughout the desert southwest that had long been financially supported by my stepmother. Because of that dissolution, by the start of my high school years my uncle had long returned to Santa Fe and I went to live with my grandmother after a rather unsuccessful placement with a foster couple.[5]

No sooner had I entered the 9th grade than I was able to land a part time job a couple of days a week after school and on some weekends running errands for a house-bound former merchant marine that lived just around the corner from me. In the early days of World War II he had been badly burned when the ship he was on was torpedoed by a German submarine. In order to save himself he had no choice but to jump overboard, landing in an area with oil and naphtha burning along the surface of the water, the fire scorching his skin as he plunged through and returned for air. He spent months in recovery and rehabilitation. Because of the attack and the resulting injuries he was still, years later, hooked up to some sort of breathing apparatus attached to an oxygen tank, plus, on-and-off throughout the day he had IVs stuck into his arms and wires attached in various places for monitoring equipment to record his heart rate, blood pressure and other vitals. So said, for the most part, because he was so hooked up to machines and couldn't move he basically just sat there all day long in a den-like room overlooking the street reading books, newspapers and staring out the window.

The interesting part of the story surrounding the man I eventually came to call my Merchant Marine Friend is that unlike other surviving shipmates he was NOT found immediately following the attack. Actually it was weeks, possibly months after his ship was torpedoed that he was discovered strapped by ropes to a piece of debris floating in the middle of the ocean thousands and thousands of miles away from where his ship went down.

He had no idea how he got there or how he survived but he likened his survival to that of the story surrounding the downed U.S. Navy pilot written about in the novel The High Barbaree. In the novel, the pilot, while on patrol in the South Pacific in a PBY 5-A floatplane, is shot down. He and his co-pilot find themselves stranded and drifting without communication and become listed missing in action and presumed dead. Days go by. To pass the time, through a series of flashbacks, the pilot begins telling stories of his childhood, taking the reader through his life as a young boy including his friendship with his Uncle and how much he loved the tall tales he used to tell. His uncle, a seafaring man who is now a Navy Captain, told him about a mysterious enchanted and uncharted island that rose up out of the sea that he saw once in his youth, an island called High Barbaree. In his stories he even related the latitude and longitude of the island. The co-pilot charts their position and discovers their location is right on top of the coordinates the pilot's uncle had given him for the legendary island many, many years ago. Before the disabled floatplane is able to drift to the actual location --- 1 Degree North, 160 Degrees East --- the co-pilot dies and the pilot is left all alone and on the verge of dying himself, adrift at sea having long since run out of food and water. He is eventually found alive, but not until after he apparently finds refuge on High Barbaree. Of course when he is finally found --- on his downed PBY --- even though he is no longer dying and in good health, as well as seemingly of sound mind, just like in the ancient Egyptian fable The Shipwrecked Sailor, there is no island or sign of High Barbaree.

One day, about 25 years after the 1942 attack, in a small gathering in Taos, New Mexico with my uncle and a few of his friends, I told the story of my merchant marine friend, including the fact that he felt the results of being found practically replicated that of the PBY pilot in High Barbaree. Accompanying us at the table that day, and not at all that unusual, was a man known to be a highly regarded and respected tribal spiritual elder. The elder listened intently to my story and, although not interested in the specifics because much of it was foreign to his culture, the overall theme of the story he liked.

However, a few days later he showed up with a truly elderly man. The spiritual elder had been talking to a group of men about my story when an elderly man stepped forward saying he had been a Code Talker in the south Pacific during World War II and knew about PBYs. This in turn put a second truly elderly man in the group into some sort of trance. Using his native language the second truly elderly man told the Code Talker for ME to beware of PBYs. Because of the unusual nature of the warning, PBYs and all, the spiritual elder brought us all together. The second truly elderly man, calling me by my Navajo name "Haashke yah Niya" (wandering boy) that had graciously been granted me by a tribal spiritual elder, was somehow privy to a story that it had been said that I, as a young boy, had been touched by the White Painted Lady (see). Because of such, he felt a connection that otherwise might not have been there. Basically, through translators, because the second truly elderly man did not have a full command of the English language, he wanted to know if I had access to a PBY. I told him not only had I never been on one or near one, to my knowledge I did not think I had ever even seen one. Then the following happened:


"The old man slumped back almost as though he had fainted. Within minutes he returned to consciousness. He said that if not me someone from my past, possibly a woman, and if not her someone close to her would be impacted adversely in the use of such a craft. He told me to stay away from such aircraft and ensure that any of my friends that might fit the bill stay away from them as well."


At the time I knew nobody that in anyway would be involved with a PBY, especially so since they were for the most part World War II aircraft on the brink of obsolescence.

One summer, albeit unrelated to any of the above by me at the time, I crewed on a yacht come marlin boat owned by the multi-millionaire David J. Halliburton. On one of the days the boat was in the marina a very little girl who apparently couldn't swim fell off the dock into the water. I jumped in and pulled her to a location along the docks where the skipper I worked for, who was following right behind me, was able to lift her out of the water. In the process a small crowd gathered and in the crowd was a woman from my past that I had not seen in years. The following relates to that incident and is found in context at the source so cited:


"Amongst the crowd was a woman that recognized me, a former Rose Marie Reid swim suit model that I knew as Sullivan, but since married to the son of a renowned ocean explorer. They had a boat in the harbor and since we had not seen each other in years, after everybody was sure the girl was OK, she asked me to join her for drinks on her yacht, get into some dry clothes and get caught up. As I was leaving later in afternoon Sullivan asked if I would be willing to go to a party she was throwing in a couple of weeks. As I slowly strolled away down the dock I halfheartedly turned back and nodded in agreement that I would attend." (source)



THE LADY ON THE DOCK


Now, I do not recall if the above incident between the former model and myself occurred before or after the warning by the elderly man, but please note that I say the woman in question was married to the "son of a renowned ocean explorer." She and I never had an opportunity to talk or cross paths again after the aforementioned party. However, some years later --- and with me being in absolutely no position to know of such things --- they, in the mid-1970s, bought a PBY. Four years after the purchase her husband was killed piloting the plane during a water landing.


It is with great sadness that I have recently received notice that Chester Nez, the last surviving member of the Navajo code talkers, passed away on June 4, 2014 at age 93.(see)


KUAN YIN, SHAMBHALA, AND OM MANI PADME HUM


COBRAS, SCARABS, MASERATIS, AND ZEN



(please click


THE WANDERLING AND HIS UNCLE
Their Life and Times Together

NAVAJO CODE TALKERS


BUCK ROGERS
HIS HISTORY AND EVLOLUTION


Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where
we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience
and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.


(PLEASE CLICK)


CLICK
HERE FOR
ENLIGHTENMENT

ON THE RAZOR'S
EDGE


E-MAIL
THE WANDERLING

(please click)



As to the subject of donations, for those of you who may be interested in doing so as it applies to the gratefulness of my works, I invariably suggest any funds be directed toward THE WOUNDED WARRIOR PROJECT and/or THE AMERICAN RED CROSS. Please consider also:


THE NAVAJO CODE TALKERS FOUNDATION






















Footnote [1]


When I was in high school one of my best buddies had moved into a house that three Japanese, just at the outbreak of the war, were said to have been hanged. He was one of seven brothers --- all one year apart one after the other except for the year his parents bought their first television set he used to say. With so many brothers in such a small house he slept on the couch in the living room. He told me on many nights, coming through the front windows along the porch he had seen the shadows of the three hanged Japanese swaying in the wind on the wall behind the couch of the living room. When he would get up and go to the windows nothing was there. I had to see it. It was his father that told me the story of the hanging. I never saw the shadows and now days the house is long gone.

Only a smidgen over two months into World War II one of the weirdest events to transpire during the war on the U.S. mainland occurred, an event that has come to be known as the Battle of Los Angeles or the UFO Over L.A.. On the night it happened a mysterious airborne object of enormous size and of unknown origin overflew the city of Los Angeles and environs in the darkened early morning hours, all the while defying the impact of 1440 rounds of anti-aircraft fire and escaping seemingly unscathed. Decades after the overflight I personally interviewed a man who was an eyewitness to the event. He was a man of Japanese descent who, in a month or so following the overflight would be, along with all the members of his family, sent to the Manzanar internment camp along the barren eastern slope of the High Sierras.

The eyewitness I interviewed was totally different than any other eyewitness in any capacity connected with the event. The reason being is that his location was on the far southern end of the object's path after it cut diagonally across Redondo Beach but prior to it exiting southbound on the eastside of city of Long Beach then out over the ocean. In all the years of reports no one has come forward explicitly as he has.

The name of the eyewitness was Albert Nozaki, an Oscar nominated motion picture art director. Nozaki's nomination was for his creation and design of the Martian flying war machines as seen in the 1953 movie War of the Worlds. From his experience Nozaki told me:


"Nozaki said he incorportated some of the ominous-like aspects of the object he saw such as the curving down contours into his 'War of the Worlds' craft wanting to capture some of the fear he felt as the real-life dark object came toward him --- as though he was going to be clutched up by it. So too, how it mysteriously remained aloft, apprently with some sort of technology or power we did not have. In Wells' novel the machines were held upward by three robot like legs. In the movie he tried to make it seem they were being held off the ground and "walking" by three invisible force-field legs."


When the over-flight occurred, inland from the coast and south of Los Angeles were vast tracts of land that soon after the war would be covered by cookie-cutter homes from one end to the other but were at the time acre upon acre of agricultural fields --- a good portion of those fields under the auspices of Japanese Americans. Nozaki was what I would call a city boy holding a masters degree from USC. He was however, a loyal family member, and some of his relatives who tilled the land in the fields south of Los Angeles were having their crops destroyed at night by bands of raiding trucks that would tear through the fields leaving wide tire tracks and broken watering systems. Sons and other family members who worked the fields all day were taking turns guarding the fields at night. His father asked him to assist and in doing so, on the night the giant object overflew L.A. he just happened to be helping to guard one of the fields. By 1:00 AM a relative or family friend with him who had worked all day and guarded the fields all night the night before, had dozed off. Around three in the morning or so, after drinking almost a whole thermos of hot coffee, Nozaki got out of the truck to shake off a little chill, stretch his legs, and relieve himself. He noticed that when before there was a slight glare of city lights along the horizon from the beach towns a few miles off to the west it was now strangely dark. Feeling in his gut something was strange, and since the truck was parked hidden near a small structure and a few trees, Nozaki walked some distance out into the middle of the field to get a clearer unobstructed view. In our interview he described what happened next thus:


"Then, approaching him well above the fields from the west, silhouetted against the slightly lighter night sky, was a fairly huge dark airborne object coming straight toward him at a fairly quick pace. At first it seemed as though it would take a path off to the right of where he was standing, but before it reached him it just barely began turning flatly toward the south, almost as in a controlled drift. By then he was just under the edge of the object as it went over him with the center off to his left, continuing its turn and eventually disappearing in the southern night sky while all the time gaining altitude. It was huge, dark, very long and wide with no lights or signs of windows. Although it did not have protruding wings like an airplane, the object's outside edges ominously curved down. As well, other than feeling a slight vibrational 'hum' in his chest as it passed over, the object made no sound. Even though it was airborne it did not seem either lighter than air nor remaining aloft by forward thrust. He felt it was being kept up by some kind of downward facing force although he did not sense any pushing or thrust on his body nor did he see any effects against the ground that would indicate such a theory."


THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES: The Radar Dilemma


WORLD WAR II UFO SCARE





















Footnote [2]

Some people have asked just who was the marine? After all I was just a kid and he was a grown man. Was he a friend of the family, a relative, somebody I knew from the past? The answer is he was none of those things. I basically just met him out of nowhere --- fate as some might say.

The eventual meeting between the two of us occurred when a western swing band called Texas Jim Lewis and his Lone Star Cowboys began a long running stint in a huge ballroom down on the front in Redondo Beach. One of the performers that sang with Texas Jim's band was a female vocalist that just happened to be a friend with the marine. Between sets and after the show the three of us would go down to the Wagon Wheel Cafe, basically just below the dancehall, sit in one of the booths and get something to eat. Even though I was a kid, I had become deeply smitten with her.

I don't recall her name, however, not unlike any number of female western singers of the day she had long platinum blonde hair, ruby-red lips, and dressed in the finest female western singer regalia --- white cowboy boots, above the knee white satin skirts, fringed all the way around with hundreds of little strings, topped with white satin western-style blouses with snap buttons, big embroidered red roses and arrow-ended pockets. Whenever it was time to do one of her numbers I would sit on the edge of the stage and just stare at her.

One day I decided to run away from the foster couple I was living with. I gathered up what few things I had and went down to the waterfront, got in the shotgun side of the marine's taxi and never left his side to speak of until months later when my grandmother came and took me away.

The singer always told me she would take me away with her someday and my dream was that she and the marine would get married and we would live happily ever after. Of course, such was not the case. I never saw or heard from either of them again after my grandmother, hearing I had run away, took me back with her the same day she found me. Not having gone away with the singer and the marine still tugs at my heart, remaining even now one of the biggest disappointments of my life. How it would have turned out is a question that will never be answered.


ENTER PBYs AND THE BLACK CATS

One night I was in the Wagon Wheel Cafe with the ex-marine and the singer when a man stepped up to our booth telling the ex-marine that some months before he had been a fare of his, having been taken to Torrance Memorial Hospital to visit a former Navy friend who had been seriously hurt in an auto accident. He said since then he had been contacted by an anonymous source saying the taxi driver had found something he had left in the cab that may have been of some value to him.

The man, apparently without realizing it, had left an envelope in the ex-marines taxi, an envelope that contained a large number of photographs of the man and a bunch of Navy guys in the South Pacific during World War II. By the time the ex-marine discovered the envelope then tried to locate the man's friend in the hospital, the friend had already been released. Over a period of weeks, since the man never came back for the envelope, using his connections and information about unit numbers and such on the photos the ex-marine was able to track him down, leaving a message that he had the photographs. The man, thinking he had left them with his buddy in the hospital, showed up at the Wagon Wheel Cafe to pick them up.




The man sat down at the table and went through the photos one by one, reminiscing about every one, something I found absolutely fascinating. It seems during the war he was a Navy pilot flying PBYs for a then clandestine outfit called the Black Cats. I practically fell off the booth seats, having my breath taken away as he told story-after-story how he flew stealth-like PBYs against Japanese ships and Zeros in the dead of night in almost invisible, all-painted-flatblack planes. They would swoop in quietly, flying just above the surface of the water at no more than mast height, and before the Japanese even knew what hit them, leaving nothing but a path of destruction and sinking ships behind. Japanese fighter pilots couldn't see them from above nor could they get underneath them. So too, they could fly so slow and low if need be that the Japanese fighters would overshoot them trying to come in from behind. Plus the fighter pilots didn't like having to be so low to the water during a night time attack. Most of the time the Black Cats, having nine lives, got away.



COUNTRY-WESTERN SINGER CINDY WALKER
(please click image)




















Footnote [3]


On Christmas day 1941, almost within viewing range of my home where I lived in Redondo Beach, California, the long-range aircraft equipped Japanese submarine I-19 struck against two unarmed American merchant ships. The initial target of the I-19 was the lumber schooner Barbara Olson headed toward San Diego, and secondly, later in the day, not far from San Pedro in the Catalina Channel off Point Fermin, she struck the S.S. Absaroka a 5,695-ton American lumber carrier owned by the McCormick Steamship Company.

The I-19 went on to kill again before its actual overall ultimate demise on November 25, 1943. It is officially recorded as racking up considerable damage and sinking of a number of other vessels prior to that demise --- and not just unarmed freighters either. For example, on September 15, 1942, the I-19 fired a half dozen torpedoes at the aircraft carrier USS Wasp, two of which hit and sank her. The remainder of the four torpedoes hit and damaged the battleship USS North Carolina as well as the destroyer USS O'Brien which sank later.

A few months later the aforementioned two-man Japanese midget submarine washed up on shore next to the Redondo Beach pier --- a submarine which I saw myself and of which my dad lifted me up on to see more closely, actually peering through the open hatch, a midget submarine said to have had two dead Japanese officers inside. Sure, it was nothing like what was happening in either of the two major theaters, but happening none the less.

If that wasn't enough, the Japanese, after successfully consolidating their wartime efforts in Burma, in April of 1944, launched a major invasion into India. Although I was born and raised in a southern California beach community, for about six months as a very young boy I was traveling in India with a couple I had been fostered out to because of debilitating illness faced by my mother at the exact same time as the Japanese invasion. Like thousands of refugees that fled ahead of the Nazi onslaught in Europe, if the Japanese invasion attempts into India has not been slowed down and eventually stopped by the likes of U.S. Army Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell on the ground and Gen. Claire L. Chennault in the air with his Flying Tigers, I too may have been a refugee caught up in events much larger than myself, trying to escape the onslaught of the Japanese. See:


JAPANESE INVASION OF INDIA
DURING WORLD WAR II


CHRISTMAS DAY 1941

As found in the footnote text above, on that exact same day of the S.S. Absaroka attack in the channel off Palos Verdes, Christmas day, December 25, 1941, a half a world away from Redondo Beach, Japanese bombing raids against Rangoon, Burma, as shown on the illustrated page below, found the quiet Christmas dinner for the pilots and ground crews of the Flying Tigers interrupted by the Japanese throwing a slew of 63 bombers escorted by 25 fighters against them. Almost immediately the Flying Tigers were able to scramble 14 P-40s into the air, with the battle ending that day by the A.V.G. having shot down a combination of 35 bombers and fighters with a loss of only five P-40s.


(for the full Rangoon attack story please click the image)

(CONTINUED...)

JUNIOR AIR RAID WARDENS





















Footnote [4]



Because of a clearly seen excessively keen interest by me --- a mere not yet even ten-year old boy or so --- in a potential Zuni-Japanese connection relative to the Zuni and the Zuni being excluded from any code-talker equation during World War II because of it, under the cover of that equation, a Zuni spiritual elder took my uncle and me to an ancient Zuni pueblo site known by the name Kyaki:Ma.

Under the pretense of wanting to show me the ancient Zuni site of significant importance to the Zuni, but without me knowing it was a pretense, I happily went along. The elder said we were going to visit one of the original seven pueblos of Seven Cities of Cibola, important because of the death of a man known as Estevanico at the hands of the Zuni.

Estevanico, I was told, was a guide and translator of a spearhead expedition sent one year ahead of Coronado. While most historians would semi-agree to the elder's esteem or role of Estevanico, most would not agree to the elder's summation regarding the location of death of Estevanico. The majority of historians cite the pueblo known as Hawikuh, however the elder insisted that in Zuni tradition, the site we were going to visit, was the actual place he was killed, and it was done so because he presented himself as some sort of a healer and carried talisman decorated with owl feathers, a symbol of death rather than healing to the Zuni. Later research has pretty much revealed that most of what the elder related to us that day is deemed fairly accurate, albeit offered to us through more traditional tribal fare than typically found in hard-core academic research, although it must be said a full and total consensus of the location of Estevanico's death had never been reached.(see)


VISITING KYAKI:MA AND THE ZUNI STONEHENGE

Why we went to the pueblo site is another story. I thought we were going to be shown secret solid proof related to a Japanese-Zuni connection. Such was not the case and for me it was a big let down. Even though the elder himself seemed quite easily able to discriminated differences large or small between himself as a Zuni and another Native American, say for example of Hopi descent, he didn't seem too concerned with any vast differences that genuinely occur between those with a historical Japanese heritage and those from a Tibetan heritage. However, it was much bigger picture than that, huge actually, with me not realizing at the time I was on the precipice of something major, a fact I wouldn't learn until years later.

Like most of the early pueblo sites the one we visited, at least for me as a kid with no background knowledge of pueblos and such places, it was pretty much a dump of a place, that is, fallen down walls, piles of rocks, covered outlines of rooms. While I was out exploring and finding things that captured my interest which is what my uncle and the elder had been wanting, they kept widening the distance between myself and them. What caught my interest for the most part was not in the ruins itself per se' but a series of five or six upright stone slabs all set in a row at least as high as I, a ten-year old boy was tall, showing to me, as least at the time, no apparent connection the ruins.

It was then I noticed my uncle and the elder, some distance off and not in the pueblo proper, after brushing the ground with their feet in several areas then kneeling and bending down as though they were digging up or removing something from the ground they stood up looking at whatever the elder took my uncle to see. Wanting to know what was so captivating but not being revealed to me, I start heading their way, but was stopped with a hand gesture from my uncle. In the meantime the object of their attention, which seemed to be wrapped in some kind of animal skin almost like ancient mummified leather, appearing all the same from where I stood as a book --- although as far as I knew the Zuni had no legacy of a written tradition, ancient or otherwise. After my uncle carefully looked it over the object was placed as near as I could tell back in the same location it was taken from and covered up in the sand as though nothing ever happened.

When I asked him what all those secretive events were about he answered with a four word phrase that I easily recognized as a Tibetan mantra. I had become aware of and learned the mantra only a year or so before when I was introduced to a comic book hero called the Green Lama. Because his Tibetan background ordained his super skills he quickly rose to the top of being one of my favorites. The following is found in the opening paragraph of the Green Lama link so cited:


"Like Superman and Captain Marvel, the Green Lama was a 1940s superhero. Sporting an everyday guise as Jethro Dumont, a rich New York City resident and man about town, if necessity demanded it and he recited the Jewel in the Lotus Mantra Dumont underwent a startling and dramatic change, becoming the Green Lama, gaining super strength, invulnerability, and the ability to fly."


In an amazing set of timing, karma, and coincidences, as trite as it may sound, if I hadn't just learned of the Green Lama through comic books over the year previous I would have had no clue as to the cryptic remark given me by my uncle:


OM MANI PADME HUM


Although I was able to recognize and understand the mantra and that it's originating source was Tibetan, what I didn't know was how any of what I had seen or heard tied into anything we had been participating in, especially the Zuni and the larger environment of the desert southwest. That would come many years later following the death of my uncle and the rise of the internet. In the late 1990s to at least 2012 or so, bits and pieces of information began to bubble up scattered around the net regarding the potentiality of a sandstone slab found in Zuni territory that had, it was said, unmistakable Tibetan script carved on it's surface, of which, one of the inscriptions was said to clearly be the Om Mani Padme Hum mantra. I have linked the two most memorable internet sites remaining on the subject below, although not necessarily to be taken as an endorsement by me here of their content, because both sites have their critics and of which a good portion is highly valid on the surface, although many critical aspects put forth do loose a lot of their strength when meshed together with what I've presented.

You have to remember I am citing an incident over 60 years ago in the mid to late 1940s when I was a mere yet-to-be ten year old boy. Please note in text of the second link, the author, although nowhere is the name of the pueblo ever brought up he clearly makes reference to the same stone slabs that so enthralled me at Kyaki:Ma. The author writes, and I quote, "a line of large sandstone slabs that had been planted upright deep in the sand. 'Looks kind of like a Zuni Stonehenge,'" which pretty much puts the nail in the coffin as to which Zuni site is being talked about. My uncle took his secret to the grave with him, my remembrance of the events leading up to and surrounding the secret only staying alive through me to this day because of an early childhood fascination of comic book super heroes. Not much to go on, but something.


THE ZUNI/TIBETAN CONNECTION


TIBETAN INSCRIBED TABLET FOUND AT ANCIENT ZUNI SITE



MY TAKE ON THE ZUNI/TIBETAN TABLET

Not one credible archaeologist or scientist with strong undisputed credentials in the field has come forward substantiating the authenticity of the Zuni/Tibetan stone tablet so described in the above two links, nor can I vouch for it myself. For one thing no scientific archaeological backup documentation exists as to when, where, and how it was actually discovered, in other words, a la Carlos Castaneda, who I am totally familiar with, no field notes. The quote below is taken from the second link:


"The former pueblo site at the base of the mesa is where the archaeological dig was being conducted at the time of Dan's of the enigmatic tablets discovery by Dan. I asked them why the discovery wasn't mentioned to the other archaeologists and Clifford made the comment, 'Why show it to them, they'd just steal it like everything else.'"


The quote clearly indicates a discussion of an archaeological dig and archaeologists, but of who or of what affiliation they represent isn't mentioned. As well, one could if so aligned, side with Clifford to some extent, however what he does say carries within it's contents the scent of archaeologists within the group other than Zuni --- possibly untrustworthy in some fashion. Why he would be working with such a group is not known. The thing is, you just can't put together a high profile ragtag group of pothunters and go jackbooting ramshackle through a bunch sacred Zuni archaeological sites whenever a whim comes up, Zuni or otherwise. If the so mentioned Dan, said to have found the tablet, was a Zuni archaeologist of some repute, then most likely the digging team was duly registered and authorized to be operating on the location. If such is the case, knowing how sacred the tribal lands and artifacts are to the Zuni, it can be ensured that records exist on who, what, when, and where the team whence came.

In my much younger days I would have made a road trip to at least see the stone for myself, so at this point I am taking the graphics of the stone as the stone being real, although for all I know it might not even exist. The credibility I give to the Zuni slab actually existing is the incredible coincidence of where and how it was said to have been found and my experience with my uncle at the same Zuni site 60 years or more ago, especially so the mention of the upright slabs. The following is also from the second link above describing the location of the discovery of the stone:


"The ancient pueblo site was located north of a dirt road that snaked east from the present day pueblo. We parked and began to walk up a sandy hill that was covered in prickly pear and rabbit-ear cactus. We wound our way up and over the hill headed toward the base of the beautiful mesa that towered over the site. We took a break as Dan showed us the exact spot where he found the tablet. I looked around and marveled that I was standing on such a historic spot and I wondered if this was the exact spot where Coronado got beaned off his horse. The view to the south was spectacular in the late afternoon light that graced the ancient site. Majestic clouds dotted the sky and a pair of soaring ravens eyed us from high above as we headed over to a line of large sandstone slabs that had been planted upright deep in the sand. 'Looks kind of like a Zuni Stonehenge,' I joked as we scratched our heads and tried to figure out why this unusual arrangement of large stone slabs had been placed there."


ZUNI STONEHENGE


One of the complaints lodged against the the object is that it didn't seem old enough, that is, it did not have an ancient quality about it, the carvings looking as though they had been done fairly recently --- although I must say I've seen shards of painted pots at various archaeological sites that have been exposed to the weather for centuries and you would never know it. However, the author does have a valid point. Nowhere in anything I have read about the Zuni/Tibetan stone has it been brought up that it was wrapped in anything, leather or otherwise. I'm the only one that says anything about such a probability. It was quite clear even at the distance I was from my uncle and the elder that whatever they dug out of the ground and were looking at was wrapped in what appeared to be leather.

If the object the elder and my uncle were looking at was indeed the same stone depicted in the graphics, then being wrapped as it was would most certainly have shielded it from the ravages of time, allowing from whenever it was made to the present day to have remained relatively unharmed. One thing that can be surmised is that the stone was carved in America on sandstone and not transported from Tibet in some manner. When the tablet was carved and who carved it is another thing. It certainly isn't representative of typical Zuni handiwork. The day I was at the pueblo with my uncle, from a distance I saw what looked like a book, although truth be said leather wrapped around a piece of sandstone could easily take on all the semblance of book from a distance. If what the elder revealed that day to my uncle was NOT the stone but instead a parchment of some sort with the same Tibetan writing on it that appears on the alleged stone, then what's not to say that someone in more recent times didn't simply copy the inscriptions onto the sandstone to ensure it's longevity, with the book, if it was a book, secreted away for posterity.





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Footnote [5]


Sometime in 1950 my dad and stepmother went on an extended trip to Mexico and South America for a couple of years because of what my stepmother viewed as an increasingly unfriendly business environment --- and it was their departure and the length of their stay away that brought about the demise of MY times with my uncle.(see)

During the two years they were gone things really changed, and not all of the change transpired quickly or smoothly in one year blocks --- nor to my benefit. A good part of it had to do with financing, which, while they were gone, either began to erode, became sporadic at best, or just plain stopped while the two of them were out of the country. My stepmother's longtime trusted bookkeeper began to renege on payments for our upkeep such as rent, mortgages, utility bills, and day to day expenditures, then began siphoning off the money --- if not more --- for himself. My older brother, without the monthly stipend to the people he was fostered to, came back from Idaho to live with our grandmother in the mountains east of L.A. before she moved back to Redondo Beach. My uncle, who I had been with almost exclusively for four years straight, found himself in such a position that he eventually had to return to his old stomping grounds in Santa Fe.

Just as my dad and stepmother were leaving for South America, with no one specifically in the picture to oversee my younger brother, a woman by the name of Pauline who had at onetime worked for my stepmother came forward and requested --- or at least consented or coerced in some fashion --- to have him come live with her.

With my father, stepmother, brothers and grandmother all elsewhere with lives of their own and my uncle just on the cusp of returning to Santa Fe, I was left basically hanging. Without many options, after some heavy negotiating that bordered on pure begging by my uncle with Aunt Pauline, as we were told to call her, she halfheartedly agreed to take me in as well. I don't recall if I started an even school year or not when I moved to Pauline's to be with my younger brother, but I do know by the spring of 1951 I was fully ensconced, however good or bad, and my uncle was long gone.

During the summer that ended up being my last summer at Aunt Pauline's --- which coincidently turned out to be the summer just prior to me starting my first year in high school --- I ran away from home, ending up at my stepmother's newly bought ranch in the Mojave Desert. She had only just divorced my father and unwilling to call my grandmother because of some sort of animosity between them, in the process of trying to contact him in some fashion, called my uncle.

My uncle decided I should come stay with him in Santa Fe until something could be resolved. My stepmother, concerned I might get off a bus somewhere along the way before I got to Santa Fe, arranged for a World War II pilot she knew to fly me to my uncle's, figuring I would be less apt to get out mid-flight. The pilot picked me up early one morning in an AT-6 leaving from an old abandoned wartime desert airfield not far from her ranch called Victory Field. Before I even arrived my uncle had decided to go to France and asked me to join him. His reasoning for doing so, however adventurous for me or however lofty or shortsighted of him, is summed up in the quote below as found in the source as cited:


SKIPPING ROCKS WITH EINSTEIN


ROGERS AND DEVINE


THE STEPMOTHER


FIREHAIR






















The rational behind my father and stepmother's decision to go to South America, i.e., leave the country, grew, and continued to grow following the arrest on May 19, 1948 of woman by the name of Brenda Allen. Allen's arrest, because of operating in a closely similar economic sphere as my stepmother, sent what I would call chills down my stepmother's spine. In my stepmother's view, from the time of Allen's initial arrest to her conviction (without a jury) and sentence to serve time in the State Institution for Women at Tehachapi in September, 1948, was way too harsh and moved way to quickly. Even when a police officer, by her own testimony before the grand jury stated that as a witness she swore falsely against Allen under oath during the trial, a motion for a new trial was denied, the judgment and the order were allowed to stand. Allen filed an application for probation which was granted on condition that she serve one year in the county jail in addition to five years probation. In May, 1949 she commenced to serve her time. Less than four months later, Friday, September 2, 1949, Allen was released from jail on order of the California Supreme Court based solely on the fact that the police officer had purjured her testimony.






















ZUNI-TYPE ROSETTE PETROGLYPH IN THE VALLEY OF FIRE
NOT FAR FROM THE VEGAS STRIP AND COLORADO RIVER.

__________________(please click)


Because of my rather extensive travels throughout the desert southwest with my uncle from a very young age I had developed a fairly strong general working knowledge of Native Americans cultures, absorbing as a second nature many of their subtle intricacies. My earliest interaction with Native Americans on any sort of a level, especially spiritually related that I can recall circulated around me being caught up in a major train crash that occurred in the middle of the Arizona desert, a train crash that injured over 100 people and killing four.

Part of the crash event circulates around a somewhat mysterious tribal spiritual elder my uncle arranged for me to be watched by until he, my uncle, could catch up with me. After the wreck, because the adult or adults I was traveling with had been hospitalized, I was left without adult supervision and my uncle, who lived 300 miles away in Santa Fe arranged for a nearby tribal elder he knew to oversee me until my he was personally able to intercede and safely get me to Los Angeles Union Station and thus then, to my grandmother's home in California. The thing is I recognized the spiritual elder the moment he walked into the hospital waiting area looking for me as found in the following quote:


"Mid-evening on the night of the-unknown-to-anybody at the time up-coming crash I had gone to bed in the bunk in my compartment and as far as I knew had fallen fast asleep. Sometime during that period between the time I fell asleep and the crash occurred I found myself neither asleep nor in my bunk but outside of the train standing barefoot on the desert floor in the middle of the night in my PJs some distance off from a set of railroad tracks, my hand being held by an elderly Native American man."


THE SPIRITUAL ELDER AND THE SANTA FE CHIEF


Three of four years passed, when around ten years old I was on one of my infamous road trips with my uncle, only this time to San Rafael Swell that included Bryce and Zion Canyons. I was just barely into the early portion of my Native American learning curve when we stopped at a major petroglyph site north of Las Vegas, Nevada less than 20 miles from the Colorado River called the Valley of Fire. While exploring the various petroglyphs my uncle pointed out several glyphs he said that except for the difficulty of being hand-etched into the rock surface, and in the same way the big horn sheep and the human figures are abstracted, they duplicated the Zuni Sacred Rosette --- explaining that if so, their location would be unusual in that the Zuni was a tribe known to inhabit areas well to the east. Because of like and similar type input over time I became familiar enough with the Zuni culture to know that they used the rosette amongst their symbology, however never to my knowledge, tied directly to any kind of recognizable Asian script.



A ZUNI ROSETTE AT TOP
IMPERIAL SEAL BOTTOM


As mentioned in the main text, Davis cites as evidence in support of her theory what she describes as a number of striking parallels in language, religion and crafts between the Zuni and Japanese. The Zuni Rosette and the Imperial Seal of Japan, as graphically depicted above and cited by Davis in her book, is an example of some of what she presents as that paralleling supportive evidence. To add a little mystery to the whole thing I offer the following from the source so cited:


"I was cutting across Arizona from Phoenix to Flagstaff on my way to Santa Fe, New Mexico to see my Uncle who was quite ill. In the process of that cutting across I went through the mile-high old mining town of Jerome hoping to catch up with a onetime army buddy of mine who lived there. As it was, I was told he wasn't in town and not expected back for two or three days. Jerome is a small community built on the side of a mountain about 300 miles north of the Mexican border in a fairly rugged area of Arizona. It is full of boutique-like arts and crafts stores, antique shops and little restaurants. In one of the antique shops in a glass case in with a bunch of costume jewelry, old watches and other trinkets I came across something that appeared to me as being rather odd, a heavily weathered if not ancient cast ingot looking all the same as being gold. Inset on the top surface were bas-relief markings, of which one appeared to be the sacred rosette on the Native American tribe called Zuni. Along with the rosette symbol was what looked like Asian script, possibly Chinese or Japanese. There had been rumors to the effect that the Zuni were impacted by a large influx of Japanese from across the Pacific in the 13th century, but nothing ever discovered was so blatant as to have recognizable Asian script associated with it. As for the ancient Zuni there is no record of them ever having an interest in gold, and surely they never possessed the ability to cast it. However, I thought, since time immemorial the Japanese did. When I asked the woman behind the counter about the ingot she confirmed it was gold and said the owner took it out of his safe now and then and put it in the glass case just to attract attention. If it was actually for sale or not she didn't know."(source)





















The Zuni elder's mention of the Seven Cities of Cibola may have been the first time the Seven Cities came up in my life, but it sure wasn't the last, following me throughout my childhood into adulthood one way or the other. For starters see:


LOST SHIP IN THE DESERT





















ZUNI STONEHENGE



UPRIGHT SLABS AT KYAKI-MA CIRCA 1984

By going to the second link in Footnote [4], Tibetan Inscribed Tablet Found At Ancient Zuni Site, the author, although nowhere is the name of the pueblo ever brought up, clearly makes reference to the same stone slabs that I saw and so enthralled me as a young boy at Kyaki:Ma. The author writes, and I quote, "a line of large sandstone slabs that had been planted upright deep in the sand. 'Looks kind of like a Zuni Stonehenge,'" which pretty much puts the nail in the coffin as to which Zuni site is being talked about.


Courtesy Historic Zuni Architecture and Society: An Archaeological Application of Space Syntax. There is a good discussion of the whole of the Zuni site including the slabs that starts on page 45. See:


CLICK HERE





















VALLEY OF FIRE STATE PARK





















Of course, when the war with the U.S. was still raging in high gear all around the world, everything was being directed toward the use by the troops. It was only after the war that all of that military equipment, much of it brand new and still wrapped or in boxes in the pipeline on its way overseas, was suddenly stopped in transshipment and became surplus, being dumped on the market for pennies on the dollar. It was sometime after that Army Navy surplus stores began popping up all over and soon as well full page Army surplus ads started showing up in comic books issue after issue.

Take a close look at the full color Army surplus ad below. Back in those days a kid, like I was in those days, could order knives, machetes, and axes if they were so predisposed. My dad even bought a brand new World War II Army surplus jeep right off the docks in San Francisco by responding to a similar ad. When the war ended the jeep, along with hundreds of others, was lined up on the docks just about to be shipped off to the South Pacific. The government was selling them off as fast as they could, first come first served for $225.00 bucks.(see)




Before then, while we were over our heads fighting for our lives on two or more major war fronts spread all over the globe, although there were comic books with full page ads, what they championed was much different --- albeit, a lot of them war related in some fashion. That's how me being a Junior Air Raid Warden came into the picture. I responded to an ad. My dad was an Air Raid Warden and I wanted to be one too.

The Junior Air Raid Warden Kit I sent for, although not a box top offer like I usually responded to, did fall into a similar or like category, that is, getting it in the first place through a comic book ad. What was different with the Junior Air Raid Warden Kit was that it's application of use was raised to a higher level. Fictional characters like Captain Midnight, while great role models in the fight against the Axis and had all kinds of adventures combating our enemies, some of them based on actual facts, in the end they were still make believe.

While it is true one could argue that the air raid kit I sent for was a "toy," air raids themselves were REAL. The chance of attacks were not fictional, but an actuality. Living on the coast we were constant hostage to the possibility of attack. Christmas day, December 25, 1941, practically within eyesight of my home in the California beach community where I lived, a Japanese submarine, the I-19, took up a position in the narrow channel between Santa Catalina Island and the mainland just off Point Fermin near San Pedro where my dad worked in the shipyards. Laying in wait at periscope depth in sight of the fully operational military installation of Fort MacArthur, without warning, the I-19 torpedoed the unarmed U.S. freighter SS Absaroka followed then by a nearly clean escape. A clean escape that encompassed going right past by my place just off the coast before turning west to dive into the deep marine channel not far off the Redondo Beach pier. All those Japanese submarines that plied their way up and down the California coast, and there were a bunch of them, were aircraft equipped, capable of launching airplanes on a moments notice, so we had to remain vigilant, not just play.


JUNIOR AIR RAID WARDENS



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My dad actually bought the Jeep after answering an ad similar to the full size black and white ad further down the page. It offered surplus Jeeps for $278.00. Although there were hundreds of scams going around right after the war, after looking into it he discovered he could actually purchase a brand new, or at least never used, World War II Jeep for $225.00 cash right off the docks in San Francisco, which in reality turned out to be not docks in San Francisco, but across the bay in the naval ship yards at Vallejo or Alameda.




I still remember as a boy showing up with my dad and brothers. The whole place turned out to be a huge labyrinth of buildings, cranes, railroad tracks, and narrow between the structures roadways. On the docks were literally hundreds and hundreds of jeeps lined up row after row along with all kinds of other military hardware and equipment. The jeeps themselves had been taken right off the factory assembly line to the docks months before for transshipment to the South Pacific just as the war ended and when I was there with my dad as a kid, all of them were still just sitting there gathering dust and getting flat tires.

Other than learning a new word and having it added to my vocabulary, i.e., cosmoline, except for one thing, I don't recall anything specifically about the logistics of how or what my dad had to do to get the jeep, how long it took, how much paperwork he had to shuffle, or how the jeep was prepared so we could drive it home, only that it was and we did --- drive it home, that is. The one thing I remember is that the man who sold my dad the jeep told him he couldn't pick it up until the next day because of some longshoreman rule. The thing is, my dad brought two longshoremen with him and the man who sold my dad the jeep gave it to him. The two longshoremen were provided by a longtime old friend of my stepmother named Johnny Roselli.

During the heat of the summer my dad didn't want to drive down California's central valley on Highway 99 or cross over the Sierras to use the 395, although once to either highway it would have been the most direct to the ranch. Instead he chose to drive down the California coastline on Highway 1 --- and what a trip it was no matter what highway we would have used. A jeep, no top, my dad and three kids, no real back seats and all before seat belt days. At first the jeep wouldn't go over 45 miles an hour. When we stopped for gas for the first time and with my dad complaining, the attendant, who had been in the Army and knew about jeeps said it was because of a "governor," a device or some such thing the Army put on vehicles to ensure they weren't driven too fast. The attendant took a screwdriver, fiddled with a few things, and the next thing we knew the jeep could do over 60! A couple of days later after camping along the way we were back at the ranch.

Living on the ranch in the high desert of the Mojave in those days were heady times. With the war finally over almost everything was doing nothing but going upward. All kinds of things were happening, especially in the aircraft and automotive fields and happening in the desert besides. The ranch was located not far from Muroc Dry Lake the same place Edwards Air Force Base was located. So too, the ranch wasn't far from Mirage Dry Lake either. On the ground at Mirage were nothing but numberless hot rods and belly tank lakesters. My uncle would take us out there to watch some of the hopped-up Ford flatheads hitting 150 mph. In the air, flying right over the ranch, were B-36s and flying wings. Higher up they were testing the Bell X-1 and breaking the sound barrier.

For us, we went from a bunch of kids tooling around the ranch to chasing locomotives out across the raw desert land at 90 miles per hour all the while watching B-36s and flying wings and hearing and sometimes feeling the sonic booms from the X-1.


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WORLD WAR II SURPLUS JEEPS
NEW, STILL IN A BOX FOR $50.00

JEEP IN A BOX


THE BOY AND HIS JEEP: ADVENTURES IN THE DESERT

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