Archery

Regardless of one's college major, most states require every undergraduate to enroll in physical education courses.  In state universities, these are legislative regulations, no exceptions.  Actually, only P.E. instructors cared; but, you know: the law is the law. Why else have lawmakers? Administrators didn't care.  They just wanted forms filled in.

As the rules didn't say anything about what a P.E. class had to be to pass muster, at Cal State San Francisco, John Haake and I signed up for girls' archery.

We didn't have to change, or shower, or sprint to the next class in the few minutes remaining. And if it rained, we didn't even have to leave the library.

The targets were set up at the football field, a comfortable walk from the main campus building. Neither of us was particularly skilled.  Big deal!  Neither were any of the girls.  And nobody cared, not even the instructor.  She told us she was grading us on showing up and on helping each other. BUT we had to retrieve our own arrows.

The best part about the practices was that between every volley of arrowing,   we all sauntered to the targets and back together. Girls do talk a lot.

After a while, we were actually hitting the targets oftener than not.  One girl made a bulls eye once. She had the instructor sign the target. She took it to her sorority.

I hadn't planned it, but all through high school and college, I only went to a regular P.E. class a total of three semesters -- in tenth grade, once Cal. State San Jose, and once at Cal State S.F.

       

At Berkeley they let you play noontime basketball.  Several fellows made themselves a team (of sorts) that would do. At San Jose they insisted that, if you were going to teach, you had to play on a squad of some sort three times a week.  One semester of that qualified for P.E. credits.

I wasn't cheating my body, and, clearly, nobody cared.  My sister, who followed me to S.F., asked me if the archery girls had to wear “those awful gym outfits.”  When I said no, she said she would sign up for the next semester.  I don't remember if she did or not. Probably not, because she began dating a basketball player. The basketball court was nowhere near the football field.

Sully

His surname was “Sullivan," which, of course, meant that he was called “Sully.” He made basketball look effortless.  He was always in the right place doing the right thing with graceful ease.  I wished he’d been playing for our Polytechnic High School.  When his team from Lowell High came to our gym to play our 135 pound squad, I was assigned to write up our game for our school paper, but I focused on “Sully” from the time his team got off the team bus.

High school students collect in fairly good numbers to watch football contests, but the rooting sections for nearly any other activity rarely reaches double digits. This game between Sully’s Lowell High "lightweight" squad and our very ordinary squad drew about a dozen spectators, probably all relatives of the players with a girlfriend or two.

Sullivan had come to play basketball just the same, and he was magnificent.  He made our players look as if they hadn't been coached much.  My “Poly” was embarrassed.

When I turned in my report to our faculty advisor, she said,  “You’ll be criticized for putting this in our paper.”  I shrugged.  “He's better than anybody in our whole school,” I said.  “He's the best in the league at any weight.”

              

“All right,” she said. “You’ll hear about it, though.”  I gave another elaborate shrug.  The flack wasn't as much as she’d predicted, and only my friends actually called me dumb. 

Lowell’s school paper reprinted my story.  Then the San Francisco Chronicle apparently took notice, giving Sully a half page following Lowell's reprint.

When Sullivan became the first “lightweight” basketball player in a San Francisco high school to be named “All City” on the unlimited team, I sort of felt that I’d contributed.  Anyway, I felt justified in writing up an "enemy" athlete.  Also, my faculty advisor suggested that I had earned a parenthesis alongside Sully's name. 

I never saw Sully after that game or heard what happened to him, except that a Sullivan from Lowell was listed as a WWII casualty.  I am glad I was assigned to cover that game.  It was like watching a leopard.  It also taught me that I wasn't one.

Guerillas

While serving in the Pacific, most of my orders for my LCT (Landing Craft, Tank) were simply a TBF message to proceed to a coded point in the Leyte Gulf, and then to another. These meant a ship was waiting for us, where we would take on a cargo and later beach it at a coded location.  We didn't believe that our progress was much of a secret, as we were quite sure that Japanese hiding in the hills were watching our every move. They couldn't know our cargoes exactly; but if they were as smart as we (and they were), nobody was fooling anybody.  It just didn't matter.

Sometimes, though, we actually did something secret.  Like the time our cargo was a group of eight Philippine guerrillas and their officer.

Arriving at a beach well south of our usual haunts, we were met by the Philippine officer (a man in his late twenties) and his crew of eight, all of them under twenty, which become our secret cargo.  The officer was a handsome, clean cut, articulate person.  The eight who boarded with him were something else. They could have arrived the day before from East Los Angeles.

The nine young men came over our ramp like cats over a fence.  They were lithe as gymnasts, smoothly muscled, their eyes flicking this way and that like Mafiosos on a job.  The officer approached, saluted, extended his hand, identified himself, and never smiled.

I returned his salute, and shook his hand.  The salute part was awkward, as no LCTers bothered with any protocol, nor among officers, and, on my ship, between my crew and me.

I offered him and his men coffee, a shower, and whatever else we might do for them.

He spoke beautiful English when he thanked us for our hospitality.  His crew accepted the coffee but were disinclined to converse much with my crew. None of them spoke much English and little more Spanish. Their fluency was in Tagalog. It might as well have been Navajo.

Ignoring the nearly vertical sun, they sat on the deck in a tight ring.  At least one, usually two, constantly swept eyes over the area. Every time a door moved the slightest bit, an extra wave tapped our vessel, or a new sound from beyond the ship occurred, all eight heads flipped.

The officer, a lieutenant, told me that he had four years of engineering at Manila's university and hoped, “after this,” to do graduate work at the University of Southern California.

“Your crew?” I asked.

His face clouded.  “They only know to murder,” he said too softly for any of them to hear. “They'll go back to their villages; but they won't adjust well.  They'll drift to Manila, or another city, and do what they've been doing now since Bataan -- murder.  They're restless now because we've only gotten about a Jap a day for the past week.  We know that there are a few thousand in those hills.” He pointed north.

I smiled. We'd been sailing by those hills several times a day for weeks, usually close enough to see parrots.  We'd even considered inspecting a waterfall we could see back a short distance in the hillside.

“USC,” I said. “It has a fine engineering department.  Lots of the students are Arab.”  The officer nodded.  “And, at USC, about 25 per cent of the students will be Nisei and Sansei.”

The officer pointed to his eight young men.  Very softly, he said, “They don't know anything else.  They couldn't live there.”

“You?” I asked.

He didn't answer.

El Valle de Los Caidos

While Nazi Germany plotted the Berlin-to-Baghdad Express, Stalin thought that competition meant eliminating everybody.  Europe and the U.S. pretended that if we just looked the other way, they would go away.  They didn't.

Instead, the world wide disaster brought on by the Roaring Twenties and the Allies having trashed WWI's losers, led to the mushrooming of dictators, every country seeing enemies among themselves.  Up sprang opportunists promising instant relief.  Translation: “I'll rescue you from these enemies within.  And I'll beat up on your neighbors.”  They all called themselves Socialists.  It was the first time I'd heard of right wing, conservative socialism; but then Stalin's Communism looked remarkably like Ivan's Czarism.

Francisco Franco was “protector of the Crown,” building his Fascist army in Africa and bent on turning Spain into his own Falange.  Hitler, wanting to try out new weaponry, gave to Franco guns, specialists, and military vehicles. Stalin promptly matched the Nazi contributions with his own. Spain's modest, internal tussle stopped being modest.

England only really cared about Gibraltar and remained technically neutral. Which, de facto, meant Spain was flooded with enough spies to form an unofficial United Nations.  Spain became the safest place to be during WWII.

That, in turn, meant Franco had to keep his people relatively calm. Unlike every other dictatorship, he treated loyalists and populists alike with careful respect. 

Toledo

His political masterpiece was creating El Valle de los Caidos (The Valley of the Fallen), memorializing combatants of BOTH sides equally. Placed in La Mancha, not far from Toledo, the site is deliberately isolated.  Even the countryside is quiet, almost barren.  Rising from the cone of an ancient caldera, Franco built a magnificent basilica replete with massive, action murals.  One could be standing before Diego Rivera exhibitions.

Driving toward the site, one begins to feel a grayness settling in. The memorial spire appears gradually, peering above cone center.  Finally, coming around a curve to the parking area, the great building emerges suddenly, like a curtain drawn. 

A wide promenade surrounds the basilica guarded by several bronze lions, larger than elephants.

Inside, the dome is dominated by massed action murals, massed violence.  Bloody courage is everywhere...above, to the sides, in every direction, even in side rooms.  Inscriptions detail the history minutely. 

              

A guard helped me photograph one of the side room ceiling murals.  I asked him how Spaniards, some three decades since the war, now feel about Franco.  He shrugged slightly.  He responded in Spanish, “That was then. El Generalissimo has mellowed, as have we  –  my parents. We Spanish are, as you say, open of the heart.”

He was so right!  I loved Spain.  Probably because they were so wonderful to me, everywhere.  The longer I was in Spain, the more I've puzzled that these people could have waged the most savage violence on each other.