Memoirs of a Dromomaniac: A Randy Romo from One Side of the Earth to the Other

By V Traven

MEMOIRS OF A DROMOMANIAC: A Randy Romp from one Side of the Earth to the Other

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462856831

V Traven

For forty years, v traven worked as a professor and researcher at one of Texas’ premier universities, where he authored or coauthored 150 scholarly works. On his retirement in the autumn of 2011, at the age of seventy, he decided to begin a new career as a commercial writer and author. The son of a career soldier, traven early developed a life-long penchant for travel; thus, Memoirs of a Dromomaniac represents his first foray into the world of commercial literature and the settings shift from various parts of North America to most of Eurasia and segments of North and East Africa. *”v traven” is a pseudonym that spoofs the pen name chosen by the legendary reclusive writer, B.Traven who was the author of inter alia The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was first published in New York in 1935 by Alfred A. Knopf.

Book preview

MEMOIRS OF A DROMOMANIAC

A Randy Romp from One Side

of the Earth to the Other

V Traven

Copyright © 2011 by V Traven.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011905882

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4628-5682-4

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4628-5681-7

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4628-5683-1

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Dedication

1 1941-1951

2 The Death Of Koba (Winter 1953)

3 The Chaplain’s Daughter (1954)

4 Eddie Scott Couldn’t Hit A Curve Ball, And I Got Little League Elbow, Killeen, Texas (Spring 1955)

5 Saving Vic Traven (Late Summer 1956)

6 The Birth Of A Dipsomaniac (New Year’s Eve 1957)

7 A Time To Live And A Time To Scythe (Summer 1958)

8 The Ice Princess And I (Spring 1959)

9 The Great Eiffel Tower Caper (Fall 1959)

10 Monaco Or Bust (Spring 1960)

11 You Saw Us—Ing In The Chapel (Spring 1961)

12 The Pleasure Of The Sierra Madre (Summer, Fall 1964)

13 To Da Nang And Back (1966-1967)

14 The Bunny And The Bong (Spring 1973)

15 Arrested (Twice) In The Ussr (Summer 1973)

16 To Silken Samarkand (Summer 1973)

17 No Visa To Niigata (Summer 1973)

18 Homecoming (1973)

19 Back To The Roots (March-April 1985)

20 Golden Link

21 To The Land Of The Black Dragon (Spring 1987)

22 Into Brightest Africa

23 Lolita And Zhores (1987-1999)

24 Shunga On The Shinkansen (Spring 1989)

25 End-To-End (Summer 1990)

26 Seoul Food With A Side Order Of Panmunjom (Winter 1990)

27 Nine Eleven (Fall 2001)

28 The Alanian Invasion (Winter 2000 To Summer 2003)

29 To The Cradle Of Humanity (Spring 2006)

30 The Stroke Of Midnight (Spring, Summer 2008)

31A Dromomaniacal Conclusion

Epilogue

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my mother, Annie Laura, who lived in accordance with the philosophy that it is always better to give than to receive, and she gave, gave, gave until there was nothing left to give, and that which she gave most was love. To my wife, Natalie Akhbulatovna, who, through thick and thin, was there for me when I needed her most. To my children, Eliot and Jessie Traven, Vicki and Bradley Bodwell, and grandchildren Fischer Bodwell, Henry Bodwell, Wesley Bodwell, Sedik Traven, and Abby Traven. To my closest friends and most ardent supporters, Peter Maffitt, Danila and Carol Kitt, Clifford J. Pete Peterson, Ivan Gatchik, Dima and Lyusy Pines, Bella Bychkova-Jordan, Terry Jordan-Bychkov (deceased, 2003), Ron and Sally Vardy, Alan and Iris Wood, Harry and Sandra Walsh, Birgitta Ingemansen, Bryan and Larissa Redman, Harrell Rodgers, Joseph and Jo Nogee, Russell Curtis, Edna Aguila-Thompson, Vladimir and Svetlana Fogel’, Rita Griffin, Robert Lineberry, John Antel, Wang Ching-Hsing and Robert Blunt. To my stepfather, Dale Griffith-Traven; my sister, Sharon; my brother, Kim; and my cousins, Mike and Allyson Jones, and Lewis Wade Rooks.

—V. Traven

Houston, Texas

September 2010

Dromomania: an often irrational impulse to travel or wander.

1

Memoirs of a Dromomaniac (1941-2010)

Memoirs of a Dromomaniac: The Early Years (1941-1951)

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

—W. Shakespeare

I’m typing this one key at a time, with the index finger of my right hand, the reason for which will become evident as my story progresses. Typing this way is time-consuming and fatiguing, and if I sit in the same position for too long, it becomes downright painful.

I have lived an interesting life, not that of Steven Callahan, who survived seventy-six days adrift in a rubber raft on the Atlantic Ocean; not that of Sir Edmund Hillary, first conqueror of Mount Everest; not that of the fabulously wealthy adventurer, Richard Branson; not that of my favorite travel writers, Paul Theroux and Jon Krakauer; not that of the incredible medal-of-honor-winning politicos, Teddy Roosevelt or Daniel Inouye… No, many other humans have led more vigorous, adventurous, and successful lives and lived to tell about them, but now that I am nearing the age of seventy, it is quite evident that my life has proved to be very intriguing. My friends and others tell me so.

I was born in the year of Pearl Harbor, when the planet Earth accommodated a mere 2.2 billion people. I was alive during World War II, bore witness to the Korean Conflict, served as a marine officer in Vietnam, and vicariously observed at least two Middle East bloodlettings. I have lived under thirteen U.S. presidents, have been to every U.S. state save one, and have seen 40 of Earth’s 192 countries.

Inspiring my dromomania is the fact that I was and in some ways still am an army brat. As a youth, I played baseball, basketball, hockey, and football, the latter of which I tackled well enough to obtain an athletic scholarship. I have studied seven languages but speak only two. I have earned and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. I have drunk barrels of alcoholic beverages, sung thousands of songs, loved dozens of women and married three, and helped to raise eight children that I know of. I have lived during a time the planet ostensibly cooled and during a time that it has warmed again, all the while watching with trepidation Earth’s human population soar to seven billion.

The Maiden Head

My maternal family tree precedes the American Revolution to a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Josiah Bartlett, governor of New Hampshire. Whereas my paternal great-grandfather fought all five years of the Civil War as a Confederate Private, meaning that he was either one of the luckiest or most craven Johnny Rebs to have ever donned the gray uniform.

Until I was five, I had a recurring nightmare: I’d walk up to a chicken wire fence and insert the index finger of my right hand. An angry hen would peck the tip and bring forth a spurt of blood, sending me into a drowsy panic. When I finally told my mother about the childish dream, she replied that the incident had actually occurred in Waco, Texas, before I was two.

A less persistent but no less dramatic incubus involved my being hit over the head by a hammer. When I again turned to Mom, her response was Ershal—my dad’s name was alleged to be biblical—Victor Lee remembers when Louis Wade struck him with the hammer. When I was merely two, it seems that my slightly older cousin, Louis Wade Rooks, had landed a solid blow to Nickna Nee’s noggin with a hamma-hamma—Louis Wade was a master of the infantile nonce word.

These traumatic events still form my earliest memories. Because of my mnemonic precocity, Mom and Dad thought I was a genius.

Yet, everything else in the early 1940s is a stellar blur. For instance, Dad went into the army in 1943 after having worked at Swift and Company in Fort Worth, where he learned the arts of meat inspecting and packing. Accordingly, it was only natural that his designated MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) after his basic training at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, should be in that field, and for the next eight years, including the remainder of the war, he was based at the Army Quartermaster Corps in downtown Chicago.

Strangely, with apologies to Mom and Dad, I have few memories of my first cross-country trip from Stephenville, Texas, to the Windy City, except for the sleeper car we rode in, the smiling black porters, and the dining car’s generous servings of Cream of Wheat, my then-favorite breakfast. I have an excuse: I was only three, and my sister was not quite one.

I was nearly five when I had my second travel experience, a round-tripper in a jalopy owned by one of Dad’s army buddies. The buddy and his wife had no children and drove Mom, my sister, and me in the backseat to Texas and back. Rumor had it that after that experience, they swore to never have children of their own.

In Texas, we visited a few of our many relatives. One of them, an enate aunt, had terrible in-growing toenails that had turned thick and black (at a little over three feet tall, I had a close-up view). I still quake when I think of them.

Another aunt, this time on my father’s side, cooked delicious twice-mashed potatoes in the potato skin, with melted brown-crusted slices of American cheese on top. She also had an old-fashioned foot-pump organ in her living room; however, neither she nor her husband could play it. They were religious. I have no memory of our return to Chicago. I must have slept a lot.

In fact, fast-forwarding to 1951, very few things are truly conspicuous: the huge photograph of FDR on the front page of the Chicago Tribune on the occasion of his death; similar pronunciamentos on the passing of Babe Ruth; the movies Dad took my sister and me to (The Babe Ruth Story, The Claw, Paleface, The Secret Lives of Walter Mitty, and an assortment of Abbott and Costello greats); my first day at Robert Burns Elementary School; the school library; Mom taking me into the voting booth in the 1948 election (we voted for Truman); the Tribune’s embarrassing announcement the next day that Dewey [had won]; our first television, an Admiral with a seven-inch screen; my man Truman’s humorous televised speeches—few democrats and no republicans at all remember how funny he was; Doak Walker; the outbreak of the Korean War; Doak Walker; the firing of General Douglas MacArthur; baseball and football cards; the Go-Go White Sox of 1951; and Doak Walker.

Like the vast majority of Americans, my parents loved Roosevelt and deeply mourned his loss. For teenage Americans, such as Kim Novak, who went to Farragut High School, directly behind our three-story apartment house on South Homan Avenue, FDR was the only president they had ever known. I still daydream that sexy Kim was one of the bobby-soxers who at lunchtime, converged to smoke in the shadowy entranceways of the several unoccupied stores on my street. When later she became famous, I often boasted to my peers that I had once met her there. It was, of course, a lie, but this muse and her future layout for Playboy intensified the pleasure of my pubescent onanism.

Babe Ruth died on August 16, 1948. The movie about his life was released around three weeks later. The newspapers were full of information about the Babe, and as a six-year-old just beginning to grow interested in baseball, I was fascinated with him. Dad took me to see The Babe Ruth Story, and all I could say was that the Babe was lucky he died before it premiered. Even to a six-year-old’s naive sensitivities, the movie was awful.

The movie houses were the Homan, the Atlantic, or the Madison Square. The Homan, opposite the Goldblatt’s Department Store on Twenty-sixth Street, was the closest. To get there, my dad would walk hand-in-hand between my sister and me west on So. Homan, past his favorite tavern—in the Slavic part of Chicago, there was one on every street corner—then past his and my barber shop owned by a Russian who boldly displayed a picture of Joseph Stalin on his wall above the mirror.

The barber, who was a phlegmatic double of Jerry Calona, always smelled of garlic and was probably like Stalin, a Georgian. In those days, everyone who came from the Soviet Union was a Russian. That may have been the reason why he never smiled, even when we thanked him for the haircut. He was so unfriendly that I never understood why we continued to patronize his shop. I guess it was the geographic convenience.

I always walked the six or seven blocks to Robert Burns. It was a hulking redbrick facade of a school with strict postwar spinsters for teachers. Those who had been married lost their husbands in the crusade. The schoolmarms were so intimidating that kids were afraid to raise their hands to go to the bathroom. Once a little fat girl who sat in the desk in front of me was so terrified that she did number two right on her seat, and even I, in Mrs. Boot’s second-grade class, struggled to restrain my urgency in order to make it to the three o’clock bell but failed at least once, releasing a hot stream of number one soaking the left pants leg of my new Levi’s. Ashamed, I limped home, chafing my skin with each step. The inside of my left leg burned like fire for three days, and I never did that again.

What I liked most about Robert Burns was its library, which was filled with children’s classics. It was there that I discovered the works of the American explorer and adventurer, Richard Halliburton, especially those that dealt with the world’s marvels. Presumed dead at sea before he reached forty, Halliburton left a legacy of fifteen adventure books, and I got to read most of them in that hallowed library. There were also tons of sports books, especially about baseball. One had been freshly shelved, called The Jackie Robinson Story.

The 1948 election was memorable in many ways. Harry Truman was supposed to lose, but yellow-dog democrat, Mom, insisted he would win if she voted. So on the afternoon of November 7, 1948, she grabbed me by the hand, and the two of us walked to the Twenty-second Street polling place. The voting devices were mechanical, and when the lever was yanked to the left, a maroon curtain closed behind you. Once you had voted, you pulled the same lever to the right and the curtain opened.

Throughout that fall, the precinct men, both democrat and republican, continually made the rounds of our neighborhood, inviting us to picnics, rallies, and rousing parties of all kinds. I learned to love the picnics; Chicago hot dogs were the best. Oh yeah, back to the election, even though he lost badly in the East, Truman swept the Midwest and West. Mom got it right, and the Chicago Tribune got it wrong.

It was 1949, when my dad came through the door of our third-floor apartment with a box about the size of a modern computer tower. He brought it into the living room, brushed aside the bibelots on our second-hand coffee table, and tore open the box to reveal a brand-new Admiral television set. The screen was only seven-inches in diameter, but all the reigning stars were there, including Milton Mr. Television Berle, Jack Carter, and Ken Murray.

The movies were oldies but goodies from the thirties, and once a week live baseball or football games were played. What I enjoyed most, however, was watching my man, Harry Truman, give postprandial political speeches, which he interlarded with his own brand of homespun humor. I guess you’d have to say that I was rather peculiar for a seven-year-old.

Eventually, I walked to and from school with either Norman Miderski or Barry Scanlon. Norman was my best friend, who lived in a nice detached house along the railway verge not far from my apartment complex. Even shorter than I, he was a brown-haired, doe-eyed Polish Jew, although neither of us knew or cared at the time.

Norman liked Truman too and told me my first joke.

What do the letters on packages of Lucky Strike cigarettes stand for?

LS/MFT?

Yeah.

Lucky Strike means fine tobacco?

Nope. ‘Lord, save me from Truman’!

It was about that time that the feisty little president was at a deep low in his popularity. This would reach an absolute low when he fired General Douglas MacArthur for disobeying orders in the Korean Conflict. Now I loved Truman, but I idolized MacArthur. Afterward, when the disgraced general arrived to a hero’s welcome on the West Coast, the American Press followed him everywhere. His Old soldier’s never die speech to Congress was even broadcast live over the intercom at Robert Burns. A shiver ran up my spine with every mellifluous word emitted from MacArthur’s septuagenarian larynx. It was Dad who set me straight and renewed my admiration for the president: The president, no matter who he is, is the nation’s commander-in-chief and must be obeyed by every soldier, even one as lofty as Douglas MacArthur.

Barry Scanlon was the direct opposite of Norman Miderski. Barry was tall and lanky, with a carrottop and freckles. He reminded me of the skinny donkey kid in the movie Pinocchio. Barry lived above a candy store that doubled as a hangout for Farragut High School teens at the other end of South Homan. His father owned the shop that also sold ice cream. Barry’s seemingly endless moxie sprang from his nearly constant exposure to the tough-talking teens. He knew all the bad words and latest slang and used them effortlessly. He talked big and acted big.

As I strained to keep up with him, Barry loped, rather than walked, reeling off one lie after the other. Even though I knew he was prevaricating, it was fun to listen to him. I began to copy him. Barry was not a good pupil and boasted that he got big red U’s (unsatisfactory) in conduct. His parents didn’t seem to mind, but when I brought home my first U in conduct, there was hell to pay.

Barry also had a paper route with the Chicago Sun Times. One wintry day, he came down with the flu, and he asked me to deliver his papers for him. He’d pay me a quarter, he said.

I’d just received a little red Radio Flyer for my birthday, so I neatly stacked the papers in my wagon and placed a couple of rocks on top. It was a cold, drab day, one of the rare ones when you couldn’t smell the stockyards. Anytime, you couldn’t smell the stockyards in the Chicago of that time, it was a good day.

I was about a third of the way into Barry’s route when the weather turned especially blustery. The first page of the Sun Times soared into the canyon of facing apartment buildings and three-story frame homes, quickly followed by sections and then whole newspapers. I was frantically grabbing and glomming but couldn’t stop the flow. It was then that I understood why Chicago was nicknamed the Windy City. The sky over South Homan could have passed for a ticker tape parade. In the end, the wagon was bare, except for the two forlorn stones that lay in the shiny red bay of my wagon. So much for your weather forecast, Clint Youle! I didn’t get the quarter, and Barry never again asked me to deliver his papers.

The Sun Times was my ticket to learning geography, at least the geography of Korea. Everybody in our apartment building, except us, subscribed to it, and each day after school, I would rush home to see the front page of the Sun Times before the neighbors came home from work. There conspicuously illustrated on page one was a little map of the Korean War, showing the ebb and flow of the front line. For a while, it looked bad for the allies: the Pusan Perimeter kept shrinking until there was barely anything left except a toehold. Then MacArthur landed at Inchon, and matters began to change.

The Inchon wedge became a channel that widened straight toward Pusan, cutting off the North Koreans in the southwest. Once that area was assimilated, the allies could drive north across the thirty-eighth parallel toward Wonson and beyond. Once MacArthur reached the Yalu River, that was where he ran into political trouble. He wanted permission to cross the boundary and to bomb strategic targets in Communist China. This was his Waterloo.

Fresh out of one world war, neither Truman nor the Congress was ready to risk World War III over the Korean Peninsula. The general was relieved of his command. After that, the great Douglas MacArthur, like the old soldier he praised, did in fact fade away.

The Doaker

In the late 1940s, almost every prepubescent Texas male adored Doak Walker. I was no different. Modest, handsome, and a nonpareil three-time All-American from Dallas-based Southern Methodist University, the Doaker, between 1946 and 1950, almost single-handedly built the Cotton Bowl. Although I saw him play only in sports newsreels on our midget Admiral, Dad told me everything about him, and the one time when I could have listened to his exploits on our static-laden Philco radio, he was hurt and had to be replaced by a guy named Kyle Rote.

That game between Southern Methodist University and Notre Dame was one of the greatest of the half century. With the Doaker sitting in a wheelchair on the sidelines (he suffered from blood clots in one of his legs), the Rote-led Mustangs outplayed the Irish but lost by a single touchdown. Although Bill Stern’s splendid sportscast painfully waxed and waned over the Philco, I did not budge for more than three hours, not even to eat my mom’s version of twice-mashed potatoes in the potato skin with a melted, brown-crusted slice of American cheese on top.

The Go-Go White Sox

Of the two Chicago baseball teams, the more likable seems to have always been the Cubs but not in my family. For a dedicated career soldier like my dad, the Cubs were anathema to him because two of the more famous Cubbies, Phil Cavarretta and Mickey Owen, were alleged to have been draft dodgers during World War II; thus, for Dad, the beautiful Wrigley Field might just as well have been across the River Styx.

I was, however, permitted to like and follow the exploits of the White Sox, whose manager, Paul Richards, and speedy outfielder, Jim Busby, were native Texans. In May 1951, the Sox had a phenomenal fourteen-game winning streak, and Dad decided to take me to Comiskey Park in the hopes of our seeing them win their fifteenth in a row against the Ferris Fain-led Philadelphia Athletics. Unfortunately, the A’s won and broke the streak. During the streak and for some time afterward, the Sox became known as the Go-Go White Sox, a reputation enhanced by the speed and the agility of Busby, Orestes Minnie Minoso, and Nelson Nellie" Fox. I also loved listening to the White Sox radio broadcasts because of the colorful voice of their announcer, Bob Elson.

Bubble Gum Cards

1951 was also the year that I began to collect baseball and football cards. It was a terrific collection in which the cards were lovingly stacked by sport and team in numerical order, bound together by rubber bands. All the stacks were placed neatly in an old shoe box that was well hidden on a closet shelf. It was a great year to start my collection: I had the rookie cards of Busby, Minoso, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Doak Walker, who had turned pro in 1950. I maintained this valuable congeries through my high school graduation (1960), when I learned that my mother had cleaned out all the closets, including the one with my venerable collection.

As a noncommissioned officer (NCO), my father attained the rank of sergeant first class, but at the Quartermaster Depot, his work and IQ attracted the attention of Brigadier General Everett Bush, who had served in the Great War and with Patton in World War II. Bush recommended Dad for warrant officer. Dad took the test and passed with distinction. He thus became a warrant officer junior grade (WOJG) and immediately received orders that transferred him to Fort Lee, Virginia, nestled in the old Civil War battlefields between Hopewell and Petersburg.

Dad departed for his new duty station in the autumn of 1951. We would follow him in December that same year. A blizzard rolled through Chicago the night before we boarded our eastbound train. I stayed overnight with Barry Scanlon. The next morning, a Sunday, was cold and gray. The day’s gloom did not help my somber mood: I cried true tears as the train pulled out of the only home I’d ever known. I just knew that I was going to hate Virginia.

Fort Lee turned out to be a fabulous place for a ten-year-old. Our housing project consisted of standard wartime barracks. Each of the buildings was a two-story beige-painted rectangle that contained four two-bedroom furnished apartments. Our district of the Quarters was juxtaposed to a big grassy field that had a mature persimmon tree in the middle of it. The fruit that it grew was each as big as a tennis ball, and the ripe tennis balls fell to Earth with a splat, so the ground around the tree was slick with wet, sticky persimmon pulp and juices.

It was on that field, however, that I learned to play American football, and I quickly became very good at the game. I was fast and shifty and could pass and punt, and I honed my skills every day, dreaming of becoming an All-American like the Doaker.

Fort Lee was surrounded by Civil War trench lines and a mixed forest of dense summer green deciduous trees of dogwood, tulip, and southern pines. I loved playing in the woods and strolling among the dogwoods when they were in bloom, the white petals of which covered the ground like snow.

I had just about forgotten Chicago and embraced the verdant environs of Fort Lee when my father was transferred to Fort Richardson, Alaska. We crossed the country in our 1939 Plymouth. My sister and I read the Burma-Shave signs and counted cows all the way to Seattle, except in Wyoming, where we counted dead jackrabbits from Laramie to an enormous newly opened motel complex named Little America.

That year, the ecological vicissitudes had encouraged a massive migration of jackrabbits, which at night froze in the face of the oncoming headlights; consequently, the Wyoming jackrabbits had been squashed by the millions all over the asphalt highways, layering them with rabbit-pelt carpeting. My sister and I felt really bad for the bunnies.

In Seattle, we crossed Lake Washington, over the world’s longest floating bridge. While we waited for our flight to Anchorage, we stayed with another Alaska-bound family in a rent house in the fisherman’s ward of Ballard. My sister and I walked to and from John Adams Elementary School.

At John Adams, I quickly recognized how well I’d learned to play football in Virginia because when I received a punt or a kickoff, I left a trail of sprawled preteen Seattlites in my dust and inevitably weaved my way all the way across the goal line. The Seattle kids had no idea who this elusive stranger was. I also had no idea from which this power and agility sprang; I only knew that I was glad I had them.

On the third or fourth day at John Adams, the reputed toughest guy in school decided to pick a fight with the new guy, and I shocked everyone who feared him by soundly bloodying his nose and putting him down on his back in the middle of the schoolyard. Nobody bothered me after that.

Finally, our flight plans arrived. We flew from Seattle to Anchorage in the dead of night. It was my first plane ride.

5.jpg

In front of our Chicago apartment house

(2353 So. Homan Chicago, Illinois)

Summer 1948

left-right Sister Sharon (5 yrs)

V Traven (7 yrs)

Sunday dress-up

2.jpg

Chicago, Illinois

Summer 1943

left-right Dad (Ershal Lee Traven (b.1914 ; d.1969),

V Traven (2yrs), Mom’s Uncle Elmer had gun, would travel

4.jpg

Near front door of our Chicago apartment house

(2353 So. Homan Chicago, Illinois)

Summer 1948

left-right V Traven (7 yrs) Sister Sharon (5 yrs)

Sunday dress-up

2

The Death of Koba (Winter 1953)

In the Anchorage winter, I would get up and walk to the local grade school, a congeries of overheated Quonset huts, in the dark before sunrise and walk home from school in the dark after sunset. Then, after dinner, provided the temperature was warm enough, I would toss my figure skates over my shoulder and walk back to the public ice-skating rink across the street from my school. I’d put on my skates inside the drafty warm-up shack that was heated by a smelly crude-oil heater.

On one of my first nights in the shack, I had the distinct pleasure of meeting a talented GI figure skater, Michael Misha Dobisch.

Nice skates, Misha said as I hooked my shoestrings into the grommets of my skate boots.

"Yeah, thank you, my folks got ’em for me for Christmas.

Well, take care of ’em. They’re really good ones. ‘Nd by the way, my name is Misha. What’s yours?

Vic… Vic Traven. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you. You know how to skate?

Guess so, ‘cuz I don’t fall very much.

Well, that’s a good start. Know any tricks?

I was staring at Misha. He was all legs and really tall. It hurt my neck to stare up at him. I can skate backward, turn, and jump. I’m trying to learn to spin.

Maybe I can teach you some moves. Would that be okay?

You betcha, I answered firmly. I had not seen him perform yet, but I figured that with his classic skater’s physique, he had to be great.

As I emerged from the warm-up shack, I observed Misha do a triple axel and float beautifully into a camel spin followed by a sit spin, whirling at impossible velocities—I had chanced upon my mentor. I skated over to him as fast as I could.

Teach me to do that, pu-leeeezzz! I entreated.

Okay, but it’s going to take hard work and dedication, Misha replied sternly.

I’m yer guy, I said.

After showing Misha my best moves to date, we arranged to meet in the shack to discuss my training schedule and ground rules.

Michael [MEE-sha-el] Ryazanovsky-Dobisch was born in 1929 in Halle, Sachsen-Anhalt, in what became East Germany after World War II. His mom was German and his dad was a Russian Jew who’d served in the Red Army. After the war, Misha’s nuclear family emigrated to Brooklyn. It was said that he was born on figure skates because he was skating at age three in Halle, and in New York, he simply continued his training at Rockefeller Center. He grew up to have the perfect male figure skater’s body: long and lean, tall, dark, and handsome. On the ice, he was a ballet dancer, exercising grand battements with perfect coordination.

Misha watched me do everything I knew how to do and then told me that we would next meet at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 5. Meanwhile he wanted me to work on one-legged figure eights without sliding out of the numerical groove.

On March 5, I arrived at 7:00 p.m. on the dot. Misha was in the warm-up shack, listening fixedly to the radio, the reception on which was terrible: a funeral dirge faded in and out as an announcer with a deep bass voice glozed over the music. The voice spoke in a strange language that I did not recognize but one that Misha did.

The old bastard’s dead at last. Good! That was the first time I’d heard Misha curse, so I figured he’d said it for good reason.

Who’s dead, Misha? I asked innocently while I laced up my skate boots.

Stalin is, and the world’s a much better place for it, Misha replied decisively. My grandparents, bless their souls, can finally rest in peace.

It was the ultimate irony for Koba, Stalin’s Georgian nickname, who the longer he lived, developed a wildly paranoid fear of death, which may help to explain why he banished so many of his closest friends and most loyal comrades to horrible death camps where they lived and died under the most unbearable conditions. Regarding Misha’s paternal grandparents, they’d been sent to the worst place of all, the Kolyma region in northeastern Siberia during the 1930s. They’d been loyal members of the Communist Party, but they were also Jews, and Koba, like Hitler, was a notorious anti-Semite.

The year 1953 brought the trauma of death to my own family. On May 11 of that spring, a powerful F5 tornado ravaged the Central Texas cowtown of Waco. My grandmother who worked as a seamstress in the downtown R. T. Dennis Building was one of the 144 fatalities buried in the brick-and-mortar rubble after that event. It was not yet summer in Anchorage, but the sun was still up at ten o’clock that night when our phone rang, and Mom answered the long-distance call that informed her of her mother’s tragic demise. Mom screamed and Dad ran to her aid. We kids were in bed despite the near-midnight sun. I listened to her sobs all night. She lay on the living room couch and never slept a wink; Dad didn’t either. I ached for both of them, even though I had met my grandmother only twice in my life. I recall her being very kind and caring, but that is about all.

Anchorage was and still is renowned for its Fur Rendezvous or, as it is alluded to today, the Fur Rondy," which hosts World Championship Sled Dog Races in February and March annually. The mushers start on the city’s main drag, Fourth Avenue, and race along preselected streets through the rest of town. The first year we were there, the street just north of our poorly insulated white clapboard rent house served as part of the circuit. I can still hear the howls of the huskies and the drag-and-clunk of the mostly wooden sleds on the icy street, which heralded their actual passage for more than a mile.

Until I reached Anchorage, I’d not been able to participate in organized baseball. Neither Chicago nor Fort Lee had teams yet, and Anchorage had just started its own Little League. Simultaneously, divisions were created on the neighboring Elmendorf Air Force Base and Fort Richardson Army Base. Because my family would not obtain quarters on Fort Rich until the summer of 1953, I was eligible to play only in the