Anecdotes to Dote On: Random Remembrances of Random Times

By Barry Hansen

For Barry Hansen, looking back in time shows him that success in life is the continuous collection of memories that make you smile. Anecdotes to Dote On is an anecdotal biography that begins with Barry’s recognition that he is only here because of a double dribble—a memory that makes him smile, which he shares now.

Anecdotes to Dote On offers you a window into Barry’s memories from boyhood through adulthood. His boyhood during World War II was highlighted by sitting for many hours in the copilot’s seat of a B-17, with occasional breaks to pretend as a bombardier, trying to focus on a Norden bombsight. Interspersed was his introduction to the making of Hollywood movies and a fascination with being in the audience of the biggest national radio shows—like watching TV before there was TV. Barry also shares his good times at college (often at the expense of his GPA) and the unexpected career path that propelled him to a fifty-year-or-so career in international cargo transport, mostly by air.

Barry’s anecdotes relate to events that he encountered, traveling to all of the world’s continents—except to the one where penguins outnumber people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
• Release date: Jun 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781489723222

Barry Hansen

Barry Hansen was always told by acquaintances that he should write a book, though the real motivation for Anecdotes to Dote On was a request by his children and teenage grandchildren. Barry chose stories about his personal experiences, stories that were humorous and positive, stories about friends and people he has met, and stories he was told that he found interesting and entertaining. The randomness umbrella allows him to write what he remembers when he remembers it—a privilege one invokes at age eighty-three.

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Copyright © 2019 Barry Hansen.

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This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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ISBN: 978-1-4897-2321-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-2322-2 (e)

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 06/11/2019

Contents

Suggested Support for the Reader

Even Less-Structured Odds and Ends

In memory of the Reverend Arthur Holt of Ocala, Florida. I reconnected with Art, a grade school friend, by chance some

two years ago. He was encouraging several people to write about their family histories. I never would have undertaken this effort without his constant support and encouragement.

In memory of Donald Dahlgren, my friend of some seventy years, whose lifelong support and zest for life convinced me to tell my stories, which oftentimes are also his.

Suggested Support for the Reader

You will need tolerance to read Anecdotes, so allow me to suggest an appropriate wine for the sideboard:

For those who hope for mercy, a ruby port (from Taylor Fladgate if you are lucky), taken at as fast a clip as prudence permits.

For those who want to dwell on every word, Zeltinger Sonnenuhr (Selbach-Oster or one of the neighbors), taken in leisurely sips.

For the great majority, a dry Gewurtztraminer (Trimbach or Hugel), alongside some bits of ham, cheese, or both, or for resolute fanciers of red, Chianti Classico—Antinori is suggested.

These suggestions are those of my good friend Bob Thompson. Bob is considered an expert on California wine and has been described as one of California’s foremost wine writers. He was designated in 1989 as the wine writer of the year by Wine and Vines. His best-known effort was The California Wine Book, written in conjunction with Hugh Johnson. He has served as an international wine judge. As far as wine is concerned, his knowledge is vast, whereas mine has been described as half vast.

FIRST OF ALL, whether I was going to have a life was questionable. My biological father, Jerry McMahon, was courting my mother, Marjory Card, whose interest level in this process was neither hot nor cold; it was closer to lukewarm. Jerry had been a college athlete in both basketball and baseball—in fact, he had played in the minor-league chain of the Cleveland Indians. He had thrown out his arm pitching a double header and never progressed further. He had, however, become the general manager of radio station KIT in Yakima, Washington, at the height of the Great Depression. He made the princely sum of $500 a month, considered quite significant for 1934.

There was no professional basketball at the time, only company-sponsored AAU teams (I believe AAU stood for Amateur Athletic Union). The big-time teams were the Phillips 66 Oilers, the Goodyear Flyers, and even, eventually, the Buchan Bakers in Seattle. There also were less-well-funded leagues and levels of play, which gave rise to the KIT Kittens representing Yakima, and Jerry was the star. They could have been called the Lions or Tigers, but Kittens was probably more suitable for this team. This reminds me of my old high school, whose team was named the Franklin Quakers. Actually, they were known as the Fighting Quakers, which was incongruous at best.

Jerry’s basketball team qualified for a version of a state tournament that was held in Seattle. The Kittens, true to their name, were seeded last among sixteen teams. My mother, in a moment of flippancy, committed to Jerry that she would marry him if KIT won the tournament. Off they went to Seattle, and much to her surprise and amazement, KIT made it into the finals. With the game nearing the end, the opponents held a one-point lead and were stalling out the final seconds on the clock. There was no shot clock in those days, and who knows what the foul rules were? Inexplicably, one of the opposing team’s guards double-dribbled and Jerry made the winning basket with seconds left. My mom and Jerry were married the next night in the home of close friends Jim and Margaret Morford. I remain friends today with their son Don. I owe it all to a double dribble.

A marriage built on the solid foundation of who wins a basketball tournament is not likely to survive, and in three years it ended in a bitter divorce. My mother and her family were staunch Episcopalians; Jerry’s family were all devout Catholics. My mother was concerned that if his family had access to me after the divorce, they would spirit me away and have me baptized as a Catholic—horror of horrors. She got a friendly judge to issue an order that Jerry could not visit me until I reached age eighteen. I met Jerry when I was a freshman in college. In the intervening years, he had been in the Office of Strategic Services during the war, spending over two years behind Japanese lines in Burma. This experience had had a materially negative effect on his long-term health and how he viewed the world going forward. He did not trust anyone or want to work with anyone. He created a formula for brass and silver polish, which he manufactured by himself in his garage. He filled each bottle, created a label, and applied each label individually. He convinced a leading Seattle department store, the Bon Marche, as well as its parent, Marshall Fields, and some other Seattle outlets to handle the product. He delivered each order personally in his car, wrote out each invoice, and tracked each receivable. He was a brilliant man who lived with the constant memories of what he had experienced in the war.

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A COUPLE OF years after the divorce, my mother remarried, and Harold Rossing Hansen became my adoptive father. Harold had a lifelong passion for aviation. He had lied about his age and joined the National Guard air division at Felts Field in Spokane, Washington, at the age of sixteen. The air guard’s aircraft at the time was a two-position, open-cockpit, bi-wing Jenny. He diligently observed and studied the flying of the aircraft. Late one afternoon, he stayed behind until everyone had left, snuck out to the plane, rotated the prop to start the engine, got in, and soloed without an instructor.

Flying was in his blood, but it could create only supplemental income, not enough to live on, and times were hard. He took a job with the Washington State Patrol, setting up safety-testing operations in various towns in eastern Washington. All cars had to be tested for safety once a year. This job allowed him to keep up his flying hours. He flew some mail routes, literally landing in pastures to pick up and drop off mail bags. To promote aviation, several big companies sponsored point-to-point air races. One of the biggest was sponsored by Bendix Radio. Dad competed in several, meeting such folks as Amelia Earhart, Willy Post, and Will Rogers along the way. He never met Charles Lindbergh. He won a couple of useful prizes but never any real money. Part-time, he trained Northwest Airlines pilots on how to fly by instruments. In all this time, he had only one mishap. As a young man trying to show off for some girls at Liberty Lake, near Spokane, he flew upside down over the lake. Unfortunately, he misjudged the altitude and crashed in the lake. He suffered a broken jaw, which in those days doctors treated by putting the patient’s head in a total cast. They set the cast incorrectly, and when they took it off, all his hair came with it. Except for a fringe, he remained bald all the rest of his life.

Every six months, I would find our living room entirely covered with topographic maps of the western United States. Dad said there were lots of good pilots in the western part of the country, but the good old pilots constantly did their homework. He studied and memorized the location and height of every peak in the western United States, and he refreshed his memory every six months. In those days, in bad weather, we lost a lot of pilots flying into mountainsides.

When the testing job wound to an end in the late 1930s, Dad joined the Army Air Corps and was stationed at Gray Field at Fort Lewis, which got us to Tacoma, Washington. At the time, the base commander at Fort Lewis was a young General Eisenhower. We lived in a little house in the Fircrest district of Tacoma, and I started kindergarten. The most excitement in Fircrest ever was when Dad got us in the car one day and raced to a location a short distance away. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was undulating widely, and he didn’t want to miss seeing it fall into the water. He wasn’t disappointed—Galloping Gertie took the plunge. It was the kind of thing that you remember at any age.

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DAD WAS OFTEN asked if he would do some part-time flying; at one time, he even did some crop-dusting. One time a group of friends had organized the use of a two-engine float plane and needed a pilot. They wanted to fly deep into remote British Columbia to a lake for a weeklong fishing trip. Dad arranged for leave and flew them to the lake, where they could all fish in isolation. There were no communications available except in the unoccupied float plane.

On Sunday morning, while he was away in British Columbia, my mother was home making breakfast. I remember sitting at the breakfast bar on a chrome stool with a yellow seat cover. Suddenly, over the radio came the terse announcement of the Pearl Harbor attack. I will never forget the fear in my mother’s eyes; she knew that Dad’s squadron would be activated immediately. That happened, but the squadron commander couldn’t get in touch with Dad, and the squadron left for the Philippines without him. My mother’s fears were justified. The group fought in aerial battles until they ran out of avgas. They then took up rifles and fought with the ground troops until they were overwhelmed by the Japanese. What was left of the group was forcibly marched torturous miles to a prison camp in what became known as the famous Bataan Death March. Only a handful of men from the squadron survived. After the war, my parents had the squadron commander, Col. Sam Gracio, over for dinner. He was a true hero. He had eventually escaped from the prison, joined a guerilla group, and fought with the group until the Philippines were liberated. So that I could understand the brutality of war, my dad asked Gracio to take off his shirt. His back was disfigured from broken ribs and welts where he had been beaten. I will never forget the sight or what the colonel said to me: Son, in your lifetime, make sure the United States is always the toughest son of a bitch on earth. Colonel Gracio was the last surviving member of the squadron. He died at age forty-three.

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WHEN DAD RETURNED to Fort Lewis, he was advised that he was being transferred immediately to Seattle to be the air force acceptance pilot for the B-17 production at Boeing Field. Staffing for the assignment was only five pilots due to the immediate call-ups, and Dad was the only military pilot on-site. Upon arriving in Seattle, he had immediate orders in a special envelope from the War Department to evacuate fourteen B-17s sitting on the tarmac at Boeing Field to Moses Lake in eastern Washington. During that time, the War Department was aptly named; it is now the Department of Defense. Though intelligence officers felt that an attack on Boeing Field was beyond the Japanese supply range, they also knew there was nothing to stop the Japanese if they chose to try. They didn’t want the aircraft damaged while sitting on the tarmac. Dad flew the first aircraft to Moses Lake, and Mom and I got in the car to go get him. It was December, and the Snoqualmie Pass over the Cascade Mountains was just an infrequently plowed two-lane road. Mom had to stop to put on tire chains to get over the pass. She laid her fur coat in the snow as an area from which to operate. Once over the pass, she then reversed the procedure and took off the chains. My mother dropped me off at my grandmother’s in Yakima and then proceeded to make the fourteen trips back and forth, till all the planes were transferred.

We rented a house from a Northwest Airlines pilot whom Dad had trained on instruments the previous year. Dad flew seven days a week, and I saw him only at dinner. He figured the only way we could spend time together was for me to accompany him on his flights on weekends. He certified each aircraft as air-worthy and acceptable for sign-off to the air force. We climbed up a ladder, and I was secured in the copilot’s seat. Boeing Field was quite a sight in those days, with barrage balloons at all altitudes, designed to protect the landing strip and the manufacturing plant. The placements were designed to make it more difficult for enemy aircraft to strafe at lower altitudes or bomb at higher. Throughout the takeoff pattern, we serpentined our way on a designated path through the balloons. After several flights, once we were at cruising altitude, he let me bank the B-17 and elevate and lower it, or at least he made me think I was in control. Later I learned to feather the engines and also to open the bomb bay doors. I crawled around to the different gun turrets, with the exception of the belly turret. It may have been accessible only from the ground. None of the machine guns were installed. The radio operator’s position was fully outfitted but was not to be played with.

We lived in the Mount Baker section of Seattle, and one day my dad took me down to the construction site of the first Lake Washington Floating Bridge. His friend Brigadier General Lacy Murrow of the US Army Corps of Engineers was in charge of the project. He said the concept was from a series of tests they were doing on various-size projects to determine the fastest way to reconstruct bridges over various lengths of water, where bridges had been bombed or destroyed by a retreating foe. On the way home Dad mentioned that I had heard his friend’s brother, Edward R. Murrow, on the radio.

The nose gun and the bombardier’s position were the most fun. I could crawl out on a piece of plywood to the end of the nose turret and check out the Norden bombsight. With Dad’s help I figured out enough to be able to bomb the Smith Tower and the ferries going to Bainbridge and Vashon Islands. My scariest moment came when I was returning to the cockpit from the main section of the aircraft. The bomb bay was positioned right next to the wing section because this was where an aircraft could carry the heaviest load. That remains the case today with jet aircraft. To traverse over the bomb bay, I had to navigate over a narrow aluminum walkway by putting one foot ahead of the other and holding on to two guide wires very tightly. Not knowing where I was in the plane, Dad decided to test the bomb bay doors—when I was standing directly over them. We were at a fairly low altitude, so oxygen was not a problem, nor was the air current strong enough that I couldn’t easily hold on. But looking down was an experience I will never forget, and it instilled in me a fear of heights that I retain to this day.

When landing, we had to maneuver through the balloons in the reverse pattern to the takeoff. I was amazed that I couldn’t really tell where Boeing Plant 2 was located. The side of the plant had been painted in camouflage greens and browns to blend in with the landscape. The roof of the plant had been designed to look like a typical Seattle neighborhood. The site featured streets with sidewalks, utilities, prefab houses, parked cars, laundry hanging on the line, and toys in the backyard. I met the man in charge of the project. Each day he would move the cars, hang and then take down laundry, leave out lawnmowers and kids’ toys, and otherwise rearrange things so that it looked like a real neighborhood. Obviously, the landing strip at Boeing Field couldn’t be hidden, but someone looking might struggle a bit to figure out exactly where the plant was.

Dad was interested in my getting involved in aviation as a pilot. His dreams were dashed when I went for an extensive eye test. To start with, I was severely color-blind. After the test the doctor said I had a special kind of 20/20 vision—at twenty feet I could see a twenty-story building. Even though I had more second-seat multi-engine hours than any nine-year-old in America, a passenger I would always be.

Actually, there were some unanticipated incidents during this time, because under the pressure of flat-out production, quality control was sometimes not 100 percent. The landing gear on a plane would come down on one side and not the other, requiring a landing on the gear on one side and the wing-tip on the other side. When both wouldn’t activate, a belly landing on the grass strip was in order. They didn’t foam the runways in those days. The more my mother became aware of these incidents, the less enthusiastic she was about my flying with Dad.

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DAD CAME HOME one day and advised that we were being transferred to Los Angles. In order to increase production, the air force had decided to produce B-17s at the Lockheed plant in Burbank, California, in addition to Seattle. It was quite an interesting transfer experience for me. Highway 99 was the main north–south highway on the West