Graduating from college in America in 1960 placed one square in the eye of the US Draft. The Selective Service Act of 1948 and its various follow-on modifications essentially subjected lads of my age (roughly 18 to 35) to a call-up for two years of active duty and five years of reserve duty service. This so-called "draft" continued at various levels from about 1948 (start of the Korean War) until about 1973 (withdrawal from the Vietnam conflict). Within a couple weeks of graduating from college I received a notice to report, something that I was fully expecting and was girding myself mentally to undergo. The alternative was to "get a job in a defense plant" -- something I could easily have done by going to work at Lockheed as had many of my contemporaries, but something that also seemed like cutting one's youth short way before its time! My somewhat haphazardly thought-out decision was to volunteer for three years of active duty in the US Army Security Agency (USASA), which would give me the best shot at getting into the Army Language School in Monterey, California for a 47-week course in Russian with a hoped-for follow-on assignment in Europe (alternatives being assignments in places like Adak in the Aleutian Islands, Sinop in the Turkish desert, or locations with other unfortunate geographical circumstances!). My family, in particular Bob Keaten (Kim's husband at the time), tried vehemently to talk me out of such an ill-considered decision, but I wasn't terribly thrilled at the prospect of returning to Atlanta, Georgia to settle into a career at Lockheed at age 21 and so went ahead with the enlistment procedure.
There were indeed a few brief moments of terror in being transported across central Georgia in an Army bus loaded with a group of teen-aged Army recruits in the middle of the night, arriving at Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina at about two in the morning. Interstate Highway 20 from Atlanta to Columbia, SC didn'tyet exist in 1960, so the trip was made on the two-lane country roads of those days. Upon arrival we were dumped out of the bus onto a road somewhere inside the base and told to hoof it across a set of railroad tracks and over to a set of rather dim lights about a quarter of a mile away, where each of us immediately had a load of bedding dumped on his back (no 'hers' in that era) and were corraled into a rather primitive "Reception Center" barracks. We were awakened at 6 am the next morning by something called 'Reveille' (a rather scratchy record played on speakers throughout the base which woke us up after about 3 hours of sleep) to fall out and "police the cantonment area" for haphazardly discarded cigarette butts, then formed up to march to breakfast at the huge facility referred to as a "Consolidated Mess Hall." There's a certain state of mind that one quickly falls into when entering military service whereby one simply does what one is told, thereby avoiding a great deal of the unpleasantness to which one frequently observes one's less sanguine fellow travelers being subjected! Throughout the course of my seemingly interminable week or so at the Reception Center waiting for a new Basic Training cycle and the subsequent eight weeks of actual Basic Training to begin, I rarely opened my mouth other than to report my "Name, Rank, and Serial Number" (RA14719053, Sir! -- just in case I should ever have need of it again at some future date, perhaps in Military Heaven!). The experience is not dissimilar to entering a certain Zen-like state in which the passage of time has no meaning, since each day is remarkably similar both to those preceding as well as to those following, with only small variations in the actual type of training one undergoes -- marching, physical training (PT), marching, marksmanship, marching, gas-mask exercises, marching, classes in various military topics including disassembly and assembly of the M1 rifle, marching, and eating interminable quantities of K rations from tin cans stockpiled during WWII and cooked by dumping them into garbage cans of hot water heated using something called an "immersion heater," and, of course, repeated policing-up of the cantonment area. The routine would be broken up from time to time by an assignment to KP (Kitchen Patrol/Police), during which time one would spend a pleasant day away from normal boot-camp training, toiling instead in the company mess hall, mucking large quantities of grease out of huge black cast-iron stoves, washing endless numbers of trays in blistering hot steam baths, repeatedly mopping large expanses of cracked linoleum floor (into the cracks of which dirt and grease unceasingly penetrated), and enjoying other highlights of the Army boot-camp mess hall scene circa 1960. Basic Training was organized into separate "Companies" with each Company being further broken down into several "Platoons" with each Platoon housed in a separate two-story barracks, each side of the long bunk-bed-lined room on each of the two floors comprising a "Squad" resulting in a total of four Squads per Platoon and also effecting a certain social makeup due to the physical closeness of those involved (never more that a foot or two from someone either underneath or on top of you and close by on either side -- a true bonding experience. Each floor also contained a "head" area at the end of the building, consisting of a long row of unpartitioned tankless johns screwed directly into the floor perhaps a short foot apart from each other, a long row of elbow-to-elbow sinks for shaving and washing, and a large communal shower with poles coming out of the floor, each containing several physical shower heads -- an area in which one was advised to be careful not to let the soap slip out of one's hands in case one's immediate neighbor might inadvertently yield to an attraction for any body openings made suddenly available as one bends over to retrieve the soap (in the roughshod Basic Training setting, this was perhaps more of an urban legend than actual fact, but in a more polished -- even sophisticated, one might say! -- setting such as the soon-to-be-encountered barracks at Army Language School in Monterey the possibilities were much more open to discussion!).
At some point in the long days of idleness at the Reception Center prior to beginning Basic Training, a knowledgeable lad confided to me that the one thing one didn't want to do was to get a truck driver's license. Having such a document would mean that one's follow-on career in the Army would be a permanent assignment to the "Motor Pool" which would deny one the opportunity to get some sort of training that might be useful in a future career once Army service was over! Since I already had my "Outfit" assigned to me (the USASA, or US Army Security Agency), this probability seemed rather low (for me the possibilities had already been narrowed to either linguist or Morse Code operator!) and so when the opportunity came along to join the ranks of future Army truck drivers I was among the first to volunteer. At some point in the process of falling into formation one morning, a sergeant we had never seen before came along and barked, "Anyone here know how to drive? If so, fall in behind me!" It seemed unlikely that any 18-year-old lad of that era would not know how to drive, but only half a dozen lads out of some 50 or 60 in formation stepped forward, and I was among them. We went off for a day of driver training, which including mastering a Military Driver's Handbook along with receiving a few minutes instruction at the wheel of each of four different vehicles -- a jeep, a half-ton pickup, a one-and-a-half-ton truck, and a two-and-a-half-ton truck (the so-called 'deuce-and-a-half' of that era). The chief requirement appeared to be the ability to drive a "stick shift" since at that time the automatic transmission had become almost universal in new cars and many lads had never been exposed to a "stick shift." The 1937 Chevy in which I had learned to drive did indeed have a stick shift, and so my career as an Army driver was launched in grand fashion (being able to read well enough to master the Military Driver's Handbook in a couple of hours' time was also a distinct advantage!).
I was intermittently assigned to drive a vehicle during the remainder of my time in the Reception Center, the chief activity being the transportation of laundry (vast quantities of towels and bed sheets) from the Reception Center barracks to the Post Laundry facility -- a large building off in one corner of the post from which emanated vast quantities of steam seemingly both day and night. Once we transitioned to our actual Basic Training Company, I was assigned driving duty only one morning a week so that it wouldn't overly interfere with my Basic Training activities. The routine was to request the company runner (a lad assigned to man the desk during the night in the company 'Orderly Room') to wake me up the following morning at 4 am to get dressed, eat an early breakfast, then hoof it over to the post Motor Pool. I would typically sit in the Motor Pool for several hours drinking coffee and reading newspapers (the Army Times was often the only thing available), then return to rejoin the others in whatever the day had to offer in the way of 'Basic Training.' Occasionally, however, my name would be called out, along with the type of vehicle required and I would receive the paperwork for an actual driving assignment. This would most often involve the assignment of a one-and-a-half-ton truck and give me the opportunity to renew my acquaintance with the Post Laundry. On one occasion, however, I was assigned a half-ton pickup accompanied by a PFC (Private First Class, or E3 -- two full ranks above my own E1 Recruit status, and a full rank above the intervening E2 Private status). The PFC seemed a little older than I would have expected for such a junior position, but he seemed affable enough. He had been at Fort Jackson for a considerable period of time, it turned out, and the job that seemed to have best fit his talents carried the MOS (Military Occupation Specialty) of something along the lines of "Ice Delivery Man." The small individual Basic Training mess halls of that era (circa 1960) still used ice as a coolant instead of electric refrigeration, and his job was to deliver blocks of ice from the "Post Ice House" to each of the innumerable Basic Training mess halls on base. His job at each mess hall at which we stopped was to throw a thick leather apron on his back, separate a substantial block of ice from the huge block in the truck using an ice pick, hoist the separated block onto the leather apron on his back with a pair of tongs attached to a leather strap running over his shoulder, lug the block of ice into the mess hall and dump it into the refrigerator box, where he would then chop it into smaller pieces using the same formidable looking ice pick. Without stopping to inquire as to my qualifications for this job, he quickly instructed me as to how to perform the transportation step while he concentrated on the ice pick portion of the task. I spent an exhausting morning lugging ice from the pickup into various mess halls, while wondering exactly how this particular division of labor had come about. As we were returning to the ice house to pick up our third or fourth block of ice, I mumbled something about having to get back to my company in order to catch that afternoon's exercise on the firing range, and after a bit of back and forth I was finally able to drop him off back at the Motor Pool to locate a fresh driver for his afternoon's activities. In my future weekly early morning forays to the Motor Pool, I often noticed him casting about for a suitable candidate for that day's work and also noticed that he never seemed to select the same person twice (I imagine he realised that even the thickest of us caught on to his rather creative "division of labor" scenario after just one morning's round on the ice detail).
It has often been remarked that human activity seems to be characterized by an underlying impulse to form some sort of social structure, whatever the circumstances might be. Basic Training companies, with their several hundred members randomly selected from wildly varying levels of society, form a fascinating study of human interaction, in particular for those quiet members such as myself whose principal activity in such surroundings is reduced to simply observing those around us. Reading is, of course, a potential activity in a barracks setting, but one has to be careful not to raise the level of the reading material much higher than that of a comic book for fear of taunts and abuse that might lead to accusations of one's being some kind of freak or homo! Fortunately, the fascination of observing a racially mixed group of testosterone fueled lads at close range is a wholly absorbing one that more than compensates for any lack of reading materials. One has to remember, of course, that most young white males who enter military service in a Southern setting have never had any prolonged contact with young black males, so that one suddenly encounters democracy in a much more egalitarian setting than any ever encountered in civilian life. At the onset of a Basic Training cycle, stern warnings are issued that no racial conflict will be tolerated, and rather surprisingly this seems to largely set the stage for acceptance. This is not to say that the races mix socially, but there is simply very little overt conflict such as one might expect in a less controlled setting. Although I witnessed occasional fights between two whites or between two blacks, the unspoken rule in the military seemed to be that a fight between a black and a white was simply unacceptable and would be punishable by a trip to the base stockade (such a fight would almost certainly spread to include others and could easily escalate into a riot!). As a result, there was a certain loosening of racial tension in our close quarters that allowed many whites such as myself to unabashedly observe the social interactions between blacks in a manner that would never have been possible "on the outside." Young black males are an extremely demonstrative group with a highly developed and unique sense of humor that one could otherwise never get close enough to appreciate. Many of us young whites would roll at laughter at the continuous stream of back-and-forth between a group of people we had never dealt with or observed up close in any previous social interactions. Of all the people in my Basic Training barracks, the ones I remember most keenly are the blacks, and I have always felt an acute sense of loss that social mores never allowed me to get close enough to them to share in the laughter and enjoyment that was so much more a part of their lives than of ours. Such brief encounters in life can leave strong memories that are never forgotten and make one reflect on what we lose by hanging on to the social prejudices that we seem to be programmed to pass on from generation to generation!
On the last day of our 8 weeks of Basic Training in the early Fall of 1960, our little company concluded its activities with a grand ceremony replete with a number of very impressive looking flags we had never seen before that were apparently kept in the company storeroom to be brought out only at the end of each Basic Training cycle for display (including, I believe, the only South Carolina state flag I have ever seen)! The name of each participant in our cycle was read out, along with his rank and upcoming assignment. With the exception of a few "retreads" (a rather sorry group of men who had re-entered the service after failing to adjust to life on the 'outside'), each of us had advanced from the rank of E1 (Recruit) to that of E2 (Private) with an accompanying increase in pay from approximately $65 per month to $69 per month! Most of the young country lads in our Company were going on to so-called AIT (Advanced Infantry Training) to receive 8 weeks of training in weapons such as bazookas and Browning automatic rifles (the M1 rifle of our era was essentially a single-round weapon, although with a "banana clip" it was capable of firing several rounds in succession, heating itself up in the process to the point that it was too hot to be held!). It was to a great deal of relief that I heard my name read out followed by the order to "proceed to the United States Presidio in Monterey, California to embark on a 47-week course in Russian language studies." I'm afraid that whatever good will I had managed to establish with my comrades of the previous 8 weeks suddenly evaporated amidst a concentrated stare of hatred from all around me. I had managed to keep a low enough profile so that hardly anyone outside of my own Squad even knew my name, and so by dint of swinging my head around as though I myself were looking for the individual in question I managed to avoid identification and escape the parade grounds alive! My parents had actually driven over from Atlanta to witness the grand ceremony, and after having taken my first step off the base in the nine or ten weeks since I had first arrived in the middle of that long-ago night, the drive back to Atlanta was a thoroughly enjoyable one.
One of the occasional good decisions I made at that time of my life was to drop about $400 hard-earned dollars to procure a 1951 Dodge sedan for my round-trip (over the course of a year) drive to Monterey, California and back. At that time (1960) Japanese imports had not yet made an appearance in this country, and Detroit was in the middle of its "planned obsolescence" mode, by which cars were intentionally manufactured to fail on multiple fronts as they approached about 90,000 miles on their odometers. With a new car costing in the range of $1500, my $400 was good enough to acquire a car with about 80,000 miles on it (actually it belonged to my parents,who were good-hearted enough to part with it, most likely in the interests of my safety!). The trip was about 3000 miles each way, and that, along with a planned 4000 miles of driving in California during my year-long stay, we figured would suffice to get me there and back within the 90,000-mile limit if I kept the speed down to about 55 mph to reduce engine wear! That sounded like a very acceptable arrangement to me (anything to get a car!), so I grabbed my Army duffel bag along with a small quantity of civilian clothes ('civvies' they called them then) and set off from Atlanta for Monterey, California -- 3000 miles distant!
After five days on the road (mainly what was then Highway 66), including a brief side trip to Santa Fe to enjoy a quick dish of sopapillas and revisit the town for the first time in over 10 years, I arrived in Monterey via the coastal highway -- Highway 1 from the South, having crossed over the San Padre mountains on a little back road I've never been able to retrace. Not eager to give up my precious, hard-earned leave, I spent my last night of civilian freedom in a small B&B right on the ocean almost a stone's throw from the Presidio, blowing $15 of my $69 monthly pay! After finally checking into the Company "Orderly Room" I was assigned to the First Platoon, which was immediately adjacent to the small EM parking lot, which held maybe a dozen or so cars. I had had no idea, but there were very few enlisted men (EMs) at Presidio which had cars, and I was about to become a sort of superstar popularity-wise, not because of my presumably brilliant personality and/or movie-star good looks, but simply because I had the keys to a beat-up ten-year-old car -- passport to freedom on the California coast from Big Sur to San Francisco and beyond to the Napa wine country!
Having been born in Los Angeles and having spent almost the first ten years of my life there, I had always proudly considered myself to be a native Californian. However, my arrival in the San Francisco Bay Area (with Monterey attached by temperament at its southernmost end!) was an eye-opener of the first magnitude as to what I thought California should really be like. Los Angeles is largely quite flat and can be crowded, hot, and smoggy. San Francisco, being on a peninsula, is much more exposed to the ocean (and its bay) than is Los Angeles (most Angelenos rarely see the ocean), and the city (although it is not immune to the problems that plague Los Angeles) possesses a beauty of a very unique nature.
In my mind I've always liked to think of Monterey as a miniature San Francisco, although that is, of course, a gross exaggeration (albeit a very pleasant one). Monterey is the proud possessor of an impressive fort (and much coveted piece of real estate) overlooking Monterey Bay called a "presidio" (Presidio means 'fortification' in Spanish, and both Monterey and San Francisco have spectacular Presidios overlooking their respective bays). The Presidio of Monterey is where ALS (Army Language School, affectionately referred simply to as "Al's" by long-departed alumni) is located (now renamed to DLI -- Defense Language Institute), and when we stepped out the side door of our First Platoon barracks we were treated to an incredible view of both the harbor and the surrounding bay (although in the winter months often accompanied by a menacing bank of fog rolling up the hill towards us from the bay at an alarming speed!). It's hard to describe the transition from hot and sandy Fort Jackson, South Carolina (with its collection of Coral snakes and other slithering critters through which we had to crawl on our final test under overhead machine gun fire!) to this oasis of beauty and calm tucked into the coastal hills of northern California. Hallelujah!
The Russian language school at Monterey has two courses -- a 37-week course and a 47-week course, the difference being in the amount of detail that gets covered. During the 1960s there was still a very active Cold War in progress (the Cuban missile crisis occurred in early 1963, just as I was about to get out of the service and threatened to extend my enlistment by 6 months!). During this period the Russian course was one of the most heavily attended, as many of the graduates went on to serve at listening posts in various locations throughout the world to monitor Soviet voice traffic of different kinds. Present-day activity at DLI is more focused on the mid-Eastern political situation with emphasis on languages in those regions. The Russian-language department at Monterey may be about to stage a comeback, however, as Mr. Putin attempts to re-establish Russian dominance in the post-Cold War world. One can hardly wait ...
When student soldiers arrive at Monterey they are assigned to a course that may start a few days or (more often) a few weeks after their arrival. After spending a few weeks tending ice-plant beds on the Monterey post (a fascinating, although somewhat repetitive job), I started my studies as one of about 50 soldier-students in a class labeled R-12-87, i.e., the 87th 12-month (47 weeks, to be exact!) Russian course that had been taught at the school since its inception back in the late 1940s. Our teachers were all native Russian speakers, most of them at that time being refugees either from the Russian revolution or from various phases of the Second World War. They were a mixed group of folk, consisting of former nobility from the Czarist days along with some military types (a White general or two thrown in -- no Reds to the best of my knowledge), a few academics and/or professionals (mineral engineering, for example) who had managed to get out just as things were turning really sour during the Revolution, a ne'er-do-well type or two with just enough money to bribe his (or her!) way across some border, and even one or two suspiciously peasant types hoping to conceal his or her origins from their compatriots -- not an easy thing to do! The teachers we had at that time have, of course, all died off by now (they weren't young to start with when we arrived!), and a completely new generation of Russians have taken their places (with undoubtedly a completely different set of world views, which very much colors the language instruction the students receive!). The Presidio holds an open house once a year for the public to visit (the facility was once an open post, but has been closed to the public since 9/11/2001). The instructors seem to be a much younger, hipper group, many of whom have spent much of their lives either in the Bay Area or in similar Russian enclaves in other parts of the U.S.
The classes were intensive, going for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week for 47 weeks (37 weeks for the abbreviated course). In addition, students were expected to put in a couple of hours outside of class learning a new dialog and a set of about a dozen new vocabulary words each school day. Back in our day classes were attended in dress uniform (not fatigues), although during a recent visit we noticed that this particular protocol seems to be changing! The barracks in our time consisted of rows of two-man cubicles with a single desk and two metal cots in each cubicle, along with two upright clothes lockers, and two foot-lockers, i.e., you were definitely in the Army! A normal military schedule was followed with Reveille (lights on) every morning at 6 am, classes being three 1-hour sessions from 8 to 11 am, with a 2-hour lunch break, followed by three more classes from 1 to 4 pm, Retreat (end of normal work day) at 5 pm, and Taps (lights out) at 10 pm. There was a theater, day room, and EM club on base, and downtown Monterey was about a 10-minute walk down the hill (lots of bars, but no GI bars -- they were more out towards Fort Ord, at that time still in situ). Since those days the whole area where our barracks were located has been razed and a parade field and/or sports area put in, with the soldiers' housing having been moved further up the hill into the area where the other language departments are located. The classroom barracks are, however, the same as in our time and are not that different from the barracks back at Fort Jackson, SC circa 1960!
Being stationed at Monterey was, and actually still is, quite a privilege, with spectacular scenery surrounding the whole area. In addition to Monterey itself, the little towns of Pacific Grove and Carmel are within bicycling distance, and the coastal area on Highway 1 to the south of Monterey rivals anything anywhere in the world for sheer natural beauty. Just south of Carmel was Point Lobos State Park with its China Cove Beach, now closed due to erosion, but at that time the only safe swimming beach on that part of the coast (due to strong rip tides -- in our day, a soldier in one of the language classes drowned while attempting to swim at one of the beaches, even though he had been a strong collegiate swimmer!). A favorite destination on weekends was Nepenthe, a restaurant (with an excellent bar, featuring large Gin Fizzes and exotic Singapore Slings) hanging over the ocean down by Big Sur about 25 miles south of Monterey where chamber concerts were held on weekends several times during our stay there (featuring Stanford harpsichordist Margaret Fabrizio, here then-husband flautist Ray Fabrizio, and SF Symphony oboist Raymond Dusté -- all strong players and a real treat).
Over 47-week period of the course, several breaks were scheduled -- a Christmas break for about a week during which I drove down to Los Angeles to visit my (Russian, what else?) grandfather Leon Strashun, greatly surprising him with my unexpected ability to spit out a few Russian phrases, including one using the Russian word for barracks (kazarma) which he marveled at, saying he had not heard that word for over 60 years (he had left Russia in 1895, and that visit was the last time I ever saw him, as he died just a year or two later at the age of 86); a 12-day break during April which I spent camping in Yosemite Valley with a classmate (David Griffiths, a Swarthmore grad who later worked at Radio Liberty in Munich and eventually became a professor of Russian history at the University of North Carolina); a week's break in July spent hiking in the Yosemite high country area called Tuolumne Meadows (again with David Griffiths and one or two other barracks mates); and a final break spent in the King's Canyon Sequoia Park area south of Yosemite. David and I also discovered an interesting little place in the Santa Cruz area called the "Sticky Wicket" which put on small outdoor performances of staged operas, the one we saw being an extremely effective rendition of Gluck's "Orpheus et Euridice" -- the opera being staged outdoors while we the patrons enjoyed a very nice wine-fueled buffet dinner on a warm summer night! Interestingly, many of our classmates went on to pursue careers in Russian-related fields, either as college professors or working for one of the intelligence services (principally NSA and/or CIA, both of which offered opportunities to work in various European, as well as other foreign, locations).
Frequent visits to San Francisco over the weekend were a favorite diversion, although finding an affordable place to stay overnight was always a challenge. During our time at Monterey it was normal to receive a promotion from Private to PFC (Private First Class!), something that included a modest pay raise from about $69 to something around $80(!), which surprisingly was a considerable help! Gasoline was only about 15 cents a gallon if bought at the little on-post service station in Monterey, but in those days cars only got about 15 miles to the gallon! I slept in a number of places in San Francisco -- the downtown YMCA for about $5/night (another place to be careful about dropping your soap -- I stayed there only once!), a Mission Street dump called the Keane Hotel (still there!) costing about $4/night, the floor of David Griffiths' aunt and uncle's small flat in San Francisco (free, and included a lovingly served breakfast!), the floor of a college roommate's tiny room in a residence club call Baker Acres (stayed there again when I eventually returned to SF in 1967, as did Malcolm Walker in 1969 -- for about 10 months!), and (worst of all) a barracks on the grounds of the Presidio of San Francisco where we had to get our bedding out of the store-room at night and return it next morning, as well as having to fall out at 6 am to "police up the cantonment area" (also a one-time stay!). We also camped out of the car several times during trips to other local spots, in particular while investigating the coast up as far as Fort Ross and the Napa wine country. Being awakened by the local police at 2 am in the morning was not unusual while camping alongside the road, although showing them our military IDs usually took care of things (one cop even snapped us a salute with a sappy grin on his face as he returned our ID cards). During occasional times towards the end of the month when we had completely run out of money, we would hitchhike from Monterey out to Highway 101, then up to the city wearing our uniforms (which helped in getting picked up, but was actually very much against regulations).
The musical offerings in the San Francisco area were abundant and often quite good, although, having come from Boston where the BSO set a very high standard (at surprisingly affordable prices, with weeknight Open Rehearsal seats for students going for only a dollar each!), there were occasional surprises! I recall wandering through the rather seedy "Tenderloin" area of San Francisco with a friend one early Saturday afternoon looking for possible lodgings, when a Monterey acquaintance of my friend came down the street from the other direction. This gentleman had actually been a Harvard undergraduate and, upon seeing us, began exclaiming enthusiastically about a very affordable matinee performance of the San Francisco Symphony that would be taking place that very afternoon and which would be featuring a performance of the Schumann Opus 86 Konzertstück for 4 French horns -- a bravura piece that I knew from recordings, but which I had never heard in an actual concert. My friend was also a brass enthusiast (even played the double-bell euphonium, an instrument rarely seen, much less played!), and we decided on the spot that it would be a good way to sample the quality of the San Francisco Symphony (matinees usually had plenty of seats available at discounted prices for military personnel!). We had expected the other gentleman to join us, but he began enthusing about a bar he was headed for just down the street that served "boilermakers" for only fifty cents and headed off in that direction. We eventually ended up at the concert ourselves, but when the conductor (Enrique Jorda, as I recall) raised his stick and started things off, I had considerable trouble recognizing the piece (which starts out with the four solo horns in virtual unison, but in this case all playing only moderately related notes!). After the first movement had finished, we looked at one another and decided that the boilermakers presented a much more attractive option and slipped quietly away. The next concert of the SFO I attended was about 10 years later under Josef Krips (featuring André Watts playing the Brahms Second Piano Concerto and accompanied by a date named Kathy!), and I'm happy to say that the quality had improved greatly.
Another musical adventure in the city included a quick evening's trip up and back to take in a special one-time performance of the Russian opera Prince Igor (from which the music for the Broadway musical Kismet was taken -- think Polovtsian Dances!). That one took a late-night stop for coffee on the way back to stay awake, since my partner in crime, Brown University philosophy major John Rollinson (and later military Major before finally getting a Divinity degree and settling in as an Episcopal clergyman and part-time church organist!), didn't do much driving in those days and I had to take the wheel all the way up and back! It was probably a rather foolish thing to try and do, but we couldn't resist (ah, youth -- even if already beginning to age a bit!).
John Rollinson was also a great enthusiast of German opera, in particular Richard Wagner. I attended my first Wagner opera with John in San Francisco one Saturday evening -- a bravura performance of "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" which included Mary Costa in the role of Eva. Mary Costa is perhaps better known as the voice of Princess Aurora in Disney's 1959 animated version of "Sleeping Beauty" as well as having been the wife of Frank Tashlin, the author of the 1946 children's book "The Bear That Wasn't" which was a favorite of mine at about age 8 when it first came out! In any case, John and I went on to attend many Wagner operas together, principally later on after I had returned to San Francisco in 1967, but also during two summers at Wagner's Bayreuth Festival in Germany -- unfortunately also a favorite spot of Adolf Hitler, with whom one of the Wagner heirs, Winifred Wagner (the English-born wife of Siegfried Wagner, the son of Richard Wagner) unfortunately had become close friends. Keeping one's aesthetic tastes politically correct can sometimes be a real chore ...
After having been at Monterey for several months, I had the good fortune to be invited (through John Rollinson's efforts) to join a regular Bridge foursome. I had dabbled at the game in college, although I only occasionally had had the time to play a hand or two. Military service, however, offered time in much more generous quantities than engineering school, and I soon got in the habit of playing for an hour or more each evening at the local Presidio service club -- about a one-minute walk from my barracks! The Monterey experience was an odd one in the sense that one was very much in the military, but there was still very much a whiff of a college lifestyle on base -- a rather unique co-mingling of what one normally would think of as being quite different experiences (keeping in mind that we were enlisted men -- not officers, that we lived in barracks -- not BOQs, and that many of our cohorts were real soldiers who had spent time in places with live wars, like Korea). In a sense we were sort of playing at being in the Army because none of us ever expected to see actual combat and never did (at least to my knowledge. Heaven help any fellow soldiers who might expect to be depending on our combat skills!).
Another member of our Monterey bridge foursome was a gentleman by the unusual name of Clayton Coon -- a Berkeley astronomy major who also ended up in Monterey after having graduated from college and having been pursued by the draft, much as I had been! Clayton was a pipe organ enthusiast (the first I had ever met!) who would sit in his little Morris Minor (parked right outside his barracks!) every Thursday evening at about 9 pm in order to catch the organ recitals which at that time were broadcast on a weekly basis from the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City -- a really dedicated organ enthusiast! Over a period of many months, I attended a variety of concerts with Clayton, including the regular Sunday organ recitals at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, which even today still draw a very eclectic group of organ enthusiasts from throughout the Bay Area -- although a different set of organists than in the early 1960s, when the local favorites were the Grace Cathedral organist Richard Purvis (sometimes described as a "local San Francisco legend") and Ludwig Altmann (a Jewish organist from Berlin who served as the organist at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco for some 50 years after having fled Germany in 1937). We also managed to squeeze in a quick trip to Reno in Clayton's Morris Minor one weekend, where I spent almost 4 hours at the crap table while slowly diminishing my $20 pile of $1 chips -- my first and only venture into a casino where I actually took part in the proferred activities -- a very good object lesson, obviously. Clayton also went on to become an Episcopal priest, eventually transferring to the Anglican church where he served in several parishes in England, at one point even managing to interest an American organ enthusiast in financing the acquisition of an organ for the little parish in which he served in Northern England (in the somewhat mixed agricultural/industrial town of Huddersfield!).
It's interesting to reflect on the process by which the 50-odd members of our class happened to all converge together at one time and place in Monterey. The classes were a mixture of ranks (enlisted men and officers) and services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and occasionally even a smattering of civilians from various government agencies). The officers typically could request the option of taking a language course at some point during their periodic reenlistment cycle, provided they actually had a need for the language (the highest-ranking officer in our class was an Army colonel preparing to serve as a military attaché in the US Embassy in Moscow). Most of the enlisted personnel were potential draftees such as myself, who were told by a recruiting sergeant that the only way to get into language school was to enlist in a particular branch of the service -- typically either ASA (Army Security Agency, military counterpart to the civilian NSA) or DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency, military counterpart to the civilian CIA). This did not actujally guarantee entry, since one also had to pass an exam that was administered only after enlistment! The exam was administered typically around the 3rd or 4th week of Basic Training and only in the evening at the end of a full day of Basic Training exercises. It was only at the "commencement service" at the end of Basic Training that one knew whether he (no she's back then!) had been accepted. The whole thing was a real gamble, but one which we had all taken ...
The end of our 47-week course was marked by a grand ceremony in the fabled "Tin Barn" -- a revered if somewhat dilapidated structure on the Post where each class would hold its graduation ceremony. Surprisingly (to me), the proceedings were held in English rather than the language which we had been studying for so long, perhaps because the eloquence of any Russian speaker who might take the microphone could easily exceed our still somewhat rudimentary level of fluency. There was also the very real possibility that a certain small percentage of the graduating class might not understand enough of what was being said to realize when the moment had arrived for their brief march across the stage to receive their diplomas. The language department personnel were quite good about making sure that as many of their students finished the course as was practicable, but there were nevertheless one or two ex-cooks, infantry sergeants, and even some of the older career officers who struggled with the language to the point that it was perhaps a bit of an act of charity to hand them their diplomas! Even those of us who had done passingly well in the course were in possession of a knowledge which at that point was more one of recognition than actual fluency in speaking.
One final bit of frosting on the cake at graduation time was the simultaneous elevation of those of us who were still at the PFC (Private First Class) level to the exalted rank of SP4 (Specialist 4th Class -- a somewhat hokey rank used at that time to promote someone to the pay grade of a Corporal without actually making him a Corporal in the sense of having any field command role). The promotion vaulted my pre-tax pay to something like $90/month, a not unappreciated sum. And just to pile the frosting on a little higher, we were each notified of our follow-on assignments -- for me, to my great relief, a passage to Germany and all that Central Europe had to offer to a farm boy just recently out of the North Georgia hills.
One of the interesting things about the social dynamics of the language school was that one was thrown in with a wide variety of people -- some in the particular barracks one lived in, others in the particular classroom environment, a few encountered during the occasional round of KP and its socially leveling influence, and still others being people one might meet in the day room over a game of snooker or ping-pong, or whatever. However, in my experience it was only occasionally that the people one mixed with in one setting would in turn mix well with those from another setting, even though all of the settings were physically within a hundred feet or so of each other -- a phenomenon which often occurs in mixed social settings, but is quite pronounced in the military service where one lives and works in close proximity to the same group of people 24 hours a day!
In a setting such as Monterey there is, perhaps understandably, a notable whiff of the phenomenon sometimes referred to as "ambiguous sexuality!" For instance, the space freed up for me at the bridge table occurred because one of the foursome had developed an interest in participating in a local theater group with its attractive collection of creative types from the Monterey scene! The soldier occupying the cubicle just across from mine in our barracks suddenly disappeared one day, and a pair of MPs appeared later that same day to clear out his belongings and prepare the cubicle for a new occupant -- a would-be sports announcer who unfortunately liked to spend his evenings listening to recordings of old Monmouth Hawks' basketball games which he had broadcast during his (as yet uncompleted) undergraduate days at his alma mater of Monmouth University back in New Jersey. Another soldier in the barracks had unfortunately lent the departed soldier some money, and I gave him a hand in tracking down the suddenly absent soldier (now apparently ex-soldier) who was living in a rather seedy area of San Francisco, where his circumstances as a dishonorably discharged soldier were sadly such that there was little hope of recovering the money! One would occasionally hear the term "Monterey Mary" used by the recruits up the road at the infantry training center in Fort Ord to refer to our lapsed brothers at the Presidio (and by association perhaps to the whole lot of us as well!), a term heard even more frequently when we eventually transitioned overseas to some of the "real military" installations abroad!
The Army is in some senses one of the most democratic of all American institutions in that people from all walks of life are thrown together for a brief period of time, function together in whatever manner is required, then go their separate ways -- most often never to see one another again, while at the same time having acquired some very useful insights into an important aspect of what constitutes a democratic society ...