i just finished going through Vanderbilt, Summer, 2018 magazine. When i get them, i turn to the “epilogue” section to see if there is someone i knew who has passed away. i knew already, but Albert Noe was listed in this edition. Sad.

 i read the rest of the magazine for a number of reasons.

Just to make sure you know this isn’t under false pretenses, i didn’t graduate from Vanderbilt. i started all right. On a NROTC scholarship, pretty much a full ride, Blew it big time. i finished my undergraduate degree at Middle Tennessee. Got as good as i could get in a BA in literature. Two and a half years of some of the best times of my life. PhD’s Bill Holland and Scott Peck challenged me to rise to academics heights i have never reached before or since but was definitely on a roll then. Vanderbilt. i still went there, socially, you might say.

Vanderbilt was a defining point of my life. i had a lot of fun and probably broke a few drinking records. i also met some of the best people on this planet. They became my friends for life.  i had a lot of respect for them and a lot of guilt for me for flunking out — you may have read this before, but i was within one course of being the first student to flunk out without failing a course. Yep.  i had 16 D’s in four semesters. But in that last semester, the spring of 1964, i flunked statics, an engineering course, majestically. i took it over in the summer and got a D. But that is another story altogether.

Yet i was tied to Vanderbilt. i have tried on several occasions to return. The first was when i had to have a shore tour (bah!). i requested an NROTC instructor billet, fully aware of the irony. i wanted to be in the Vanderbilt NROTC unit, but opted for Texas A&M to get my disgruntled wife on her way to dropping me out of her life like handling a hot skillet barehanded. She was a Texan. Her father was an Aggie. It made sense. But i regretted not going to Vandy and perhaps, perhaps getting a graduate degree while working for the Navy.

Didn’t happen.

Then about a half dozen years ago, i got this idea of getting a graduate degree in writing. Stumbling through the options, the only one was a masters in fine arts for writing. i tried. i was old and what credits i had couldn’t compare to super performing, younger and current applicants.

One of the reasons i thought the old man had a chance is that a recipient of this program would also be required to participate, maybe even be the editor for…yep, the Vanderbilt magazine. Perfect. i thought. Nope, new age stuff doesn’t make an old time editor look good.

Didn’t happen.

Still, Vanderbilt has always had my respect and support. Especially sports (and that’s another story involving Fred Russell and Bob Thiel and Roy Blount and Coach JB Leftwich). i was a huge basketball fan and a distant adjunct to the ’64-’65 team that won the SEC. i loved to sit on the first base hill and watch  baseball on Hawkins Field. i even covered a Vanderbilt-Kentucky freshman football game while working at the Banner.

Except for some random good seasons in basketball and one or two in football, there were some rough years. Then the new age came in. Vanderbilt now has great success in all of the sports and is competitive in the two biggies of college sports, football and basketball.

So i participate in Vanderbilt events for old folks. i’m even a “Quint,” an honor for those whose class was more than a half century ago. i give a few bucks to the athletic program every year.

When i read the magazine after the obits, i am always amazed at the quality of the magazine, the incredibly diverse achievements of the alumni, and the amazing accomplishments and potential great futures of the current students. i’m proud i went there.

In this issue, Mitch Litch wrote an article about Vanderbilt athletics, “Grade A Talent.” Litch captures what i think is most important about Vanderbilt athletics and fostered by David Williams, a rather incredible asset to Vanderbilt athletics who is retiring from his Vice Chancellor of Athletics position next year. As i have noted several times, Dr. Williams endorsed success in athletics at Vandy doing it the right way, the Vandy way.

It is a tough road, this doing it the right way. That means a college student who participates in athletics is integrated into all of student life including academics, a name only thing at a lot of college athletic programs who have sacrificed the “student” part of “student athlete.”

In the middle of the article, there was a quote from Derek Mason, the current — and i hope the long range — coach of the football Commodores:

Our student-athletes have to go across campus and compete against students who don’t really care about their athletic prowess, and then they have to come back and compete against athletes in the SEC who don’t really care about their ACT or SAT scores.

There lies the delicious problem and the beauty of Vanderbilt’s quest in athletics. They are trying to do it the right way. College is upper education. It was not meant to be a contest to see who can win athletic contests by recruiting people only to play sports who are hoping against terribly long odds to make a career as a pro athlete and then keeping them away from solid academics and life on campus with ALL of the students.

So you see i hope Vandy continues the quest to not only succeed in most sports but to succeed in football and basketball as well by doing it the right way, even if it makes it a bit tougher on the student-athlete, and recruiting and competing in the SEC and big time college football and basketball. Vandy has done that in men and women’s sports.

Hopefully, they can do that in these two highly visible sports as well.

And you know what? As long as they are competitive i hope…no, i pray they continue trying to it the right way, the Vandy way, and the way it should be for all colleges and all sports.

i am sitting here in my home office. It is late in the evening.

i should be working on my book. You know, the book about my positive experience with women at sea in the Navy, which never progresses at the speed which i plan, damn near always because i can procrastinate with the best of them and allowed to do so because i have reached that glorious age where it is okay. i should be in bed.

i’m sitting here thinking about logos. Logos? Yeh. Logos.

One reason i’m thinking about logos comes from what i’m wearing. i’m sitting here in the house wearing a ball cap. It just came in the mail. i don’t normally wear my ball caps inside anything. My mother and daddy taught me well.

My Vanderbilt ball caps have pretty much run their course, mostly in the sun of the golf course. So i ordered a new one. It came today. Black. Handsome, the ball cap, not me. It’s on my head in my house.

i’m also wearing my Castle Heights tee shirt. It also is pretty new. My old gray one, looked (and eventually smelled) like it came out of the locker room of that old gym basement. But not this tee shirt. This new one is maroon, with Castle Heights in that Gothic  lettering and the Tiger in gold. i have three Heights ball caps like i did with Vandy’s caps, now numbering four.  i have about twenty ball caps with logos and about six polo shirts with logos. i have the Vandy, Heights, Middle Tennessee, and a Lebanon High School ’62 Football caps. i have a bunch of caps from where i’ve been, like Brenneke’s on Poipu Beach in Kauai. There’s also a couple of Navy SEAL golf tournament hats, and a couple from the USGA. And there is one from Pacific Tugboat Services. In fact, the other piece of garb i’m wearing is a faded blue chambray shirt with a Pacific Tugboat logo on the breast.

In my youth, besides hood ornaments and the tail fins on cars of the fifties, i don’t remember too many logos except the inescapable Coca Cola and a couple of others like Goo Goo candy. i’m sure there were more but i don’t remember any impact they made on me.

Back then, those hood ornaments and one other logo influenced me. When i was accepted to Vanderbilt, one of the first things i bought was a decal to stick to the back window of the family’s 1958 Pontiac Star Chief. i was proud of getting into Vanderbilt.

i also had game and practice jerseys from Heights football. One disappeared during one of about 15 moves during and after my Navy career. The practice jersey, a heavy cotton one (#27) became so ratty Maureen made me throw it out. Then there was a Texas Boot softball jersey (which Sarah still wears). Of course, i wore Navy uniforms for nearly forty years, on and off.

i now have a different idea about logos than most folks’ ideas about logos. For starters, i don’t particularly like them. i definitely don’t like logos of the company on products they sell. i don’t own and never will golf apparel with a logo like Titlelist or Taylor Made or Calloway unless it’s a golf bag from which there is no other option.  i wanted to get rid of the logos on my cars. i figure if i am wearing a logo for a product, i am advertising for that product. So they should be paying me…you know like Tiger and Lebron and Matthew McConaughey. i mean i don’t expect to be paid in the millions or even a thousand, but i think a rebate on the products i use would be proper.

An aside: Do you know how hard it is to find a good shirt without a logo on it?

i also will not wear paraphernalia, including ball caps or jerseys of the team i’m rooting for at sports events. i sure as hell won’t wear paraphernalia with somebody else’s name on it, even like Tony Gwynn. i still have some tee shirts with players’ names from the freebie handouts when i had season tickets to ball games, but generally, i am me, not somebody else, no matter how much more famous they are than me. i don’t want to confuse people by making them think i might have another name. And i don’t wear tee shirts except for working out and home tasks (unless of course i have to make a run to Home Depot or Lowes). And if i go to a sports event, i don’t wish to look like a lemming.

i usually wear my logo stuff where it isn’t worn by everybody else. Like out here in the Southwest corner, i wear Castle Heights, Vandy, LHS 1962’s undefeated team, and Middle Tennessee hats. When i go back home, i wear Padre, Navy SEAL, and Pacific Tugboat hats. i mean if i am back home, everybody there knows this is San Diego with Padres, SEALS, and Pacific Tugboat. And back home, everyone knows Vanderbilt and Middle Tennessee and Castle Heights (past tense) and Lebanon High School and UT Chattanooga Mocs.

But tonight, i’m celebrating the joy i have with memories of things i love. So i have my hat on and my CHMA tee shirt and my Pacific Tug shirt. It’s been a good life and my logos help me recall some good times:

At my age, memories fade and confuse. It seems i’ve written about this box before. Don’t care. The real memories, not forgotten and clear came rolling out yesterday.

It’s not much of a box really.

i got it out yesterday to replace a button on my working shorts.

The box is about five inches square, an old haze gray box. In 1975, i found it my new stateroom on the USS Anchorage (LSD 36) when i reported aboard in San Diego to relieve the first lieutenant. Since the guy i was relieving had the first lieutenant’s stateroom, i was put in another stateroom. The temporary was on midship passageway in the after row, the first one on the port side in officer’s country.

Looking back, it seems almost prophetic where i was berthed. It had been the stateroom for the ship’s bosun. i never knew his first name. i imagine him as a balding big man with a deep voice. i do not know why. He left about a month before i reported aboard. He left me in an awkward position.

It was February. The Anchorage was about six weeks from a ten-month deployment to WESTPAC as a ship in Amphibious Squadron Five. i had never been on an amphib; didn’t know squat about them. i considered myself a destroyer sailor and had come from being the chief engineer on the USS Hollister (DD 788) out of Long Beach. But the Navy had decided to share the wealth and introduced split tours for department heads. i went from Destroyer School in Newport, Rhode Island to the Hollister for about eighteen months. Rather than spending three years in that billet, i rotated to an amphibious ship, one of the first department head grads to finish Destroyer school and then split to another type of ship, amphibious, or service force (oilers, ammunition carriers, etc.).

Although i was not enamored with the idea of leaving destroyers, the “greyhounds of the fleet,” i admit i was glad to leave chief engineering behind me. The job of keeping a thirty-year old, abused engineering plant up and running was harrowing to say the least. i was absolutely thrilled when i just missed my goal of holding it together well enough to meet all of her operational commitments. We failed to meet one five-day underway period just before we went into the yards for a periodic overhaul. It was one of my toughest jobs in the Navy.

So as the completely unarmed lieutenant reported to the Anchorage, he was counting on the ship’s bosun to provide all of his knowledge and expertise in maintaining amphibious operations at an acceptable level, at least until i learned more and became more proficient in boats, cranes, well decks, and landing operations.

One problem: the Navy (again) had decided to rotate the ship’s bosun a month before i got there. He left with no replacement.

But he left his little metal box in the small fold-out desk in his stateroom. With a felt-tip pen, he had written his name, “Bosun Holtzclaw,” now faded to almost illegibility, on the top.

When i discovered it the second day aboard, i picked it up and opened it. It was the bosun’s sewing kit. There were some small scissors, about a half-dozen sewing needles of various sizes, straight and safety pins, Navy exchange thread kits wrapped around cardboard, white and Navy blue spools of thread, and about fifty buttons from pea coat size to small uniform buttons for nearly all officer uniforms.

i didn’t have a sewing kit. Convenient. At least the boatswain left me something.

i have many tales about that deployment and my tour aboard Anchorage. Except for a couple of personal setbacks and a shocking abuse of power by the chain of command at the very end of my tour against Art Wright, one of the best commanding officers i had in my career, it was my best tour of my Navy career.

Not known at the outset, we would take part in the evacuation of Vietnam that May. We were chased by typhoons in the South China Sea. We did some rather amazing lifts of cargo and hit some great liberty ports. As first lieutenant, i was in charge of just about everything except engineering and the small Combat Information Center.

i was in charge of all exterior maintenance of the ship (the first commanding officer, Lou Aldana, told me my job was like a farmer’s: when it was good weather, my boatswainmates would work long hours painting and chipping. When it was bad weather, we would be getting ready for the good weather, and  when we had finished, we would start over again).

i also was responsible for the ship’s boats (an LCVP, motor whale boat, and the captain’s gig) as well as the embarked Assault Craft Unit boats, two LCM8’s (70-foot landing craft) and an LCU (120-foot landing craft). The two 60-ton cranes were my responsibility in addition to the flight deck, the mezzanine deck, and the well deck. I was the well-deck master for all boat and cargo operations. i was responsible for all flight operations and the flight deck. i had the gunnery department under my aegis and was in charge of all ammunition storage. Troop berthing (about 600 enlisted berths) were in my bailiwick and being in charge of any troops when they were embarked. There are probably a couple of things under my responsibility i have left out.

i was one of the four Officers of the Deck (OOD’s) underway and Command Duty Officers with 24-hour duty every fourth day. i was the sea detail and general quarters OOD. One load required me on station throughout 42-hours, followed two days later by a 22-hour load, and there were numerous loads twelve hours or longer.

And you know what, it was fun. No, it was a wonderful time to be a mariner, a Navy surface officer at sea. i’ll cherish the memories for the rest of my life.

*     *     *

i am a collector of memories, some might say a third degree hoarder. i have a garage full of stuff from the past, my past. i have an inexpensive glasses holder on my nightstand. My aunt gave it to me for a small Christmas present. I think of Aunt Bettye Kate every night before i go to bed when i use it for my glasses. i have a wine bottle foil cutter my brother and his wife gave me one Christmas. The plastic holder is broken and i have other foil cutters but i always use this one because i think of them when i open a bottle of wine. i have about two hundred photos of my daughters and grandson around the house and garage so it feels like they are with me when i am anywhere in our house. i have my father’s Tasmanian Devil floorboard covers i gave him for his Ford Escape one birthday. Every time i get in my car, i think of him.

That’s just the beginning.

And on a closet shelf, there is this little metal box tucked away for when i have to sew a button on some pants or shorts. Anything more sophisticated tailoring than that i seek out Maureen or even a tailor. At Castle Heights, i had about four or five “bachelor buttons” to use vice sewing on a button: emergency kind of thing. Yep, i have a couple in the metal box that allows me think of the hilltop back a long time ago.

Each time i pull that little metal box out, i think of the man i never met. i wish i had met Boatswain Holtzclaw. i have the greatest admiration for Bosun’s, some of the finest men and capable sailors i have ever met. i suspect some of CWO4 Holtzclaw wore off on me through his little metal box.

i would like to thank him.

Thanks, Sean:

http://seandietrich.com/hartford-2/