All posts by Jim

Neiderfrank’s: Old School

A Pocket of Resistance

i claim it was the jacaranda that made me do it. Saturday loomed as the day to get done all i had put off all week. i arose with that intent, devoting the day to the never-ending, always growing to-do list as well as much needed exercises and a good swift walk.

i grumbled and felt badly. Most of our country was sweltering in unheard of heat and humidity. i had incredible Southwest corner weather: low 70s, slight sea breeze, no clouds. And the whipped cream was, because of the dour winter and spring, the jacarandas were still in bloom, usually done by mid-June. These kind of days have been rare this year out here. The weather guessers are predicting we are going to get the same kind of miserable heat elsewhere. i wanted loll about outside while it was possible. But i had vowed to get things done.

i decided to compromise with myself.

i chose to run my errands first. i headed down to Third Avenue in Chula Vista’s older city area. Currently, there is an effort to revive this older part of the city. It is a bit run down and does not feature The jeweler there needed more guidance on an old engine order telegraph to replace missing parts. i wanted it for memorabilia, knowing it would invariably be moved into my garage “workshop” even if was allowed inside the house before being relocated by a wife of mine — that was perfectly okay with me. My garage work space walls are line with my memorabilia. It is not so much a workshop, more like an escape. So i headed down the jacaranda lined streets to Third.

King’s Jewelry is a marvel in today’s world. It is a narrow space with counters on both sides to the reception table. the counters and the walls are crammed with clocks of every kind. Many are of the wood carved wind-up clock variety with glass fronts displaying the works and the gongs that can make you reel when they go off on the half-hour (one clang) and the hour (a clang for each hour, e.g. two o’clock = two clangs. Fortunately, none were wound. It is a private shop. These folks aren’t into uppity, high-end jewelry. i have the impression most of their business comes from repair of watches, clocks, and strange requests like some old Navy guy asking if they can come up with an arrow matching the one he lost for the Engine Order Telegraph repeater. They were not only courteous and helpful but were downright interesting in the project. i should have an update after the holiday tomorrow.

Man, it felt like old school.

Since i was on Third in Chula Vista (i will repeat a post with the poem i wrote more than a dozen years ago about Third after posting this one), i used the excuse of proximity to head to National City and Neiderfrank’s. It really isn’t that close and even more distant if the route is on surface streets. Since i avoid freeways as much as possible, i chose the longer route.

8th Avenue in National City is much like Third Avenue in Chula Vista. It is older, the chic upper class (they think) folks don’t go there much. No one is going to be impressed by their high-priced duds. You find working people there. The homes, mostly well kept, are modest bungalows from bygone days. Back when, i went there a lot, primarily for McDini’s. McDini’s originally was an amazing Irish pub, located downtown San Diego on Market Street, now a condo high rise haven with trendy restaurants. McDini’s shut down its operation and the National City restaurant became “McDini’s Baja,” a combination of Irish and Mexican fare. There is a post there all by itself. Later. It is shut down now. Sad.

But across the street on A Avenue stands Neiderfrank’s, truly an ice cream parlor par excellence.

The parlor was created in 1948. New owners took over in 1995 but retained the business in the exact way it had been run just shy of a half century. They didn’t change a thing.

That includes using an ice cream maker that is over 100 years old as well as the process that reduces the amount of aeration. They also have created or retained some great quotes like:

“We make our ice cream by some of the most antique, inefficient, outdated, and expensive process in the world,” and “We are so far behind in modern technology that we are about 100 years ahead.”

They are ahead of the world by retreating to a world i once knew. Neiderfrank’s is old school, my kind of old school.. The reason i went there was to get my fix of black walnut, my favorite ice cream since i finally realized my father was wise in choosing that flavor at Johnson’s Dairy on the corner of West Main and West End Heights some eons ago. i have had other black walnut concoctions but Neiderfrank’s is the best. As i was waiting for my pint, i noticed a hand printed add-on to the available flavors. Peach. When this affable and fun lady, whom i presume was the owner, returned with my black walnut, i added a scoop of peach in a cup.

i took my first taste as i walked back toward my car. Bells went off. Choirs sang. i called Maureen to tell her i was cutting my errand run short because i had something i wanted her to taste before it melted. When i got home with the one spoonful i had not eaten, she tasted it and shared my ecstasy.

i was back to the 1950’s in the back yard of our home on Castle Heights Avenue. We only ate two things in that backyard. One was slices of a whole watermelon long before they agronomists or whatever they are figured out how to reduce the number of seeds in a a watermelon. The children sat cross-legged on the lawn, take a bite, and spit the two dozen or so seeds that came with each bite before diving in again. Oh, oh, that sweet delicious taste.

But the best was when the ladies of the house mixed the ingredients for ice cream in with the sliced peaches they had picked from the trees. Those ingredients filled the small wood barrel of the ice cream maker, and closed with the churn handle on top. The whole shebang was covered with dry ice and that, in turn, was covered with old blankets. The children would take turns at the churn until they were worn out. Often the men in the family would finished the churning until the ice cream had hardened. The adults would sit on the lawn chairs and the children, again cross-legged, would sit on the lawn and feast in heaven on the home-made peach ice cream.

Fantasia. Neiderfrank’s peach was that good. i’m going back tomorrow to get a half-gallon.

You see, Neiderfrank’s is old school. There isn’t a lot of glitz, just perfect ice cream. Old school. Like me.

A Tale of the Sea and Me (For Sam) – Installment 12

Sea Stories

This is yet another of my sea stories out of sequence, actually just a short description of a destroyer’s firerooms in 1973 when i was her chief engineer. It will be included in my serialized book in progress A Tale of the Sea and Me (For Sam), more or less in chronological order. But the other night, this thought came into my head about the attraction i found in the firerooms i had on the USS Hollister (DD 788), 1973-74. i wished to capture it before it left my head as other thoughts have disappeared into the void of age.

Fireroom, 1973

She was old and worn out. Today’s Navy engineering plant “experts” would consider her abused. She had 27 years of service and three wars under her belt. Her firerooms were in another world.

And she was mine.

Un-dog the hatch and hoist it up to where it catches the lock on the bulkhead and stays. Slide down the slightly slanted ladder like any self-respecting boiler tender (BT) would do: facing forward, sliding on your hands with an occasional foot break to slow you down. Hit the upper level, propelled forward by your slide, take a step, and repeat to descend to the lower level. There you lurch against water tank sides where electrical cables hang in a bunch wider than a railroad track and a foot deep, running the length of the fireroom. And when you lean against that tank, you feel a slight shock, and draw back knowing to find the short or exposed wiring is an impossible task, omitted from the shipyard work because the expense would be more than the old girl is worth. But you are where men spin dials, light fires, replace burner plates, keep the furnace fires a’boiling with black oil, and sweat shirtless in the dank and dark lower level with blowers on the burner flats drowning out your voice and blowing off the sweat but not doing much to abate the heat. Worse than the humid Southern summer heat, not the dry heat the deserts to the west.

Your realize she, the boiler, and her sister across the flats, and the two in the forward fire room are the stomach of the food cycle, digesting the black oil with burners to heat the water coursing through the steam drum before routing the newborn steam to the heart of the two turbines, producing efficiency through the reduction gears to drive the two huge shafts to the propellers, the body, the legs, to thrust against the propellers: the steam cycle on the 600-pound steam plant of a World War II destroyer made perfect sense when you traced it, but tracing a Rube Goldberg composition was less complicated when you are down in the midst of it.

Then, the bridge orders up thirty knots, and the BTs shift into high gear for anything above twenty-seven requires super heat. More burner plates are thrust into the furnace. More black oil pores through the veins to the plates and the temperatures rises to 850 degrees and the superheater tubes at the top of the boiler reheats the steam and it is dry and courses its way to the turbines and Mr. Goldberg is smiling,

And then, they pass the word through the 2JZ sound-powered phone circuit that the ship is commencing a full-power run and there is no leash on the steam blasting out of all four boilers and you walk behind the boilers in the after fire room, and they are wheezing,, huffing hulks, the metal sides flexing with their power and you realize you are in the guts of a living thing, a living thing that any slight misstep might blow the whole thing away, including you, in a ball of fire hissing into the sea and she keeps pounding and the bridge announces she has reached her top speed of 37 knots but she keeps on winding out and no one can record the knots, but you know she’s getting close to 40 and the thrill is in your throat, pounding in your heart…and finally, the bridge commands to cease the run, not because she reached her limit or even that she became unsafe, ah unsafe, you laugh, because it ain’t ever safe unless she’s sitting cold iron at the pier, but the slow down begins because the ship has to be in another OP area for an exercise and cannot turn onto that course with that much speed, not even turn at all because of the high speed endangers any turn and the steam decreases and slowly, carefully the superheat is finally secured and the boiler and fireroom returns to normal steaming, but the BTs don’t slow down but stroke the boilers and their firebox like a child and you watch with pride and joy and allow the thrill to rest in your memory and you emerge from the hatch and walk out to the weather deck on the port beam with the wind and ocean spray cooling you…and you smile.

Notes from the Southwest Corner – 012

Notes from the Southwest Corner

As i edit this post from my past Democrat columns, i still miss Erma Baird, and all of those folks, now over that bridge, who were like family back home those many years ago. Life goes on and seems to come back to me in my older years. It was a lovely way to grow up, and those folks like Erma, Charlie, and Sharry made it that way.

SAN DIEGO – This has been a difficult column to write. Numerous things from my perch in the Southwest corner and far away in Lebanon made my past weekend (January 18-20), poignant with significant personal events.

Working backwards, Sunday was moving day. Our daughter Sarah, after a semester of commuting to San Diego State University from our home, moved into a dormitory for her second semester. I once again experienced the difficult art of letting go.

Her departure was rough on the old man. While many have experienced a child leaving home, my role as the at-home parent, a.k.a mister mom, and at a substantially older age than most parents, made Sarah’s departure particularly emotional.

The day before, Saturday, January 19, I became an old man according to the Beatles. On their “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band,” album, McCartney sang “When I’m 64.” I reached that magic number. Robert E. Lee reached birthday 200.

Friday, the beginning of this significant weekend, the initiating event was sad. My mother, Estelle Jewell, called to inform me Erma Baird passed away.

Mrs. Baird, her husband Charlie, and their daughter, Sharry Baird Hagar, have been a part of my life, literally since I was born. Sharry, Henry Harding, and I were baptized on the same Sunday at the Lebanon First Methodist Episcopal Church South on East Main in the late spring of 1944.

Erma is one of my wife’s favorite people in Lebanon.

On one trip to Lebanon, Charlie and Erma came to call while we visited my parents. Mischievously, Erma smiled and said, “I have something for you.” She gave Maureen pictures of a play the Methodist Youth Fellowship produced when I was fourteen. Many friends were co-stars but somehow I had been chosen to play Jesus as a young boy.

Maureen focused on this goofy looking guy at center stage, complete with a page boy wig, knee-length toga, and madras Bermuda shorts showing underneath as he sat spread-legged on a stool. I am not sure Maureen has ever completely recovered from laughing at the photo.

Erma, of course, loved the reaction.

The women of the “greatest” generation, as labeled by Tom Brokaw, were an incredible group of people. Their role through the Depression, World War II, and its aftermath was the synthesis for change. They balanced being a housewife and mother with pioneering equality in the workplace. They were strong; they were supportive; they were always busy.

Erma Baird had all the characteristics of the women of her generation. She was also one of the sweetest, loving women who ever walked the face of the earth. It seemed to me she loved everybody and could always find something good about any person or any situation.

She was that way when I can first remember her in my life, and she was that way when I visited her just before Christmas.

Even though, I am some 2,000 miles from Lebanon, the impact of losing Mrs. Baird hit me hard.

In the middle of all of these significant events, my daughter Blythe informs me my grandson Sam has spoken his first words, “Kitty Cat,” and is obviously connecting the word to the two felines who reside with him. It was a big day for the Jewell household. We are informed of Sam’s “firsts” almost daily, but a baby starting to talk is a giant step.

Years ago, a great deal of this weekend’s events would have washed over me. I would have kept on “chooglin’” along as Creedence Clearwater Revival exhorted me to do.

But late that Sunday evening, I sat before the fading embers in the family room fireplace and reflected: The world continues to change with significant events. Letting go of children, getting older, losing friends who have completed life’s cycle, and welcoming new friends into the cycle is constant. If all of us can deal with the cycle as have Erma and Charlie Baird, my parents, and many, others of that generation in Lebanon, we will be all right.