The morning of Sept. 6th, 1971 I lived in West Haven, at West Walk apartments and our apartment looked out over Long Island Sound, it was 50 yards from our front door. It was just getting light, I had the window open and I kept hearing PLOP!! and splashing so I rolled over, looked out and had a heart attack. The Sun hadn't risen yet but it was light and in that early morning light, 50 yards from my window, everywhere I looked there were schools of Big Bluefish slaughtering the Menhaden, or Bunkers. The Bunkers were literally jumping up onto the beach, out of the water to stay away from the Blues shredding their schools. I got dressed in about 2 seconds, ran down the stairs and out the front door and grabbed my fishing rod and a small tackle box of lures. This was before the world went to shit and everyone who fished had their fishing rods hanging from hooks, not locked up at all, on their front porch. I ran to the water, took my first cast and caught the first of maybe 25 fish that day, big Blues, anywhere from 12-18 pounds. As the Sun came up over the horizon, more and more of The Regulars.. the fisherpeople from the complex... came running down to the beach and started flogging the water with Hopkins Lures and Pencil Poppers and with almost every cast they were hooking up. It was ridiculous. By 8 I knew I wasn't going to even think about going to school because there were huge schools of Blues no matter where you looked. They were so thick and man in East Have caught two with a clam rake, just slamming the water where the fish were killing the bunkers And all day long there was absolutely no wind, the water was absolutely glassy calm. I met my friend Wayne Johnson about 9 AM and we fished together until the tide went out about 2 PM and it was absolutely non-stop. When word got out about how many fish there were first dozens and then hundreds of people were frantically casting, lined up between Savin Rock and Chicks and on probably 8 out of 10 casts they were hooking up. There is a 'system' for catching Bluefish, you have to cast to the near side of the school because they run through a bait ball just biting everything, and if you cast to the middle or the far side of a school you'd get your line cut every time. I lost pretty much all of my lures by about 10 AM but by that time so many people had lost lures I was finding one about every 5 minutes or so. There were literally millions of Bunker and Blues in New Haven Harbor that day because no matter where you looked you could see fish tearing it up, terns and seagulls everywhere diving to chow down on the tattered remains of the Bunker that were torn apart by the Blues.
Stories
Sunday, September 3, 2023
Thursday, August 11, 2022
The Press Box Scam.
We almost always went into New Haven in the fall, Saturdays mostly, and that was almost exclusively to go the football games at Yale Bowl. Well, in truth, the football games were dessert from the legendary Tail Gating Party. It was like a gourmet buffet sitting out on the tailgates of Ford Country Squire wagons and the food was just incredible. Eggs Benedict, grilled ham and cheese, fried chicken and buns and rolls and cinnamon everything. And no telling who you'd run into. Governor of Ct., Lowell Wicker, Walter Pigeon... and it was just plain fun. The air was cool and crisp, everyone was happy and smiling and waving to each other, just flat out almost perfect Saturdays. Everyone would have some food, some hot cocoa and some Bloody Mary's and stroll across to watch the game. There are 8 Ivy League colleges and they played football against each other every year. All in the same order. Every single year. 2nd week, Harvard, week 3, Columbia. Yale bowl is huge, it can seat over 80,000, it's impressive to say the least. The highest portion of Yale Bowl other than the lights and scoreboard was the Press Box. It sat perched above the crowds and field on the 50 yard line and was pretty good sized. It had an aisle towards the back for members of the press to walk up and down without getting in front of anyone and potentially blocking some reporters view to a historic moment in Ivy League Sports History and a rail. Down a few steps towards the front there was a row of seats and desks and then right at the very front were the seats for the various incarnations of Scoop Newsworthy, Ace Reporter. At one end of the press box sat a table that had a huge pile of incredibly delicious sandwiches, and against the wall they had thermos dispensers of coffee and hot chocolate and chicken soup. And it wasn't 7-11 snacks, it was ridiculously good food and the hot cocoa was just... perfect. On any given Saturday there were perhaps on the high side of 50 people in the press box. It was an exclusive club as well, if you didn't have a Press Box Pass hanging around your neck with the number of the week and the name of the Ivy League team you were playing surrounded by a huge red circle you didn't get into the Press Box, No Way.
I usually went with the Goulds and Todd and I noticed a flaw in the system. The Press Box Passes looked the same every single year. The sequence of games and the corresponding number of the week were the same. The Press Box Passes year after year looked exactly the same, the only variation being the date of the game, which was printed in probably at that time the smalled font available to nearby commercial printers and you literally had to look HARD at the pass to see the date. It was a Eureka Moment in our young lives and we immediately, at the end of every game, would ask anyone we saw who had a Press Box Pass if we could have it, and the game being over and members of the press leaving, they always said yes. Didn't do us any good at the time but the following fall, for two years, Todd Gould and I, adorned with what appeared to be authentic Press Credentials, sat hight above Yale Bowl, drinking hot chocolate and eating sandwiches and watched the games on those brisk, crisp fall mornings. What a view!
Tuesday, August 9, 2022
I used to go to Ticla when I was an agricultural relocation specialist, and not to badmouth Ticla it had it's good times and it had it's bad times where it looked like shit and items turned up missing. But when it was on the upswing it was cool and nice and mellow. I'd wake up, get up out of my hammock, grab my fishing rod and walk down and take a few casts while recycling the previous nights Coors Light. Without exception, I'd catch either a mangrove snapper, or something that looked like them, or a snook and once in a while the snook was big, 10 pounds or so. However big or as many as I caught, I'd take it up to the restaurant of Emalia, the woman we rented our Palapa from and tell her "Half of the fish for us, the other half is for you, sell them for lunch" and it worked out fantastic. We got free food, Emalia got free fresh filets and all was right in the world as far as meals went.
We were down there one time when Ticla was at it's nadir, dank and dirty, pissy people and whiny surfers from Cali. One afternoon a rental VW beetle shows up with some honeymooners. The groom had been to Ticla many times in the past when it was cool and chill and he wanted to take his new wife down for a few days to relax and surf before continuing south. The wife is not having it, and she's being sort of vocal about them not staying there at all. He complains and conjoles and she says he can go surfing but they have to leave right after that. Which considering was probably a good idea. He wanted to go across the Rio Ostulo, which was about calf-deep in the middle and go about a quater mile north to a break called The Bat Cave... it was in front of a 100 foot cliff and had a cave in it and bats actually lived there, it wasn't something to do with Batman. All good. She's sitting in the sun watching and working on her tan, he's out tearing it up and having a good time. As I turned back from the river I looked up the mountains and the sky was jet black, midnight black and lightning was tearing it UP. Within about 5 minutes the Rio Ostulo went from 8 inches deep to 3 feet deep and hauling ass, a real flash flood deal working and the storm parked, didn't move at all for at least an hour. We didn't get the really bad thunderstorm but the storm eventually moved over Ticla and started raining hard. But I digress. Bob and Judy were on the other side of the river and there was no way in the world they could cross back over to their car, no way in the world. He had his jams and a t-shirt and a vest, she had on basically a bikini and shirt, thin shirt, hot chick beach type shirt. And they were both soaked. They were sitting under a bush, his board over their heads and they were still there when I went to sleep. About 4 AM I woke up to take a piss and I went down to see what the river was doing. It was still raining but not hard at all, just a cold steady rain. I turned on the lights of the truck to see the river and there, off in the darkness and rain, I could see them still sitting there under his board and I almost wept in pity for the groom because I knew she hadn't been suffering in silence. And suffering they had been. See, the beach doesn't have anything to hold the heat even in the hottest days of summer and when the Sun goes down it gets pretty chilly. Actually it gets really chilly. They been sitting there, wet and freezing for about 12 hours so yeah.. poor him.
It wasn't until about 9AM before they could cross the river and she absolutely stomped across that sucker and up the street to their parked car. And guess what? During the night, knowing the people were stuck across the river the local incorrigibiles had helped themselves to just about everything in the car other than the butts in the ash tray. Everything. Which I thought was rather uncool so I walked up into town and up to the kids I knew had done it and told them in no uncertain terms to bring their passports, visas, wallets and cameras back to the car because the camera had all their wedding pictures on it and they couldn't use anything in their wallets anyway. Half an hour later some older woman brought the stuff back, including some clothes and said she'd 'found the stuff'. I think she was either the mother of or grandmother of one of the miscreants. I just felt so bad for the groom, she was like a pit bull on a squirrel, and I doubt they stay married more than an hour after returning to the US.
Friday, July 29, 2022
When I was in the Army I met a guy named Tony Olivares. He was from El Monte, California... Hacienda Heights actually I think. I assumed he was Mexican but one night we were out drinking and someone called him a Mexican. Not all that good an idea. Tony was Spanish, Castillian, pure blood. When Spain sold California to the US, his family's ranch in the San Jacquin Valley was not included. So yeah, Tony was Spanish. We were not really all that friendly at first, in fact we almost came to blows one day but we got to be good friends, maybe Best Friends. I hung out with him and his buddies in El Monte, "You're the only white guy within 10 miles of here" and the first time I went to Mexico was with Tony. We got his VW van stuck on the beach south of Encinada for 3 days until some Marinas came along and asked us what the hell we were doing there for 3 days, we told them "We're stuck!" and they pushed us out of the sand and up onto the road.
After I got out of the Army I moved to Denver but Tony and I fell out of touch. I used to have lunch pretty much on a daily basis at the Star Market at University and Evans and one afternoon I was having a sandwich and clam chowder and up walks my brother Tony. I said "I don't know if they let Mexicans around here" and he just smiled. Hadn't seen him in two years and there he was. Small world.
Tony had gotten out of the service and married an Army Brat who's parents were stationed at Fort Carson and they had gone to the post to visit. Tony and his wife were just going to drive up to Denver because, well, it's Denver but at the last minute, his mother in law asked his wife to help her do something so Tony decided to drive up anyhow and enjoy the front range and the weather. It was a picture perfect Colorado afternoon and Tony, never having been there and knowing nothing about it other than it's location and name, decided to get off at the next exit and he did. He decided to go left and two blocks from the freeway, he got a red light and was just waiting for the light to change, looking around and he saw me coming out of the Market and sitting down. He went and parked and walked up and Boom! Time didn't matter, we were instantly best friends again. We spent the afternoon driving around Denver and ended up at Malibu Grand Prix to take some laps. AJ Foyt had been there when they opened the track and they had his best time posted up on the board and I was within 3/100ths of a second 4 or 5 times. I asked the pit man "Damn how come I can't break the record!?" and he said "You're about 240 pounds. AJ is about 185" and that was that. We did about 20 laps each, Tony gave me a ride home and he headed back down to Colorado Springs. It was the last time I saw my friend. We spoke often over the years after that, and when I was working as a mud engineer we kept missing each other's call for about a week. When I finally got through it was someone telling me that Tony Olivares, Castillian Spaniard and my best friend had shot himself and had died. But I always remember that day in Denver where he just walked up to me completely out of the blue and said hello, and the smile on his face as he waved goodbye and headed back down to Fort Carson.
Sunday, June 26, 2022
OK, so, I know I haven't always been what might be considered a Model Citizen or Typical. I quit high school and joined the Army when I was 17, broke my back in basic training but being a Bruce I shrugged it off and did 3 years as a scout for a tank battallion. I got out when I was 20, and since then I've done a ridiculous amount of different jobs, from parking cars to being a drilling fluids engineer and working for CNN to having the 2nd late night food cart in Austin Texas, the first and for many years only cart in the just flourishing Warehouse District. Did a fair amount of stupid stuff and despite what have apparently been my best efforts, if I died and went to heaven when I got there I would be dissappointed. In almost everything I've ever done it's really worked out well. I've crashed and burned a few times for sure but you can count them on one hand. I think the thing that made all these crazy jobs work out was that I never did anything that I didn't know I could do. When my friend Joseph asked me one afternoon if I thought I could fly a plane back from Port Mansfield to Cameron County I said 'absolutely' because I knew I could. And I did. When I decided to bake and sell cheesecakes to just about all the hotels and restaurants on South Padre Island everyone told me how hard it was going to be and how it would be almost impossible but I did it because the day I decided to do it, I knew I could. Same thing with the hot dog cart. I walked out of Lavaca Street Bar one night and there wasn't anything to eat so I decided in about 5 seconds that I was going to buy a hot dog cart, serve hot dogs and water and nothing else. I quit my job at Dell where I was making bank but I knew I could make the hot dog cart work. And I did, for almost 8 years because I knew I could do it. You can't listen to other people telling you how hard it is or why you can't do something. Their intentions are good but they don't know you. Every obstacale you run into you don't freak out about you just roll over it. It was like I was trying to get a permit to throw old people off a building when I went to get my permits for the cart in Austin but I just rolled over all of them. Because I knew I could do it. You have to know that no matter what you want to do, how or where you want to live, you have the ability to do just that, to be where you dream of and be the person you want to be. And the funniest thing about it is this.. no matter how much well intentioned comments on how dumb I was to try to do something, being where and who you want to be isn't difficult at all, it's incredibly simple to do. The only thing required is that you have confidence in who you are with all your good points and flaws and when you accept who you are nothing anyone can say or do can stop you. I swear, I am about the laziest person you'd ever meet... not that I sit around all day or anything, I've worked my ass off most of my life... and I've done OK because I knew I could. I decided I could do those things. And I did. And if I can, you can. I'd like to think my heritage has something to do with it but then again, if I can do it, anyone, with any other heritage can do it to. It's pretty cool actually to be really honest. I highly recommend it to everyone.
Wednesday, June 1, 2022
Waiting for the Green Flash
Saturday, May 7, 2022
Pink Yarn French Poodles.