Glenn Gallup EM3 2048-815 USCGR 1959-1967

 

 

Kathleen has asked me to blog about growing up in Texas. My plan is to crawl up to the subject sideways like a crab. But when I’m done it should be a good series of posts. People who know me well know I was in the Coast Guard. The U.S.C.G. was founded in 1790, the Coasties and Marines have had a longstanding dispute about who came first. I’m not too worried about this, it was a long time ago. As was my service. Why the Coast Guard? Here’s where we get to Texas. After WW2 we moved to a subdivision South of downtown Houston. One of our neighbors was a fisherman and he had two sons a little younger than me. I had a fishing pole so I got to go along. His favorite spot was on the mainland just across from the Coast Guard Lifesaving Station on the inland side of Galveston Island. It was right on the East end, shielded from the Gulf and was probably good duty excluding Hurricane season. There was a crew quarters and a boat house on the highest part of the property. The boathouse had an elevated track that went into the water, inside the boathouse was a 26 foot a self righting motorized lifesaving boat  like this one.

Most of the time while we were fishing nothing much went on. An enlisted man might be tending the yard or sunbathing. Then a siren would sound and all hell would break loose. Guys would come running out of the crew quarters into the boat house, the doors would swing open and the boat would start rolling down the tracks with some guys pushing the cart it was cradled on.  About halfway down the engine would fire and by the time they hit the water the Coasties were mission ready. The coxswain was the only one you could see. He stuck his head out of a rubberized watertight gasket around his neck. The boat could roll over 360 degrees and he was the only guy who got wet. .And it was only his head.

So fast forward to 1953.  I moved to California, I forgot about fishing, I forgot about baseball, there were hotrods and California girls,  by 1959 I had my first aborted run at College. Vietnam was a blip on the horizon. Military service made a good bridge. One of my HS friends told me about the Coast Guard Reserve program designed for students and I signed up. I can’t say watching that boat head down the tracks and disappear into the Gulf of Mexico to save somebody was the deciding factor but it was a factor.

 

The Holocaust and Me.

I don’t know how many times I’ve said I’ve been lucky in my life. My luck has taken many forms. Sometimes it was meeting the right girl at the right time or having a job that let me grow at my own pace and rewarded me at every step. I’ve been a witness to auto racing history. And  because I was lucky enough to be born in 1939 I’m a witness to another kind of history. My first living memory is the Japanese attack on our military installations in Hawaii. The last time I saw my Mom and Dad as a young couple in love and dancing was VE Day, May 8^th, 1945.  When I was 10 or so my Mom and Dad  had had an eclectic group of friends. Everybody from University Professors to oilfield hands gathered around our Texas table. We ate BBQ and pot luck, the adults solved all the worlds problems. While us kids set off firecrackers and dug for worms so we could walk down to Buffalo Bayou to catch fish. One of the regular couples was a Cajun guy who was one of the D-Day heroes and his French wife. He wooed and won her with his Cajun French. She bonded with my Mom because of Mom’s sketchy French ancestry, and I began to notice that French girls were pretty, because she was. One night a single guy showed up, don’t have any idea who invited him, he was a Polish émigré engineer who like a lot of people came to Texas to work in the oil business. We ate good food and lots of cold beer flowed. At a point our Cajun friend remarked that he and his wife had just returned from France and Germany. They went to show their young son off to the French grandparents and revisit his charge across France and into Germany with the US Army. He made what seemed like an innocent comment about the speed with which the Germans were rebuilding their country (there were geopolitical reasons for this and the rest of us helped a lot). The Polish guy stood up and said something to the effect of “I’ll show you about your precious Germans”. Then he turned his back and hiked up his polo shirt, His upper back was a mass of scars, Seems he was in a work camp in Poland, didn’t get out of the way of the Camp Commander quite fast enough and was whipped from his calves to his shoulders. Then he had to show up for work the next day and fill his quota or be sent across the road to the gas chamber and the ovens. So he showed up. And worked. He said “I won’t show you the rest out of deference to the ladies but all my back is the same”

Now there are active Holocaust deniers in all walks of life including the Academic community and with the death of Elie Wiesel virtually the last well known witness to this black chapter in human history is gone. I’ve been face to face with some of the deniers and they pretty much run to a type Terminally stupid. They say stuff like “The Holocaust never happened but if it did it was a good idea” or variations on that theme. They ignore the non Jewish victims, in the millions in Eastern Europe and the 350,000 ethnic Germans who were either opponents of Hitler or Retarded. They ignore the Russians who suffered 85% of the European casualities.  And 10% of the Austrians. People like me who saw it second hand will be gone soon enough and the weak kneed among us may well defer to the deniers. If Israel is destroyed it will be the end of Western Civilization and it will go with a whimper. Glad I’m the age I am. And don’t have grandchildren.