About this blog

This is a project I've been meaning to work on for a while. My father, Carl, is ninety-five, and loves to talk about his life. He was born in the small town of Portsmouth, Virginia, and grew up in a time when people kept their food cold with an icebox, AM radio was a new and exciting form of entertainment, and most people got from place to place by walking or riding the electric line. His mother was a Methodist, but he was an unbeliever from an early age, and when he was given a nickel for the collection plate and sent to Sunday School, he tended to duck out of church and walk down to the drugstore to spend his nickel on what was in those days a special treat-- a pickle from a barrel. He has grown no more reverent with the passage of time.

When he grew up and graduated from high school, during the Depression, he got a job working for the railroad, and later for the local radio station (WTAR- "We'll Try Another Record"). He developed an enthusiastic love for jazz, and later for classical music, and amassed thousands of 78s (he sold them off in the 1970s, and now he has thousands of CDs). He joined the Army Air Forces in World War II, though he couldn't be a pilot because he wore glasses. However, because of his ability to ace an IQ test, he was picked out for Officer Candidate School. He did well there, and wound up teaching pilots to identify airplanes at Santa Ana Army Air Base in California for the duration of the war. He left the Army a Captain, and was tempted to go to the University of Virginia on the GI Bill, but decided against it because it would mean leaving his girlfriend at the time. He wound up working as a civilian clerk for the Coast Guard, and as a reviewer and journalist. While working for the Ledger-Star in Norfolk, he met my mother, and the two of them had two children.

He has an excellent memory for his age, and is full of fascinating stories about the things he's done. I intend to record his ramblings and transcribe them here. His favorite topics include trains, music, his time in the armed services, and "the way things used to be." I don't vouch for the absolute truth of anything I record here-- this is oral history told by a very old man, and as such some of the facts may have been distorted or lost over the years. What he chooses to talk about is quite random (hence the name of this blog), but I will try to label his entries with tags so that specific topics can be found readily.