Friday November 26, 2004 – Camp Losey 1955 to 1956

Friday November 26, 2004 – Camp Losey 1955 to 1956

The year my family and I spent at Camp Losey on the southern coast of Puerto Rico was my first ever spent within the world of a military base. When we arrived on the base, our family belongings from El Paso finally arrived after six weeks in transit. Our house on base was a row of four white two-story cinder block townhouses. Each row of four had an ample front yard and a large back yard with no fences. We had an end unit so we had plenty of room to run around after school and on weekends. Our row was on a cul-de-sac with several townhouse rows lining the street on either side. A main thoroughfare gave access to the line of cul-de-sac’ed townhouse rows. I can’t remember how long the main road was nor the number of culs-de-sacs, but across from the townhouses was an expansive golf course. Golf was that popular on the base that on weekends, there were classes that taught kids the sport. It was the year in which my memories are most vivid.

My sisters and I were enrolled in Camp Losey Elementary School on the base. I was entering the 5th grade and my teacher was Mrs. Etchison who taught a classroom containing 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. Mrs. Etchison had a son, who resembled the Nobel Laureate William B. Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor. If you can picture Shockley as a 5th grade student, Mrs. Etchison’s son not only resembled Shockley in looks but also his stoic demeanor and seeming lack of emotion. I can’t remember the kid’s name but after my first conversation with him and the aftermath of that conversation, I hated his guts. As soon as I arrived at school, he approached me and asked if I would like to box at recess. Trying to fit in I agreed only to find that he was a master pugilist and I was a complete neophyte and he spent the better part of a minute or two pummeling me with the oversized gloves the physical education teacher had put on each of us. I remember falling to the ground to the chants and cheers of all the kids in school. After my thrashing, he never paid me further attention, establishing his dominant role over me. Curiously, I never held any resentment to Mrs. Etchison, who should have reined in her attack dog but chose to let “boys be boys.”

Once the fight was over, I had some how been made part of the student body. I played a decent game of marbles and managed to maintain a sock full of other kids’ marbles that would increase and decrease in size depending on my aim on any given day. Those were the games we played during lunch period. During recess, the games were more supervised and included dodge ball where your classmates try to bash you with a red rubber ball slightly smaller and lighter in weight than a basketball. If you got hit with the ball it would rouge the impacted skin. Other games we played include red-rover, red-rover, though for the life of me I can’t remember how it was played. We also ran relay races in mixed groups of boys and girls. Winner got bragging rights. The kids in school were mostly white with a sprinkling of Hispanics and mixed Asian American, me included—if you lump The Philippines into the Asia. There was one Jewish kid that I only remember because at Christmas that year, everyone asked him what he and his family did if they didn’t celebrate Christmas. There was an audience of a half dozen kids sitting on the steps leading into the classrooms listening to his answer.

I did pretty well academically in school. My report card for that year showed mostly B’s with nothing lower than C’s, one in Social Studies and a second in Health. My conduct was shown as a consistent B-, mostly for talking in class when I wasn’t supposed to. The grades were comparable to those of my 4th grade year at Travis Elementary School in El Paso. I was beginning to establish my lifelong interest in reading. I remember one particular story I read during that year that has continued to stick in my head. The main character of the story was a young boy living in Hawaii, who was an accomplished surfer. The story described how the boy would paddle out into the oncoming waves, mount his board, catch a wave and ride it back into the shore. For the life of me I could not conjure in my mind what the boy was doing and I must have read the story many times over trying to “get it” to no avail. It was some time later watching something on television showing surfers in Hawaii that it finally dawn on me what was happening.

My other memories of that school year were three brothers, one each in the three grades of Mrs. Etchison’s class. All three were heavy, large framed boys, who had the build for linemen on a football team. Curiously, they were easy going and all three had the habit of sucking their thumb, a habit their parents never felt was worth breaking them of. I enjoyed their flaunting convention and “doing their own thing,” though no one in their right mind would have made fun of their practice at the risk of getting the big guys mad. Still it was a curious sight. Perhaps it was their way of coping with the trauma of transient military life. The kids in school had seen more of the world than most U.S. civilians. Ask them where they were before and all would give different army bases in Europe and the U.S.

The kids in school were a close-knit group since the base was relatively small and we were allowed to walk about alone, knowing where we were allowed to go and where we had to keep out. Every Saturday morning, the base theatre—a darkened room with a projector and pull-up movie screen in a recreation room set aside for kids in a building near the school—would run free movies for several hours. I remember seeing the entire Flash Gordon serial as well as most of the Three Stooges shorts. Also shown were the movies of the great comic actors of the time: Buster Keaton, Abbott and Costello, to name a few. Then there were the western, Hopalong Cassiday, Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. And there were always plenty of cartoons and Newsreels.

We got around via a regularly scheduled free bus service that had stops all over the base where we would jump on and off throughout the day. When we weren’t going to school or watching movies, we boys would build forts of piled up rocks and have mock wars with one another. There was a large open field on the base that we would explore on the weekends. It was once used for military maneuvers and had plenty of brass shell casings strewn about and God knows what else left over from that time. On one such outing, I had a pocketknife with me and I was trying to cut the branch of a young tree. The knife slipped and I somehow cut myself just right of the index finger knuckle on my right hand. Fearing the worse if my parents found out where I’d been, I bandaged myself and hid the wound as best I could. After two days, my conscience and worry over the cut not healing faster drove me to confess my escapade to my parents. My mom took me to the base infirmary where a medic cleaned the wound, and fixed me up with a butterfly bandage. He said it should have had stitches to prevent scaring but it was already on its way to healing and thought doing stitches now would not provide any benefit.

I remember another time that a wound was treated with first aid and not given medical attention. My dad and three of his friends had decided to drive to Ramey Air Force Base near Aguadilla, a town on the northwest tip of the island sixty miles from the base. My dad drove our 1951 Olds. It was an all day outing and on the return trip, which began in the evening, the four heard several gunshots as they passed a particular stretch of road and heard the back window of the Olds shatter from the impact of a bullet. As the passengers ducked my dad instinctive accelerated to put distance between them and the shooter. When they had driven some distance, one of the passengers in the back seat realized that he was bleeding from his head.

They applied a makeshift bandage held in place by a belt cinched around the injured passenger’s head. This is how he appeared coming into our house on base after the four returned. Removing the bandage and cleaning the wound, they saw that the bullet that had struck the back window had grazed the rear passenger’s head just above the right ear, The wound was not deep and the skull was not punctured, so no one thought the matter should go any further including the injured man. The Olds still had its Texas license plates. At that time, there was a major labor dispute between oil giant Texaco and its Puerto Rican workers. The shot was obviously fired at the car because of its plates and the presumed relationship with the oil company, or so the thinking among the four went. Somehow the next day the back window was replaced and the inside the Olds showed no trace of the previous evenings’ near miss.

We arrived at Camp Losey in 1955 and a year before the Army turned the base over to the Navy. Some of the Army personnel stationed at the camp were reassigned to Army bases throughout the states and overseas. while others, my dad included, were transferred to Ft Buchanan Army Base near San Juan.