Saturday November 27, 2004 – Ft Buchanan 1956

Saturday November 27, 2004 – Ft Buchanan 1956

The year my family and I spent in Camp Losey on the southwestern coast of Puerto Rico went faster than I could have imagined when we first arrived in the summer of 1955. The base had become familiar to me and I had made friends and had gotten into a comfortable daily routine of school, play, dinner, homework and television viewing on our black and white Dumont cabinet TV. There was only one English language station to watch and it provided a selection of various shows airing on the two major networks back then, NBC and CBS. Two that come to mind are I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. Then there were the news program See it Now, with Edward R. Murrow, and the evening news broadcasts: NBC News with John Cameron Swayze and CBS News with Douglas Edwards. We were living an idyllic suburban 1950s existence in a completely realized enclave of America in Puerto Rico.

That came to an end in the summer of 1956 when my dad was transferred to Ft Buchanan near San Juan on the northeastern coast of Puerto Rico. The base was much larger than Camp Losey and had many more amenities, a much larger movie theater with a regular size screen though now we had to pay. Still, seeing the Three Stooges on the big screen was a better experience. Another movie I remember from that time was Ransom about a kidnapping that traumatized me so that I still remember it. The base had an expansive park with a large reception hall for holding parties, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool, where I learned to swim. The base also had plenty of wooded areas that my friends and I spent our free time exploring. We were emboldened because we’d learned the island had no snakes due to the mongoose that had been brought in to rid the island of the species.

We were once again housed in the rows of two-story cinderblock townhouse rows similar to the ones we had down south. The houses up north had no back yard but did have a lawn in the front between our front door and the street above. Behind our street of houses was a large concrete spillway for carrying rainwater runoff just beyond the paved alley that provided access for the parking space in the back of our house for the 1951 Olds. The spillway was about ten feet below ground level and twelve to fifteen feet across. A bridge over the spillway provided a pedestrian walkway to access the Post Exchange (PX)—the equivalent of a large department store off base. The PX carried dry goods, small appliances, and clothing, just about everything except groceries. We got those from the nearby post Commissary, the equivalent of supermarket that were cropping up stateside in the 50s. Besides the PX there was a canteen—a self-serve café that sold breakfast, lunch, and dinner to solders and dependents. Outside the café, military buses transporting soldiers and dependents about the island picked up and dropped off passengers.

The base had a large well-stocked library and this became as important to me as the base movie theater. It was at the library that I became hooked on The Hardy Boys series of books. My interest in reading was engendered by a tradition that valued reading, not only in school but outside as well. Many of my classmates were avid readers, though I can’t remember us discussing what we read. It was something we enjoyed when we were alone and we weren’t playing together or going to the movies, which we did discuss at length. The stairway in our house had a closet underneath and I would love to go inside close the door and read by the light of the bare 60 watt bulb that illuminated the small space. One book that I still remember reading was a biography of David Glasgow Farragut, the nation’s first Admiral of the Navy. I was struck by the life of a young boy in the 1800s, whose family gave him up to be adopted by a Naval family at a young age to learn the art of seamanship. The biography of Babe Ruth was another book that engaged me.

I joined the base little league team, probably accounting for my reading about the Babe, and we played teams from other military bases over the island. We had uniforms that I thought was just like the major leagues. I recall that in my first tryout, I had terrible difficulty hitting and my throws were wild. I managed to get control of my throwing and eventually found myself in the shortstop position playing most games. I was quick and instinctive grasped how to play a ball hit between second and third base. The second baseman and I were whiz kids when it came to the double play and we made a lot of them. However, it took everything I had to step into the batter’s box and face a pitcher. I was terrible at bat with an average somewhere around 150.

Little league taught me a great deal about the world I would one day become part of. We were in a heated contest for first place among the island teams. The coach and a few of the parents of the kids on the team really wanted to win this one particular game at the end of the season. There was this big kid—he towered over all us small guys, who was playing in the pony league but was still young enough to play little league. They suited him up in one of our uniforms and he took the plate for us. The result was predictable. The kid slammed a hit every time he came to the plate ensuring we won the game. The kids on the team all knew we hadn’t won it fair and square and though we celebrated, we knew it wasn’t completely our victory, but that of a ringer bought in to give us the unfair advantage.

My one fond memory of little league was watching a game between the 1956 U.S. little league team from New York who had traveled to the island to play the local Puerto Rican little league champions. The baseball field on base where the game was to be played had extra bleachers set up to accommodate the expected crowd. We were all expecting the stateside champs to have an easy victory over the local team, but we were surprised at how well the Puerto Ricans played. You could tell that these local guys had much more at stake in winning the game than their opponents. Though the first part of the game had both teams scoring evenly, the later part belonged to the locals, who hit more consistently and kept the stateside little league champs from scoring. At the end of the game, both teams showed great sportsmanship shaking each other’s hands and congratulating one another on a well-played game. It kind of compensated for the feeling I had at the end of our last game.

There was a Catholic Church on base and I would go not only to mass every Sunday, but also to catechism classes on Saturday. There, I had an adult male teacher that the class was encouraged to address by his first name. During the time I attended classes I was being taught the seven sacraments all Catholics received during their lifetime: baptism, communion, marriage and last rites. I’m forgetting a couple but those were the biggies. I was pretty dutiful about going to confession and communion. Religion seemed to provide something that was missing in my life back then. For one thing, it kept at bay those private demons that would visit bad dreams to me at night.

My other fond memory of 1956 was my mother’s quest to become a U.S. citizen. In hindsight, it was quite ironic that my mother acquired her citizenship not in the U.S. but rather in a U.S. possession, not unlike her own, The Philippines. She studied all the course materials to prepare for the examination that would occur at the end of the process. She was required to learn some U.S. history as well as understand the way the U.S. government functions. My dad and us kids helped as best we could. My mother was pretty well read on U.S. history and government as she learned it in school in The Philippines. However, details such as the Electoral College system, how a bill gets passed in Congress, what the function of the various courts were—state and federal, the different appeals courts, and the Supreme Court. We were all really anxious for her, but in November 1956, she was granted her citizenship by the U.S. District Court of Puerto Rico. It was her proudest moment.