The oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico brings back memories of the area I spend some great years in.
One year after graduating from Holy Redeemer High School (Class of 1965), I was attending Wayne State University (pre-med program) on a four-year scholastic scholarship… but I was not really going anywhere because I was a goof-off!
I could not support my grades(C+) required to maintain a “deferment” from the military draft and therefore became draft material but before they could make me into cannon fodder, I signed with the Air Force where I basically continued my medical education and eventually served in various positions in the medical corps.
At one point in my military career, I was stationed in a hospital at Keesler Air Force base in Biloxi, Mississippi. Imagine, a naïve, Catholic boy from a basically all Polish parish in West Detroit setting up residence in the deepest part of the South in the late 1960s.
I befriended many southern good ole’ boys that took me under their wings to teach me everything about Southern Coastal living; and I had a ball. Everything from drinking Jim Beam bourbon while driving a 1953 Chevy to gigging flounder by flashlight in the bay to going into the Gulf on an old shrimper and fishing for Lemon fish under oil derricks.
I learned to appreciate and love this form of life that I have never experienced before and grew to understand the people that lived and worked on the coast.
The damage and desecration that the oil spill is causing to the Gulf area and to the people that live and work there is personally painful to me especially when I remember the great times I experienced there in my youth.
When I returned home in 1970, I was a changed man ready for adulthood and all that came with it…but the memories remain.
One year after graduating from Holy Redeemer High School (Class of 1965), I was attending Wayne State University (pre-med program) on a four-year scholastic scholarship… but I was not really going anywhere because I was a goof-off!
I could not support my grades(C+) required to maintain a “deferment” from the military draft and therefore became draft material but before they could make me into cannon fodder, I signed with the Air Force where I basically continued my medical education and eventually served in various positions in the medical corps.
At one point in my military career, I was stationed in a hospital at Keesler Air Force base in Biloxi, Mississippi. Imagine, a naïve, Catholic boy from a basically all Polish parish in West Detroit setting up residence in the deepest part of the South in the late 1960s.
I befriended many southern good ole’ boys that took me under their wings to teach me everything about Southern Coastal living; and I had a ball. Everything from drinking Jim Beam bourbon while driving a 1953 Chevy to gigging flounder by flashlight in the bay to going into the Gulf on an old shrimper and fishing for Lemon fish under oil derricks.
I learned to appreciate and love this form of life that I have never experienced before and grew to understand the people that lived and worked on the coast.
The damage and desecration that the oil spill is causing to the Gulf area and to the people that live and work there is personally painful to me especially when I remember the great times I experienced there in my youth.
When I returned home in 1970, I was a changed man ready for adulthood and all that came with it…but the memories remain.
No comments:
Post a Comment