OH LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM

It's September, 1954. Two weeks after staying with my brother and his family I was on my way to fly to New York City and eventually bound for the city of Bethlehem where Lehigh University is located. Contrary to what Tony Bennett made famous in his song, “I did not leave my heart in San Francisco”. I took the prop plane early in the morning with a stop over at Chicago. Those days prop planes took at least 10 to 12 hour flight time coast to coast. It was already getting dark when we made our stop over at the old Midway airport in Chicago. There was a change in flight crew. I noticed one of the flight attendants was a young platinum blond, the Marilyn Monroe type. I was thinking then, so this is where you find the blonds in the US, in Chicago. After the plane got airborne and the passengers were served, I went to the back of the plane to use the toilet and then conversed with this blond. She was pleasant enough. So I walked back to my seat and in front of me going the other way was this young zoot-suiter, with a long coat, baggy pants, and a duck ass haircut (short at the top and long greasy combed hair on the sides). So as we met, he says to me, “How did you make out?”

We finally arrived in New York late at night. I took a bus for the city. Arriving at the bus station, I walked towards Times Square and looked for the Hotel my father stayed at while in NYC. Two years before I left, my father, being at that time Flood Control & Irrigation engineer for the whole Philippines, was given a grant by the US government to tour those flood control and irrigation areas of interest all over the US. However, his base headquarters was NYC where he worked with fellow engineers doing the same related work. So arriving at the Hotel late at night I handed my father’s letter of introduction to the clerk in the lobby and he gave me a quick NYC acknowledgement and thereafter gave me a room a few stories high from the lobby. From my Hotel window I could see Times Square’s famous lights and all around it. While in my bed, I could not sleep. I was expecting a gangster to bust into my room, take my money, and probably shoot me. I was scared just like in the Hollywood movies I saw in the Philippines. At the hotel lobby next morning, I was greeted by an engineer, a Mr. Philip Wolfe, who worked with my father during his six month stay in the US. Mr. Wolfe brought me to their engineering office to show me off to other workers there. In front of his fellow engineers, he said, :”He does look like his father, right?” After having lunch with him and fellow workers at a NYC restaurant he then brought me to the train at Grand Central Station bound for Bethlehem. While in the train to Bethlehem, I then realized, “Tony, you are on you own from here on.”

No, not Bethlehem, Palestine, but Bethlehem, Pennsylvania was my destination. This small city was founded by Pennsylvania Dutch Moravians. There even was a Moravian Church and College in the city. All around there were towns with names like Nazareth, Emmaus, etc. During the Christmas season the city had a large lighted star located on a high hill, visible for miles around. I stayed for three nights at the best hotel in town, Bethlehem Hotel, for $3.50 a night. After three days in this Hotel I started looking for a rooming house close to Lehigh University. Staying at the Hotel was costing me too much money, and so I located a boarding house where the old, German accenting, couple would charge me six dollars a week. My room was on the third floor of the house and I had another roommate, Jim Hogan, an undergraduate student at Lehigh U. On the second floor were two other students. One, a Pete Danfort, became my good friend. He was a Fraternity kid who would tell me stories about the wild Fraternity parties they had and even showed me the first early editions of Playboy magazine. According to Pete one very promiscuous girl attending those parties was the daughter of the minister at the Protestant church on campus. My roommate Jim kept pretty much to himself. Once I was curious about the Quaker religion, predominant with Pennsylvania Dutch people. And so I asked Jim, “Have you ever met one of those Quakers?” He replied, “I am a Quaker.” In my mind I wondered how a guy with an Irish name like Hogan ended up being a Quaker. I ate my dinners at the campus cafeteria. Compared to Filipino food, I thought this food was much more appetizing. There were two other Filipino students who were also awarded some student aid by Lehigh. Initially, they wanted me to room with them at a small trailer house they rented. I replied, “Thanks but no thanks”. I wanted to be on my own. They were not too happy with my response.

The first few months at Lehigh was fun. The head of the Civil Engineering Department, a Prof. William J. Eney, gave a picnic at his apple orchard farm. All graduate students working for the university were invited. So I never saw an apple tree before then, and I looked at those nice juicy apples hanging from the low branches. Standing next to Prof. Eney I asked him, “How can you tell when those apples are ripe?” He must have read my mind as he replied, “Well you pluck one out, take a bite, and see if you think it is good enough to eat. If not, go pluck another one out.” So, I did eat the first one I plucked. Prof. Eney was a well rounded structural engineering professor. I took a senior undergraduate class with him, not having adequate preparation in my Engineering schooling in the Philippines. He was also very informal He would call us by, Tony or John, etc during the lecture. He took a liking to me as I was one of his best students.

At Fritz Engineering Laboratory where I worked as a graduate assistant for two academic years, the laboratory at the time had the largest structural testing machine in the US. It was capable of testing 5,000,000 pounds of load in any steel or concrete column either in compression or tension. The machine was donated by Bethlehem Steel, where I worked 8 years thereafter. Many of my graduate assistant friends working at the lab were Australian. Lambert Tall (to the left of me in the photo) was a friend but also a competitor. During social functions, when I started conversing with a young girl, he would butt in. When I danced with one, he would dance with the same girl. During those days I was a strict catholic church going member in Bethlehem.. Lem was an agnostic. He used to call me, “a white sepulchere”. These are white above the ground tombstones in a cemetery, the message being pure on the outside but rotting in the inside. I usually countered by making fun of his Aooustralian accent. Lem married an Austrian pretty young lady after he met her in Europe. Years later she complained to me about his rigidness. They eventually got a divorce.

During the Christmas holiday season I was invited by Mr. Wolfe to spend the holidays in their home in Clinton, New Jersey. With the traffic not as heavy as today, Clinton was just about an hour drive to New York city. Christmas day we had the usual turkey dinner, also with friends of the Wolfe family. I remember they were Irish from the pictures my father showed me while I was still in Manila. They were a family with a grown up son and daughter. My father encouraged me to seek out a good Irish, catholic girl here in the US. Although this daughter was pretty, she was taller than I was and I think she was already engaged. Later in my years of experience with Irish catholic girls, I found out they were not as they were cracked up to be. Some of them were even more screwed up than the average young girls I met.

Between Christmas and New Years, Mr. Wolfe’s son drove, his girlfriend, the daughter and myself up to the state of Vermont, about a four hour drive, to a dairy farm. The farmers apparently were acquaintances of the Wolfe’s. Soon as I got out of the car, I slid landing on my behind. Vermont is a colder state and there was a patch of ice greeting me as I got out of the car. My first thought was to get rid of these steel tip shoes I was wearing. Next morning we had a tour of the barn and the milking cows. Well for breakfast, you guessed it, we had hot cereal with straight from the cow’s milk still smelling like the barn. New Years day the four of us again drove near Times Square, NYC, to watch the ball drop down from a tower in Times Square. After the ball dropped, I noticed a bunch of young girls running one way, and a group of young men chasing these girls. They told me it was legal to kiss any girl in Times Square on New Years Eve. Well we went back to Clinton after the Times Square episode. However the son and his girlfriend went out again probably to do some necking. The parents were also out somewhere. So I was left with the daughter talking the early morning away. During our conversation, I believe I saw a “go ahead green light” signal. Then I thought, “Tony this daughter is older than you, she has a boyfriend, and remember, you are a guest in this house”. So I turned around and went to bed. Years later, a parish priest who used to introduce me to the young girls in his parish said this comment from the girls who met me. “He is too good”, meaning I assume to be “he is not fun to be with”.

SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

It is the last day of August, 2008. We are on our trip back to the Mainland from our Alaska cruise vacation. We had several hours wait at the Anchorage Airport waiting for a plane to take us to Seattle and then onto Detroit. I was curiously looking at these Alaska Airlines planes taxiing near the terminal and I recognized the same emblem on these planes painted on their tails. They were the same logos I saw fifty four years ago. They all carried the same black painting of a funny looking face of a man with rabbit like ears who looked more like a Walt Disney creation. The attendant at the airline desk smiled at me when I asked the question, “Who is that funny looking man in your plane logo?” She told me he was the man who started Alaska Airlines. When we finally boarded the Alaska plane, I was again startled to see the same embroidery decorations on the cabin partition walls. There was this same embroidery carpet in Native Alaska design as I saw them in 1954 when I took the Alaska prop plane from Seattle to San Francisco. These images started me to reminisce down memory lane when I made my initial trip to the USA.

It was early September 1954. The Northwest Orient Airlines plane was on the tarmac in Manila. We passengers were embarking. During those days you boarded the planes on the tarmac with a roll away staircase on the side of the plane entrance doors. I remember my father rapidly taking pictures with his powerful 1.2 lense Laica camera. As I boarded the plane, my father said to me, “You don’t have a camera. Here!” So he promptly placed the camera on my neck and off I went on my first leg of the trip. I still have this camera. Every time I see it, I think of my father.

We stopped in Okinawa to drop off some US service men and picked up others while at the Base airport. We then proceeded to Tokyo where Northwest treated us for a one day and night stay in Tokyo, meals and hotel expenses paid by the airlines. While in Tokyo, we did some sight seeing in the city which still showed the scars of the air raid bombings of World War II. I remember an elderly man shouting at a boy not to talk to me. Being a mestizo, he probably thought I was an American tourist. During the night we toured Ginza street in Tokyo which is now the equivalent of Tokyo’s NY 5th Avenue. We passed some night clubs with scantily clad Japanese young girls luring us to come in. Many of the Filipinos in my group went in. Like a dope I copped out and went back to our Marenuchi Hotel which was right close to the Emperial Palace. The Japanese Emperor resided there.

The next day, our prop plane took off bound for Anchorage. We had a stop over at Hokaido for refueling. Non-stop long trips were non existent then. On our trip to Alaska, I was amazed at the snow covered mountains we passed along the way. Planes traveled at only about 20,000 feet altitude, so it seemed we were skirting along the mountains of Alaska. On landing in Anchorage, we were given lunch and took off again bound for Seattle While inside the plane everyone was in a jovial mood finally going to the US and people including myself seemed to be partying around. Suddenly those artic winds in Alaska started to make our plane bounce around like we were in a long roller coaster ride. People got sick and started to throw up. Yes, I also was sick as a dog. I remember the Scandinavian looking stewardess whom I had an early conversation with from Minnesota. She started chuckling while talking to the plane male purser. She probably was telling him, “Look at that Filipino, he is throwing up too”.

We landed in Seattle at night. As soon as we touched ground I was recovering. Our Filipino group chose a restaurant in the airport to have supper. My first impression of the US was this is like being in another world where everything looked luxurious. While eating supper at this restaurant, our Filipino self appointed leader started flirting with the blond waitress who enjoyed all the attention of the Filipinos. What irritated me at the end is this Filipino asked everyone in the table to give the waitress a big tip.

Seattle-Tacoma airport has changed much after 54 years. An airport worker kindly gave us a map and directions how to get to the S-terminal for our transfer plane bound for Detroit. We went thru 3 escalators and 2 transfer rail cars around the airport. If this was the same airport some 54 years ago I would still be there looking for my transfer plane bound for San Francisco.

The next morning I was on my flight for San Francisco to stay with my brother and his family before proceeding to Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.. Instead of Northwest, I now boarded an Alaska Airlines plane with this same funny looking man logo in its tail and also the same Alaska embroidery carpet inside the cabin walls. After 54 years the only changes were now they are jet planes and before the stewardesses were prettier and in their late teens or early twenties. While in the plane bound for San Francisco, I was getting homesick and longed for some familiar company. As I arrived at the airport in San Francisco, I was excited and quickly picked up the phone to talk to my brother who was working in the city. I was surprised to hear from him what I gathered was a less than enthusiastic reception as he told me to wait at the airport for several hours until he got out of work. My brother, his wife and three close to the same age small children had a nice home in Richmond, near SF. I did not feel at ease while in their home. From then on I started my journey in the US, vowing to depend only on myself and I have stayed that way ever since. But I also had my time of joy while in Richmond. Once at a candy store, I stopped by and bought me an enticing foot long chocolate covered caramel and peanut Baby Ruth bar for only 10 cents. I ate it all.