It is a major tour, requiring a minimum of two hours to breeze through. I was inside the turret shown here, with steel walls around a foot thick. Those are 16-inch cannons which could fire twice per minute. Huge areas of the ship are dedicated to firing information for these weapons, a superhuman feat in the days before computers. I went below into the shell hoists and magazine.Notice the wooden deck. This was to prevent freezing and create good traction even in the rainy weather seen today. In that British tradition that lasted far too long, the officers lived in luxury while the seamen bunked up to 85 men per room in shifts. Agility is needed for the tour, there are constant ladders to get through all but the main deck area. What struck me was the obvious expense of operating this vessel, something that requires a measurable chunk of the national budget.
In addition to fighting all kinds of enemies, the ship has a bakery, barber shop, post office, dentist, and an ice cream machine. If the Air Force didn’t hit Tojo with the atomic bomb, there was always the threat of those cafeteria buns. As P.J. O’Rourke says, any nation who can make such things out of yeast, flower and sugar is not to be trifled with.
I was late finding Teresa in a pub downtown with a very distinctive sign, the “Brewery”. This was your typical California-grade mini-brewery with lots of spice-flavored beers (no thanks) and overage waitresses pardon me bar servers. We met a few interesting people but opted to look for a place with live music. No luck. A few blocks south was another joint called the “Barbary Coast”, which caught our attention because it was the only place we saw with a broken neon sign making it look like “Barbie’s”.
No band there either so we settled for a very loud juke box. We got to yakking and I think we stayed there something like three hours. It might have been four, but Teresa found the barman to be a real creep. I did not mind the fact the place had some fairly good-looking babes passing through. Here is another photo of the general area, showing the shops along Third Street south of Market. Looks like Seattle. Movie producers take note, the place looks more like Louisiana than the real thing.Teresa got me to talk about my family, something she finds intriguing. She cannot believe my own parents stopped grade schools from advancing me nor how they conspired to prevent me from going to university. I assure you, it is true. I never received one cent of help from my parents for the expense of my education. I should some day write that story. Teresa’s disbelief that parents would do this to their own son is rational because she thought parents only did this to their daughters. She had wanted to be a plumber’s helper.
My parents were much more insidious. Mine repeatedly promised to put me through university, thus I took only matriculation subjects. This placed my entire trust in their honesty. Bad move. They thus made sure that when the time came, lack of any trade skill at all (I could not even build a shelf) would stop me from putting myself through. It worked for enough that they got away with it, delaying my graduation by 12 long years, during all of which I had to work full time. All Teresa's parents did was refuse.
