Y.M.C.A !

If you read one of my last military posts you will recall that after I left Radar school I was sent to an isolated remote radar base in Northern California.  It was called the 776^th Radar Squadron and located in Point Arena California. Although it was located only 135 miles north of San Francisco it took over five hours to reach it on the famous and beautiful Highway 1.  The first six months there I was still saving for a car. It was hard to go anywhere without any transportation. There were times when my friend in Motor pool, David Giagos, would sign a van out to a group of us to travel to San Francisco for the weekend. We were allowed to drive it from one military base to another so we had to check in at the world famous fort; the Presidio.  We would leave the van at the fort and catch a cab to the heart of the city. There were usually five or six of us. We had little money to waste so we always went to the Y.M.C.A. for a cheap room that would accommodate all of us. The cost was only about $2.00 a night per person. The other guests, all men, were a little shady but we were in a large group and spent very little time at the  facility.  Usually we would get drunk and attend a concert a Bill Grams famous Fillmore Auditorium. After the concert we would go to more bars and generally wonder around the city on foot. Once we were at White Castle at closing time and they served these little pies. One night at closing time we were in the parking lot when a worker carried a tray of pies to the trash bin. We asked him what the heck he was doing and he informed us they had to destroy all pies at the end of each day. We asked if we could have some and he said it was against the rules. In they went. No problem for a bunch of young, stupid drunks. We just climbed in and ate what we wanted. They were not bad.

One night we were on our way back to the Y when we had to go through a bunch of prostitutes who gave us a little trouble. One of our Latino Airmen started calling them dirty whores and grabbed the breast of one of them. We pulled him away and went to our room on the fourth floor. Out little Mexican buddy opened the window and started a verbal war with the ladies of the night. They yelled at him and showed him their middle finger. Being quite drunk he yelled back and grabbed a fist full of those little hotel soap bars and started to fling them at the young women. Next he started to throw pillows and finally we had to intervene when he had half of a bed out the window. The police were called and entered the room just as one of us was in the process of reliving ourself in the sink.  Naturally we were asked to leave. We spent the rest of the night on the street.  We ate an early breakfast and caught a bus back to the presidio. We never were allowed to stay at the Y again. We also never went anywhere with our little Mexican buddy or got him drunk again.

I took many more trips back to the city the next two and a half years with many more stories to tell and a few I can’t