1959

  This might have been a pretty quiet year, I think it was.  Getting settled in to my first actual Navy job went very well.  I worked in Document Sorting; before computers documents still need to be sorted.  We had a steel "board" with 36 flaps attached at about one inch intervals, the tabs were marked A thru Z and 0 thru 9.  It was pretty simple, soon I could sort without reading the flaps, depending on how I positioned the "board" I knew by feel where each flap was - it's too bad they didn't have braille dots then it would have been very easy.  My first boss was a woman Chief Petty Officer Norma Suddeth (we called her "Mother Suddeth behind her back).  As long as we didn't play the radio things were okay.  In about the second week I was put in charge (there were only two of us), the other man was named Jimmy, he was black and a third class petty officer, a Steward (those were either black or Filipino and worked in officers mess (dining) or in officers quarters) he was trying to change job description to Storekeeper.  He also thought Japan was in Europe - I don't know how things worked out for him.
  We had security duty, and supply duty every fourth day, getting parts from various warehouses and shipping them, or just security, riding a bicycle, from building to building making sure they were locked and safe inside, it was fairly boring at night when everyone else was sleeping, but it wasn't difficult either.
  Weekends I spent hitchhiking to different places, or sometimes I'd take a bus to maybe Salt Lake City and hitch back, or Pismo Beach was a place I went a few times, sometimes I'd just hang around in Oakland.  A couple of times a group of us would go to different events.  We saw the San Francisco Warriors play, I went with somebody to see Robert Frost in San Francisco - just stuff like that.  Life was good.


The East Gate



The VW Bus - soon very popular

A lot of these at work too.