Five Easy Pieces (Interesting Facts?)

If I was an interesting person, I'd write a biography that would sell a million copies and then I could really retire. However, since skoshi http://shortandpunchy.blogspot.com/ asked, here you are......

1. My mom's side of my family was a lot more interesting than my dad's. She had two sisters, Lulu (actual name) and Wilma. Everyone called Wilma "Bumpy", but I don't know why. They left the farm when they were young, moved to the big city (Rochester, NY), and married Italian men, Lou DiFazio and Guy Borelli. City dwelling, Italian, Roman Catholics. Wow, they and their families were pretty exotic to me. THEY could write a biography that would sell a million copies.

2. I have a twin brother. We wore matching clothes every day of the week through sixth grade. We were both pretty good students, but starting in the sixth grade I went off the boil while he continued to excel. He scored 1600 on his SAT's, went to med school, and is now a well-to-do physician in California. I wish I had kept up with him.

3. I was the first chair trombone in the 1972 Stueben County (NY) "Wind Ensemble". This was as high as you could get for a public school band student from my school in NY State. However, I really wasn't that good. That was my senior year in high school. Because I had scored an "A-Rating" on my audition (Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gershwin, I shudder now just thinking how it sounded as a trombone solo), I ended up ahead of the juniors and sophomores in the county who were actually better than me.

4. I voted for George McGovern for president in 1972. Nixon won easily, and there weren't very many people in the USAF who voted for McGovern. However, I felt I'd made the best choice in 1972, and I felt even better about my choice two years later.

5. I was a fighter pilot in the USAF for twenty years, ending up with about 4000 flying hours in the F-4, A-10, and F-111. Most of the flying was pretty tame stuff, training for WW III versus the Ruskies. I flew some "combat sorties" over Iraq in 1991, but these weren't very dangerous either. It was just after the First War With Iraq, and the Kurds were running from Iraq into Turkey. The Turks didn't want them either, so the Kurds were freezing and starving in the mountains along the border between the two countries. We flew escort and recon missions for the transport aircraft carrying tents, food, and water to the Kurds. We generally stooged around northern Iraq keeping an eye on the Iraqis. The Iraqis had just gotten their butts whipped in Kuwait, so they would just wave at us and we would wave back. I did fly some missions over Iraq with Chad Hennings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Hennings. Shortly after this, he got out of the Air Force and went on to play with the Super Bowl Dallas Cowboys of the 1990's.

muffinman