"Donald’s father, Fred Trump, already alarmed by his behavior in school and in church, promptly shipped him off to NYMA to be straightened out. The academy, where Trump arrived in 1959, was hardly a common destination for the children of New York City’s elite. Trump had been raised with a chef and chauffeur, and was shocked by this strict, abrasive, and intensely physical environment. Scuffles and fights were common. Trump allegedly got into an argument with his roommate Ted Levine that got so heated he tried to throw Levine out of a second-story window. But by all accounts, Trump responded well to the rigidity of a military academy; it was the ideal educational incubator for someone with an unquenchable thirst for competition and a love of physical dominance...."
From "Was Donald Trump Good at Baseball?/The president has long claimed he could have gone pro. We looked into it" (Slate).
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193 comments:
Reminds me of all of the boarding school stories they made up about Romney.
BTW I collected knives when I was that age too. Most boys collect knives.
If that part of the story is even true.
Nothing like the military to build a man...
And what dad would be so upset about a switchblade collection that they would send their son to boarding school? Not me. Not any dad that I know.
Heck, lots of dad's buy their sons hunting rifles at that age.
Only a lefty would believe that story.
Do we buy any of this unverifiable Bullshit from the hack D press?
Haha. My husband used to buy butterfly knives at a swap meet in Port Chester, New York during his boyhood. He carried them on him because boys beating each other up was considered normal behavior in suburban Westchester County in the 70s and early 80s.
Other things he and his friends did: put an outboard motor on their rowboat and cruised Long Island Sound blasting the Miami Vice theme from a boombox until the Coast Guard kicked them out; rode their bikes into Connecticut; took the train into the city for entire days with their parents completely unaware of their activities or whereabouts.
Different times.
Remember - when it's Trump, we are not allowed to hear his side of the story.
The hacks know the whole story and every detail of Trumps' deprived life. No questions asked!
Bee leeeeeve!
I'm glad that Trump wasn't collecting pink ribbons.
Going pro? He's trolling again.
You can play for the Yankees, or the Everett AquaSox. All those guys are paid to play baseball. Pro!
Obama claimed to be good at Basketball, did someone look into it? Clinton claimed to be good at the Trumpet or Tuba - did someone look into it?
JFK claimed to have written quite a few books. And we know that NO ONE looked into that, before he got elected POTUS.
Slate's cracker-jack investigative team is looking into the important stuff. A Pulitzer in on the horizon.
Slate is on it. Working as feverishly on this as they did trying to uncover Obama's grades or anything he wrote at Columbia. Anything. Or the magnificent work they did uncovering the fiction that was Russia collusion.
The left media knows that if they just throw enough shit on the wall, some of it will stick, and every year or so they'll get a Pulitzer for one of those wall marks.
The bad actor from Monk?
"Someone with an unquenchable thirst for competition and a love of physical dominance"
Who knew Trump was a man?
The bad actor from Monk?
He did a good job as Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs.
As I remember Obama couldn't make the starting basketball team because he played "too black". I think it was in one of his books.
And didn't some Senator and his daughter challenge Obama and his daughter to a game of hoops?
Of course both the Senator and his daughter played college basketball.
Switchblades were kind of a thing back then. They were associated with city hoodlums who had sort of an enviable panache - ducktails, low-slung jeans, turned up collars, and gang fights (think of West Side Story - although that, a wussed-up version of them). So switchblades were cool for that reason, as well as in their own right.
I had one, plus a small knife collection (and I was an honor student and a Boy Scout). I had a stiletto, which my buddy and I thought was the coolest thing ever. We didn't do anything with any of them except fool around with them and fake knife fights, etc. You could buy all that stuff mail order out of the ads in backs of magazines. They weren't a big deal - nor was owning or collecting them. Nor is Donald Trump's having done so.
"Your mother and me would like you to cozy-up to the Finkelstein boy. He's a bright kid and he's going off to military school..."
"You get a god-damn job before sundown or we're shipping you off to military school with that god-damn Finkelstein shit-kid!
Son-of-a-bitch!"
What's a switch blade? Folding pocket knife? Or the push button, spring open blade? I have been collecting pocket knives since ~8. I was not impressed with the couple switch blades I have owned. As on oldster, my tastes have gone upscale to the $100+ lockup pocket knives, one hand opening.
this is a nice assisted open I've carried for years
The premise of the story seems a lot like a pre ordained conclusion, with interviews chosen to reach the conclusion.
"rigidity of a military academy; it was the ideal educational incubator for someone with an unquenchable thirst for competition and a love of physical dominance.."
Looks like US Grant, McCain, Jimmy Carter, and Ike were like that too. They loved the Military academy so much they joined West Point and Annapolis.
I wonder if Trump is mixing up WIllie McCovey with BIlly McCool, a pitcher who entered the majors in 1964 and was good enough to make the 1946 all-star team (but did not play in the game).
When Trump was 8 years old, he had his GI Joe Doll tear the arm off Barbie. Hence, his love of the military and hatred of women.
At that age I used to dream about having an illegal switchblade knife.
All I got was a crummy switch hair comb... that I wanted to turn into an illegal switchblade knife.
You could buy all that stuff mail order out of the ads in backs of magazines.
Comic books were the best. I absolutely believed I needed X-Ray glasses!!
Later on, we were buying recipes for contact explosives. Yes, the recipes worked about as well as the X-Ray glasses. Still, I'm lucky to have ten fingers, and two eyes.
Caution to my link above. Assisted open knives are illegal in some jurisdictions. Not that I have ever been asked about it.
Slate recently started a paywall. They need to write articles that Bubble-Living Coasties will click on, and something that is critical of Trump, in any way, is just the clickable ticket.
Did not I read this story a couple of years ago? I thought this might be a flashback to "Four years ago today, this was in the news..."
I guess this is a step up for Slate. Wasn't their last big presidential investigative deep dive into the question of whether Obama farted rainbows or sparkle glitter?
Wince - Strother Martin did have a way of coming away with the most memorable scene in any film he was in. I laugh every time I think about his "We're loooosing" speech from Slapshot.
>>Later on, we were buying recipes for contact explosives.
NI3. Simple to make, safe to handle when wet. A feather will detonate when dry. A classic chemistry class demonstration.
When I was a kid; I used to go to the local hardware store and buy paints for my models. All that stuff is behind locked doors now, because other kids used to do stupid stuff with them so the solution was to treat us all the same. Of course I had knives. Everything from the assorted multi-tool knives, a butterfly knife, and how could you do models without an X-Acto knife. Hell, we used to carry that stuff on airplanes.
Iowan2, CRKT makes some dandy one-finger opening tactical knives too.
Switchblades were illegal in NY State in the 50s and only recently have become legalized. Ditto gravity knives.
If young Donald Trump had been scooped up with a switchblade, it could have been a serious offense.
Even worse, had he been convicted, he might not be president today.
John Henry
1959: West Side Story was still playing on Broadway, gang violence was rampant, "the Capeman" was killing people in parks with a switchblade. Of course they shipped the kid off to military school.
I read the whole thing, and there are a number of impeachable offenses clearly documented.
Jimmy Carter never threw out a first pitch. Another basic error for Slate.
Banana knives were cool. What guy didn't collect knives? OOOPs trigger warning! Trump jumps to %105 in my book.
This story is beyond pathetic. Why doesn't the media work on a story how Obama used cocaine and visited the gay bathhouses in Chicago? There is evidence of that behavior which seems far more problematic than this nonsense
iowan2 @ 10:04: nice carry knife. I have a similar one. Beautifully made, not like those cheesy things we used to admire in the ads in the back of the comic books in the Sixties. I am not impressed by a story of Trump playing with knives at age 12. We sure did (skinning knives and Bowie knives were very popular in my Northern Canada home town). And wasn't there a game of "stretch" or something, where you faced your opponent and threw a knife into the lawn near him, and he had to stretch to reach it and then throw it near you?
Point being, that between knives and Daisy BB guns and air rifles (got one at age 12) and .22 rifles (got one at 15), and firecrackers (the bigger the better) it is a wonder that any of us survived. But we did, and this kind of bedwetting revelation does not impress me much.
I can tell what that story says without reading it.
I remember buying switchblades in Chicago when I was about 14.
It's very important to get to the bottom of Trump's 60-year old switch-blade antics as a teenager, of course, while it is very important to not get to the bottom of Biden's 30-year old pussy-grabbing antics as a United States Senator.
We recognize that Slate.
Carry on!
That actually could be pretty interesting if it was edited to get rid of the hit piece element. But I know slate can't help themselves. Poor things
The outline of the story is that Trump loved baseball, played enthusiastically, dreamed dreams, gave them up when he measured himself against a pro level player and loved remembering it all. And Slate in a time of national lockdown has sent someone from place to place, gathering and spreading the virus and gathering and spreading the information that the newspapers didn't really cover Trump in the Sixties. In these days that is worth time, energy and the spreading of TDS as well as Wuhan. Maybe a Pulitzer is next. Democracy Dies In Darkness.
And?? We had bb guns, knives and M-80's ect…..I guess it depends on where you grew up.
this kind of bedwetting revelation does not impress me much.
We are not the target audience for this sort of story. Remember a couple of years ago when a black pro football player got into trouble for using a switch to whip his child? A lot of the stories about it had to explain exactly what a switch was. My guess is that the people reading the article at Slate have only ever used a kitchen knife and were butt kissing goody goodies in school.
Buy the way, gravity knifes and switchblades were illegal were I grew up, so other weapons were improvised.
Orange Man doesn't respect my beliefs and political commitments to '(W)omen'
Orange Man doesn't respect my beliefs and political commitments to 'The Environment'
Orange Man doesn't respect my beliefs and political commitments to 'Race Relations'
Orange Man doesn't respect my beliefs and political commitments to 'The Nation Which Must Fundamentally Change Or Continue Being Evil'
Orange Man doesn't respect me, and I deserve respect. I am guaranteed respect.
The outline of the story is that Trump loved baseball, played enthusiastically, dreamed dreams
So, he was a normal kid who played high-school baseball?
I remember when a guy pulling out a bigger knife in NYC, "that ain't a knife, this is a knife" was a joke in a movie.
The entire point of the article is to prove Trump is a liar. My eyes rolled all the way back into my head when the reporter went through the small town paper microfiche archives. This is the work Slate is paying someone to do, right now? Does anyone actually care that PDJT wasn’t as great an athlete as he says he was?
I’m very confused. Does Slate think this baseball expose is finally going to the lift the scales from the eyes of Trump’s supporters? “He said he could’ve made it to the show, and he only batted 138! I’m over him!”
In what reality does this make any kind of sense? I am strongly reminded of the hack reporters who combed through Sarah Palin’s trash.
And when the shit got real, Donnie Daddy payed a quack off to invent debilitating bone spurs to keep prescious out of 'Nam.
Love these hard-hitting stories.
iowan2,
Whoa. What should I have in my pocket at this very moment but the same thing (thougn olive handle/black blade)? Awesome knife.
Danno,
I have a CRKT Bear Claw strapped to my PFD for sailboat emergencies.
Also, Back In The Day™.... every single day of my high school career I openly carried a large Swiss Army knife in a leather belt pouch. Nobody cared. Nobody noticed.
Jersey Fled said...
As I remember Obama couldn't make the starting basketball team because he played "too black".
Does "playing too black" mean missing 20 of 22 shots?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IjDqm-JHrA
Yeah, he clearly had the makings of a Michael Jordan there.
I missed the switch blade fad (seems like more of a 50s-early 60s phase).
But, when Bruce Lee got famous in the early 70s -- my friends and I convinced our parents to take us to SF Chinatown (Grant St, near Stockton) to buy some nunchucks.
That fad lasted about 3 or 4 months.
Maybe Trump garnered the attention of some pro scouts. Maybe he did; maybe he didn't. I don't know.
I had a switchblade as a kid. Found it in the woods.
Add me to the list of pre-teens with switchblades. Had both stiletto and side-opening. Very cheap but fun to play with. Also had the Rambo-type knife later that I kept in my tackle box. Never found that one very useful since I wasn't holed up in a cave fleeing law enforcement. Also had a slew of camping/Swiss Army knives. Now carry a Spyderco (with the hole in the blade for easy one-handed opening) for everyday use and possible self defense if necessary, though that has never happened. It clips onto my pocket and stays out of the way.
As on oldster, my tastes have gone upscale to the $100+ lockup pocket knives, one hand opening. this is a nice assisted open I've carried for years
My favorite is a Benchmade auto open (maybe a 3550?). I have a few Kershaws that I like too. The Rainbow one is the prettiest.
I can't wait for the equivalent deep dive story on Joe Biden and CornPop.
I had a BB gun when I was 11, but never got a chance to shoot someone's eye out. no swtichblade, just a swiss army knife.
Agree Whitney. It could have been a really good article, but TDS is too strong.
New York Military Academy at Cornwall-on-th-Hudson records show that Donald John "DT" Trump played Freshman Baseball in school year 59-'60 and again in '60-'61, which well documents why it took our genius five years to get through the Academy. His academic records remain hidden after fixer Michael Cohen, acted on DT's orders “to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.”
Lurker 21 at 10:22, thanks for reminding me the Jet Song from West Side Story:
When you’re a Trump,
You’re a Trump all the way.
From your first Diet Coke
To your last dyin’ day.
When you’re a Trump,
If the spit hits the fan,
You got ex wives around,
You’re a family man.
You’re never alone,
You’re never disconnected.
You’re home with your own -
When company’s expected,
You’re well protected!
Then you are set
With a capital T,
Which you’ll never forget
Till they cart you away.
When you’re a Trump,
You stay a Trump!
When you’re a Trump,
You’re the top cat in town,
You’re the gold-haired kid
With the heavyweight crown!
When you’re a Trump,
You’re the swingin’est
Little boy, you’re a man;
Little man, you’re a king!
Here comes the Trump
Like a bat out of hell
Someone lies about him
Someone don’t feel so well!
Here comes the Trump!
Liberal world step aside,
Better go underground,
Better run, better hide!
He's drawin’ the line,
So keep your noses hidden!
He's hangin’ a sign say “Illegals Forbidden,”
And we ain’t kiddin’!
Here comes the Trump -
Yeah! And he's gonna beat
Every last buggin’ gang
On the whole buggin’ street!
Enemies of the People.
[Mamaroneck, N.Y.—May 6, 2020] A CBS News crew pulled medical professionals off the floor at the Cherry Medical Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to line up in their vehicles so a CBS film crew would have a long line for their COVID-19 coverage.
...
'Apparently, the news crew wanted more people in the line,' said a Cherry Health Supervisor. "We pretended. There were a couple of real patients, which made it worse," Said Another Registered Nurse.
In other words, CBS delayed the treatment of real patients so they could get their shot of fake patients waiting in long lines.
Project Veritas report now at Ace of Spades. Althouse's NYT will have it.......never.
As long as Slate was making shit up, they should have added more racist and sexist elements. Maybe there's Part II.
Gadfly,
Trump started at the school in 8th grade. School went grades 8-12.
He played freshman baseball the first year as an eighth grader.
Why doesn't the media work on a story how Obama used cocaine and visited the gay bathhouses in Chicago? There is evidence of that behavior which seems far more problematic than this nonsense
Obama admitted to trying cocaine. The "evidence" for him visiting gay bathhouses certainly is "problematic" if you use the word correctly.
His academic records remain hidden after fixer Michael Cohen, acted on DT's orders “to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.”
Can we just put a stake through the heart of that myth. It is the law that schools, colleges and examination boards don't make grades and scores public without an individual's consent. If we want to get detailed, they may be allowed confirm that you went there, and there may be circumstances when law enforcement authorities can get a warrant for more information, but they don't just release personal information if you don't want them to.
Most politicians don't give their consent because there's nothing to be gained by releasing grades and scores. The exceptions (which really aren't) are when class rank is a matter of public record (as a West Point and Annapolis) or when grades are included in government files that are released to the public, or when somebody at the college breaks the law and makes grades and test scores public. That is why we know John McCain's class rank at Annapolis, John Kerry's college transcript which was included in the Navy files he had released, and George W. Bush's grades which were illegally leaked to the public by someone at Yale. If Trump threatened academic institutions with action if they broke the law, good for him.
It more and more occurs to me that Trump is the second coming of Teddy Roosevelt.
rcocean said...
I had a BB gun when I was 11, but never got a chance to shoot someone's eye out. no swtichblade, just a swiss army knife.
I had a BB gun about that age and one time fired it at a tree about 6 feet away. The BB ricocheted and hit my front tooth cracking off a corner. I eventually had to have a cap on the tooth. It was pure chance that it did not hit me in the eye.
@Gadfly,
New York Military Academy at Cornwall-on-th-Hudson records show that Donald John "DT" Trump played Freshman Baseball in school year 59-'60 and again in '60-'61, which well documents why it took our genius five years to get through the Academy. His academic records remain hidden after fixer Michael Cohen, acted on DT's orders “to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.”
Did you write this in gest? Or are you declaring to the world that you are so politically lost, your Trump-infested mind is now causing neurological damage.
Here's a friendly suggestion. Return to Planet Earth, and return to Trump's public policies between 2017-present. Those are relevant and ripe for critique.
Just a thought:)
When I was 13 I had a bolt action .22 that I took to the town dump with a box of .22 shorts and shot rats. My parents would spend 12 years in prison for that now.
That is an incredibly exhaustive article about something so insignificant. Joe Biden claimed to have played varsity football at UDelaware. I await a long, detailed exposure of his false claim from Slate.
The switchblade story is actually only a small part of the article. It just makes me think that he was a normal 50's boy. It's not all surprising his father sent him to military school, though. In those days, just few miles away in Manhattan, if you were playing with switchblades in a public park you were likely to be taken for members of a gang and jumped and possibly killed by a rival gang.
Yeah, let's comb through everyone's claims of high-school and college glory, and make all grades and test scores of all candidates for public office public records.
I'm serious--I'd like to require every sitting or aspiring politician to release all such info and the results of a CURRENT, STANDARD, IQ TEST.
Narr
That will be hilarious
Howard said...
And when the shit got real, Donnie Daddy payed a quack off to invent debilitating bone spurs to keep prescious out of 'Nam.
Howard the Marine once again spreads the bullshit about bone spurs.
Howard, if indeed you did join the military, you did the heel walk which is to test for bone spurs that are disqualifying. If the recruit has pain with the heel walk, xrays are obtained to confirm the diagnosis.
Try to keep the DNC bullshit to a minimum no matter how many emails they send you.
Darrell said: Maybe there's Part II.
Eek, no. That article is too long for anything but an excerpt from a groundbreeaking new book.
Plus this: You don't need to read articles about politicians to know publications' views of them. You just look at the illustrations they choose. Slate hates Trump.
Trump's old friends/coaches from high school are still close friends five decades later. That says something about the depth of his relationships. As far as his baseball accomplishments, who cares? He's a genuine fan with a deep appreciation for the game.
I find these kinds of nitpicking attacks tiresome. Did anybody complain that we were sold a line about Obama as an avid basketball player (because he was so virile?) and yet once he was elected instead he became an avid golfer? Not that I can recall. Has anyone noted that Obama required the services of a body man and we all went along with that because of course that's required? (Reginald L. "Reggie" Love is an American political aide, former college basketball player, and media editor. Love served as the special assistant and personal aide, commonly referred to as body man, to United States President Barack Obama.) And yet Trump seems to function fine without a personal man servant?
The playing fields of NYMA won many a Waterloo since Donald Trump competed on them. Maybe the Russians were running the school. Ask the Crossfire High School Sports investigation run by FBI guys as an extra insurance policy.
'Round here, we call 'em slingblades.
Already mentioned by some, but here's my boyhood in synoptic form: model planes built and painted with highly toxic glues and paints, displayed for a few years, and then loaded with hoarded firecrackers and set on fire over in Monkey Mountains--flying plastic shrapnel never did more than cause a few burns.
Every home with a boy had a BB gun; most homes with boys had at least a .22 single-shot plinking gun; NY and 4thJuly were massive events, and chances to stockpile for the rest of the year.
We could drive out to the Wolf River bottoms on a Saturday afternoon and plink for hours--now that area is high-end residential, and a gaggle of boys with .22s would prompt a SWAT team response.
My worst firecracker injury was from one I was throwing and released a little late. My thumb and first two fingers tingled for about five years.
Narr
I'm a rightie but was throwing left
Barack Hussein Obama once rode a bicycle with a helmet on, while wearing mom jeans. So, there's that.
By many accounts Trump was decent enough at baseball. But pro level? Probably not. It really is unbelievable to be close by pro level athletes, regardless of the sport. Your jaw just drops at their talent.
OMG - DJT acted like a kid of the male persuasion when he was a kid. Big whoop.
I have carried a pocket knife since I was nine. It does freak a few people out, but they all seem to be named 'karen'.
In high school (graduated in '70) myself and two friends used to make our own explosives and roam the backwoods looking for things to blow up. You could buy the ingredients from mail order chemical supply outfits at the time. It was getting more edifficult to buy fuze in bulk for somr reason, but the ingredients to make black powder or flash powder had so restrictions. I have no doubt that such behavior in today's world would warrant death by SWAT.
Today, if you let your child walk to the park by themselves to play, some karen will call the police and they will arrest you for child endangerment. I don't think the world is better with all of the karens demanding we behave ourselves.
For those with no time to read the link:
But about a month after Trump announced he was running for president in the summer of 2015, the NYMA coach that Trump mentioned in his tweet, Theodore Dobias, chimed in. Dobias told the Daily Mail that Trump was scouted by the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Phillies, and repeated to Rolling Stone that the Phillies had been interested. “He was quite the athlete,” Dobias said, going on to praise the future president’s cleanliness and his ability to get along with everyone.
So does this mean that snopes would give Trump "not mostly un-true"?
Bay Area Guy @ 11:03: "...buy some nunchucks..." Saw the Bruce Lee movies and absolutely wanted some of those. Couldn't find them, so I made a pair out of sawed-off hockey sticks with clothesline. Played with them until I hurt myself: no idea what I was doing, other than establishing I was never going to be Bruce Lee.
Good times, good times.
I have carried a pocket knife everyday of my life that I can remember. I have no idea how any man can get through a day without one.
We all had BB guns in our youth and had many fights with each other. Bows and arrows too. Sling shots. I have no idea how we all survived without an eye loss. Once my older brother and I were surrounded while in a depression in a grassy field. We decided we would make a break for it. He arose first, and fired his BB gun at the closest opponent and got him right between the eyes. That ended the battle until we all ascertained that he hadn't been hit in the eye. Then, back to the fight.
The local moonshiner's kid had enough money for a coke and Hershey bar every day and also had a BB pump gun. Boy, was that thing powerful.
We all remember when Daddy got mad at younger brother for shooting out a window, and took his BB gun and wrapped it around a tree.
Played with them until I hurt myself: no idea what I was doing, other than establishing I was never going to be Bruce Lee.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExO8wWUosZ4
@Allen S,
"Barack Hussein Obama once rode a bicycle with a helmet on, while wearing mom jeans. So, there's that."
Heh -- have you seen him bowl? It's not pretty:)
Maybe Trump was Corn Pop.
Biden can bring a pool chain to the debates.
Owen
Stretch. Forgotten game. Thanks for that.
etbass said...
I have carried a pocket knife everyday of my life that I can remember. I have no idea how any man can get through a day without one.
I have lost two to the TSA. Forgot I had them.
"Even worse, had he been convicted, he might not be president today."
Damn! "Missed it by this much!"
Another persistent myth to spike. Everybody in politics above a certain level has a "body man" or "body person" to take care of their everyday needs. You can find a list online going back to Richard Nixon. A-holes made much of Obama's Reggie Love or Hillary Clinton's Huma Abedin to imply something sexual going on. Can we finally get over that garbage now? President Trump has had three "body people" (not at the same time) since taking office.
The contrast with the limp-wristed bullshitter Obama is striking.
Wait. Are you sure it’s a sunrise pic. It looks like a red moon rising. Nature is going haywire.
DanTheMan wrote: "NI3. Simple to make, safe to handle when wet."
And hilarious when sprinkled on the floor of the classroom before the teacher comes in.
so, if i read that right....
Trump said he was really good
His Coach said he was really good
His teammates said he was really good.
BUT!
NONE of those stories (his, his coaches, his teammates) could be supported, except by those involved in the games... AND!
looking at the papers and records from 8th and 9th grade, he was NOWHERE NEAR as good as the seniors
For reasons not really explained, the writer didn't find/look for any papers/records of his senior year
Conclusion! TRUMP never actually played baseball, or went to highschool
instead, Trump spent the 60's in reform schools and prisons.. Records of which must have been erased, since they don't exist
" . . .a love of physical dominance...."
Golly gee, not like "liberals" and other State-shtuppers at all!
Regarding getting interesting stuff mailorder from ads the back of e.g. Popular Science, we had lots of extremely dangerous fun with potassium chlorate and other chemical odds and ends that we ordered. You could buy rocket and firecracker casings, fuse, etc. Fortunately, I didn't know about thermite back then but the possibilities with that stuff in the hands of a kid is disturbing to contemplate.
All you had to do was tell your folks you were doing "science experiments" and generally you were left alone, unless something went off in the house, which it did on a couple of occasions, though creating no real damage. One had to cool it for a while after that, before resuming business as usual.
Teenagers can cause a lot of havoc if they have too much time on their hands.
Can you imagine some liberal/left so superficial and dull that he'd spend time looking up what Sports Trump played 50 years ago?
i think being a liberal/leftist is a mental disease - or evidence of brain damage.
Rcocean: The far left liberals who do politics 247 are definitely nuts.
This long thing is the book Trump was writing in. As always, it's his voice:
https://books.google.com/books?id=KT_GhA_hnwEC&pg=PA297&lpg=PA297&dq=%22being+a+pro+was+in+the+equation%22&source=bl&ots=-Xlkg_JVlz&sig=ACfU3U005TTK2tC4w-nBi5xNzMmekPQbZg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiU0qHR8p_pAhW0gnIEHVKPAJgQ6AEwAHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22being%20a%20pro%20was%20in%20the%20equation%22&f=false
The most interesting line in the reasonably fair article is this ....
Trump won "The Coach’s Award [which] was apparently given to someone who was an exemplary team player rather than the most talented or most accomplished player."
Donald Trump... a team player...Imagine that...and the writer says nothing else about that.
Michael K,
I would also point out to Howrrd that just having a note from a doctor was not enough to get out of the draft. If it had been, no person would have been drafted unwillingly.
You got examined by a military doctor, or at least a civilian doctor working for the military. You had to get past them to beat the draft.
Howard has no idea what he is talking about.
John Henry
You got examined by a military doctor, or at least a civilian doctor working for the military. You had to get past them to beat the draft.
Did every draftee get a one on one with a psychiatrist?
Slate?
Yeah. I'll get right on that.
Everybody who was good at any sport, especially baseball in the '50s and '60s, dreamed of being a player and thought they could make it. If he didn't try how would be know. Another B.S. article trying to give Trump a hit! I love today's "Ace of Spades" article on Trump said, "...eat more greens should help your immune system...but am no doctor..." CNN's response , "...Trump says people should mow their grass and eat it..." No that's entertaining. While there check out the #metoo activists about being raped by Biden and still voting for him - unbelievable.
FullMoon said...
You got examined by a military doctor, or at least a civilian doctor working for the military. You had to get past them to beat the draft.
Did every draftee get a one on one with a psychiatrist?
5/6/20, 2:06 PM
Only if you showed up in a dress or pissed yourself while taking the eye test.
This is why I fkn LOVE Trump. He's a blue collar city guy down to his marrow. Try to picture Schumer as a teen: a slicked down oily valedictorian with that smug condescending smirk on his face. He would have shit himself if he ever so much as spied one in a store window.
Speaking of people shitting themselves, I carried a bayonet. Was like a Scottish claymore compared to a switchblade. Had to stop carrying when I reached majority. I was crazy not stupid.
In high school, 1971, when Texas Instruments first sold complex personal calculators, my math genius (won the Westinghouse National Science Contest) friend bought one and gave me his top rank slide rule. It was about a foot long and had a leather scabbard you could loop onto your belt. Wish I still had it to impress Corn Pop.
Howard has no idea what he is talking about.
It does make me wonder if it is just TDS or he is lying about military service. Harkins and Blumenthal both lied and are Senators.
Did every draftee get a one on one with a psychiatrist?
I suspect every one that claimed a psych condition saw one. We routinely referred applicants but most psych consults are useless.
I was not examining draftees during Vietnam but I have heard that it was much harder to get exemptions. The claims about the rich getting off was mostly BS. Some went to extremes but most just stayed in grad school. They became the Marxist professors.
Anyone else have a Gilbert Chemistry set/
I could not make explosives with it but had no need. I found a couple boxes of shotgun shells in the attic and gunpowder makes a perfectly fine explosive. At 11, I felt no need for anything more sophisticated.
John Henry
This is in the same vein of those who claimed that Romney was mean to somebody once when they were teenagers. Or that Kavanaugh was writing on his calendar in secret code about leading his roving posse of gang-rapers.
I hope everyone will cut me some slack today. I seem to be dead. As in non-compos, pining for the fiords etc.
The plant I am working in checking my temperature twice in the process of getting in the door. Two stations, two guards 2 thermometers.
One measured about 95.2 degrees (the .2 shows how accurate it is)
The second check showed me at 83.7 degrees.
So either I am dead or the thermometers are useless.
Plannedemic theater is the likely explanation
John Henry
Anyone else have a Gilbert Chemistry set/
I had two chemistry sets but don't recall the name. I also used to take my father's shotgun shells apart to make rockets with
gunpowder. I also had a set of molds to make toy soldiers. I made most with lead but then someone gave me a bag of aluminum pellets and I made aluminum toy soldiers. Charcoal will melt aluminum. 1100 degrees, I think.
NC-Dad at 11:25AM, that was excellent!
Always had a knife as a kid/teenager. Also had a very serious sling-shot. Not something fragile and dainty, but something that would do serious damage if intended. We also grew up in an era when we could go out on our own. We'd ride bikes down high, steep hills in the summer, then stand up on sleds down those same hills in the winter. It was not easy. Body flips, head over sled, were common sights. We played in new housing developments. We'd jump into the pits just cleared out to make the foundation/basement. Jump down and hope we could climb back out from a pit much higher than we were tall, with smooth dirt sides. Later we'd climb around on the wood framing tearing out insulation in the process. We'd have 'wars' with groups of other friends, flinging shingles at peoples heads. And of course, throwing stones at each other because they made that cool 'bullet in sand' look when it hit the dirt pile just below someone's peering face. When really bored, we'd swipe tomatoes or eggs from our own families and toss them at people's front doors or garage doors. Not proud of it. But nothing much happened from it all. A few cuts and maybe a broken bone here or there, but with kids, that used to happen. Sometimes I wonder why they didn't remove all of us from the neighborhood. One time a neighbor did catch me running- as always- against the grain as my friends were running away from our enraged neighbor, I (of course) ran in the opposite direction (always the contrarian) and right into his arms where he picked me up and let me know there would be some cleaning up and apologizing coming. He was right. My folks were so pissed. I had to go over and formally apologize to him and his family the next day, then had to clean up his garage door. I never threw another tomato or egg at anyone, except my wife, of course. But she loves me.
And the thing is, we were the 'good' kids in the neighborhood. There were others much worse than we were. Much worse. Today's kids- my grandkids- are more likely to get tunnel carpal syndrome than a cut from a shingle flown into the side of their head. Some would call that evolution.
you seem very alert to be dead, I would say those things are poorly calibrated,
I read part of the article. It seemed like some kind of a parody of an investigative journalist with an obsessive need to find something--anything not matter how trivial--that reflects poorly on Donald Trump....Trump was a starting player and co-captain of the team. He was a good athlete. His memories made him out to be a better athlete than he really was. The investigative reporter really blew the lid of those memories. He checked the box scores of his high school games. Trump only batted .129 in those games.....Great work by the reporter, but there's another story here. Why did they name this lackluster player co-captain and put him in the starting line-up. Further investigative work might reveal that Donald, using his munificent allowance, bribed his teammates and the coach to give him preferential treatment. That has not yet been proven but can you think of any other explanation of how he perpetrated this massive fraud on the school baseball team.
Daisy BB guns... one of our Rites of Passage at age 11 was you had to get shot in the thigh from 10 feet and not shed a tear.
Obama definitely farted sparkle glitter. He was that wonderful.
For the record, there can be no doubt that Biden piles the horseshit much higher than Trump. He graduated towards the bottom of his class, and he's on video bragging about being a top student. Biden's grandiosity exceeds that of Trump and passes unnoticed in the media.
Slate looked so closely into Obama's claims about his basketball skills, I remember. He said he didn't start in high school because he had too much of a "city game," for his league and culture at the time. Those willing to comment who were there tell us that is ludicrous.
My younger brother still believes it to be true.
Also had a very serious sling-shot.
My family lived in Los Alamos when I was five. I recall a pair of kids walking down the street with slings -- not sling shots -- throwing small stones at telephone poles. The stones didn't bounce, they stuck into the wood. The poles were decorated with stones.
Trump only batted .129 in those games.....Great work by the reporter, but there's another story here. Why did they name this lackluster player co-captain and put him in the starting line-up.
Because the other ball players weren't very good hitters either and he played his field position better than anybody else on the team?
The question is "Was Trump a Good BB player? The author was able ( if we believe) to only get stats for 9 games spanning 3 years. He went 4 for 29 which is a BA 138, which is below the mendoza line - bad hitter. The reporter takes that stat to indicate Trump was not a good baseball player. However that amount of games hardly makes for 1/2 a season and he played for 3 years as a starter. So the question is still not answered. Also if he were really good he would have made All-star teams and received scholarships. That should be easy to check. In fact a savvy reporter would have asked him what was his career BA, if he made any high school all-star teams and did he get a scholarship. All bs.
He said he didn't start in high school because he had too much of a "city game," for his league and culture at the time.
Obama rode the pine at Punahou. And bitched about it the entire time. Had nothing to do with his 'city game.' He simply wasn't that good.
>>Did every draftee get a one on one with a psychiatrist?
When I joined the USAF, one of the questions they asked was "Do you favor overthrow of the government by force or violence?" I chose "force".
Talking knives now; turned on to Spyderco all stainless steel knives by my daughter. I carry a beauty with a partial serrated blade, clipped to my change pocket in my jeans, easy to access, but out of the way. Own two folding under three inch versions (legal in Tennessee) and a collectors version made of a titanium handle and a Damascus blade that never leaves my safe deposit box. One other knife in my procession is a Swiss Army knife with a sterling silver handle that hangs on my keychain. Functional but just for looks. In the late fifties and early sixties, Santa left a child's toy gun made by Mattel. It was a hybrid revolver with a plastic rifle stock attached. The working cylinder of the revolver could be loaded with play bullets, each bullet cartridge containing a spring that would, in turn, be cocked with a plastic "lead" slug. On the other end of the bullet, a round adhesive cap would be applied. The result of all this fuss and bother would allow a boy to aim his toy weapon at the cat or his sister and nail them with a plastic projectile that gave out a satisfying bang! By today's standards, the executives of Mattel would be serving long prison sentences after a lengthy show trial. It's a minor miracle that we don't have a generation of one-eyed, septemgenarian adults.
>>One measured about 95.2 degrees (the .2 shows how accurate it is)
Wrong, but to three significant figures. :)
JMW Turner - Ah the joys of the Mattel Shootin' Shell gun sets with the greeny stick on caps. Dog those were fun - I had several back in the day. I seem to remember my sister was not amused.
As I recall, we all knew switch blades were verboten, like smoking and drinking, but that is what attracted us to them. We wanted to be bad boys to impress our friends That’s why we had Boy Scouts to occupy our time. Until you can drive, there is not much you can do using bicycle transportation. And our parents only drove us to good activities. But organized team sports is the answer. Friday Night Lights is a true story.
switchblades and cherry bombs. oh and the Charles atlas plan to take my skinny early teen physique to the next level. the only reason I ever picked up Boy's Life magazine.
Doesn't everyone have a pipe bomb story??
We decided to play it safe, and only make an open ended pipe bomb. Realizing that it might behave like a rocket, we strapped it to an old roller skate.
Safety was a concern, and we deemed the cyclone fence surrounding the playground to be our containment vessel.
We lit the fuse, and stepped away!! WHOOSH!!...and then bewilderment. Where did it go?? We later found pieces of the roller skate in the school yard. The pipe was gone.
The next day we observed a tow truck taking Mr. Mills' 1965 Chrysler Newport to the garage. There was a perfectly round two inch hole in the fender.
I should have said.....front fender. The car was inoperative.
Was Trump really a potential professional baseball player? Who knows, who cares? When you're a male in your 70s you remember yourself in your high school years as being stronger, more athletic, more suave, and less pimply faced than you really were. A quick feel inside your girlfriend's bra becomes going all the way and she was screaming in her orgasm.
It's a guy thing.
Doesn't everyone have a pipe bomb story??
I remember making skoal bombs in college. We used to throw them in empty dumpsters for the big bang. The things that nobody cared much about prior to 2001.
MadAsHell @ 3:44 and 3:50: read your account of rocket experiment. Laughed until I cried.
I wish we'd used a pipe that one time we used instead an empty beer bottle. Even that flash-bang powder they put in firecrackers, if you empty enough of them into it, can explode a glass beer bottle in such a way that there is really is no safe distance for such an experiment--scars to prove that.
ALLEGEDLY!
All it takes to convict, in the court of D-hack public opinion.
Off with his head!
Good thing the Clinton's aren't crooks with a history of sexual misconduct.
Kavanaugh and Trump ALLEGEDLY ran rape rooms with pipe bombs. I heard a rumor.
Iman said...
Daisy BB guns... one of our Rites of Passage at age 11 was you had to get shot in the thigh from 10 feet and not shed a tear.
5/6/20, 2:43 PM
-----------------------------
BB's are Ok but our Rite was a dart in the thigh. BB's sting but there's something about
seeing that dart stuck in your flesh...……….
NI3. Simple to make, safe to handle when wet. A feather will detonate when dry. A classic chemistry class demonstration
Some of the wise guys in my high school mixed up a batch and splashed it down the halls after hours. It dried into little spots. The next day as kids walked the halls....hilarity ensued.
On knives... I bought one at about age 12. My Dad suggested I trade it for a stalk of bananas. "Why Dad", I asked. "Because," he explained, No one will take your bananas away from you and stab you with them. And if you get hungry you have a banana".
Been buying knives ever since.
Bar story:
A guy who was briefly a major league ball player was in a bar when he was asked by a drunk who never played ball what his batting average was. The drunk laughed at his answer, which was a pretty low number. Unfazed, the ball player responded “What did you hit?”
“ I was not examining draftees during Vietnam but I have heard that it was much harder to get exemptions. The claims about the rich getting off was mostly BS. Some went to extremes but most just stayed in grad school. They became the Marxist professors.”
Real story. About 1970 a friend got a draft notice. Showed up to the draft physical, and expected to get out on his height. He was 6’5”, but slouched, so they measured him as 6’2”, which at his weight was in bounds. So, he passed. He then did a delayed enlistment to be a helicopter door gunner. During the 5 months delay, he may have injured his elbow flipping on skis, or in any case, the enlistment physical determined that he was out, because he couldn’t fully extend one elbow, and thus couldn’t do push-ups. Likely was the case with the draft physical too, but he passed there. Then, maybe a decade later he tried again, was accepted, and served a term of enlistment in a tank. Which surprised me, since I thought that tankers had to be be runts. He was overly tall and pretty skinny.
In any case, at the time this happened, it was generally understood that it was hard to fail draft physicals, but not as hard to fail enlistment physicals.
How many scoops of ice cream did he get at that school?
Not reading the story - Slate is a joke at this point - but going professional in baseball is not quite as difficult as you might think. Getting to the majors is very difficult, but the lowest levels of the minors are basically at high school all-star team level. There are very few veterans below AAA (the level directly below the minors) and basically none below AA (the next level down), so most of the minors are teens to mid-twenties who get pushed out in a year or two if they do not prove at least somewhat promising and/or useful by then. It is also noteworthy that the low level minor leaguers get paid very little unless they are prospects, so often the lowest rungs are filled with players who are willing to make that sacrifice as opposed to the best players available. It's going to be a lot of rich kids who don't care about the money, passionate players who just want to play baseball, and international players from poor countries hoping to hit the lottery.
"Doesn't everyone have a pipe bomb story??"
Oh hell yeah! The following is an absolute true story:
In 1981, age 14, we were having a friendly poker game with my uncles/aunts, visiting from New York.
Meanwhile, there was this nice older kid, about 17, a few houses down, who spent every waking hour working in his garage on motorcycles and cars. 24/7 his garage door was open, the light on at night, and he at work. I wasn't particular close with him, but in an amazing coincidence, he shared the same last name as famous Credence Clearwater Revival singer, John Fogerty - who also lived in our same neighborhood! Swear to God. The running gag with this garage/mechanic kid was "too bad you're the poor, not famous Fogerty of the block! We didn't pay too much attention to famous John Fogerty, who was my parents' age and travelled a lot. Separate story there.
Anyway, during our family poker game, we heard a loud KABOOM! and then "OhmyGod, OhmyGod, OhMyGod!"
Instinctively, I knew it must be coming from the Fogerty garage, so we ran outside to find outside to help. Someone had already called 911, but Paul was alive, but dazed with his hand, wrapped in a bloody t-shirt. He had blown 2 fingers off his hand, fooling around with a pipe bomb that blew up in his garage. We tried but couldn't find the missing fingers, beforev the ambulance came to patch him up.
He got very lucky, survived, but now had this hideously disfigured hand. After his recovery, he would occasionally let us inspect the hand in amazement until we had our fill of the gross-out. It was not attractive.
Nice kid, went to junior college, eventually shaped up, and got an engineering degree at UC Berkeley. But we lost touch in my early 20s
That's my John Fogerty pipe-bomb story. All true.
All male politicians talk about sex in private and exaggerate their athletic careers in public.
I wonder what all female politicians talk about and exaggerate.
I wonder what all female politicians talk about and exaggerate.
Being sexually molested. They think it makes them sound like some male was attracted.
Michael K said...
Howard, if indeed you did join the military, you did the heel walk which is to test for bone spurs that are disqualifying. If the recruit has pain with the heel walk, xrays are obtained to confirm the diagnosis.
I realize it was 38 years ago, but I don't recall that part of the physical to join the Navy. I do recall people spreading the story about the square needle in the left nut part of the exam...
Was he a Jet or a Shark?
Also had a very serious sling-shot. Not something fragile and dainty, but something that would do serious damage if intended.
The "Wham-o" company made those heavy duty slingshots before they invented the Frisbee.
Speaking of slingshots, in sailing we sued to shoot water balloons at other boats if they were close enough. Usually it was at anchor unless there was no wind and you were drifting. You used a plastic funnel and a piece of rubber tubing about 6 feet long. We called it "The Funnelator" and it could throw a water balloon 50 feet.
Sure am glad all those person-hours went into that masterpiece of investigative reporting, rather than, say, why Fauci has gotten every estimate of every pandemic wrong over the past 40 years.
As for Trump's athletic abilities, if I don't like someone and they wax on and on about their high school careers, just shut it down with, "So, which college did you end up playing for?"
the rest of us just say, as I do, "I ran track at the university of Wisconsin" or the sport you did.
What a great comment thread. Lots of great memories and sweet nostalgia, and minimum derangement. Perfect for an afternoon break. Thanks, guys!
I don't recall any heel walk at the AAFES station downtown LA. you definitely needed strong heels in the Marine corps of the way we banged them on the deck. I still bang my heels on the deck when I'm pacing I'm still plus or minus 2 ft at a football field length with that 30 inch step.
The only thing I remember from the physical is flunking the color blindness test which dq'd me from my chosen MOS.some guy tried to convince me to go in open contract because I had good test scores and would be able to get whatever I wanted. F*** that I said I'm dumb enough to join the Marine corps but I'm not stupid enough to go in open contract. He then reviewed the regulations and figured out that I could enlist as a reservist and still get the MOS that I wanted. That's how I became a Hollywood weekend warrior and was able to finish college.
Can I get you guys to defend Ted Nugent's draft dodging now. Also could you please provide a link that shows that Trump was examined by a military doctor.
Michael K. said, "I have lost two to the TSA. Forgot I had them."
Me too. I normally carry a Swiss Army knife. Great tools but not too fancy or expensive and when I have one confiscated, I just curse and go buy another.
"Doesn't everyone have a pipe bomb story??"
Took empty CO2 cartridges - left over from shooting BB pistols at frogs, mostly - and sawed off the punctured end. Stuffed them with cut-off match heads and put a whole match in for a fuse. Put it between the fencing and wood railing and lit it off like a cheap rocket. Sometimes difficult to see where it went. Put one into a (fortunately not home) neighbor's siding a couple doors down. Good times.
Also stuffed caps into two screws and a nut to make "bolt bombs." If you ran into some money and could afford a couple of boxes of caps, it was always fun to hit a whole roll with a hammer.
Do they still make and sell caps?
Any of you folks commenting here who were born on July 1, 1955 or thereafter were never subject to the draft. Oh, you might have had to register, but you weren't going to be drafted. President Nixon ended the draft on July 1, 1973. You had to be 18 in order to receive a 1-A or an induction notice. So realistically if you're less than 65, you're talking hypothetically. Put another way you're talking through your hat. The draft lottery (so beloved by Bill Clinton when he got a "high number") was first held January 1, 1969 and applied to the draft from January 1970 on.
After WW II and through the early mid 1960s, the draft really didn't reach out for middle class kids (they were in college with student deferments) or young married husbands and fathers. They had marital and fatherhood deferments. The draft took young single men who might or might not have finished high school before dropping out---and even if they didn't want to go lacked the financial or legal resources to challenge their draft notice.
Came LBJ's Viet Nam ramp up the draft reached middle class and upper class kids. And a lot of them didn't want to go. They hired lawyers to challenge their draft notices in federal court--and in many cases those lawsuits succeeded since the local draft boards were either sloppy, or didn't even understand their own complicated regulations. If the regulations hadn't been properly followed, the draft notice was voided.
Leading liberal lawyer Michael Tigar published a loose leaf legal periodical "Selective Service Law Reporter" from about 1967 to ~1972. It collected opinions from all the federal court cases which had successfully voided induction notices. It also had information about which medical examination stations were reputed to be "easy" on which medical conditions would make a person ineligible for service.
Yes Howard, bone spurs were one such condition. People who received an induction notice went through a physical exam which they had to pass. If you didn't pass, you didn't get inducted.
If you were a "draft lawyer" as I was for a time at a big Southern California law firm helping employees and sons of clients with their draft issues, you read Tigar's loose leaf service and kept up with what was going on. If your "reluctant draftee" had one of the medical conditions which would keep him from service, you might want to have him take his physical exam at a particular station. 50 years on I can recall that the Wyoming medical exam facility was "loose" on some condition but I can't recall what it was.
Why did I do it? Well as a junior associate you take the assignments you are given. Why did the firm ask me to do it? I was 25 years old, had graduated law school and taken the bar exam, and my wife was 8 months pregnant with our first child when I got my 1A notice. Life is luck and timing--my wife and I had missed all the deadline dates for getting various draft exemptions which would keep me from the draft. I took the easy way out and joined the California National Guard--and did my six months active service at Ft. Polk Louisiana in the summer of 1969. When I got back in the fall of 69 (still with 5 and 1/2 years go in the Guard and Army Reserve) I was given the task.
Skeptical voter thank you for your service as a draft attorney. My brother who went through fort Polk in 1967 finally got out of Vietnam because of the actions of a draft attorney in LA. About halfway through his tour flying Huey's out of Dong Tam, my brother signed up for a special program where you could fly home for two weeks over Xmas and then get extended an extra six months in country. He canceled his trip home and when his year was up they told him he had another six months of combat to serve.
I remember going to meet the attorney in his luxurious Westside office that was chock-full of brightly colored modern art each of which had a price tag on it in the thousands of dollars. Because he was trying to get my brother out of his mom he did to work pro bono.
his main success was getting through to our congressman at the time Barry Goldwater Jr. Rumor had it that Barry went to his father who went directly to someone in the Nixon administration and my brother got out after only spending an extra two months in Vietnam. The whole experience was very very hard on my mother I was in the fourth grade at the time, he was my hero.
Thank you for your service, Howard. I tease you sometimes, but once a Marine, always a Marine. Semper Fi.
You wanna hear some more harmonic convergence?
Somebody should ask Doc K whether he was giving physical exams to recruits at the MEPS station in south central LA (near Florence & Normandie, I recall) in the summer of '86. That's when I took the train to "Dago" (San Diego) for the first miserable day of Navy Boot Camp. Enlisted folks, no pansy officers allowed (apologies to Drago).
What are the odds that Doc K yanked my balls and made me cough:)
BAG:. No worries I can take anything and I give as good as I get that's kind of those seco enjoyment a lot of us have here.
At mcrd, we would see you guys across the fence and you looked so happy and well-fed. That was almost as torturous as watching all those people take off in the airplanes and leave that godforsaken place every minute of every single day.
@Owen
It's worse than that. He was Professor Mills in the department of Mechanical Engineering at the other UW. He effectively signed my diploma.
Trust me! Not a day goes by.......
BAG: "Enlisted folks, no pansy officers allowed (apologies to Drago)."
Why you I oughta....
My father was a nuke Navy Senior Chief who booted up and retired as a Commander.
My brother was a Machinist Mate Nuke as well.
Somebody should ask Doc K whether he was giving physical exams to recruits at the MEPS station in south central LA (near Florence & Normandie, I recall) in the summer of '86.
Nope. I was still operating on drunken illegal immigrants in the middle of the night for free then.
My favorite was the illegal who was walking on the railroad tracks, Memorial Day 1986. He had his SONY Walkman in his ears and did not hear the train. Maybe he thought Armtrak took holidays off. 60 units of blood later, he survived.
As an illegal, he was not eligible for MediCal so it was one more freebee. When he came in the office postop I found out he was a gardener. I had a few uninsured patients doing barter so I suggested he could thank me for saving his life by cutting my lawn for a few months.
Nope. He was too busy.
We called it "The Funnelator" and it could throw a water balloon 50 feet.
My sailing buddies in Seattle called it the same thing. The funnel was usually the top of an old plastic Clorox bleach bottle. The bleach bottle had a nice handle.
Trump used to dress up the female members of his Sea Monkey family in suggestive, inappropriate clothing. They never were the same.
As a child I had Uncles and such who would give me bayonets, don't quite know why. American and British, each basically a short sword (still so today). Bring on those flick knives you thugs, I've got a 16" piece of 1915 Sheffield steel in a lovely M1907 British bayonet, which will still take an edge. If more encouragement is necessary, I've a M1905 American bayonet. If they are still obstreperous, I've Uncle Bob's M1917 Bolo knife. Had all before I was 10, and they are still in my basement, most next to or on the appropriate rifles. I remember buying the British No.4 spike bayonets by the dozen for tent stakes as they were less than a buck a piece. Now they are 20 times the price without a scabbard, and mine are now scattered across New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland in various camp grounds.
In 1959, I was working as a junior engineer and going to night school in premed. I was 21 and figured I would get drafted as I could not afford full time student status. A buddy called me and wanted me to join the Washington state ANG in Spokane. I had just had a big fight with my father and thought it was a good idea. I drove to Harden Lake ID where his parents had a summer home and signed up.
The Basic Training story is here.
Anyway, we got back in December and I found that Congress had passed the National Defense Student Loan Program, effective January 1, 1960. I went back full time and a year later was accepted to medical school. I started September 1961, right after the Russians built the Berlin Wall. My ANG unit was activated October 1. I year later, I started again.
That year of active duty was enough to satisfy the active duty requirement or I would have gone to VN as a doc. I thought about an Army internship and residency but an asshole AG officer in my reserve unit convinced me I did not want to do that.
He was Professor Mills
I'm sure he rationalized....
Civil engineers build targets. Mechanical engineers build weapons.
Speaking of slingshots, in sailing we sued to shoot water balloons at other boats if they were close enough.
Flash back memory. In the 80's 4 of us couples would rent a houseboat on lake of the Ozarks. We did that for 6 years in a row. Most relaxing vacations I ever had. We saw the other houseboats launching water balloons at each other, and contemplated building our own, but never did it. One year we showed up and the house boat rental place had signs all over that shooting water balloons was now a $5,000 fine. Someone had gotten seriously injured. (its all fun and games until 911 gets called). That was the same year they put a speed limit on the lake...at night...100mph.
Wild Horses - novel by Dick Francis has knife collecting background for unsolved murder mystery.
knives are "frowned upon" to put it mildly in UK
"Barack Hussein Obama once rode a bicycle with a helmet on, while wearing mom jeans. So, there's that." And it was a girls bike.
"JFK claimed to have written quite a few books. And we know that NO ONE looked into that, before he got elected POTUS."
https://www.amazon.com/Unknown-Profiles-in-Courage/dp/B01H440SME/ref=sr_1_1?crid=KJOC43CKK9LR&dchild=1&keywords=profiles+in+courage+by+john+f.+kennedy&qid=1588822723&sprefix=profiles+%2Caps%2C149&sr=8-1
"I wonder if Trump is mixing up WIllie McCovey with BIlly McCool, a pitcher who entered the majors in 1964 and was good enough to make the 1946 all-star team (but did not play in the game)."
Easy to mix them up- they were both left handed.
Sumbitch TSA stole my SWK. But I have a new one, and I won't make that mistake again.
One of older friends showed up for his draft physical expecting to fail on account of his flat feet, but says everyone in that group that day was hustled onto buses and away. This would have been about late 1968 IIRC; he ended up in VN as a door gunner.
A friend my age (b.1953) got a note from a doctor that he sleepwalked and that was that; I can testify that he didn't actually sleepwalk, it was more like sleep-levitating out of his bed, over me trying to sleep on the floor, and walking down the stairs . . . and he was really asleep.
Narr
Ummm . . . sleep
"It more and more occurs to me that Trump is the second coming of Teddy Roosevelt."
speak softly and carry a big glass of Lysol.
"You got examined by a military doctor, or at least a civilian doctor working for the military. You had to get past them to beat the draft.
Howard has no idea what he is talking about."
John Henry
this is true. when i had my physical, the military doctor examined me thoroughly to determine that I did not have bone spurs. I recall they were very concerned about bone spurs and they went out of their way to make sure I didn't have them. Same thing with my friends- very thorough. They were also very concerned about anal warts as well.
We would mix lye, and aluminum foil in a glass pop bottle. The result was hydrogen, and we would capture it in a balloon placed over the top of the pop bottle. The reaction would create enough hydrogen to displace the balloon, and create lift.
"Oh...the humanity!!"
Yes, we tied a cotton line dipped in kerosene to the bottom of the balloon. The kerosene wicks were lit, and the balloons deployed. The balloons attracted a lot of attention when the burning wick reached the hydrogen.
Orson Welles could not have imagined the chaos.
@mccullough said...
Gadfly,
Trump started at the school in 8th grade. School went grades 8-12.
He played freshman baseball the first year as an eighth grader.
Gosh, Mac - I provided a link that says he started at the academy in the fall of 1959 which was after he turned 14 (born June 14, 1946). So if he was an 8th grader, he was a already a year behind - graduating in 5 years at age 19. In your scenario and in mine, he obviously had a problem with academics.
To be clear, making rookie ball, or any of the minor leagues makes you a pro ball player in my book. Being a successful pro player is making the major leagues. Claiming he coulda been a major leaguer is a lot. Claiming he could have signed a contract at a time when the major league draft had 20 plus rounds (and taking kids out of high school), and some teams still had open tryouts for spring training slots isn’t unrealistic. The biggest risk for him against it was his dads wealth (team would not have enough leverage to keep a guy who could make more doing something else)
This is the most amusing thread ever on Althouse. What do men born between 1940 and 1960 do when they get an opening? They muse about the years 1955 to 1980.
We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.
(eaglebeak)
Boys will be boys. My father claimed that he stored enough nitroglycerin "to blow the privates off everyone in school" in his locker in the high school in Coweta, OK--who knows if it's true, but it's the kind of thing that boys do or think about doing....
Remembering my father, whom I adored, I can almost believe it.
Meanwhile, I was a student at a girls' private boarding school and I had a switchblade when I was 15. Where on earth were the Slate writers raised, and in what frightful environment?
because he played "too black"
Yeah.....black on ammo! Nothing in the chamber!!
Lucky bastards. I had a lousy little penknife in elementary school and the principal, Mildred Schwartz, took it away and kept it in her desk. Never got around to getting it back. Probably still in the desk of her successor as she must be dead by now. On the explosives front, interesting things will happen if you direct the jet of an unflicked Bic into a Heineken bottle for awhile, then flick it. The burns healed up real good though.
Howard said...
And when the shit got real, Donnie Daddy payed a quack off to invent debilitating bone spurs to keep prescious out of 'Nam.
5/6/20, 10:55 AM
How mad you must be, Howie, that you had the proof of that, and you signed the NDA shutting you up during the election. Hope the money was good.
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