Tales of the Base Tour Guide

20. February 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Memoir

Since my daughter and Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson have moved themselves and a large part of their belongings from my own little suburban house, I have been occupying part of my days in packing up their stuff and rearranging my own furniture and various bits and bobs. There is more room in my place now – and consequently less of it in hers – but I really am enjoying being able to do this. I am way overdue for repainting the living-room and kitchen, and resorting/rearranging the bookshelves and decorative elements … but anyway, when I was moving stuff around today, I was reminded by a book on my shelves, of how I managed to efficiently conduct a tour of Mather Air Force Base when the tour group did not come all neatly compact in a school bus…

That was a year of my time in the military which I thoroughly enjoyed – that year in the Public Affairs shop. The commander of it was a wonderful, competent and engaging officer, one of the two best as commander and leader/manager of people that I ever worked for.

An explanation: during the time when I was assigned to the Public Affairs office there, Mather boasted a tiny planetarium, and a small historical museum. The planetarium’s reason for existence on the base was to teach celestial navigation to masses of brand-new second lieutenants taking a very lengthy course which would qualify them as official Air Force navigators. It was also about the only planetarium anywhere within an easy travel distance of Sacramento. The museum was there just because. The planetarium and the museum featured on the lists of officially approved venues for student field trips by local school districts. Essentially, this meant I would be heading down to the main front gate two and three times a week to meet a school bus. I’d swing up the steps of the bus, introduce myself, give a cordial but firm little talk to the kids, explaining that the base was a serious place, and reckless shenanigans on their part would not be tolerated. If such shenanigans did occur – wandering away from the group or carelessly messing around with any interesting yet potentially dangerous bits of equipment within reach – I would speak to their teacher. Once. And if such shenanigans happened twice – then the tour would be concluded right then and there. I would see them all back to the bus and out the main gate. Some of my assisting helpers on these tours did comment that it was a very savage little talk, but I never did have to cut a tour short, and I never lost a member of a group, so … hey, results count.

There usually was a block of time to be filled between arriving at the gate, and when we were scheduled at the planetarium. To fill it,  I would conduct a brief tour of the base, standing up at the front of the bus and using whatever public address system they had, pointing out the various facilities and explaining that the base was just like a little self-contained town, with a general store/BX, a grocery/Commissary, a school, a town hall/AKA the Head Shed, a church, a park, apartment houses/dorms, a suburb/AKA the housing area. Then to the planetarium, where the officer instructors who ran it had a nice little hour-long canned presentation suitable for students of all ages. Then – a walk down the street and around the corner to the building which housed the museum for another hour. The sidewalk passed close by a place where a certain species of California ground-burrowing owl had set up housekeeping at the edge of an empty lot where probably a WWII-era temporary building had once been. Since the owl and mate were individuals from a rare, endangered and protected species, they were protected and were consequently rather cherished as a kind of mascot. The guys from the local CE shop had provided Owl and Mrs. Owl with a miniature picnic table with an umbrella adjacent to the burrow mound.  Usually, only the first three or four kids in line after me would catch sight of Owl or Mrs. Owl, perched on their burrow mound – the owls would dive into the safety of the burrow as soon as we came close. Still, in a lot of the pictures drawn by the kids and sent to the Public Affairs office with a thank-you note from the teacher, the owls and their burrow figured highly, almost as much as the airplanes.

The museum featured a scale model of a WWI biplane, which was big enough for kids to climb into, and a WWII wire recorder, which still worked – and recorded brief messages; there were some other interesting exhibits, although not interesting enough for me to recall any specifics. It was run by a very cool major, who would sometimes amuse the visiting kids by riding his unicycle through the museum. (Majors are usually very tense, humorless officers; nervous because if they are ambitious in any degree they are facing retirement at 20 years in that grade, when they really would like to retire as lieutenant colonels. It’s more dignified, that way, plus a fatter retirement pension. There are some who purely don’t care; the unicycle-riding major was one of them.)

To conclude the tour, most frequently the class and I repaired to the base picnic grounds for the kids to eat their brown-bag lunch. Occasionally, a tour extended to a visit to the working dogs, and the training aircraft on the flightline, but mostly it was just the planetarium, the museum, and my introductory briefing about the base-as-small-town.

Oh – and my work around for when the school tour arrived in half a dozen car-pooled automobiles driven by parent volunteers? Well, I still did the base brief; leading a convoy of cars from one spot to another where they could all park, and the kids gather around me for the relevant part of my talk – but how to get everyone back into their seats and moving on to the next stop without wasting time? That’s the bit I was reminded of, when I dusted the bookshelf with this book ( Scramble, by Norman Gelb) on it. I thought to tell the kids when we gathered at the front gate to begin the tour – a brief outline about the Battle of Britain; how in the summer of 1940 the RAF fighter pilots were on alert status, ready at the command to ‘scramble’, to get into their airplanes and take off on a moment’s notice to fly and fight. I would tell them that they had to be just as fast, to run and jump into their places in the cars, fasten their seat belts and be ready to move on – just as speedily as those long ago pilots, who were in the main not very much older than some of the schoolchildren I related this story to. Yep – blow the whistle (which I have routinely kept on my keychain since I could drive a car myself), yell “Squadron! Scramble!” and the students would hightail it to the cars with all speed. Very efficient – but I would venture a guess that certain adults who toured Mather AFB in that year came away from the experience with a very odd notion about the Battle of Britain.

And then there was the occasion that I had the base MPs point loaded weapons at me, and my tour group on the flightline, but that is for another time…

Plots Within Plots Within Plots

11. February 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Old West, Random Book and Media Musings

So … working on the next installment of the Kettering Family chronicles – this time around the narrator/main character is Rafe; the little boy who along with his younger sister, was rescued from the starvation trail at the end of The Hills of Gold. Rafe and his sister Rose are the orphaned children of a hapless young English couple, who got into more difficulties on the overland trail than they were able to handle … and anyway, Rafe has been traumatized by the hardships and deaths of his parents, and Rose almost too young to remember much of anything. Rafe deliberately puts all those earlier memories aside; it was all confusing, horrible and miserable. He wants to forget and works very hard at putting all that awfulness in the far-distant past. Quite early on, the two of them fully embrace being part of the Kettering family and an American identity, in Gold Rush-era California … but there are lingering threads, connecting them to their original parents and to their families in England, which will come up as the series develops.

My overall story arc is intended to see the various Kettering children as tweens and teens, experiencing all sorts of interesting adventures and encounters with famous, soon to be famous, or just interesting people of the period – which potentially makes a cast of thousands. This was the wild west – and in the precious metal rushes to California, Nevada, Colorado and other locations – it was really, really wild. The scope for dramatic plots is practically without limit. I plan tentatively to carry the overall story arc up to completion of the continental railway.

Rafe’s part of the overall narrative initially was to be on the spot during the episode of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1856, at which time he will be twelve going on thirteen. As it has developed, Pa Kettering has some business interests in San Francisco – as an early settler in California, he purchased land early on … and found that business interests were more to his liking than farming. Anyway, I was thinking on what else might serve as a direct source of adventure for Rafe, and I harkened back to some of the material I had read about how the San Francisco waterfront was a scary-dangerous and lawless place.

There was a reason that it was called “The Barbary Coast” – and one of those reasons was the fact that during those years, it was common for sailors to jump ship and go looking for gold, to the point where many ships could be left seriously under-crewed – even abandoned in the harbor. There were a number of enterprising criminals operating waterfront saloons and other places of … umm … recreation, who specialized in drugging unwary young man and packing them off to a ship headed for the far east. Upon waking up, they’d find themselves far out at sea, usually penniless and without friends, and forced into crewing the ship. (This is the derivation of the term ‘shanghai’, meaning to forcibly redirect an unwilling person in another direction from the one they intended) … so I thought – let the thirteen-year old Rafe be mistakenly captured by one of these operators looking to fill a head-count for a ship captain, put on board a ship heading for Shanghai in the middle of the night … only for the ship-master to realize too late that he has been cheated, and has inadvertently assisted in the kidnapped the son of a prominent merchant landowner. So Rafe winds up in Shanghai, China – and meets a British missionary there who turns out to be a relative …

Yes, this will be a fun adventure. Back to the books, and the contemporary memoirs of 19th century California…

Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game?

04. January 2026 · Comments Off on Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game? · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings

Such was the deeply sarcastic query from Casey Stengel, the frustrated manager of the spectacularly inept early 60’s NY Mets. Well, at least that Mets lineup were only flaming out at baseball, but after reading a certain historical novel on Kindle last week, I’m honestly wondering if a trio of supposedly able and best-selling scribblers blessed by an establishment publishing house and significant placement on the NY Times best-sellers list can play that game, too.

I’d never heard of any of the trio of writers who got together to scribble this novel about a trio of nurses in the Philippine Islands during WWII; I’m honestly not into what passes for modern women’s novels that are popular with Oprah, or wine-mom’s book clubs. I’m also not really into romance novels, either, having outgrown that genre at least 4 decades ago, if not longer. But when this novel came up on Amazon suggested for my next read, it at least looked interesting. The sample offered looked at least OK … and I’ve been diverted by reading a lot of light, amusing historical mysteries lately – mainly Rhys Bowen’s Royal Spyness series, which has the benefit of amusing and well-developed characters, nicely-played mysteries, and an excellent sense of the period – 1930s England, mostly, with some side excursions to France, Italy, Kenya and the United States. No wildly impossible historical clangers dropped, with a sound like a manhole cover hitting the pavement at speed. Just an interesting reading diversion when spending 40 minutes pedaling the electric bike at the gym, or for winding down at night. The setting for When We Had Wings was one which I already knew something about; I had done the research for my own WWII novel, and had at least four non-fiction books on my own shelves about the experiences of American military nurses in that place and time.

A novel about three women – an Army nurse, a Navy nurse, and a Filipino civilian contract nurse, who are best friends in Manila in 1941 and have dramatic wartime experiences under the Japanese occupation thereafter looked to me as if it would be an interesting read, but holy moly, did I want my money back when I was done! I should have bailed out at the first historical clanger, dropped at about a quarter of the way in. Yes, a young, enlisted man in the early weeks of 1942 talked about how he planned to go to college on the GI Bill … a program that wasn’t even created until two years later. I carried on, glummer by the page, just to see how many other historical improbabilities there would be; the very worst was close to the end; one of the freed nurses watched Dick Tracy on television … in 1945, about two years before TV sets were widely available to the public (the war stymied manufacture of them), and five before Dick Tracy was even broadcast as a TV series. There were some other, small historical improbabilities, and omissions which would have added something to the story (in my opinion), the characterization of the three heroines was on the level of cardboard cutouts. I could barely tell the three of them apart, their backgrounds were underdeveloped, why they were even best pals to start with wasn’t developed … it was all a case of “tell” and hardly anything of “show.”

It’s the historical clangers that bugged me, most of all; they are all very obvious things that would have been easy enough to check, at least by an editor – and yet, apparently no one did, or even thought – Hey, maybe we ought to check this element, make certain that this was something that someone would have been talking about in that year. It is indeed a pitfall for writers who venture into historical fiction. This came up in a long-ago discussion in another group of writers who specialized in that genre; you almost had to reprogram yourself of the assumption that long-ago people lived just like us moderns, only with curious clothes and no electricity. Attitudes, customs, everything from food items and recipes to religious practices were different, sometimes wildly different. Knowledgeable readers would be cruel to writers who didn’t at least try to immerse themselves thoroughly in another time and place.

Now and again in the independent author groups where I hang out some of the contributors with scars from their time laboring in the dark galleys of the big-name establishment publishers recollect how careless and amateur the big-name publishers have become, to the point where the sane and intensely creative people fled to the saner world of indy writing and publishing.  I suppose what galls me the most about the careless flubs in When We Had Wings was that it was a simple matter for an author, editor or proof-reader to have checked the dates of the GI Bill and broadcast television programs, just to make the period setting believable. When I helped out another local author with her memoir of growing up in the 1950s and 60s, I went to the trouble of double-checking what TV programs her parents would have been watching on a weeknight at 10 PM when she came waltzing in way past her curfew and thereby kicked off a scene with them. That no one bothered with such in Wings is a sad refection on the big publishing machine. I won’t soon pay as much for an ebook put out by one of them, that’s for certain. Just not worth the candle.

Looking Ahead and Back

28. December 2025 · Comments Off on Looking Ahead and Back · Categories: Domestic, Old West, Random Book and Media Musings

Time to look back, at what I decided to do during 2025 – those things accomplished according to the program set for myself during that year, and what I want to get done in the coming year of 2026.

I did manage to finish Luna City #12, get it out there, as well as The Hills of Gold,  the second of the YA series set in the pre-Civil War wild west, such as it was in California, Nevada and Utah. This offers a lot of scope for writing about all kinds of far-west shenanigans in the various precious mental rushes in California and Nevada, as well as scope for touching on all kinds of things – like vigilante organizations, and transcontinental communications and transport, in the heyday of the Pony Express and getting the telegraph and stage lines operational … and to write about them with the aim of getting tween and teen readers interested. I’ve said it before and will say it again – that history is a great deal more interesting, complicated and nuanced than school history textbooks present it. It’s almost as if the producers of such textbooks really want to turn off any interest on the part of pupils anyway. So – for next year, I’m aiming to do at least one and possibly two of the sequels to Hills of Gold, each focusing on younger children in the Kettering family. I also managed to dash off a Hallmark-style romance novel, for the Christmas trade, in three months of frantic scribbling, for an output of three finished books in 2025.

As for household matters – the 30-year mortgage on my little cottage was finally paid off, in March of 2025, which was a huge thing for me. I still am paying on the new windows, siding and HVAC work done several years ago, but one of those accounts is close to being paid off.

In the new year – I’d like to finally get a luxury vinyl plank floor installed in the kitchen/living room area, and the master bedroom, to match what is in the den and the front bedroom. This I likely will have to pay to have installed – I did the den floor myself, and that was a small room and doing it myself about wiped me out for a week. That job might have to wait for a year… Now, repainting the kitchen/living room and master bedroom myself, as well as repairing or replacing some of the installed bookshelves is well within the realm of possibility – that being a job I can do myself.

The other big expense project is getting the Accura Legend running again. I was so freaked about driving after getting T-boned when driving Thing the Versa that the Accura sat in the driveway until it couldn’t even be started by an electric charger. So – get that running again … or see about a new car. My daughter, of course, favors me in a new car. It all depends on what needs to be done to get the Accura running again, and how much it costs.

Keeping chickens is put off for another year, I’m afraid. A family of semi-tame ferals have taken to hanging out in the garden again, and they will not get along with cats. I was told by a guy who raises chickens and game fowl up in the Hill Country that it was likely a cat who killed two of our last flock and mauled a third hen so badly that she died later. Unless I keep them 24-7 in a secure, covered run …

So that’s the wrap of 2025 and expectations for 2026! And now, back to writing…

Coming up on Christmas, 2025

22. December 2025 · Comments Off on Coming up on Christmas, 2025 · Categories: Domestic

Another journey around the sun, another year, another Christmas looming up rather like the iceberg loomed over the Titanic. Wee Jamie may be old enough this year to really appreciate it all, but with one thing after another, we didn’t so as much as we usually do to prep for Christmas. I was hustling to finish a romance that I began as a challenge, which I wanted to launch (read – kick ruthlessly out into the world and see if it flew) as a Christmas present for the public, or at least, that portion of the public who adores romance novels and consumes them like a box of gourmet chocolates.

Oh, we got the shopping done, gifts for each other and for Jamie, but the tree is minimal – even with gifts piled up around it (mostly to protect from Miso, Moose, Prince the Magnificent who love to play with the ornaments, or sleep on the tree skirt, and Persephone, who usually doesn’t care). We didn’t put out lights outside or put out much in the way of ornaments. The time just seemed to catch up to us, I guess. We did get the Christmas baking done, and distributed platters of cookies and fudge to the fire department, police substation, some local businesses and a sadly diminished number of close neighbors. Our next-door neighbor passed away late in the fall, as did some others that we had been close to, during the time we lived here. Some other neighbors moved … anyway, we only did two batches of fudge this year with whatever we had on hand left over from previous years, some pecan angel bar cookies and lebkuchen from a recipe that I had been intrigued by for a couple of years. (The lebkuchen was splendid, by the way – a soft bar version made with dates and raisins, and almond-flavored frosting. Recipe included below.)

We will have a splendid Christmas supper though – the usual Beef Wellington, and everything bought to fix for it, although puff pastry was a bit of a challenge to find.

We’ve got some big projects coming up in the new year, including getting my own car running again (since it sat for months in the driveway, as I was too jumpy about driving, after the accident with the Versa) getting Jamie started in regular school, and getting Return to Alder Grove in a print version – so I think we are just resting before the big push.

For the splendid lebkuchen; Preheat the oven to 375 degrees, grease and flour two 9 x 9 pans.

Sift together, 2 cups flour, 1/2 tsp. baking soda, 1/2 tsp. baking powder, and 1 tsp. cinnamon

Beat together with a rotary beater till the mixture forms a ribbon; 1 pound dark brown sugar and 4 whole eggs.

Add 1 tsp. each of orange juice, lemon juice, vanilla extract, almond extracts to the egg and brown sugar mixture.

Gradually stir in the dry mixture, a little at a time.

When completely mixed in, add 1/2 cup chopped walnuts, 4 oz. chopped dates and 1 cup raisins.

Bake for about 25 minutes (or a little less; test the cake with a cake tester to see if it’s done).

Melt about 6 Tbs. of unsalted butter and add 2 Tbs. hot milk, ½ to 1 Tbs. almond extract, and enough confectioner’s sugar (about 2 cups) to make a frosting of spreading consistency. Frost and enjoy – we like the marzipan-taste of the larger quantity of almond extract, but can be reduced

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