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4 Oct 08 - There IS Life After Politics...I hope

A few minutes ago, the battle of the vice-presidents, which didn’t reach even verbal abuse standards, much less battle standards, wrapped up. And once again, I’m glad it’s over. In fact, I’ll be glad when the entire election thing is over. That way my kids will talk to me again and they can stop trying to explain me away because of the way I’m likely to vote.  You see, I have a daughter in Hollywood and a son in New Jersey, so politically I’m something of an embarrassment.
 
Actually, what I am mostly is misunderstood. My daughter said , “Face it dad, you’re a Republican and your son will probably have to go through therapy because of that.” She said it shaking her head and checking both directions to make sure no one heard. A Hollywood mogul with a Republican father: how can she possibly face her friends and colleagues? Except I’m not a Republican.
 
In reality, I don’t know what I am. I’m liberal in some areas, conservative in others and I’m registered as an Independent. But, because I don’t get goose bumps when Obama is mentioned and I don’t spit on the sidewalk when Sarah Palin is mentioned, they say I must be a Republican. And, when they say “Republican,” it comes off their tongues as if they’re spitting out a gerbil. I think the rule is, if I don’t think like they do, I must be a Republican, which apparently is a lower life form of some sort. It’s all so black and white for them. Ah, to be young again.
 
What started this whole line of politically-charged family rhetoric was the release of my daughter’s (well, it’s not exactly hers, but she produced it) election video. It featured people she manages and lots of their Hollywood friends. Boiled down to terms this country boy can understand, it says “You can’t bitch, if you don’t vote, and you can’t vote, if you don’t register and the deadline is coming.” To see it, go to http://www.youtube.com/5friendsvote
 
Considering the source (Hollywood—truly on the left coast), I was impressed that she could keep it from automatically having a left-leaning orientation. I sent her an e-mail, copying everyone on her family list, that said, “…you were so even handed, that even my machinegun toting buddies loved it.”
 
Instantly I got an e-mail from my ex (her mother), “I can’t believe you’ve become such a super right-winged conservative. I’m SHOCKED. You were never that way!”
 
Hey, what did I say? I thought I was paying her a compliment, saying that even my hardcore conservative friends thought she was fair. But, nooo! I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to convince that part of the family circle that I’m not a Nazi. It was frustrating.  Why is it the left is always trying to convert the right, but the right just wants to be left alone?
 
And this is why you’re always cautioned against talking politics and religion with friends and family.  It ALWAYS breeds bad blood.
 
I can hardly wait to hear their take on the Vice Presidential Debates. Surely, they’ll talk about how shallow Sarah Palin was (they love that word, “shallow”) and how brilliant Joe Biden was. Actually, Biden was excellent. And Palin totally redeemed herself: she did great! But, I still wouldn’t want her in the oval office. Not yet anyway. They both did their jobs well and, I personally wish Biden was running instead of Obama, although I still wouldn’t vote for him. Palin surprised a lot of folks and showed how she handled stress and what an incredibly quick study she is. They’d been force-feeding her information since last week and she made it sound as if it was part of her.  However, 90 minutes of second bananas saying how great their top banana is gets old quickly.
 
I’m going to be sooo glad when this thing is over. We keep forgetting there’s a country to run.  Now, if intersted, hang on for the sub-blog.
 
The Davisson England Odyssey, Part Two: Two Hours in the British Museum
The British Museum is their Smithsonian, but under one gigantic roof. Like idiots, we showed up around three o’clock and it closes at five. Can you do the Smithsonian in two hours? Like I said—idiots. But I did enjoy our frantic rush through what we could get through, which was mostly the Egyptian rooms. Click Here for More

28 Sept 08 - The England Experience; Doin' it the Wrong Way

Yes, we just returned from our 12-day trip to England. Our first vacation ever. And yes, this is going to be a “This is what we did on our summer vacation” essay. Sort of. What it is likely to turn into, however, is “This is how we did England, so please try to benefit from our mistakes.” If we learned anything about England, it is that while, when compared to the US, it, may not be very big area wise, every thing about it is too damned deep to be done in 12 days. We tried it and it can’t be done.
 
Actually, there were some eye-opening revelations along the way that I really want to wrap some words around and pass on, but to keep “Thinking Out Loud” from degenerating into a long-winded, many months-long travelogue, we’re going to do a blog within a blog: starting this week, at the end of each of my weekly cases of verbal diarrhea, I’ll plug in a short paragraph and a link that, if you so desire, will take you to a second, continually expanding, blog that focuses on what I learned, and experienced, over the past ten days including a bunch of pictures. If you want to share in some of those thoughts, click on the link. If not, just party on, dude.
 
First, a quick itinerary, beginning with the absolute worse routing possible to England. We were using Frequent Flyers’ miles and heading for Marlene’s cousins outside of Manchester (Southport), so we wound up going Phoenix-LAX-Frankfurt-Manchester. 16 hours of flying in total, but 11 was on Lufthansa, so it wasn’t too bad. The trip back was worse, beginning with a four-hour delay that had us sitting on the ramp at Heathrow. After well over twelve hours in the airplane we missed our connections in Philly and had to over night there.
 
As much as we’ve traveled, I’ve never experienced jet lag so that was my welcome to England: the first day we were on our feet 32 hours, went to bed at 10:30 that night, started to get up at 0800 for breakfast, closed our eyes for a few seconds and instantaneously it was noon! Then I didn’t sleep a wink for 48 hours! Jet lag hammered me at night, but the days were surprisingly normal. Then, the rocket-tour began and we started making tourista mistakes:
 

Our Thames taxi: a WWII DUKW (Duck)!

Southport (middle west coast) to Liverpool, back to Southport, a night in York (mid-country), rocket north to Edinburgh on the Scotland/England border the next night, three hours in Edinburgh, scream across to the lake district and Glasmere, Scotland (Wadsworth is buried there, very pretty, even in the rain). Then we pointed our noses south—all the way south to Wareham and the very south shore. About 300 miles. Three nights and two days there with Marlene touring with the cousins while I played with tanks and such. A train to London (the cousins had driven us prior to that) for three days of frantic touring in town, which included every single tourist site worth seeing. We did everything from riding in the Thames in an ex-WWII duck (DUKW officially) to the changing of the guards to Westminster Abbey (truly humbling) and a peek into St. Paul’s Cathedral (where Di got married—Marlene insisted). It wears me out just reading about it!
 
Okay, so now we’ve hit just about every high spot listed in every tourist brochure and some that aren’t (The Tank Museum at Bovington usually isn’t listed and should be, more on that later). What I came away with however, is the distinct feeling that I had cruised through Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and was allowed only one lick of every one of the sweets available. I want more! Frustration now reigns supreme.
 
Raising the frustration level considerably was that we weren’t there more than twenty-four hours, when it became abundantly clear that even though I had read plenty of English history, when confronted with trying to actually visit it, I was doomed to failure. There’s just too much of it: here’s a country that’s only about the size of Oregon with a history going back several thousand years and beyond: after a while, you get to the point that, if a site doesn’t date from at least the 1100-1200’s, you raise your nose at it. It seems as if every damn building in the country is at least 350 years old. I’ll bet there are Holiday Inns over there that old.
 
The bronze age/iron age/Norman/Georgian/Elzabethan/Victorian, etc. ages are layered one on top one another and crammed together so tightly that trying to absorb the history contained in a single city block of even the smallest hamlet is exhausting.
 
If you’re going to visit England, I can make one very strong suggestion: plan ahead and focus on a couple of smaller areas so you can do them justice. Don’t, for instance, think you’re going to do Edinburgh in a single morning like we did. And you have to allow at least a half a day, or longer, for any one of London’s museums. The better ones, like the British Museum will suck up an entire day. As will the Imperial War Museum. Ditto the Tower of London (which isn’t a tower, by the way).

The Tower of London—does this look like a "tower" to you? This is where you use the word "castle." This is six pictures stitched together. Cool, huh? Click Here for Larger Pix

If you want to do castles, which was one of my prime motivations, beware that the Brits kick the word around with some abandon and often call huge manor houses castles, when they aren’t. And those incredibly luxurious, ornate monuments to wealth are everywhere you look with each one being more incredible than the next.
 
One of my goals was to photograph ruined castles, which would be semi-military residences from 1100-1300 when the various invasions, wars, conflicts and feudal skirmishes were underway but I hadn’t done enough research to plan our travels well enough and barely got to shoot one (Corfe Castle on the south shore).
 
Incidentally, a century, one way or the other, doesn’t mean much in England. They tend to round things off to the nearest two hundred years. Ha! Try that in the US!
 
So, now that we have dipped our toes into the tremendously deep ocean of history represented by the British Isles, it looks as if we have no choice but to go back (when our bank account has recovered from the two-to-one exchange rate). I figure six or seven trips should do it. Maybe.
 
If you’re interested in more detailed observations and experiences, start clicking onto the follow-on blogs.
 
England Odyssey: Part One—and speaking of castles

Corfe Castle. Read the sub-blog for more

I’m fascinated by the civilization that developed in the UK that necessitated the building of honest-to-God castles that stretched even Disney’s imagination. It’s simply impossible to imagine the level of opulence and wealth each of these feudal states developed. It’s also hard to imagine, given the technology of the times, how they could erect such incredibly complex physical structures, which were designed as forts as well as homes. Each lord had his own army and his castle was his own personal army base that was to protect what was his and, when he felt like it, go take what wasn’t his. Click Here for More


7 Sept 08 - WWII: Could We Do It Again?

I’ve been racing to get the first issue of Armor Journal finished before we leave for the UK this week, and, in the process, I had an epiphany of sorts: after a lifetime of vicariously living WWII through books, movies and interviews, and constantly talking about the fantastic things done to fight it, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of it. And I had to ask a question: could we do it again?

Part of building Armor Journal has involved a never-ending search for photos. In the course of doing that, I ran across PDFs of three books put out by the US Army right after the war. They were entitled “United States Army in World War II, a Pictorial Record.” There were three of them, which covered Africa and the Mediterranean, Europe and the Pacific. They were loaded with pictures I could legitimately use because they were all public domain. So, I sat down to build an archive of photos from that one source and I ran through it from beginning to end in one sitting. All 1,425 pages of it! About four hours worth.

At the end of that period, besides being nearly blind, I was also nearly numb: I had received a crash course in WWII and I was amazed at what I had read and seen. Although I ran across very little I didn’t already know as individual events and campaigns, it was the first time I had seen them all assembled together as The War in its entirety and had the dates soak into my brain. Holy crap! It was so much bigger than my mind had originally envisioned! And because of my life-long immersion in it, I’m probably closer to it than most, which means that many folks, especially the younger generation, don’t have a clue.

A case in point: Not long ago I was sitting in our living room with Marlene’s oldest (25 at the time) and four or five of his friends and he was complaining about trying to figure out big something is and I made the comment, “Well, it’s easy enough to figure out since we know there are thirty-six inches in a yard.” I could tell from his eyes, he didn’t know, and I was appalled. Then I started doing a man-in-the-street sort of interview with the bunch of them, with me asking questions I thought everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, could answer.

It turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald was either a rock star from the sixties or an Alabama football player. Martin Luther King was…well, not one single person knew. It went on and on and was all very depressing. I knew we, as a country, were in trouble, when I got dates for WWII ranging from the middle 1800’s to the early 1960’s. Plus, we were fighting a variety of enemies, including England (they all agreed on that one) and it all took place in Europe somewhere. Or maybe South Africa. They weren’t sure. But some of those countries were involved.

Of the four or five guys involved, all in their mid-twenties, half had graduated college and all were gainfully employed, some in very responsible positions. So they weren’t dummies. They were typical, upper middle class kids. And they didn’t know sh*t about ANYTHING, from knowing how long a yard is to being able to even put WWII in the right decade. I was depressed. And then I cruised through the PDFs and received my own crash course in WWII history.

On December 7th, 1941, the concept of amphibious warfare didn’t physically exist. As far as that goes, our military practically didn’t exist either. It was tiny! Exactly eight months (to the day) later, Marines waded ashore at Guadalcanal. During those eight months, the concept was developed, landing craft designed and built, ships to carry the landing craft designed and built, all the support (ships, airplanes, gasoline, shoe laces, rifles, etc.) was designed and built and thousands of men were trained and equipped. And this wasn’t just the Marines that waded through the surf. It included the hundreds of thousands of those behind them from sailors and cooks, to the DI’s at Lejuene and Pendleton to the bus drivers that moved them around in the states. Oh yeah, then all that stuff had to be moved to the South Pacific. IN EIGHT MONTHS!!!!

What’s important to remember is that our leaders looked at the Pacific as a secondary front, as their real attention was focused on freeing Europe. So an equally big push was putting forces in North Africa to help the Allies (mostly Brits) fight Rommel and his gang.

By 1941, after years of war, the Germans and the Japanese were already well-oiled, highly experienced military machines. And they were sitting there waiting for us. From Burma to Tunisia, on dozens of little islands, from Sicily to every inch of Europe, they were waiting, and eventually every part of the globe was ablaze and practically every nation was focused on it.

It is amazing, however, that our entire war (not counting the lend lease ramp-up) lasted an unbelievably short three years and nine months. Normandy to VE day was eleven months. It took less than a year to march across the beaches and into Germany! But look how large that all looms in history! At least to some of us. But, could we do it again, if forced into it?

The know-nothing twenty-somethings I was haranguing are a big part of our voting base. They are assuming roles of leadership. The population, as a whole, is divided over drill/don’t drill, legalize the illegals/ throw them out, the globe is getting hotter/no it isn’t, terrorism will go away/no it won’t. We’ve pretty much moved our ability to manufacture off-shore and become an economy that can sell stuff but can’t make it. Our national leadership is focused on their own political survival, not our survival as a nation. So, when the question is ask “Could we put together enough manufacturing and national commitment to do something the size of the Guadalcanal and North Africa campaigns in less than a year?” you have to laugh. Or cry. Or both.

Pearl	NYC - I don't see the difference

I don’t know what my point is here, other than saying, I now have a much more solid understanding of the immensity of WWII. And I sure wish others could truly understand who we were, as a nation, in what has to be the finest hour of our existence. Could we be that people again? I like to think so. But I wouldn’t count on it.

911 killed more Americans than Pearl Harbor. And they were all innocent civilians. Not soldiers. But now, among many other things, we’re even arguing about whether we should be fighting those who, in one way or the other, perpetrated that atrocity. It’s absolutely incredible how short our memories have become. How long before the numbers 911 are once again just a phone number?

30 August 08 - I wish Mom Could See...

The other day I was putting together a little in-joke package to send to my daughter: it contained an Elvis pictorial book I’d never seen and a plastic Publix shopping bag I’d picked up while I was in Florida. She loves Elvis and, for some reason, always got off on Publix, a grocery/shopping chain she only saw when we were in Florida while she was young. I was just stuffing it in an envelope when the thought crossed my mind, “I sure wish mom could see Jen now.”
 
I lost my mother at the age of 91 ten years ago this coming February. Dad, whom we always said wouldn’t last two weeks, if mom went first, checked out exactly two weeks later at 92. When mom died, he was hale and hardy, considering his age, and appeared unaffected—five days later he was in a coma. After sixty-six years of facing life as a team, he just didn’t want to go it alone. Which, I find very poetic.
 
The two of them cut a wide swath through Nebraska and the surrounding area. She was a highly educated, feisty little fireball that kept dad’s business ventures on an even financial keel while, at the same, time being a mover and a shaker in the small community where we lived. He was a small town P.T. Barnum in that he surrounded his many businesses (all successful) with an air of excitement borne of often off-the-wall promotions: he had a radio show remoted out of his store for 45 years and, among other celebrities, he had every Nebraska governor as a guest, and they all caught a good ribbing from him. Or he’d have such-and-such a caller come with him to the interstate and they’d stop a car. Dad would pay the car’s way anywhere it was going and the winning caller got to go the same place. They might be going to the next town or San Francisco. It made no difference to him. It was good entertainment. He also built the world’s largest privately-owned time capsule and wound up in the Guinness Book of Records (1975).
 
As tight as mom and dad were as a team, that’s how different they were as people. Dad was very old world and he was a traveling fool (he took us to every state on the continent by the time I was fifteen, including driving the AlCan Highway to go to Seward, Alaska when the AlCan had only been a civilian road for two years…it was ROUGH!). Still, he was super provincial and close-minded in so many ways.
 
Mom, on the other hand, was open to anything and was physically and mentally adventurous. For instance, where dad hated that I flew, Mom wanted to learn herself, which would put dad into orbit every time she mentioned it.

Twana and Zoe. Is this beautiful or what?.

Dad was 90, or so, when my son, Scott, got married but we couldn’t tell him, because our beloved daughter-in-law, Twana (Doctor Davisson to her staff), is African American, and we weren’t sure but what that may have killed dad. That’s a terrible fact to face about one of your parents, but what is worse is that my mother would have immediately thrown her arms tightly around Twana to draw her in, making her an instant part of the family. She would have thought it was great fun to add some diversity to the Davisson Tribe, especially someone as funny, intelligent and beautiful as Twana. And the grandkids, Mason and Zoe? Forget it! She wouldn’t have let them out of her grasp, once she got her arms around them. Her love and her intelligence knew no limits.

Mason wearing grandad's old football helmet	Zoe. 'Enuff said?

24 August 08 - 36 Hours in the Urban Desert

This week I took a marathon 922 mile, 36-hour power-trip doing photography that took me from Phoenix to LA (normally 385 miles) by way of the Mexican border. Granted, it was a terribly circuitous route, but along the way I was once again reminded of the immense diversity our country offers in terms of topography, history and the problems it faces.
 
The goal of this trip was to spend as little time as possible traveling to the San Diego area to photograph a Sherman, loop up to Huntington Beach to shoot a Kettenkrad (yeah, I know, I’ll explain later), then continue the loop still further north to West Hollywood to have lunch with my daughter in the high rent district before pointing my nose East towards Phoenix. The changes along the way were a crash course in why you can’t categorize the US in 25 words or less, either physically or psychologically. We’re just too diverse.
 
I wended my way out of Phoenix, which at 3.6 million is the fifth largest city in the country and rated higher than that in land area. It flows out like a shallow mud puddle because few buildings are taller than two stories and those are rare. Then, suddenly, civilization ends and the desert takes over, as it always does. Saguaro cacti, the occasional verde tree, then nothing but rocky spines of low purple mountains break the desolate expanse for nearly three hundred miles. The occasional dried up little town struggles to survive and entice travelers into their small businesses. Even there, however, the blooming, scraggly suburbs keep growing. I, however, couldn’t believe how much Yuma, right on the AZ/CA border had exploded since my last trip, not even a year earlier.
 
As always, I craned my neck to catch sight of what was left of the fading runways at the long-gone Dateland airbase where thousands of B-25 crews learned the art of gunnery during WWII. Millions of rounds of .50 caliber lie mixed with the arrowheads and pottery shards from the original inhabitants.
 
Then, the flatness of the desert gives way to a steep climb up truly rocky mountains that redefine the word “barren” and, as you crest them, your world changes. The cactus gives way to an increasing blanket of scrub oak until the area is a broken sea of green/brown held together by rocks and sand. I’m traveling in an endless stream of fast moving trucks and SUVs all headed for the lower temperatures and green of the San Diego coast that’s barely 80 miles away over the horizon.  
 
Then, my route takes a sudden hard left toward the south and in a matter of a few miles I leave traffic, roads and civilization behind. I’m in a part of Southern California I didn’t even know existed, even though I’d driven through it a hundred times.
 
I drop down off the highway into the scrub covered mini-mountains and hills and I’m in a different world. A totally different world. The narrow two-lane road wends its way through the countryside with only the occasional double-wide or shed-like house breaking the expanse. Could it be I had found a part of California the developers hadn’t discovered yet? It was refreshingly rural. Almost scary so. Then I arrived at my destination.
 
In a matter of minutes I was driving dusty ranch roads scouting photography locations when we were brought up short by an immense, solid steel wall that looked to be at least 15 feet high and stretched out of sight in both directions. The owner had erected another fence about fifty feet from the tall brown one, this one was a 12-foot chain link affair topped with concertina/razor wire. For the first time I was looking at the Mexican border and was seeing the illegal immigrant problem through the eyes of those who live it.
 
This man’s property abutted Mexico and the two apparently didn’t co-exist peacefully. This picturesque ranch, with its free-grazing long horn cattle and horses, was a personal combat zone and the owner had a .357 on his hip to underscore the seriousness of his life.
 
It was sobering to watch Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents (ICE) practicing at a shooting range provided by the owner. When they were shooting at targets while in a dead run, it was obvious that this was their job and their lives depended on being good at it. They dealt only with the bad parts of the immigration problem. The majority of illegal’s are just people looking for a better life and pose no physical danger, but they are often sponsored by border gangsters and drug cartels who wouldn’t blink at killing a Border Patrol agent. And that’s what ICE is for.
 
Photography accomplished (see below), I was back on the road, my nose pointed northwest into the heart of Orange County and in less than 30 miles, the scrub oak beauty gave way to rampant development. You couldn’t see the ground for the rooftops. I was back in the Southern California we all know too well and my trusty GPS held my hand, guiding me through the endless maze of freeways and arterials to my hotel.
 
The next morning, I shot my Kettendrad and caught up with my daughter and we had a wonderfully loving couple of hours until I once again challenged LA to let me out. But it didn’t want to let me go, as I suffered through a solid hour and a half of bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go driving just to go 40 miles. Then magically, as the mountains opened up and the hundreds upon hundreds of gigantic windmills in Banning Pass announced that Palm Springs was just around the corner, I was once again thankfully vomited out into the desert, this time the Mojave.
 
As I climbed up the side of the valley and passed Chiriaco Summit, I thought of George Patton who established the Desert Training Command at this location. At one time, the air was split by the sight of distant dust trails being thrown up by hundreds of tanks being driven by young recruits who would soon be doing battle with Rommel and his Panzers. The little, but wonderful, Patton Memorial Museum at the Summit recalls those days and what it meant to victory.
 
Then the world was behind me, and Phoenix lay somewhere in the dark over the far horizon. I had only to follow my headlights to find it. And I did. And I had plenty of time to think about what I had seen. From the densest and richest population the country has to offer, to absolute desolation, from a city of hope and prosperity, to an on-going fight for survival at the border. All in 36 hours. It was a cram course in America.
 
The drive would be a good one for both presidential candidates to take. They might learn something about how one-size-fits-all solutions aren't likely to work. But they'd probably miss the point.

Here are some of the shots.

Sherman M4A3. How's this for protecting your property? He rents it out for movies and it was in "Flags of our Fathers."

The Kettenkrad originated as a tow vehicle, especially for airplanes, but became a general purpose machine. This one is 100% original, never having been restored.

This one's restored complete with MG42. Chassis built by NSU.

11 August 08 - Talk to me, dammit!

Doesn’t it drive you nuts that inanimate objects can’t talk and tell you their stories? One of the items I brought back from the Davisson Crap Collection and Goody Bin in Nebraska last month is what appears to be a civil war belt buckle (it’s actually a McKeever box emblem) with a rebel Minie ball stuck half way through it.  Gheez I wish it could tell me where and when this happened and how the young soldier carrying it faired after being hit.

5 August 08 -