Update 8-12-14

 

Hi,

 

I'm still stunned by Robin Williams' death.  Wow.

 

Wow.

 

There's no easy transition from that.  Fortunately, its a light week for mail, understandable since it's August.  A couple of people wrote in saying last week's newsletter was particularly interesting.  That sometimes happens, especially when a lot of people contribute.

 

From Larry Rugen:  I'm not sure South was Candyland, but it was truly a school of learning.  Sure, there were a few teachers who had issues, but so, too, some students.  For me, the good times take precedence.

 

[Rich -- And I had this exchange of notes with Stu Borman, about the class photo site.]

 

From Stu:  I'm not sure if you'll think the new version of Barnet Kellman's prom mug looks any better -- the earlier one looked fine to me.  But I did upload it to the site, in the same folder as before.  I deleted the old version before uploading this one.

 

From Rich – The new photo looks fine, and the problem was me:  I'm an idiot.  When I first opened Barnet's folder and saw the mug picture was so small, I forgot it was a thumbnail, and if I clicked on it, it would get bigger.  If there'd been another thumbnail in the folder, I would have realized what was happening, but I'm slow.  So thanks again for your trouble, and I wish I could have figured it out sooner.]

 

Coincidentally, Barnet just sent a new photo -- of the front of the new Woodro Deli.  That doesn't necessarily need to be posted, and I was hoping the deli site had the picture.  Instead, there's a giant corned beef sandwich followed by "We are now open for business!"  The new address:  1441 Broadway, Hewlett.  The site:  woodrokosherdeli . com  (take out the spaces)  Open 9 to 9 -- 7 days a week.  Now hiring.

 

About another diner, from Barbara Blitfield Pech:  A few months ago, I posed a question on the Valley Stream Baby Boomer Facebook page about a diner that was in front of the Green Acres Shopping Center on Sunrise Highway.  This wasn't the Tulsa or the Concord.  It was further down, near the Green Acres movie theater and was called The Town & County Diner.  This was in the early '60s, before Aunt Jemima's Pakcake House, which may have been in the same space later on.  I haven't gotten any confirmations, and I know I'm not crazy -- the place did exist.  Does that ring any bells with anyone?  Perhaps someone here remembers.  Thank you.

 

[Rich -- There was a diner just west of the Sunrise Drive-In, on the same side of the street but across the city line in Rosedale.  We passed it whenever we got off the Southern State and onto Sunrise.  I think it was called The Town and County, and I think it was turned into a fried chicken place later on -- perhaps in the late 60s.  At that point, the stainless steel siding was removed.  The diner had been expanded even before that, and only part of it has the shiny siding.]

 

And since we're back to filler, here's another interesting piece that came in from a friend.  It was written by Al Jacobs, a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and Ranger and a history teacher, and was published online in the August/September 2014 Boatus magazine.  Boatus stands for Boat Owners Association of the United States.

 

    A good adventure always ambushes you, and that was the case with this one.  Eleuthera, in the Bahamas, is less than a mile wide in places, so my wife, Teresa, and I set out to explore, looking to find the famous pink-sand beach on the Atlantic side of the island.  We walked and hiked, and eventually we got ourselves onto an overgrown but paved road we hadn't expected to find.  We followed it and soon began to see traces of more and more buildings until we were surrounded by what seemed to be an abandoned military base in the middle of nowhere.  There were barracks buildings, the remains of shops, four water tanks that held 200,000 gallons apiece, and many other ruins.  After nearly 30 years in the U.S. Army, I knew what I was looking at, but I didn't know why.  What was a large, abandoned U.S. military base doing out here?  Not only was it puzzling, it was downright eerie.

    Research the next day revealed that we'd stumbled on an old missile-tracking station from the dark days of the Cold War.  But of all the places to establish a tracking site, why here?  It was difficult and expensive to establish and maintain, and many other places would have done as well, if not better.  Then, at the bottom of a reference, I saw the one word -- SOSUS -- that told me everything I needed to know.  SOSUS stood for Sound Surveillance System, a U.S. Navy underwater listening program that enabled operators to track any ship in the Atlantic and pinpoint its location by triangulating its sound signature. Somewhere on that base had been a handful of U.S. Navy personnel fighting the Cold War in top secret, and no one had known it.

    Back in early 1962, the first SOSUS monitoring station had been established at the easternmost point of land in the Atlantic Ocean -- the location of the Eleuthera base -- in order to be as close as possible to the underwater listening devices and cables that converged there.  The system was operational just in time to help President John Kennedy call the bluff of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis -- 13 days in October 1962 that marked the only time in history that the U.S. military was placed on DEFCON2, the next step to nuclear war.

    Up until the past 10 years, we'd always thought that JFK had rolled the dice and stared Khrushchev down. The truth was something different.  Khrushchev had originally intended to use more than a dozen submarines to break the U.S. blockade of Cuba that was conducted with surface ships.  What he never knew was that we had the brand-new SOSUS technology that told us exactly where each of his Russian subs was.

    Because of that knowledge, our Navy was able to bring nearly all the Russian diesel subs to the surface and send them home.  The Russians never understood how we gained that knowledge, but it was enough to force Khrushchev to call off his plan to place nuclear weapons in Cuba, averting the crisis.  As a footnote, we never knew until the documents were declassified recently that many of those Russian subs were armed with nuclear torpedoes.  We came much closer to a global nuclear war in October 1962 than the public was ever told.  So what happened inside this forgotten base on an off-the-beaten-track island in the Bahamas changed the course of history.

 

The repeated upcoming reunion information:

 

The class of '64 reunion:  Friday, October 10, 2014, 6 to 11 PM.  $70 per person, cash bar.  Hyatt Regency, Hauppauge, New York.  Committee phone numbers:  Tom McPartland  570-223-2577.  Ken Silver: 631-463-2217.  Bette Silver: 631-463-2216.

 

The class of '65  50th Reunion:  April 24 through April 26, 2015, Hyatt Regency, Hauppauge. 

 

The South '65 e-mail addresses: reunionclass65 . blogspot . com  (remove the spaces)

 

The South '65 photo site: picasaweb . google . com/SouthHS65    (ditto)

 

 

Rich