I remember the first time I ate a tomato on a hamburger,
I joined the Air Force in the early summer of 1981. Having just graduated from high school with no plans, I was an easy target for the recruiter. And since my best friend’s name started with an “F” too, he struck gold when he was going down the lists of local high school graduates and ended up calling us both on the same day.
We already had a friend going into the Air Force at that time (I wonder whatever became of him?), so perhaps the seed was planted, but honestly, I’m more of a Navy man. I can still admit that after 27 years active duty in the Air Force. But it was just the perfect storm: friend already joined, no big plans, best friend gets a call on the same day – that’s low-hanging fruit right there.
So 39 years ago, on the first day of fall, my best friend and I took the trip to Lackland Air Force Base for Basic Military Training (BMT). We were both going to be Cryptologic Linguists, and we were both so unsure of what we were doing that at the last moment we had our recruiter change the paperwork from 6 to 4 years (at the expense of an extra stripe and a couple-thousand dollar bonus). We were two beds from each other during BMT, and that’s as close as we got for the rest of our careers as he got the call to be a cop instead of a linguist. He was stationed at Andrews while I was at Fort Meade, and we both ended up in San Antonio together for a while so we saw each other a bit over our careers. I’m proud to say that I got to attend his retirement from the Air Force nearly 30 years later at Travis AFB in California. Maybe we should’ve taken the bonus…
But back to the tomato.
Well, maybe not quite yet.
After I left BMT, I went to an English grammar course right there at Lackland for the weeks leading up to Christmas (yes, I am a DLIELC alum). The Air Force got the idea that teaching prospective linguists grammar first was beneficial to learning other languages (too many people in class being told “this is an adverb” only to reply, “what’s an adverb?”). It was there that I roomed with Tony Brown, a Chicago native who would be heading to Monterey in January to learn Arabic. It was also there that we hatched the brilliant idea of driving from Chicago to Monterey together after Christmas break. Tony wanted to take his car with him (we could take our cars?), and we worked it out where we would take shifts driving and get out there in just a couple of days, tops.
This was to be a memorable trip from the very start. Who knew that on the 31st of December, 1981, a blizzard would pass through the upper Midwest – not in Chicago, but in most points north, to include the city from which I was leaving by bus, Oshkosh, Wisconsin?
When I finally arrived at the bus terminal in Chicago, hours late, I called Tony’s mother (he’d just left, knowing my bus was delayed), and was soon picked up and on the road. Tony was the big-city driver, so he took the first shift. We alternated across all of Illinois and Iowa, and had just switched places when I was awakened almost immediately by Tony pulling off to the side of the Interstate at about 6:30 in the morning. We had a flat.
I thought it odd then over the next several miles that the first two places at which we stopped couldn’t replace our tire. Thinking that maybe it was because Tony was black, I told him to wait in the car on our next attempt. They had the tire we needed.
Once that was fixed, we pressed on, but when a light snow began to fall that evening in Utah, we decided to stop for the night so we would be refreshed for the next day’s drive. The blizzard and the flat had worn us out, so we needed the break. Thinking back now, perhaps this was a tactical error. How were we to know though that the very next evening, having crossed all of Utah and Nevada, we’d be told that a pass through which we needed to drive was closed due to weather. As we pulled into the parking lot of a hotel in Truckee, California, a light snow was just beginning to fall. Perhaps if we hadn’t stopped for the night in Utah, we’d have beaten the storm.
We were fortunate enough to get a two-story room for the night. Tony took the upstairs, I took the down. And when we woke up the next morning expecting a clear blue moutains sky for the last leg of our trip, we instead walked out to a car that was a barely discernible lump of white in a parking lot that only the night before was covered by about an inch of snow. And flakes the size of half-dollars still falling. I guess the good thing about that was that no one else needed the room, so we extended our stay for another night …and woke up to the same conditions the next day. It wasn’t until the third day, a lot of digging, and a walk over to a gas station to spend $53 on a set of chains (required for every car that wanted to go over the pass) that we finally checked out and made our way to the Interstate (at which time we were told we could take off the chains). We took our place in the single lane that was plowed and filed over the pass with the rest of the people who had been trapped in Nevada.
I won’t say we were more than ready for it when we descended into the Sacramento River valley and left the snow behind that afternoon…but there was a definite sense of relief when we got there. It was like entering another world, and Tony and I quickly regained a friendship that had frayed a bit over the previous few days.
Once we got to Sacramento, we left the interstate to get lunch at a Burger King, where I ordered a Whopper with cheese. And that is the story of the first time I ate a tomato on a hamburger.