YAWB (Yet Another Weird Boat)

Yes, I’m writing yet another post about a strange boat.  But, as usual, you have to go around three sides of the barn to get to the horse at the end of the rope in your hand.  Unless you are Quentin Tarantino, the only way to start a story is at the beginning.

The Douglas DC-3 airplane, introduced in 1935, revolutionized the aviation industry.  This was an almost perfect airplane, that was so rugged and reliable that many of them are still in use, despite being more than old enough to qualify for Social Security.  They were ruggedly dependable and reliable, they were easy to fly, and most importantly, they could carry enough passengers and freight to be profitable without being subsidized for carrying the mail.  This just may be the best airplane ever designed, and will certainly be the first plane to still be working despite being a hundred years old.

Almost immediately other aircraft manufacturers raced to produce competing planes—usually with four engines, longer fuselages, and a longer range.  None of the planes proved to be as versatile and capable as the DC-3.  Even today, after 88 years, the only thing that can replace a DC-3 is another DC-3.  One of the newer designs, however, deserves to be mentioned.

Boeing was already developing the B-17 Flying Fortress for the American military when it took the B-17 design, keeping the wings, tail, rudder, undercarriage, and engines but substituting a new, much larger, pressurized and circular cross-section fuselage.  In other words, it was a civilian transport version of the B-17, with a pressurized cabin that would enable the plane to carry more passengers and ascend above turbulent weather, while going faster and farther than the DC-3.  This was, for its time, the perfect plane for airlines.  And a few of them actually bought several of the new Boeing 307 Stratoliners.

In 1940, you could pay TWA $150 for a ticket to fly from New York to Burbank California in only 15 hours.  Amazingly, the plane had to stop only three times (in Chicago, Kansas City, and Albuquerque) for gas.  The overnight flight would even provide a sleeping berth for an additional $120.

Unfortunately, after only ten of these planes were built, the world plunged into World War II and Boeing stopped production of the Stratoliner to concentrate on building bombers for the military.  The few airlines that had already taken delivery of the aircraft turned them over to the military who removed the plush passenger seats and carpet and converted the planes to C-75 transport planes.  After the war, these planes found their way into various militaries around the world. 

Four of them were shot down by either the Pathet Lao or North Viet Nam.

One of the Stratoliners, however, had been sold to Howard Hughes for $315,000 before the war.  In 1938, Hughes had set the world record for a round-the-world flight in a Lockheed Model 14 Super Electra in 91 hours and 14 minutes.  Since the Boeing plane was both faster and had a longer range than the Lockheed, Hughes had planned to break his own record.  Normally, Boeing would not have sold a much sought after plane to a civilian, particularly with a war looming on the horizon, but since Hughes owned the majority of the stock of Trans World Airways and Boeing hoped to sell a lot of planes to TWA, Hughes got the fourth plane off the assembly line.

Hughes took possession of his Stratoliner in July, 1939 and was in the process of having long range tanks installed when Germany invaded Poland in September, 1939.  The new record attempt was canceled and Hughes had the plane stored at Hughes Aircraft in Glendale, California for the duration of the war.  If you are wondering how Hughes managed to keep the government from taking the plane for military use, Hughes kept them at bay by dismantling his airplane.

Following the war, Hughes had the plane extensively remodeled for his own person use, intending to use the plane as sort of a flying Winnebago. At a cost of over $250,000, renovation of the plane (that Hughes named The Flying Penthouse) included removal of the long range tanks and installation of a bedroom, two restrooms, a galley, and a large living room (sporting a large wet bar).  At the same time, Hughes replaced the engines with larger and more powerful models.  

A lot of the life of Howard Hughes is surrounded in mystery and that includes his use of his Stratoliner.  We will probably never know how often he used it, who else flew on it, and where it went, but we do know that, just before 1949, Hughes spent $100,000 to remodel the interior in preparation for selling the plane to Glenn McCarthy, the Texas oil millionaire.

“Diamond Glenn” McCarthy was the king of the wildcatters—a man who made and lost fortunes on a regular basis.  In 1949, he opened the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, that was the largest and most luxurious hotel in the world at the time.  If you have ever seen the movie, Giant, McCarthy was the model for Jett Rink.  Just as in the movie, McCarthy used his Boeing 307–now renamed the Shamrock—to fly in Ava Gardner, Bob Hope, Ginger Rogers, Jack Benny, Betty Grable, and other Hollywood stars to his hotel.

Note.  Many years later, I worked at the Shamrock Hotel while I went to college and have written about the hotel several times.  Though it had been decades since McCarthy had owned the hotel, I saw the hoofprints from McCarthy’s horse on the parquet floor of the private elevator that went from the underground parking garage to his penthouse.  The stories of a drunken McCarthy riding his horse up and down the halls of the hotel are true.  

Glenn always had several business plans in the works simultaneously, and he gambled a fortune on each.  Take, for example, his idea to build a massive enclosed baseball and football stadium on land he owned on the south side of Houston.  Other projects included KXYZ radio station in Houston, two banks, a bar, a brand of bourbon called "Wildcatter", the McCarthy Chemical Company, a magazine, 14 "throwaway" newspapers and a movie production company known as Glenn McCarthy Productions.  Glenn’s wells hit oil 38 times, and he won and lost fortunes throughout his life.  In one of those losses, the Shamrock Hotel went to the Hilton Corporation and Howard Hughes repossessed the Stratoliner.

By this point, Hughes was no longer interested in using the plane for personal transportation nor was he interested in selling it.  Though the airframe had less than 500 hours of flying time, it just sat at an airport for years, until Hurricane Cleo severely damaged the plane.  Eventually, the wreck was sold to Kenneth W. London for $69.

It was not feasible to make the plane airworthy again, so London cut the wings and tail off, fastened a hull under the fuselage and converted the plane into a houseboat called the Londonaire.  Powered by two V8 engines that were linked to the original flight controls, steering the unusual but speedy houseboat has been described as: “driving it is like driving a school bus. On ice. Backwards. Downhill. Blindfolded, and occasionally a little drunk.”

The 56-foot-long planeboat was then sold to Dave Drimmer for $7500, who finished the conversion for a measly $200,000.  Sometime during the conversion, Jimmy Buffet saw the former Boeing floating in a Florida harbor and became enchanted with it.  When he described the unique houseboat in his book, he called it the Cosmic Muffin.  While only Buffet knows what the term means, Drimmer renamed the boat and it remains the Cosmic Muffin to this day.  Most of the interior remains as Howard Hughes last saw it, including the wet bar and cockpit.

Drimmer lived on the planeboat for years until the cost of maintaining the craft became too heavy and he donated the vessel to the Florida Air Museum, where it has been restored (as a houseboat not a plane) and is on permanent display.

If you are interested in seeing the last airworthy Boeing 307, it is at the National Air and Space  Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.

College Highs

The new semester has started, and if all goes well, I’ll graduate—again—in the spring.  I’m only taking two courses this semester, but my tuition for this semester at Enema U, a state cow college in Southern New Mexico is slightly over two grand.  To that, you can add a lot of other miscellaneous charges, bringing the total bill for my two classes to roughly $2500.

I’m not complaining, since as a retired faculty member, my tuition (but not those miscellaneous fees), is waived.   There were other incentives promised to retirees, such as free golf and a special parking permit, but the university has reneged on those benefits.  The tuition waiver has so far been honored—at least until some jackass in Abattoir Hall reads this.

The steadily rising cost of going to college is not just caused by the ever-escalating cost of tuition:  increases can be found in almost every sector of the university.  I’ll start with the obscene cost of textbooks.  For one of my courses, a five-year-old book (in fact, a rather small book that is cheaply bound), the cost is $360.  An alternate option is to rent the book for a semester for only $120.  This is not a rare textbook in an obscure field, but a standard in a subject where there is intense competition.  Seeking an additional reference text, it cost me under $30 to buy a similar book, written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author.  

Why does the required textbook cost so much?  Because the book publisher also offers online quizzes, supplemental educational videos, PowerPoint slides and lecture materials to the professor.  The professor is being offered an entire course in a box, so that very little personal effort on his part is required…And in some cases, the publishing company has a financial arrangement with the university (or in layman’s terms, a kickback).   One of the other benefits for the university is that there will be dramatically less need to hire tenured professors to deliver the course.  The university can hire an adjunct professor to deliver the TV-dinner course, saving money since adjuncts are paid far less, rarely receive benefits, and can be fired at will, long before they retire—at which point they may start writing an irritating blog and take advantage of those tuition-free classes.    

One of the strange side effects of this arrangement is that, because of the higher cost of buying textbooks, the majority of the students are forced to use online E-books or rent the few textbooks that come on paper, returning them at the end of the semester.  My house is overflowing with books on history, anthropology, art history, and Latin American Studies because I acquired a lot of books while I was studying those fields—books that went from being required for a current course to later being useful reference tools.  Since the Economics Department has all but become a subsidiary of the British company, Pearson Group, I will not have a single leftover economics textbook for reference after graduation.  

Despite the widespread use of E-books and proprietary textbooks that the university can rent year after year, the cost of textbooks has risen faster than any other expense associated with university education.  Since the late 1970’s, the average cost of textbooks has risen by more than 1000%—an increase five times higher than the cost of other books.

It is hard to find something at the university that hasn’t become more expensive.  The students pay dearly in the dining halls to be served Purina College Chow.  My free retiree parking permit went up 10% this year, alone.  I may be mistaken, but the parking fee seems to go up every single year while the number of parking spaces available seems to dwindle.  Of course, every single time the subject of parking comes up, some nitwit will claim that when they were at the University of Who Cares, the parking fee was a fresh kidney and a bucket of unicorn blood.  For some reason, this is never comforting to cash-strapped students or a university employee who is forced to kick back the equivalent of a day’s pay just to park at work.

And then there is the high cost of tuition.  Universities do not waste money like drunken sailors because when sailors run out of money, they stop spending.  Universities spend money like the Federal Government:  state universities, in particular, can sell bonds to continually borrow more and more money.  Just about anybody could sit down with a university budget and cut out millions of dollars of wasteful spending (and could do it without any of the students—and most of the faculty—noticing any ill effects from the cuts).  

Here's a quick way to save millions:  eliminate all of the upper-level administrative positions created in the last thirty years.  If the university didn’t need an Executive Vice-President of Student Articulation and its accompanying staff in 1993, it could probably get along without one now.  (That’s a “real” position at Enema U and I have never been able to find out what responsibilities come with the job).

There are a lot of other, simple things that would lower the cost of university education.  Post-tenure review would remove some of the non-productive dead weight in some departments.  Or requiring every administrator to teach at least one class a semester, which would allow the university to offer more classes without additional payroll expense and simultaneously remind the administration of the real purpose of the university.  And while universities do need new buildings periodically, every new university president immediately develops an Edifice Complex, knowing that the best way to be hired away by a bigger and more prestigious university is to build a new stadium or athletic facility.  Since I have been at Enema U, I’ve lost track of how many times the coaching staff has moved into new offices.  

Which, of course, brings up the subject of the monstrously high cost of collegiate sports.  Did you know that the highest paid state employee in 43 states is a coach?  Did you know that, while the average state employee’s salary is $63,000 a year, the average college football coach brings down $3.4 million annually?  It is also sometimes a little hard to discover just how much that coach actually receives, since their pay is frequently hidden among multiple accounts such as shoe contracts, summer camps, Foundation subsides, Alumni Association speaking fees and multiple other accounting tricks.  There are nuclear secrets that aren’t as carefully hidden as the salaries of university coaching staff.  Isn’t it strange that they don’t have to pull the same bookkeeping stunts for a really good math professor?  Why don’t we ever hear about recruiting scandals in the English Department?

If you want to cut the cost of a college education, you have to address the incredible amount of money spent on collegiate athletics.  At some state universities, this can amount up to 20% of the university’s total budget.  That’s an incredible amount of money to spend on something that has nothing to do with the core mission of education and, more often than not, lends itself to corruption, scandals, and lawsuits.  

As a nation, we need to stop the conversation about who should pay for college and instead focus on why we have allowed these costs to rise to the level where government assistance is being seriously considered.  Nor should we expect that the solution will come from within the university system itself:  it has to be an initiative led by the state legislatures.  

Expecting the universities to solve their own budget problems is like expecting the drug cartels to develop a better version of Narcan.

Goodbye Flip

While I was growing up, we lived in a small Texas town so remote that we had cable radio…Well, almost.  We certainly didn’t have a local newspaper, so I grew up reading the Fort Worth Star-Telegram—the paper from the mighty metropolis to the east of us and a good newspaper that I still occasionally read.  But as good as the paper is (and was), the paper I first loved was the Weekly Reader.

If you’re reading this, you probably know all about the Weekly Reader, since it started weekly publication in 1928, providing age-appropriate news and public interest stories for school children across America.  I can’t remember exactly but I think it cost about a dollar a year, which cost was probably partially subsidized by the school.  Since my family didn’t have a television yet and about the only thing that I remember hearing on the radio back then was the farm report or Porter Wagoner, the Weekly Reader was a major source of news for me.  

For a poor, dumb ol’ country boy, the stories in the Weekly Reader were real eye openers—particularly the frequent stories about science, NASA, and exploration.  I can still remember some of those news stories practically verbatim, such as the article about Sealab and the aquanauts exploring the ocean floor.  Another one of those stories was about an amazing “ship” that was designed to partially sink on purpose.  Called the Flip Ship, the aft 300 feet of the vessel would flood with water and sink, flipping the forward 55 feet upward and aft 90°, creating a research laboratory.

Technically, Flip wasn’t actually a ship at all, since the vessel had no propulsion and it had to be towed to its destination, so it was a FLoating Instrument Platform, but probably no one referred to the vessel as such except for the U.S. Navy, who owned the platform.  The Scripps Institute of Oceanography, a part of the University of California system, used the unique platform as a research laboratory, for over 1000 experiments, because the deep vertical ballast made the portion of the platform above the water extremely stable and almost immune to wave action.  When the experiments were finished, compressed air would be pumped into the vessel, expelling the seawater, and returning it back to its horizontal floating position, ready to be towed to the next research location.  

The inspiration for such a novel vessel came from an unusual source:  A scientist was conducting experiments on sonar improvements while aboard a US Navy submarine, but found that while the sub was surfaced, the natural wave action of the ocean rocked the ship, interfering with his experiments.  One day, while the sub was in port, his eye was caught by an ordinary mop floating next to the pier.  He observed that the mop floated with the mop head below the surface and with just the top foot of the handle sticking straight up out of the water.  More important, he noticed that the mop stayed stationary as the waves hit, neither rising nor sinking as the waves passed, and he reasoned that a vertically oriented, partially submerged ship might behave the same way and be similarly unaffected by wave action.  In 1962, the Flip Ship, technically the RP FLIP, was launched in Portland, Oregon.

With a crew of five, whose jobs were mainly to care for the generators, compressors, and water purification system, the vessel would be towed into position, then the forward ballast tanks would be flooded with 600 tons of seawater to rotate it.  The process that took thirty minutes, with the last two minutes said to be the most exciting for the eleven scientists on board.  Once in place, the extremely stable platform could remain in position for up to a month.  

As you have probably guessed, the interior of the Flip was a special design with some fixtures meant to be rotated, while others had to be duplicated on either the wall/floor or the wall/ceiling.  All of the counters and kitchen appliances in the galley were mounted on gimbals.  The main living area was located in the "cradle" end of the vessel, and included a galley, a mess hall, a lounge, and a recreation room. The crew's quarters were in the "handle" end, with some as much as 150 feet underwater, and they included individual cabins, a shower room, and a laundry room.  Overall, those working on Flip said it was an enjoyable duty, but after days of living in horizontal rooms, it took several days for the crew to become accustomed to living in the ‘new’ vertical rooms.

Flip, unfortunately, has become a casualty of COVID.  After fifty years of scientific service, the research platform was to be partially dismantled and added to a museum collection, but after it sat idle during the Pandemic, the Scripps officials decided it would cost too much to prepare the vessel for display and sent the platform to a breaker for dismantling.  As I write this, Skip is being towed to her final destination.

Unfortunately, I didn’t hear the latest news about Skip from the Weekly Reader, though I would be happy to have a subscription.  (For my grandchildren, of course.). The Weekly Reader—like so  many other newspapers and magazines—was killed off by the internet and ceased publication in 2012.

Bogus Armies

A fake army is a force that does not exist—a military force that actually is not capable of delivering a strike against any opponent.  It exists only because of an act of deception or because of a misinterpretation of military intelligence.  There have been more of them throughout history than most people realize.

Though fake armies usually rely on deception, deception alone does not create a fake army.  There have been countless confrontations in which one side or the other used dummy soldiers to create the illusion of a larger force than was actually on the field.  This tactic has been a common practice in warfare for millennia and was used extensively by the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Mongols.  In many battles of the American Civil War, both sides enlisted the aid of “Quaker Guns”, bogus artillery that consisted of black painted logs set up either to intimidate the opposing side or to create a target at which the enemy would waste artillery fire.  

It was during World War II that fake armies really came of age.  During the North Africa Campaign, the British, in “Operation Bertram”, camouflaged real vehicles, created fake units out of baling wire and calico, constructed artillery out of bundles of palm fronds, and generated so much fake radio chatter that Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, was convinced that the attack at El Alamein would be farther to the south than the actual offensive was.

Similarly, the Germans kept a careful eye on the First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG) that was commanded by General Patton since they knew that this army would lead the advance for the D-Day invasion in 1944.  In reality, FUSAG’s tanks were Goodyear inflatables, the massive collection of troop tents were empty and the radio traffic was a deception invented by radio operators on one side of the tent to operators on the other side of the tent.  FUSAG worked so well that on the actual day of the invasion, Rommel was on vacation, certain that the invasion could not happen because Patton’s army was still in camp.

At least one of these deceptions had tragic results, however.  Through carefully conducted Japanese deceptions, the Allies in early 1945 were convinced that the Japanese Army in Manchuko was at least a million men stronger than reality.  One of the reasons that Allied strategy relied on atomic warfare in lieu of an invasion of the Japan was was the belief that Japan could swiftly move its forces back across the Sea of Japan to defend the homeland.  

These armies were fake, though at the time, they had very real military uses.  There have been other military forces that actually existed, but were nevertheless totally fake and were a military threat to absolutely no one.

Take, for example, the strategic bombing force so large that it was one of the top ten aviation forces in the world, all under the control of movie director Mike Nichols.  In 1969, Nichols wanted to bring to the screen Joseph Heller’s best-selling novel, Catch-22, that was based on Heller’s own experiences as a bombardier on North American B-25 Mitchells of the 488th Bombardment Squadron (Medium) in the Mediterranean.

This is a great book and I’m not saying that just because my high school confiscated my copy of the book due to its frequent use of profanity.  (I stole the book back from the principal’s office, and finished reading it during my three day suspension.). 

For Nichols to make the movie in those days (long before CGI), he had to actually acquire the aging airplanes.  At the time, the “go-to” aviation source in Hollywood was Tallman Aviation, the company started by stunt pilots Frank Tallman and Paul Mantz.  Mantz had been killed while flying the Tallman P-1 for the movie Flight of the Phoenix.  Tallman Aviation continued under Frank Tallman.

Luckily for Nichols, who produced the movie with a budget of only a $18 million dollars, Tallman already owned four B-25 bombers and was able to acquire fourteen additional aircraft.  Most of these could no longer fly, but Tallman was looking for planes with good hydraulics and wiring, intending to install serviceable engines in all of the planes.   

Since they were no longer airworthy when purchased, the planes were purchased at bargain prices (one costing only $1,500).  All of the planes were brought to flying condition, with working bomb bay doors, and repainted to resemble World War II aircraft.

In addition, Tallman spent a million dollars building a replica airfield including a barracks, a control tower, and a 6,000-foot runway.  To fly the aircraft, Tallman trained 32 pilots and had them licensed for the twin engine B-25 aircraft.  By this time, Nichols controlled one of the largest strategic air forces in the world.

The planes flew for a total of 1,500 hours with no accidents in order to create the 12 minutes of film needed in the movie.  One of the planes was intentionally crashed for the movie, and the remains were buried next to the runway.  Fifteen of the aircraft remain today, eight are still flying (including the Berlin Express above), and the remainder are in museums around the world, including the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

Nichols Air Force consisted of only 18 bombers, a handful of trucks, and a small fleet of jeeps.  Pepsi, on the other hand, once controlled an entire naval force, including a modern cruiser, a frigate, a destroyer, and 17 submarines.  

Yes, I’m talking about Pepsi Cola.  No:  I’m not talking about boats at an amusement park.

We have to start with President Eisenhower and Vice-President Nixon.  In 1959, Eisenhower convinced that the Soviets to allow a American Exhibition of Products in Moscow.  Among the array of American products were huge cars from Detroit, American-made televisions, and Pepsi.  A Pepsi executive named Kendall had convinced his company to be part of the exhibition.

When the exhibit opened, Vice President Nixon skillfully steered Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev over to the Pepsi exhibit to sample the wares.  While the Russians are fond of sweet drinks, Khrushchev was not overly impressed with the soft drink.  But the photo of the premier drinking Pepsi created the stereotype of Pepsi being part of the decadent goodies that were being denied to the Russian people.

While Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, Kendall had better luck, becoming the President of Pepsi—in part due to his product placement coup in Russia.  Kendall threw Nixon a bone, making it clear that whichever prominent law firm made Richard Nixon a partner, would be assured of becoming the house law firm for Pepsi.  The New York law firm of Mudge, Stern, Baldwin, & Todd eagerly accepted the deal.

Nixon, who became rich from the deal, spent some of his new-found wealth to orchestrate a political comeback and he traveled the world as a Pepsi spokesman.  When Nixon won the presidency in 1968, he was in a position to return the favor to Kendall.  Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State, began working on a deal for a select few American corporations to enter the Soviet market.

In 1972, Pepsi announced that a deal had been reached with the Soviet Union in which $500 million worth of Pepsi would be exchanged for $500 million worth of Stolichnaya Vodka, which the company could sell in the West.  In a small codicil of the agreement, Coca-Cola was banned from the Soviet Union.

Pepsi became very popular in Russia, while for a spell, everybody in the US seemed to be drinking Stoli.  Russians clamored for more American products and it wasn’t long before the people of Moscow were standing in long lines at Pizza Hut, which was a division of PepsiCo.

By 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was having a hard time supplying enough vodka to pay for all the soda and pizzas being consumed by the Russian people.  Surely, there was something else Pepsi would accept in trade?

Look around your house for any products you own that were made in Russia.  Except for vodka and perhaps caviar, you are not likely to find anything.  No one I know owns a Russian-made computer or a pair of shoes produced in a peasant sweatshop.  I do own a box of matches that someone brought me from Russia, that are very pretty in a rugged sort of way, but they are impossible to light.  What else does Russia make?

Russia is basically a large gas station with a military and with the collapse of the evil empire, Russia could no longer afford to maintain a huge and aging navy, so Russian officials worked out a deal to trade old naval vessels to Pepsi.  These vessels weren’t to be used, as they were rusting hulks, badly maintained, and since Coca Cola did not have any ships that Pepsi could attack on the high seas….The ships were to be sold for scrap metal.

At the time, the deal was big news.  Pepsi had a navy, albeit a somewhat fake navy.  At least for a little while.  Turning warships into soda and pizza was a better deal than beating a sword into a plowshare.  

The ships weren’t really worth having, the cost of moving them was very high and they were so full of asbestos that it is doubtful that Pepsi broke even on the deal.  What did not make the popular news was that Pepsi received a total of 85 ships and that the other 67 ships were valuable commercial vessels that included two oil tankers and an ice breaker, all of which were sold at a sizable profit.  The ships for soda trade stopped after Russia began to sell oil in Western market and could afford to pay cash for its imports.

If you are wondering, in 2021, Pepsi had its most profitable year in Russia ever.  The next year, Pepsi stopped doing business in Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine.