Final Approach: The Eagle Has Landed

Star Date: July 26th 1969.


"The Eagle has landed"

 Man had stepped foot on the moon for the first time in history...I know a bunch of rats will be sorely disappointed, but as it turns out, the moon is not made of green cheese after-all.

I have to admit, however, that I was a little disappointed that we did not discovered a colony of Martins hiding behind some pile of moon rocks. The discovery of Martins would have helped to explain some of the outlandish stories of alien abductions on those dark, two-lane highways in the middle of the desert with the lone couple in their rusty old Chevy pickup truck.


BUT... it also was a bit of a comfort to believe that my rescuers at the infamous "Salton Sea Tragedy" (Post 5/13-27/2013) had not been aliens, but angels instead. From time to time I had wondered if I had been subjected to one of those crazy abduction events in my bizarre desert incident and had been given a mind-wipe before being returned to earth at Gene's Diner at the Salton Sea Marina. (An Alien abduction would account for an inexplicable lapse in time and also for the superhuman strength, I experienced that was way beyond my mere 90 pound frame, to fight off trained wrestlers who were 100 pounds heaver than myself and also the ability to fend off five or six members of the hippie Wolf Pack at one time - who just so happened to be at home in Venice waiting for my return ).

Anyway, Armstrong and his crew had plunged into the Pacific and returned safely to earth 2 days ago as President Kennedy had pledged 8 years earlier!  And, just as they had returned home from outer-space... Troop 32 was about to make the final descent back into Venice in our inglorious spaceship otherwise known as the Scout Truck which we affectionately called, "The Beast."  i.e. The converted moving-truck turned mobile-cage-fighting-on-wheels.  

 As we farted and fought, pee'd out the back and "BA'ed" grandmas all the way home from the Boy Scout Jamboree, I imagined how dull the ride must have been for the pathetic"normal" kids like Bill Gates who had to travel in those luxury buses and couldn't help but thinking about how much fun they were missing out on.

We arrived at our Scout House at the intersection of West Washington Boulevard and Washington Way and disembarked looking like a band of rag-tag, war-torn refugees to the horror of awaiting parents! 

  

I put my backpack on and trekked the few blocks home, wondering what was in store for me when I got there.  Oops... Wait, that's not my house... 

                                                              This is..... 

A lot of scary stuff was going on at this time. Charles Manson and his crew had set up shop not far away in Malibu and were in the middle of a killing spree that included actress Sharon Tate as well as the gruesome murders of the LaBiancas. 

Meanwhile, a deranged fan of our neighbors, the Lennon Sisters, by the name of Chet Young had made threats against the Mr. Lennon, and also against President Johnson, for keeping him away from Peggy Lennon (who he believed to be his wife).  

Not only were things tense in the world, but it seemed to be touching-down right in our city... right across the street...right on Harding Avenue and right in my backyard where the Vietnam War, draft-dodging hippies were hiding out next to the "Mexican Tomato Plants" under tyrannical scrutiny of the dreaded Veloci-Rooster.  

Next time: Another escapee that terrorizes our neighborhood.       

Venice Pride, Bill Gates, and the Moon Landing!

Star Date: July 20 1969  (continued). THE BIG DAY

It was hot and muggy day at the Boy Scout Jamboree in Idaho. We wanted to hit the pool, but somehow the prior condition of our troop (back in the "Post-Prune" days in Yellowstone with the sudden flashes of diarrhea) made it all the up to the top brass. THE RULING BIG-WIGS decreed that "TROOP 32 be bared from the use of the community pool!"

Listen: It was humiliating to be the only Boy Scout Troop in the history of the world to be cut off from the public pool facilities. Unfortunately, it only served to irritated the infamous KYBO patrol.  The crazy "loons"sought revenge against the entire Boy Scout universe.  After all, we were about to land on the moon and conquer a celestial body in outer space and this is was the best thing they could think of at this historic moment! Man was about to set foot on the moon and they wouldn't let my 20 boys from Venice set foot on the bottom of the pool! Needless to say, Ronnie and Dego and Chronister and Cockerel were fit to be tied. They ended up over by Beaver Bay and began a rock throwing war with three other troops. Kissel, Humphrey and I had to get in on it and defend the honor of Venice!

After pelting each other with rocks we managed to inflict serious damage on two of the kids on the opposing shore!  We got a couple of them smack dab on the head and drew FIRST BLOOD...
                                                                               

YEAH! 

Victory! 

VENICE RULES! 

The only thing that would have made it better for the illustrious KYBO Patrol would have been if it were one of the kids from Troop 186 that we conked on the noggin... and even better than that - would have been if they had gotten that nerdy kid...Bill Gates! Luckily for him, he didn't have to eat glue-pasta like we did on the way.. he didn't have constipation...like we did... he didn't have to eat a bucket of stewed "grandma-prunes" like we did...and he and his cohorts didn't have explosive diarrhea like we did... and were now busy splashing around and having fun in the pool with other normal boys                                  ...LIKE WE WEREN'T!

The good news is we did manage to hit a kid named Charlie Schaupp who was one of the over-achievers in Troop 21.   Yeah!
 
And we also manged to hit one of those kids in the ridiculous red felt hats, who thought they were "all that."       YEAH us!

When brought up before the Tribunal, we denied it of course and had made up a big story about how we took this hike out in the woods trying to anticipate what the moon walk would have looked like.  Ronnie talked about how he pretended to eat the green cheese on the moon and Chronister said something about giant robots that morphed into different shapes on the dark side of the moon - stupid Chronister - who would ever believe that kind of nonsense!

Anyway, none of us cracked under the Waterboarding (just kidding about the Waterboarding part) not one of us cracked under their interrogation and it turned into one of those "he said...she said" type of brouhaha nonsense!

They screamed and yelled and made us recite the Boy Scout pledge to make sure we were really Boy Scouts and not that Zombies had eaten our brains and taken over our bodies.  Don't ask me how, but we managed to pull that one off!  They threatened to take the TV privileges of watching the Moon Landing away from us if we didn't behave for the rest of the day. Thank goodness we didn't do the naked raid as planned.. because they got pretty upset about the "White Angels" and 3:00 am "Pink Bellies"

Dego didn't care about watching, he thought the whole thing was a hoax anyway and was pretty vocal about it, but the rest of us wanted to watch as man walked on the moon.

We got to watch the whole boring hour of CBS coverage on the TV's they had set up all over Farragut State Park...

But the actually landing was very cool.  It was like one of those moments in life like "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" A thing you'll always remember exactly where you where!

Anyway we had a couple days left of making trouble and it is no wonder why they actually invited us NEVER TO ATTEND another jamboree.

I guess (like the Salem cigarette commercial jingle "You can take Salem out of the country, but you can't take the country out of Salem") was true for us... "You can take the kid out of Venice, but you couldn't take Venice out of the kid"  

We made our presence felt, we changed the outcome of history and two days later climbed into the back of that old Carbon Monoxide spewing "Scout Truck" and fought all the way home!

"One small step for somebody and a giant step for someone else - I guess!"


VENICE PRIDE!

Pictured to the right is the rear end of the infamous "Scout Bus"; Eagle Scout Kurt Dahlin on hood of red 1970 Toyota Corolla; Scout Steve Kissel (holding something important in the background) Senior Patrol leader...Ray (leaning in), and Markie D on bike along with other various creatures from Venice in the driveway of the Harding House with Famous Lennon Sister house in background!



Love you

Venice Zombies And Little Billy Gates pt 1

Star Date: July 17th 1969 (continued)

Unfortunately, Boy Scout troop 186 from Seattle got the unlucky pick of the short straw and had to set up camp next to us.  AND, what made things worse is that this snooty group of "cake-eaters" arrived in one of those expensive travel-coaches and didn't have to poop behind bushes and wipe off with pine cones like we did.

This automatically made them the ire of "THE KYBO PATROL." Ronnie and a couple of the kids from the Flaming Arrow Patrol overhead the Seattle kids whispering some snide comments about having to set up camp so close to the troop from Venice - and that was all it took.

Don't tell Ronnie and Chronister and Cockerel this, but in reality, the "The KYBO Patrol" looked like dirt bags and smelled even worse! When I heard all the plans for retaliation, I felt sorry for "silver-spooners" in troop 186.

They had a kid named Billy, who was a year older than me, and petitioned his scoutmasters that his troop show off the type of skills representing the Indian culture of Seattle that required the use of brains. The freshman with glasses wasn't so much into hiking and knot tying and other normal boy scout stuff. The Scout Masters liked his idea and ran with it.

In a demonstration of  Indian tracking skills, they created a 100 foot long sand course that had to be interpreted. I didn't dare tell the other kids in my troop, but I actually liked it.  It had foot prints and pokes and various paw prints and all kinds of things in the sand that told a story.  At the beginning of the Troop 186 "skills demonstration" a kid handed each camper a piece of paper and golf pencil to write down their observations. You had to identify the foot prints of various animals that crossed the path and the ones the tracker was following - get this -  they even had an owl scat (don't know where they got that?), but I dug it and felt like I did pretty good at it (no, not the owl poop - I dug the course)!

The thing I guessed right was the part about how it was a barefooted Indian who used his bow as a hiking staff which had made the round indentations and how he was followed by a three legged companion.

At the end, you had to turn your paper into the little brainiac nerd, Billy, who read your interpretation and gave you a grade. The little nerdy kid was impressed that I got the part about the limp and the staff and the three legged dog and gave me the highest score so far. Obviously, this made me feel good about myself and couldn't help, but like the scrawny, little four-eye'd geek from a rich suburb of Seattle, who had signed my "Indian tracking sheet!"    

HOWEVER, it was the owl-scat thing that triggered the vindictive imagination of the KYBO patrol which would take place - later that night, well after dark.

In the meantime, it was a historic day for the Boy Scouts as we heard Jesse Owens speak to all 35,000 of us who gathered in the massive Friendship Arena, but even more cool than that - was that Neil Armstrong sent a message to us from space on the way to the moon.

WHAT!?

“I’d like to say hello to all my fellow Scouts and Scouters at Farragut State Park in Idaho at the National Jamboree there this week and Apollo 11 would like to send them best wishes.”  


Never before in the history of mankind has anything like this ever happen for the Boy Scouts and I was there!  And, never before in the history of the Boy Scouts of America has anything as terrifying as what the KYBO patrol did later that night ever happen before...and unfortunately, I was there!

NEXT: THE VENICE ZOMBIE ATTACK!
                               Check in next time to see if little Billy Gates will make it out alive?

Hello Muddah... Hello Fadda... you thought it was bad the last time I wrote... Well you won't believe this.

         Wait until you hear about what "Dego" did!

I guess I should add this to my: "You know you're from Venice If"  list.

Venice Invades the Boy Scout Universe!

I don't know what was worst...the Dahlins headed out of Venice to the zoo (post 5/3/2103) or Troop 32 headed to Farragut State park in Idaho to meet up with 35,000 other Boy Scouts.

In the words of the robot on Lost in Space "Danger Will Robinson"

Stardate: July 6th 1969

Captains Log: We had our heavy-duty, 1959 Chevy moving-truck converted into a "scout bus" by cutting the back doors in half,  installing some porthole windows and hard wooden benches along the sides. This left the center floor section open for transporting all the tents and backpacks and camping gear and for staging cage fighting. Miraculously, no one had fallen out of the back doors on any of the trips to Camp Slauson or Josepho so far, but we came close a couple times.

This half-open, barn-door (at the rear of the truck) arrangement had its advantages and disadvantages.

ADVANTAGE 1) On one trip, Charlie climbed out of the back of the truck onto the tongue of the trailer and slid himself onto the fender of the little cargo trailer, we were pulling in order to appropriate something we "desperately" needed inside the truck that was a matter of life and death.  Like a spider monkey, Charlie, climbed up on top of the little white trailer and slowly scooted himself very carefully towards the rear. I voted against the rope. I kind-of-felt like Charlie would have been better off without a bowline tied around his waist. I figured that if he fell off without the rope then at least he might have a chance of survival, but with the rope - it would be like being dragged behind a horse at 57 miles per hour on hot rough asphalt (not a good ending - if you know what I mean)!  Believe it or not, Charlie actually made it inside the trailer grabbed the bag of marshmallows and made his way back into the back of the "Scout Bus" without the scout masters being none-the-wiser.

ADVANTAGE 2) Another thing this particular arrangement afforded us on long trips, was that we could stand on the bench seat and hang our talliwackers out the back, when some small-bladder'd tenderfoot had to take a pee-pee between potty-stops!

ADVANTAGE 3) This gaping hole in the back end also allowed us to "full-moon" passerby's, especially if there were pretty girls and grandmothers in the cars trapped behind our slow-moving, smog-belching, billboard of a truck  - representing the Boys Scouts of America (Hey, I was twelve and at least we thought it was pretty cool - though, I'm pretty sure our scout masters might have felt differently - had they known).

DISADVANTAGE 1) Potential for falling out of the back - especially when leaning out to take a leak or when "giving the moon" to an old Mormon grandmother from Utah.

DISADVANTAGE 2)  Was the fact that carbon monoxide FUMES blew into the large open back. Carbon monoxide poisoning includes light-headedness, confusion, headaches, vertigo and can lead to the toxicity of the central nervous system. This might EXPLAIN WHY we sent a Boy Scout crawling out on top of a trailer on the freeway, pee'd on the cars behind us, indiscriminately exposed our bare butts to grandmas and fought with one another all the way to Idaho.  And... it might also explain why we always looked like dazed, refugee-rats whenever the truck finally rolled into a rest stop.




The other normal Boy Scout troops did not travel like us... they had air-conditioned travel-coaches with a restroom on board and drove through McDonald's on their way across country.












Although the carbon-monoxide poisoning could be blamed for a lot of things, in our case, however, I don't think the toxic fumes we were breathing could be blamed for mass constipation. I think that was due instead, both to the menu, and to the fact that the Scout Master's son never rinsed the pasta which ended up sticking to the insides of our intestines like the heavy paste on paper mache!

It's not like something we compared notes on.  "Hey, Kissel..have you taken a poop yet?"  That would have been ridiculous.

But, after 4 or 5 hot, sweaty days of traveling and camping the two scout master finally put two and two together when everyone began to moan and groan about stomachaches which they figured was more than just the ordinary toxic confusion, vomiting associated with minor carbon monoxide poisoning that was driving us all mad.

AND SO... the night after the infamous spaghetti incident, on the very same day I rescued David Cockerel from drowning in a small muddy lake outside Rock Springs in Wyoming...is when the proverbial "poop would have hit the fan" except for there was no poop and the scout masters came up with a diabolical plan.

I'll have to leave you hanging on this one... and come back and share how this interrogation tribunal got us a Highway Patrol escort... (well, kind of anyway)... to the embarrassment of the Entire Boy Scout Universe and to which (I'm sure) Lord Baden Powell was rolling over in his grave.  

AS I leave you until next time-  there are many of you right now saying, "Oh, this guy is just making up stories for sensationalism!"

I guarantee that every single bit of this is the "Straight Up TRUTH!

And I would ask, or dare anyone who is reading this - especially if you were a member of the illustrious Troop 32 from Venice California to weigh-in and corroborate these stories for the rest of the disbelieving world - at least for those in the 78 countries who read this BLOG!

Until next time...  Du är älskad!