Part 1
When I first started using the 'handle' of WanderingSalsero shortly after I learned to Salsa dance back around 2001, probably very few people even in the Houston, TX. salsa community that I was very active in at the time realized how appropriate the name would turn out to be.
Maybe I didn't even realize it myself. But I picked it for a very sincere reason.
I remember reading a summary, in a business magazine, of the management philosophies of several famous executives once and there was one particular guy in it whose philosophy was based simply on wandering around and asking questions (especially in his own company). That's it....just 'walk around and ask questions'.
Falling into line with that guy's philosophy, I remember reading the 'jacket' of a book in a book store once and that book was nothing more than hundreds of letters which the author, an otherwise unremarkable old guy, had received from famous people in response to letters he had written them. His slogan was, "You write letters...you get letters!"
So the point is that I've always believed in seeing as many places, meeting as many people, and asking as many questions as possible. And it's not as difficult as one might think. I think that the reason we have two eyes and two ears but only one mouth is because you can learn a lot more by watching and listening than you can by talking.
Needless to say.... I love to learn.
It helped that I grew up in an Air Force family. We moved around a lot. I was born in 1944 in Amarillo, TX. >My real dad was a West Pointer, class of '39, and also the 'Goat' of his class (i.e. he graduated last in the class). He was also an Army aviator and was killed in an aviation accident. Subsequent to that my mom was married four times that I remember.
Maybe that's the reason I got pretty good at meeting people at an early age.
By the time I graduated from college in Monroe, LA., (Bachelor of Music Eduation) in 1967, I had already lived in Amarillo, Galveston, Ft.Worth, Sacramento (CA), Miami, Little Rock, Paris and Russelville (AR)and Monroe (LA).
If you know what was going on in 1967 you'll know that graduating in 1967 of course means that I was a prime candidate to wind up in Vietnam. I was well aware of that and frankly, being the politically indoctrinated dummy that I was at the time, I didn't dread 'defending my country' at the time.
Of course most of us know now that that whole S.Vietnam fiasco was a false-flag operation from the beginning only for the purpose of making the military-industrial complex rich and bleeding America of an entire generation.
But I didn't know about those things then so I decided it made sense to enroll in ROTC in college. I was a patriot, right? And besides... it paid me an extra $120 a month during my Junior and Senior years of college.
It also meant that I was immediately commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the US Army when I graduated.
The Army branch that I selected and got in my Junior year was Military Intelligence. I selected that branch simply because it sounded romantic and I speculated that I might be less likely to be stationed on the 'front lines' in brutal combat. Of course, we have since then learned that the term 'front line' isn't always very finite.
But I fully expected to go to Vietnam... which I eventually did.
After training at the Infantry Offices school in Ft.Benning, GA. (MI officers all had to go...which we didn't like) and then up the the Military Intelligence School in Baltimore, MD., I received my first assignment which was in San Antonio, TX.
That was my first time in San Antonio and to this day San Antonio is still one of my favorite cities. I was there when they were building HemisFair68 and about the same time they started to improve The Riverwalk. If you've been there, you know how pretty Riverwalk is.
The only interesting things I remember about San Antonio was: (1) that's where I saw my first prostitutes, (2) I ripped the pants on a very expensive suit entering the gate of a home in Piedras Negras, TX. where I had gone to do a background investigation, and (3) that even then I noticed that Mexican girls were very pretty.
Anyway, I was patriotic in a sophmoric sort of way, back then, and I volunteered to go to Vietnam. I got my wish and in July of 68 I jumped on that big silver bird and went to beautiful S. Vietnam to defend America.
For some reason, it seemed that most of the guys (and a very few women) on my plane were also MI officers. I remember that everybody was discussing and speculating what it was really like in Vietnam and whether or not we were going to wind up in the unit that our orders actually indicated. Most of us had paper orders already but those had a way of being changed once we got to S. Vietnam.
I don't remember whether I had specofoc orders or not but (here's where I start traveling again!) I wound up going to the 525 MI Group. It was headquartered in Saigon (now known as Ho Chi Minh City) but had several 'battalions' in different regions of the country.
I first went to their Saigon headquarters for a couple days and was shortly thereafter assigned to their 2nd Battalion in II Corps in Nha Trang). I was flown up there (I don't remember if it was on a helicoptor or a plane).
Nha Trang was and still is a beautiful place (look it up on Google Images).
Once I got there, I changed into civilian clothes because we were supposedly 'under cover'.... which of course was total denial on the part of the US Military because how the hell else could an American civilian be casually driving around in militay jeeps, and going on and off the military base that was there unless they were associated with the US military, the CIA, or some other part of the US government.
Furthermore, it was all the same enemy to the VC and North Vietnamese anyway, right? They didn't like any of us.
The only thing remarkable about my time in Nha Trang was the asshole Sargeant who I had to put up with in the office. I forget his name but he was a big, fat, slob of a blowhard who had been in tank units for most of his prior military career. I forget his rank but he might have been an E-6.
I don't know if he didn't like me in particular or maybe he just resented all ROTC officers, but we never got along and it caused me a lot of grief.
So, after several weeks there, I wasn't too sad to be re-assigned, along with a Captain (Captain Thomas) in our outfit, to duty in Cam Rahn Bay.... famous for being regarded as the finest deep water bay in SE Asia. The US had a large air base there too.
Long story short... we didn't actually do much there. The only remarkable experience I remember from that brief period was being invited to a lunch on the mainland with a group of Vietnamese National Police officers. They had a huge fish almost the size of a duffel bag, baked whole; some other Vietnamese food side dishes (which I later came to really like); and of course plenty of the Vietnamese beer called Ba Moui Ba (33).
I remember not being real happy about the lunch because I'm not a big fan of fish. I don't like picking bones out of my mouth but the Vietnamese loved it. I thought that damn fish would never disappear before they ate it all and stopped asking me if I wanted 'more fish'!
Anyway, I was very happy after just a few weeks there to be reassigned to a remote village known as An Khe. You history buffs might remember the book called 'Street Without Joy' about the French in IndoChina and the famous ambush of one of their task forces near there. Than ambush was near there and I heard that helicopter pilots often sited tombstones of dead French out in the countryside.
I have some other interesting memories about An Khe which I'll put in a later post. But I remember one more thing.
I remember getting a letter from the personnel section of the Pentagon in which they informed me that my ass-hole, CO buddy, Major Sexton, who actually lived in the coastal town of Qui Nhon a 2 hour jeep drive away and who hardly knew me at all, had unbeknownst to me given me a derogatory OER (Officer Efficiency Report).
The letter informed me that futher 'reviews' of this nature could 'jeopardize' my chances for 'retention and promotion in the Army' ....as if I gave a rat's ass. This notification came as a complete surprise to me because (1) I wasn't even aware that he had given me an OER and (2) it was my understanding that I should have been advised before the report was submitted.
Yeah, that Major Sexton was a real prick. All in all, I've never gotten along well with bureacracy anywhere.
But eventually my tour was over. However, one trivial little event almost kept me from getting out of there on time.
Part of leaving was turning is all my 'army stuff' but somehow I couldn't account for a flak jacket that had been assigned to me and I caught a bunch of crap about that. I remember thinking I would find myself writing a letter home.... "Dear Mom. Sorry but I won't be coming home as the Army has made me stay here to pay for a fucking flak jacket."
I don't remember how I rectified that situation but somehow I got out of there.
I had also fallen in love with a Vietnamese girl I met in a steam bath. Yeah... really!
So... I tried to arrange the paperwork to get released from the Army in Vietnam. It was possible to do but I just started too late. I wanted to stay because (1) I had 'found love', and (2) I had a job lined up selling cars to GI's in the PX). Some guys made a lot of money doing that but I never did.
So I had to go back to the US.... which I did. When I told my mom and my grandmo that I was going back to Vietnam, they thought I'd gone crazy.
It cost me $1,100 to fly back... and remember this was in 1969. But I flew back, stayed in Saigon with another American buddy of mine who sold cars (for GM) and who was married to a very nice Vietnames girl named Lin.
I went through some training in one of the are PX's in Saigon and then flew back to An Khe to what I thought was going to be a relatively peaceful, happy, and prosperous life with 'Hai', my girlfriend.
The job sucked and the relationship broke up because I wasn't making any money, but I managed to get another position at another PX. This next position was in the PX (still selling cars) at Camp Hochmoth located in Phu Bai (near Hue, the old Imperial City where there was so much fighting and damage in the famous Tet Offensive of 1968.
The sales weren't much better there although the social life was marginally better and there are some interesting stories concerning my three 'hootch-mates'... Mac Klepper (the Ford rep), Michael Bedford (the Chrysler rep), and Captain Bob Lee (the Army APO CO). I'm not sure where Mike is but Bob got caught doing some funny-stuff with money orders and went to Army prison in Ft.Levenworth and Mac committed suicide several years later.
Next, through the influence of my former neighbor Rick Snyder, who was the Director of the An Khe USO Club but later was promoted to the Vietnam headquarters of USO Vietnam, I got an interview and a job as the director of their 'Call Home Program' which was managed from the USO Club there on Nguyen Hue Street in downtown Saigon.
Those were pretty good days actually. My job wasn't hard, it was fun, and it suited my personality. The service I ran was much appreciated by the GI's, and most of the civilians, there in the Saigon area because they had a real international telephone call with their loved ones back home.
It cost more than the shortwave radio MARS calls which the military sometimes provided but it was real call and the quality was a lot better. My job was to determine what military bases and facilities got the limited numbers of special phones and hookups we had to work with.
I also had to keep them working. When one went down, as they sometimes did, I had to get 'up there', wherever in the country it was and however I could, and troubleshot the problem and get it back working. The GI's really depended on those calls.
I didn't really have a technical background but I understood the basics of using an ohm meter to isolate and test the integrity and resistence of sections of the line by using an ohm meter. They were constantly breaking down. Someties the GI's would go crazy and rip the wires off them because their girlfriend gave them some kind of bad news, sometimes a truck would knock a pole or a wire down, and sometimes it was just the weather in Vietnam.
When an upcountry phone had a problem, I would book a flight, usually on a MACV courier flight (sometimes a helicopter, sometimes a military Beechcraft plane called a U21 (just like 'Sky King' used to fly in the Saturday morning TV series), and sometimes I would get on a larger military plane airplane.
On those 'upcountry trip' days, our USO driver would take me out to Tan Son Nhut Airport early in the morning, I'd get on the plane, we'd fly upcountry (they were called 'milkruns'), I'd hop out, catch a ride to wherever the phone was, do my work, catch a ride back to the airport, catch my plance, fly home, the driver would pick me up and take me back home.
Those trips were in some ways pretty intense but in other ways they were lots of fun. And I got to see a LOT of Vietnam both from up in the air and down on the ground. It's truly a beautiful country.
But back to the travel part of my story.
USO gradually was closing all their clubs so I had to contemplate the future. I didn't really relish going back to the US to look for a job because. I've never been a good candidate for normal jobs.
Before we leave beautiful S.Vietnam and that odyssey, I should also mention that while I was there, in the Army and with USO, I got to visit Bangkok, Thailand; Sydney, Australia; Taipei, Taiwan; Phnon Penh; Cambodia; and Singapore. And I added Seoul, S.Korea to the list on my way home because my excursion flight on Korean Airlines required a stopever of three days there.
But perhaps you can see why I was hooked on my SE Asian expatriate life. I mean....who would want to come back to the US, with its inflation, legal complexity, annoying consumerism, stressed out society, pretense, corrupt politics, etc., etc. when you've had a taste of the serenity, the great food, the nice weather, the beaches, and the pretty girls of SE Asia?
And S. America isn't much different).
Well.... I darn sure didn't have any great desire to go back to the US.
But luckily I had two former car-sales buddies, Mac (who I already mentioned) and Gregg, who both had moved to Bangkok. Mac Kleeper told me about a certain graduate business school in Glendale, AZ, known as the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management, from which all the graduates (supposedly) got good jobs and (frequently) foreign assignments with international companies. Their degree at that time was called, Master of International Management.
Mac later committed suicide but he's the only guy I ever knew who had been to 137 different countries. He was planning on travelling the old Silk Road which for centuries connected Asia to the West. >He was also a sailor and he lived for travel.
But he committed suicide because of a health problem and never made that trip. I've got lots of good stories about the wild nights him,and Michael Bedford and Bob Lee had back in that hootch in Phu Bai....but those are for another time.
So anyway.... I applied for T-Bird's upcoming semester while I spent my last vacation in Bangkok. As I remember, Mac had moved back to the states by that time and Gregg was out of town. But Gregg's business partner in their bar and travel agency, a shyster named Tony Khin, let me use Greggs apartment while I was there.
There's also an interesting storey about Gregg's girlfriend and her sister who turned up one morning at the door of Gregg's apartment needing a place to stay for a few days. There was only one bed in the apartment but she was Gregg's girlfriend and it wasn't my apartment so.....what could I do?
As I recall, her name was Lin and her 'sister' told me her name was 'Chitima' although I frankly don't think it was. She didn't speak English so we....uh...communicated and had a brief but enjoyable friendship in other ways.
Meanwhile...I got accepted at T-bird too.
So...I went back to Amarillo (more travel), got a temporary job in the interim that I totally dispised with Jewel Tea company servicing a home shopping service route all over the Texas Panhandle in the dead of a North Texas Winter, and then when January 1973 finally rolled around, I went to Glendale to start my graduate school studies at T-Bird.
Next, to speed things up here....it was:
- 1 year at T-bird. Graduated with a 3.3 GPA.
- A couple of months back in Amarillo while I job-hunted remotely as best I could (so much for 'getting a great job
with my new degree, right?) - Up to NewYork City for some interviews where I worked part-time for 5 months until I finally found a job.
- Got an amicable 'release' from that job after about 2 years.
- Then I got a job working offshore in southern Louisiana in the oil and gas service industry (hated it too but there
are some good stories associated with it. I did that for 3 years. - And then back to Amarillo where I tried to figure out why my 'career' was so chaotic :-)
That's the time period where I got into professional direct selling with SMI (Success Motivation Institute).
Next (it might have been sometime around 78?) I moved to Waco, TX to sell franchaises for SMI, thinking that it was a 'step up'.
It's wasn't.
Their home-office operation turned out to be the kind of thing that makes a great "60 Minutes" show on consumer scams but of course I had no inkling of that when before I went. But I quickly realized that I didn't like it and frankly I wasn't very good at because it was a very unethical operation.
So I got fired there too because I wasn't producing. But I'll always remember that Waco was where I saw my first tractor-pull and drag-boat race on a lake(awesome!).
My next job (again...through a friend) was working for a sign company where we traveled about 75% of the time and sold electrical signs to small businesses all around the central US.
It was a Óne Call Close program: Find a business that looked like it needed a new sign, walk in, meet the owner, make the pitch, go for the Close, and hopefully walk out with a check (which was actually my commission although the owner didn't know it).
I did that for two years and eventually worked into regional management. Usually I was traveling with a group of other guys (and sometimes some gals). It was romantic...sorta. But it was a very intense environment because if I didn't sell, I didn't make any money. Straight commission, right?
Plus, I had the extra burden of motivating my sales reps to do something that really wasn't that easy for most of them. The mortality rate was atrocious. I had to watch a lot of broken dreams and personal disappointment of those reps who couldn't 'cut it'.
But I traveled all over Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and most of the other states in that CST time zone. I put a LOT of miles on the beautiful 72 Olds Toronado that I drove (burgundy red, all leather interior...really a fine car!).
At this point, most people could be forgiven for thinking I'm a real strange character... moving around like that and not settling down with a 'real job'. But I still don't consider it something without its weird rewards...I can't explain it. I sorta feel like the uncertainty and spontaneity of it was an adventure. And maybe that's early evidence of the 'wanderingsalsero' DNA of my life.
Around 1980, I got tired of all that travel because even though I seldom made less than $1,000 a week, the expenses and lack of any real social life were taking a mental toll on me. So...I quit selling signs 'on the road' and went back to Houston.
Those next few years, from 1980-1985, were sometimes a bit rough too but I was mostly in the local sign business except for a brief try at the carpet cleaning business which took me back to Ft. Worth and briefly to Louisville, KY. More travel...right?
Then in 1985 I met another former buddy of mine who got me into the mobile windshield repair business where he was a manager a guy named Paul from Baton Rouge. Mobile windshield repair was an interesting business with some good stories attached to it too but basically I worked for them for about 4 months and then started my own business doing the same thing.
Keep in mind that I'm still in Houston though.... I don't want anybody to lose track here, OK?)
Then, my friend's boss, 'Paul' started having some business partner problems, started paying us late and being absent and unavailable for weeks on end.
By this point, although I was only working on 50% commission, I was making enough to get by, the work was easy and I enjoyed the peope-contact of it. I really was happy with just doing my work and getting paid. But I just couldn't tolerate being paid late. So I finally decided I had no choice but to set up my own mobile windshield repair business... which I called DingDoctor.
Initially I was leery of the additional responsibility of owning my own business but that lifestyle and my new business turned out to be the longest running job I've ever had and I did that from roughly 1985 until 2007 when I went to S.Korea to teach English. More travel, right?
Speaking of S.Korea....isn't it interesting how life can change due to the most seemingly minor events?
I got my teaching job in S.Korea because one day I discovered a series of podcasts that Skype had. You know Skype, the VoIP phone service, right?
Well, in their early days they had a podcast directory of some sort. I don't remember anything more than that....except that I stumbled across one of their podcasts which had an interview with a Canadian-owned agency in Seoul, S.Korea which recruited teachers for conversational English teaching jobs in S.Korea.
What really almost knocked me off my horse was when I heard that the only requirements to get those jobs were (1) be a native English speaker from an English speaking country, (2) have a bachelors degree, and (3) no criminal record.
So... after spending all that money on graduate school and working all those crappy jobs because I thought maybe it would lead to an international job.... now I found out that I only needed these minimal qualifications to get back to the Orient... in this case....to S.Korea.
NB: I should mention here that I had spent 3 days in Seoul on my air flight on the way back from Saigon to the US. (there's a story connected with that too!)
Long-story-short, I was immensely intrigued with the opportunity to go to S.Korea.... which I did. I'd still be there now if it wasn't for my age (I'm 72).
But....it's 2:33 a.m. now and I'm going to bed. I'm getting tired. I'll finish this tomorrow. I hope you know how to find it because I'm new here and I couldn't tell you.
Regards,
Art Williams
the WanderingSalsero
P.S. One more thing! You might be wondering where my name, 'wanderingsalsero' came from. Well, Salsa is a sauce with a little bit of everything in it, right? Isn't a full life like that? And how many of us really have perfectly planned lives? Darned few, I'd say. Most of us just make the best of opportunities and situations within the limited view of our headlights sometimes it works out and other times it doesn't. But one has to be willing to explore, IMHO, to ever hope to find something better than what you've got. So...I like my brand...WanderingSalsero.