Richard Jernigan -> RE: Black Hole eats sun (May 20 2017 21:35:18)
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The Yuk Club followed a downward spiral familiar to those of us who have seen a bit of time go by. ("Yokwe Yuk" is the standard Marshallese greeting. I vaguely remember it means something like, "You are good looking.") When I first visited Kwaj in the early 1970s you had to wear long pants, shoes (no flip-flops=slippers=zoris=go-aheads) and a shirt with a collar to get into the Yuk. Service was great. You could get a pretty good steak. Shermie and his excellent amateur band sometimes provided live music that didn't drown out conversation. As the Marshallese waiters and waitresses aged, the standard of service from their younger replacements began to decline. Everyone was still polite and friendly, but things slowed down a lot. People got frustrated, but you could still get a pretty good steak. Then the quality of food began to fall off. In the '70s and '80s the club was still staffed partly by Marshallese who had been trained when the Yuk was a Navy Officers' Club. The younger people weren't as well indoctrinated in the ways of the ri-belle (white people). When Raytheon won the contract to run the base, they brought in a food service subcontractor to run not only the Yuk, but also the chow halls and the snack bar. Then word went out that dining service would be severely cut back because the Yuk was losing money. A man who worked for me checked up on the weekly alcohol sales in the bar, and the overhead figures in the budget. He reported that the only way the Yuk could be losing money would be to have five highly paid American managers assigned to it. Guess what? The food service subcontractor had assigned five managers to the Yuk! The subcontractor was chastised, and eventually fired from the whole base, but the damage was done. The dining room was shut down. Now there was no public place on the atoll to get a civilized sit-down meal. A Marshallese entrepreneur took advantage of the opportunity and opened Bob's Restaurant at the dock on Ebeye, a three-mile boat ride from the military base on Kwaj. The boat ride was a deterrent, but he got enough customers to stay in business for a few years. Some of my buddies and I made the trip, first to Kwaj then to Ebeye. The food was decent, and the wine (expensive) was flown in, instead of being boiled on the ocean going barge during the long trip from the USA. A brief cholera epidemic on Ebeye scared off all of Bob's Kwaj customers, though I believe Bob's experienced no problems themselves. Bob's soldiered on for a couple more years before closing when the Kwaj customers failed to return. The Yuk Club bar continued to be popular, sold lots of drinks, and made money. What next? The building began to show severe signs of age. More and more parts of it began to be shut down as unsafe. No funds were allocated for an expensive rehabilitation, because, after all, what did the Yuk contribute to the community? The Base Commander's wife in those days was a severe alcoholic, and the Colonel was opposed to alcohol in all its manifestations. He doubled the price of beer at the store, but people began to have it shipped in by the pallet load on air freight. Eventually the roof of the kitchen began to fall in, and bar food service came to a halt. No more hamburgers and French fries. Living fifty miles to the north on Roi-Namur I didn't follow the Yuk's further decline in any detail, but the last time I saw it about the time I retired at the end of 2009 it was a moldering ruin, surrounded by yellow tape declaring it off limits. What had begun as a fine facility, first a Navy Officers' Club, then a well run civilian facility, had been completely run into the ground by a command economy. I used to say that it would be hard to find a worse way to unfit somebody to be the Proconsul of the almost entirely civilian community at Kwajalein that to train them to be a colonel in the U.S. Army. Despite this we had some excellent commanders at times, intelligent, observant, flexible people. Roi-Namur both suffered and profited from its remoteness from "downtown." In many respects the Army left us pretty much alone. But when a new Colonel appeared every couple of years, his long resident civil service advisors bombarded him with their pet peeves and personal projects. People on Roi built various structures at the lagoon beach, scrounging materials, or sometimes outright stealing them. One civil servant on Kwaj inveighed against the beach shacks to a new Colonel. When the new Colonel came to Roi the first time, I had the usual task of giving him a tour of the technical facilities. On the way back from lunch we drove down the road along the beach. "What are all these VC (Viet Cong) hutches?" the Colonel asked. By a stroke of luck I saw one of my friends. "Want to ask this guy about it?" "Yes." My friend pointed out that on Kwajalein island the Army had spent significant funds to build facilities at Emon and Coral Sands Beaches and to employ lifeguards. There were exactly zero public facilities at the beach on Roi. "Downtown you have Emon Beach and Coral Sands, and you have your back yards to have private picnics and parties. We're completely on our own up here on Roi, we don't have back yards, and there are no public beach facilities." The next day the Colonel countermanded the plan to tear down the beach shacks on Roi, and instructed the island manager to provide materials for sale to upgrade them, including cement and re-bar to pour slabs. The Roi Rats turned to and improved the shacks with their own labor. The next time an Army Reserve construction outfit arrived for a couple months of training, one of the things they built on Roi was a nice public pavilion at the beach, with charcoal grills, picnic tables and benches. On balance I would say maybe a fourth of the Commanders were good for the community, some were neutral, and at least a third were very bad for morale. But they rotated every two years or so, presenting us with a novel set of challenges. One of my good friends, H. was Associate Director of M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory, a very influential government research and development lab. As a relatively minor part of its job, the Lab was at first the Scientific Director of the base at Kwaj, later the Scientific Advisor. H's main job at the Lab was liaison with Congress. I heard several good stories of Congressional activities from H. He was puzzled that I seemed to enjoy life out in the boondocks on Kwaj, after years of moving in sub-Cabinet and international circles. Eventually Herb came to Kwaj--perhaps because his wife would enjoy a couple of weeks in Honolulu. As we toured the tech facilities on the various islands I regaled H. with stories of lame brained Army stunts, and the stratagems devised to circumvent them. Eventually H. said, "I can finally see how someone could have a good time out here. A lot of interesting technical challenges, and plenty of human folly to observe and enjoy. I like my job, but you get more tech stuff than I do." RNJ
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