Parris Island Heads

I came across this Lego diorama of a head (bathroom) in boot camp. It's a reproduction of the final boot camp scene from the movie, Full Metal Jacket. 

When I shared this image with friends, they were amazed that the heads were actually arranged like this. Yes, we were literally side-by-side and face-to-face in some of the barracks we stayed in at Parris Island, South Carolina.

Every evening in boot camp we had 50 mins of free time just before taps where we could read and write letters home and socialize with the other recruits in our platoon (about 60 of us). The very first thing we’d all do when free time began was make a beeline to the head to poop so we could do it at our leisure. Believe it or not, we would read our letters and have discussions in this arrangement while giving our fellow recruits a courtesy look-away when completing the final paperwork.

The military excels at pushing people beyond their comfort zone in a safe, controlled environment.

Tube Tester Memories at Blair TV

Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.

– Grace Hopper

Before solid-state electronics, like the transistor, there were vacuum tube electronics like the triode. Vacuum tubes consume a lot of power and are fragile, similar to an incandescent light bulb.

As a child, we had many televisions in my home. Every bedroom had one, and there were two more in the basement. The reason we had so many TVs was because my father would always stop to pick up discarded televisions that were lying on the side of the road, waiting for track pickup. 

About a mile from home was the now defunct Blair TV repair shop that had tube tester. My father would pull out any suspected bad tubes from the TV's he found and bring the tubes to the TV repair shop for testing. Once he uncovered a bad tube, he'd pay a few bucks to replace it and, voila, we'd have a working TV in the house.