Tag: Philippines

The Rain Today

Ashland’s rain today reminded me of the Philippines. I was stationed with the 3rd Tactical Fighter Wing, part of 13th Air Force and Pacific Air Forces, at Clark Air Base in the Philippines in the mid 1970s. It was my first overseas duty assignment. Being low in rank, it was a short tour – fifteen months – and my wife was not allowed to be there with me.

I had a lot of free time outside of my shifts. I used to run almost every day, then, in addition to my walking. I typically ran three to five miles a day. The weather never felt cold to me. Sometimes, the rain felt warm.

I was comparing my Philippines memory of rain to our Ashland rain today, trying to think of how I would describe this rain. This isn’t the monsoon sort of downpours that I knew in the Philippines, South Carolina, West Virginia, Okinawa, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Germany, or England. We rarely seem to receive that sort of rain here. Nor is it the milder, lighter rain, like a shower or light rain that I often experienced in Half Moon Bay. This is just…rain.

Our athletic attire is a lot better in 2019 than it was in 1976. Back then, all my athletic clothing was cotton. When I was running in the rain, it’d get sopping wet, heavy, and start sagging and falling off. My socks then were athletic top socks that came up to my knees. They would slide down to my ankles. I wore Adidas running shoes, and head and wrist sweat bands. The wrist bands would start sliding down over my hands, and the head band would drop over my eyes.

I’d bought the bands for playing racquetball, and they were most definitely required in a a racquetball court’s humid confines. They didn’t seem to have air-con nor fans back then.

I used to run the one and a half miles between my barracks and the gym, play racquetball, and not infrequently run home. I’ve always been optimistic, sometimes stupidly so. I once saw it starting to rain in the Philippines and took off running for the gym to play racquetball. I was soaked when I arrived. Water pooled around me. There was no way I would be playing racquetball in those clothes. I had no choice but to run back to the barracks, holding up my short blue Adidas shorts with one hand as I ran.

Ah, good times.

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Today’s Theme Music

When I was young, I sought better sound in my stereos.

Whether from imagination or real ability, I often detected hums and distortion that irritated me. Conducting trail and error set-ups in those pre-Internet days of the mid 1970s, I separated power wires and speaker wires and ensured I had solid connections between everything. I bought gold wires to improve the sound and kept searching for better equipment. Vinyl had the best initial sound IMO but it was a fragile state that would begin deteriorating with play. Cassettes and eight track players always introduced warble and distortion as the tapes stretched. Muddiness would creep in.

I ended up buying an open-reel system. I developed a habit of recording my vinyl on an open reel. Although a cumbersome system, open-reel maintained the best sound quality. I would record the album on open-reel for my home use and cassette for my portable use and store the vinyl to protect it. Once the cassette quality began diminishing, I would record it anew.

But while noticing the sound difference on my systems at home, I also discovered that some albums came out sounding better in the beginning. Their colors were sharper, finer and clearer. A few of those albums mesmerized me with the beauty of their sound. Some combined that with wonderful lyrics and melodies, becoming astonishing, special albums.

The first of these that struck me in such a way was Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, a now classic rock album. But it was only one album, not much of a data set. The second album that established itself as having high production values (as I learned it was called) was ‘Songs In the Key of LIfe,’ by Stevie Wonder. I don’t know much about music production, then or now, but I thought that Stevie’s album was beautiful in and of the ways I mentioned. I was stationed in the Philippines, at Clark Air Base with the 3rd Tactical Fighter Wing, when the album came out. Intent on staying active, reading and saving money, I did a lot of walking.

‘Sir Duke’, from this album, was my favorite walking-around sound for that era’s mental playback system. It’s a good theme song to bring on Friday.

(As an aside, I wince at hearing this digital version; it sounds way too tinny to me. But that’s me.)

 

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