Marijuana and the Civil Rights Movement hadn't begun yet.
I very nearly ended up in Vietnam a few months later when I signed up for the draft.
I didn't even know a war in Vietnam was going on.
I just thought that joining the army would be a good way to finish maturing and provide for my family.
I was working at Boeing Aircraft at the time in Renton, Washington just south of Seattle.
I signed up for the draft and quit Boeing Aircraft and they gave me a leave of absence to go into the military with a job guarantee when I returned with whatever skills I would acquire.
I bucked rivets building hulls for the 707 Jet and B52 Bomber, Civilian Version I think it was.
Zoomer was the riveter I bucked for.
The riveter gets on one side of the skin or parts assembly and hull with the rivet gun, about the size of an electric hand drill, air powered and the bucker gets on the other side and holds a steel bar against the bottom of the rivet after the riveter drills and places a rivet in the hole and then with his rivet gun pounds on the rivet like a jackhammer and flattens the bottom of the rivet at the bucker holding the steel bar in place making for the fastener and hold.
If your bar slips off and the rivet gets a bad finish or sideways slope it has to be drilled out and redone.
Everything by constant inspection.
Twelve hour days six days a week for the craziest riveter Boeing ever had.
He was famous for his work.
Insane amounts of rivets drilled and set.
I was his bucker for several months before I decided to get the hell away from this crazy shit and this crazy man.
Thousands of rivets a day.
Almost like one a second at times.
Pre-drilled stuff on full skins.
A forty minute lunch break and he would run to his car and make the three minute drive to a tavern up the hill and drink a quart of beer and a sandwich and then run back to his car and drive back to the plant and run to his work station up the scaffolding and be pounding rivets as the whistle blew forty minutes later.
Me on the other end.
Bucking rivets.
I went one time with him.
It was crazy.
We mustered in Seattle a few months later for our phychial examinations and testing and whatnot and were scheduled to leave for Fort Ord, California for basic training.
United States Army
About sixty of us from Seattle and the surrounding area.
1964
Draftees and enlistees a few of us who had signed up for the draft.
I couldn't enlist because I was married and had a child and was classified as IIIA so I had to sign up for the draft voluntarily.
I got my "Greetings" several months later.
I'm not sure where I got the idea to sign up for the military.
Probably Granny Bunnell.
Daisy
My grandmother and my dads mother.
Granny being very patriotic and believing in the military even after she had lost two sons in World War II some years earlier.
My dad and my uncle.
Victor Bunnell and Tom Bunnell
1942-1945
One killed in action, one died.
My dad died on the way home from the war, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He collapsed is a shower and went into a coma and died a few hours later.
He was headed home to Detroit Lakes, Minnesota
My mother and I and my sister Patty waiting for him.
He never made it.
The Red Cross came to our door and told us he was sick and in the hospital.
We took a bus to Minneapolis but he died before we got there.
Granny is a gold star mother.
Two gold stars.
They sent us all home.
They said there was a mistake and Fort Ord was full and they would have to reschedule us.
Might be a month they said and might be six months.
We got drunk and then went home later that night.
Very disappointed.
We had all had our going away parties with our families and had our shaving kits and were headed to Fort Ord for basic training.
We thought and were told.
I got my letter about six months later and I had moved to Oregon and was selling cars in Portland, Oregon.
I wrote them back and asked to withdraw my sighning up for the draft as I was now moved and working in another state and no longer wanted to serve,
They replied a few weeks later that my request was granted.
That was the end of my military career.
Viet Nam took off a few months later.
One of my friends got killed, and several others served and came home as potheads and became a growing part of the civil rights movement and national conscientiousness.
I joined in with my fellow friends I had gone to school with that had been to Vietnam and were now College Students.
The Hippie Movement had begun and my wife and I were now a part of it.
Smoking pot.
It's shit.
Rotten dangerous drugs but we didn't know that then.
My wife was already on speed.
She started at fourteen while still in junior high school.
Ninth grade.
I met and fell in love with her the following year.
She fifteen and I sixteen.
Our sophomore and junior years.
Her mother was addicted to pills and she gave them to my wife as payment for babysitting her younger children.
Her mother also had them stashed and hidden all over the house and my wife would find and steal them.
Thinking they were good things.
The Valley of the Dolls.
A famous book about the era and it's experiences.
Eat pills and eat chocolates and drink booze by the gallon and smoke cigarettes and lay in bed and read novels about black cocks and sex and slavery.
Mandingo and Drum and that series of books and others.
Sex starved from the stimulants and speed.
Her mother also worked many and long hours in one of several tavern's and bar's and restaurants they owned.
Pills, pills, pills,.
Doctors prescriptions.
My wife was addicted but I didn't know it.
They were all taking pills but I didn't know it for the longest time.
It went on forever.
Speed and all the rest of them.
Amphetamines.
Doctors handed them out like candy in those years after World War II and on up through the sixties and even seventies.
Prescribing this shit to our children yet today.
Adderall
This shit goes on forever.
We got to stop them.
I had always opposed Vietnam because I felt it was being fought for the manufacturers of arms and ammunition and supplies.
Shoes and tanks and airplanes and whatnot.
Not a real war and not really fighting communists but fighting in the name of fighting communists to make money for these individuals and businesses and corporations.
Korea had just finished.
Some of my friend had been there.