Not Quite a Vagabond

Janet Go

Description

This is a tell-all travelography written by a woman who suffered a speech impediment and was abused as a child. At 92, she reveals secrets she didn't tell her parents, three husbands, or friends, all of whom she's outlived. She has skirted typhoons, bullets, pirates, and arrest for smuggling as she sailed on freighters and luxury liners around the seven seas. She describes her interviews, while a reporter on Guam, with movie stars, government officials, entrepreneurs, and any strays who landed on the island.

Sujets

• Personal Memoirs
• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 13 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669852902
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR:
Micronesia Tourist Guide
A Reporter in Guam and Micronesia
Dance of Desire, Tragic Passion Behind New Orleans’ Festive Mask
Where America’s Day Begins, 2 nd Edition
Waltzing on the QE2
Alpenglow, Romance in the Rockies
Don’t Miss the Boat, with Perry McGinnis
Menu For Murder
The Last Resort
Not Quite A Vagabond
 
A Travelography
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Janet Go
 
Copyright © 2022 by Janet Go.
 
Library of Congress Control Number:
2022919986
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-5292-6

Softcover
978-1-6698-5291-9

eBook
978-1-6698-5290-2
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 11/11/2022
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
842108
CONTENTS
Preface
 
1 .      Smile and Try
2 .      Below the Mason-Dixon Line
3 .      Day of Infamy
4 .      The Home Front
5 .      The Pipes Were Calling
6 .      Coming of Age
7 .      Rocky Mountain High
8 .      Sea Level
9 .      Bikes and Thumbs
10 .    Bye Bye, Birdies
11 .    My Old Flame
12 .    Aloha
13 .    Oceania
14 .    My Thrilla in Manila
15 .    Hafa Adai
16 .    Mention My Name
17 .    I’m O.K.
18 .    The Last Straw
19 .    Pamela Was No Lady
20 .    Flying Down to Rio
21 .    The Big Easy
22 .    Dancing Sands
23 .    Full Circle
24 .    Colorful Colorado
25 .    High and Dry
26 .    Just Us Girls
27 .    Around the Horn
28 .    Paradise Enow
29 .    Celebrating 80
30 .    Fear of 90
 
Photo Gallery
Acknowledgments
Preface
Travelography: an autobiography and travelog.
Musician Ani DiFranco once said, “If you’re born a lion, don’t try to act tame.” I was born on July 23, Leo’s cusp. My life certainly has not been tame.
I put up my sails and let the winds blow me across the sea of life, awash with joy, grief, and adventure. I’ve been married and divorced three times, and had more boyfriends than I can count with a straight face.
As a Jill of all trades, I’ve tried ice and roller skating, playing the piano, dancing, singing, painting, bowling, billiards, archery, bicycling, novel writing, photography, and skiing. I mastered none, but I had fun.
There’s nothing I can do about growing old, so I might as well enjoy it. I’m tickled that I’ve lived this long.
I follow the advice on a sign in Little Annie’s Eating House, Aspen: “If you’re walking on thin ice, you might as well dance.”
Writing this has jogged my memory, bringing to light things I’d rather forget. I’ve hewed to the line and let the chips fall where they may as I reveal secrets I’ve never told my mother, husbands, cousins, or peers. It’s time to tell the truth.
1
Smile and Try
On September 8, 1934, thick smoke hid the sun. I wiped tears from my eyes, which burned from the fumes caused by smoldering coal, wood, and steel.
My parents and I, along with hundreds of people from across the river in Philadelphia, had rushed to the New Jersey shore when they heard the news that S.S. Morro Castle had run aground at Asbury Park.
Sitting on my father’s shoulders, I watched men, women, and children jumping overboard into the fiery water. They waded to shore, bumping into mail bags and crates of cargo floating in the water.
Emergency crews and onlookers pulled the survivors to safety. Rescue ships and lifeboats, launched from nearby beach towns, gave first aid to passengers and carried away the bodies of those who drowned.
Hours later when the ship burned to the waterline, it exploded, sending pieces of the flaming vessel through the air and rattling windows for miles.
A fire had started in a storage locker of the S.S. Morro Castle, named for the stone fortress and lighthouse in Havana, Cuba. The ship had been on her regular run of passengers, cargo, and mail between Havana and New York City when she ran aground.
Of the 543 passengers on board the vessel, 408 were rescued, and 137 passengers and crew members perished. Only 6 of the ship’s 12 lifeboats were launched from the burning vessel.
Some think the fire was set to hide the murder of the captain; others say the captain set the fire to hide someone else’s murder. In 1935 the ship was towed away and sold for scrap. The cause of the fire remains a mystery.
Watching the Morro Castle disaster at age four didn’t keep me from catching the ocean travel bug. To tell the truth, I’ve never looked for a cure.
The Early Years
My great-grandparents were among the Irish, Scots, Germans, and Italians who sailed across the big pond from Europe in the 1840s to escape famine, poverty, and political turmoil at home. They forged new lives in America working in textile and clothing industries, building trades, railroads, and port services.
My mother’s ancestors sailed from Germany to New Orleans, where some worked in sugar cane fields and others migrated to Philadelphia.
My mother, Ethel Margaret Fullmer, was born in Philly on September 21, 1911. She was the oldest of the five children of John Henry Fullmer and Henrietta Carolina Bach Fullmer.
Mother’s father, John, worked at Curtis Publishing Company, publishers of Etude music magazine. Before she was married, my mother worked for Theodore Presser Music Company. They passed the music bug on to me; I began taking piano lessons when I was nine, and in my teens, I wrote articles for Etude .
I believe Ellis Island was the landing place for my father’s ancestors, the Hilfertys from Letterkenney in northwest Ireland.
My grandfather, Hugh L. Hilferty, Sr., had three wives. The first two woman died young, and Georgiana, Hugh’s third wife, raised his seven boys, all of whom towered over their father.
Daniel Joseph Hilferty, my father, was born on May 1, 1910, in Philly. The oldest of the boys, he stood six feet tall, with brown eyes, and black wavy hair.
My parents were married in 1929, when my father was working at Philco in Camden, New Jersey. The newlyweds moved into an apartment in Camden.
Born on July 23, 1930. I was named for Janet Turley, the sister of my father’s Aunt, Jean Gillon. I took after my German mother with my 5’3” frame, light brown hair, and blue eyes. All my life, I envied my father’s wavy black hair.
In 1931, the stock market crashed, heralding in the Great Depression. When millions of Americans lost their jobs, they lined up at soup kitchens, begged in the streets, or sold apples from pushcarts.
When Philco abolished my father’s job, my father’s Scotch-Irish Uncle, Patrick Gillon, and his wife, Jean, invited us to move in with them. They owned a three-story row house in South Philly. Their three teenaged sons had to share a bedroom after my parents and I moved in.
The Gillon’s narrow, two-story row house was crammed with overstuffed furniture decorated with crocheted doilies, end tables, ottomans, lamps, candy dishes, and fake flower arrangements. The round dining room table was set with a lace cloth and two candlesticks. The kitchen was small but efficient, and important decisions were made around the small table in the middle of the room.
Uncle Pat was a barber in the city, and he trimmed the family’s hair in the basement of their house. Aunt Jean worked the evening shift at a hoagie shop. When she came home at 11 p.m., she brought leftover hoagies which Uncle Pat, his sons, and my father shared, along with beers, until the wee hours.
After escaping an assassination attempt in Miami in February 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated in March as the 32 nd U. S President. For the first time in American history, President Roosevelt waged war on poverty.
Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps to pay young men $30 a month each to plant trees, build bridges, paint murals in post offices, and develop national parks and forests throughout the United States.
My mother’s brother, John, worked for the CCC in Washington State. The CCC built roads and facilities at Rocky Mountain Park in Colorado, and expanded to the Territory of Hawaii, where they helped build facilities in Haleakala National Park on Maui.
During those years, my parents and I listened to the President’s fireside radio chats made while sitting in front of the fireplace in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House. Fala, his Scotty, was at his elbow.
His Master’s Voice
In 1935, my father was hired by Radio Corporation of America in Camden, New Jersey, and we moved into a second-floor apartment in Camden.
I’ll always remember crossing the Delaware River Bridge, which was lit up at night like the Las Vegas’ strip.
Above the bridge’s superstructure flashed gigantic signs of a Whitman’s Samplers’ delivery boy running with a box of assorted chocolates under his arm; RCA Victor’s dog wagging his tail while listening to his master’s voice; a can of Campbell’s Soup being ladled into a bowl; and a bucket of Sherman-Williams paint pouring ou