I joined the Merchant Marines when I was 16 years old. I sailed out of the Port of New Orleans with a job in the engine room of the freighter John B, Watterman in September of 1969 with a job in the engine room.
I had spent 42 days in the Seafarer's International Union Hall down on Jackson Avenue in the Irish Channel just two blocks from the Gretna Ferry to get my seamen's papers. I washed dishes, mopped floors, peeled potatoes and carrots, did anything they told me to do to get those seamen's papers.
The drinking age in Louisiana at the time was just 18. I was paid $7 a week and a carton of cigarettes to do what I was doing in that Union Hall. It had to be reimbursed out of my first paycheck working on the high seas.
About the time when I had reached seniority amongst the plebes in the Union Hall the Port Director sent me on a desperate mission to round up medical supplies. The Port Director knew that the storm blowing in was dangerous. It was August 1969. He told me "Kid, if the eye of that hurricane comes over New Orleans we are all going to be swimming for it. The Irish Channel is nine feet below sea level."
We were in a big tall safe secure building with a galley in it and we were well stocked with groceries. But he gave me the money and told me to buy up all medical supplies at the nearest super market. Everybody else knew the storm was blowing in and the lines in the supermarket ran all the way down the row and back up again. Everyone was preparing for the storm. But they were stocking up on food supply. I grabbed all the medical stuff.
They called that storm Hurricane Camille. Everybody in New Orleans was frightened about it. Except us kids I guess. To us it was just a great adventure. The eye didn't come over New Orleans. It went over Gulfport/Biloxi. It blew those towns up. Many seamen and their families lived on the Mississippi coast. The Seafarer's International Union Hall in New Orleans, where I lived, was turned into a homeless shelter for the seamen and their families that lived on the Mississippi coast. They all came piling into the Union Hall from the Mississippi coast.
Another kid in seamen's school that we called Tarzan (they called me Hick) and me ran down along the building and all the way up on the levee of the Mississippi River when the winds were running 90 miles per hour. We made it up there to see 4 foot waves in the Mississippi River but we ran back down real quick because there were lethal things blowing in the wind. Like that dude said "Its not the wind, its whats blowing in the wind."
That's one of my trial and tribulations of being in New Orleans in that time frame. But there were other events that I can't seem to put into chronological order.
There was the weekend we thumbed up to Prairieville, up the Airline Highway because the New Orleans International Pop Festival was going on. We thumbed up and planned on crashing the fence. We were poor boys and didn't have the price to get in. The fence crash didn't work. I remember hearing from outside the fence, the Youngbloods doing "Get Together."
When it was over all them damn hippies came piling out on the Airline Highway hitchhiking in both directions. That was our gig but all of a sudden we were surrounded by 5000 hitchhikers. How in the hell our we going to make it back to New Orleans? I told Tarzan and Throttle that there was a train track just to the west of the Airline Highway. We bolted over there, jumped a train and made it back to the Union Hall just in time before we were going to be kicked out of the joint for not showing up for duty.
There was another thing that happened when I was there. The Union Hall supported Moon Landrieu in the election for Mayor of New Orleans. They threw a big party for him. And they appointed all us scrub teenage kids to be cocktail waitresses for this affair. So I was serving this one goofball dufflus brandy and waters. He was a big braggert SOB. He dominated his table. And when he was out on the dance floor he looked like a chicken with his head cut off. What an ignoramus.
The Port Director says to me:
"Crimm you see that guy out on the dance floor?" It was the dufflus I had been serving brandy and water too.
"Yes, Sir."
"Do you know who he is?"
"No, Sir."
"That's Jim Garrison, the DA that prosecuted Clay Shaw for the murder of John Kennedy."
"Sir, do you think Clay Shaw had John Kennedy murdered?"
"Don't be stupid, Crimm! Garrison is an idiot!"
There was on other thing that happened when I was in New Orleans in 1969. I was drunk on Dixie Beer, just 16 years old, and this guy told me that he was a tattoo artist. He took a needle, wrapped it up in thread, dipped it in Indian ink, and put a tattoo on me. I've been wearing it for 47 years now. Its the only tattoo I've ever had in my life. It can be seen in the photo of myself that I just recently put up on vpFREE. Let's see if you can find it.
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