110 degrees magazine - Index

110 degrees magazine - wlinks_may08 - Index

ABODE I GLASS AND JEWELRY ARTIST
A month later my parents were reunited and
moved to Tacoma, Washington where dad was
assigned to the Block Island 2 while it was under
construction. For some reason, the Navy brass had
decided to build the replacement carrier and, as
far as it was possible to do so, put it to sea with
the same crew as had been serving on the original
Block Island when it sank.
Dad had a lot of adventures. As a cryptographer,
he worked with the Wind Talkers — the
Navajo Indian communicators who would transmit
military communications using their
esoteric and completely indecipherable native
language. He was also the Crypto-officer with
Jimmy Doolittle at the Invasion of Tokyo Bay.
While I was growing up my family and I went
back and forth between California and the
islands. In 1960 we moved back to Oahu for a
couple of years so dad could manage the Naval
Communication and Moon Relay Station at
Wahiawa. I attended school on the North Shore,
not far from The Pipeline where the world’s
largest waves frequently come ashore.
At the time my father was working on an experimental
pre-communications-satellite project that
had the goal of conversing with Washington by
bouncing signals off the moon. And it worked! They
had discovered a communications system that
would operate even if the rest of the world’s
communication infrastructure were to fail.
Of course, the system wouldn’t work at all unless
the moon was up — and in the right part of the sky.
My great aunt, who had the nearly unpronounceable
name of Mariechen Wehselau, was an Olympic
swimmer who competed in three Olympic games
and won a gold and silver medal at the 1924
Olympics in Paris. She was a swim partner and
personal friend of Jonnie Weissmuller, Buster Crabb,
and the famous Duke Kahanamoku, who first popularized
the sport of surf-boarding.
Duke taught Aunt Mariechen to surf and she
became one of the first, or possibly the very first,
women to take up the sport using the huge 9-foot
long boards that were the only surfboards available
52 www.110mag.com May/June 2008
“FOR FIVE YEARS I DESIGNED PIECES FOR
SAKS FIFTH AVENUE. ALSO, I DESIGNED FOR
FOUR YEARS FOR THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF
WOMEN IN THE ARTS IN WASHINGTON, DC.”
in those days long before the modern, light,
composite boards came along.
Aunt Mariechen married a sea captain named
Jackson. When mom was younger, Captain Jackson
would give her free rides from one island to another.
MY AMAZING LIFE
I was continually doing a lot of arts and crafts —
creating hanging baskets and mosaic pieces. I’m a
self-taught artist; never taking any classes.
However, I was raised in an artistic milieu because
my dad was a wonderful artist. My mom was an
artist. Her dad was an artist. We were all like
members of an esoteric artist colony.
After Aunt Mariechen retired as a world-class
swimmer and surf-boarder, she became a master
weaver. When she would meet someone instead of
asking them what they did for a living, she would
ask them, “What do you do with your hands?”
I was always creating jewelry and clothing and
made ball gowns for proms and other formal events.
For decades my role as artist mixed with my
career in the military. I served for 28 years with the
Department of Defense, and volunteered for
Vietnam where I worked for the Defense Attaché.
This was in 1974 following the departure of our
troops. A skeleton crew of only 50 senior officers
was left behind to conduct a Vietnamization
program in anticipation of our completely leaving
the country. My job was to train the Vietnamese
girls in how to run the office.
I couldn’t speak the language, but a high-level
translator, Ngyen Thi Lan Phuong, was assigned to
work with me. After our departure Ngyen discovered
that she was on a Viet Cong kill-list so she fled
the country and ended up sleeping for six months
on the sofa in my one-bedroom apartment. I eventually
got her a job so she could move into her own
room across the street from me.
I later moved to the Philippines, and while en
route nearly died of anaphylactic shock resulting
from a severe allergic reaction to some oysters.
A doctor on board attended to me until we
landed. We only learned later that the guy was actu-
ally a dentist. I was so grateful to him for saving my
life that I married him three weeks later, which
turned out to be the biggest mistake of my life.
Dr. Wrong and I lived for four years in Puerto Rico
where he was Dental Officer at the Roosevelt Roads
Naval Base. Our base housing unit was a 500 dollar
shack with a million-dollar view overlooking the
sparkling Caribbean.
We filled our free time with swimming, snorkeling,
island hopping, and fussing at each other in
rounds of dreary and senseless arguments that grew
constantly more acrimonious.
I finally had enough, called in some chips with
the network of government contacts I had built up
over the years, and after a few phone calls I landed
a position in Washington, DC where I spent the next
15 years at the Pentagon and the State Department
working in such jobs as Secretary to the Assistant
Secretary of Defense, eventually becoming a political
appointee, and ending up in the Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency.
This was a heady time in my life because I was
traveling to Europe a couple times a month working
in capital cities throughout Western Europe.
Also, I became involved, at first professionally and
then romantically, with Dr. T.R. Concher, who was a
nuclear specialist working on the Strategic Arms
Reduction Treaty.
At least for one of us this wasn’t love at first sight.
T.R. spent two years trying to get a date with me. I
thought I had enough of marriage for one lifetime,
but he was persistent and intelligent.
After all, negotiating and winning over reluctant
antagonists to his point of view was the essence of
T.R.’s profession. And I can tell you from personal
experience that he was very good at it!
Following our marriage, T.R. became the Deputy
Commissioner for the Joint Compliance and
Inspection Commission, which implemented the
decisions of the Strategic Arms Reduction (START)
Commission.
For two years, like socks in a washer, we surged
back and forth between Washington and Geneva —
six weeks over there; six weeks back here. Our entire