Tom Allensworth

Part 1:

I have to confess that I hate writing these things, but given my role in AVSIM, it has been suggested (over and over) that I do so. I frankly equate a page like this to an “I love me wall”. Walk into the offices of some company managers and you will sometimes find a guy (or girl) who has every photo of every handshake ever made with anybody that ever had the hope of being a “name” posted on that wall. Add awards, certificates, statues, degrees and other flotsam, and you have a love fest beyond imagination; the office owner’s love of him/herself.

I have walked into some fellow manager’s offices and have on more than one occasion been shocked by the obvious statements about their egos made on that wall. VP’s and Presidents of companies seem to be particularly afflicted by this “need”. My instinct and instant reaction is to turn three shades of green, strangle off the urge to vomit, and fight the overwhelming impulse to run out their office door. I guess that’s why I never made it to VP… and that is okay by me! Retired naval officers seem to be really afflicted by this need. I have never figured that one out.

To put that last statement about retired naval officers somewhat in context of the real world, I have a story (you will see a lot of those here)… I had a boss who was a retired U.S. Navy Captain. He at one time was a submarine commander under the infamous Admiral Rickover, the father of the modern USN submarine force. Unfortunately for my boss, he was a diesel sub commander and never made the transition to nukes, which Rickover demanded that all submariners’ transition to as those subs became available in the fleet.

My wife and I were invited to a cocktail party at his home one evening shortly after we were married. As the evening wore on and the libations flowed, his wife and I had a very interesting conversation. The memorable question from her to me during that conversation was; “do you believe that they actually let him command a submarine? – you know armed with all those weapons and him with the key to the trigger?” I just laughed and mentally thought, oh man, what have I got myself into. History proved that her question about her husband was more than insightful… He WAS dangerous, even armed with a pen!

With that preamble out of the way, let me state the basics… First and foremost, I am a Navy Brat. My father was a member of the U.S. Navy for 22+ years and that molded my outlook and future beyond measure. I am proud of being a Navy Brat, and believe that children, who are denied an experience like that, are missing an extremely important component of an education. Specifically, I am referring to international living (or at least living out of the immediate area of their birth), exposure to different cultures and a wider view of the world that comes from actually living in it. Let me tell another story to illustrate my point.

One of my father’s last duty stations was in Yokosuka, Japan. At completion of that tour, we were transferred to Lexington Park, Maryland, in 1966, where he would perform his last duty at the Patuxent Naval Air Station there. We arrived during the middle of my sophomore year in high school. So that sets the background. On my first day at school, in the lunch line, I had a fellow in front of me who struck up a conversation. The dialog went something like this;

Guy: Hi! You are that guy that came from Japan, right?

Me: Yes, we just got here last week.

Guy: I have never met Japanese before.

Me: I am not Japanese.

Guy: But you are from Japan…

Me: No, I am from California. We just moved from Japan. My father just transferred to PAX NAS.

Guy: Oh.

He actually believed that he had met his first Japanese.

In his defense, he had never traveled outside the county that he lived in (St. Mary’s), and he definitely had not met Japanese before our conversation. He was a tobacco farmer’s son and knew only his father’s fields, and the very small community that he was born into and lived in. He and I became great friends over the next couple of years and he even joined me in taking typing! Back in those days, typing was not a class that most men took and a tobacco farmer’s son would never actually use. Upon graduation from high school, he was drafted into the army and I went off to college.

He survived two tours of Vietnam as a combat infantryman and finally came home to work his father’s fields as he had always done. About a year after his return, he was killed in a tractor accident on the farm. The tractor apparently turned over on him on a slope that he had probably driven a couple of thousand times.

The conversation in the lunch line that day has lasted with me now for over 45 years. It is one of those life lessons that as youth we really don’t absorb, or appreciate for that matter. It is only with time, maturity and an understanding of what our parents actually do to contribute to our education and our exposure to, and hopefully education of the world, that the importance of that conversation was finally understood to my core. As my life has progressed, the importance of that moment with him in that lunch line became an invaluable part of who I am.

Getting an education is a hot topic for me and always has been. As we went off walking down our separate paths, I went to college and he went off to learn how to be a target, and hopefully acquire the skills to survive being a target.

Looking back at it, I have no idea why I went to college right out of high school. This was the fall of 1968 and the draft pressure was one – if you didn’t attend college and maintain a certain grade average, you were going to hear from your local draft board and odds were that you would be Army bound. That really was not a compelling reason for me enrolling and attending; after all, I knew what the Navy was about, and I was prepared to join in a heart beat if Uncle Sam came calling.

Why did I go to college then? Simple; our country was evolving such that going to college was expected of youth and I was in no position to disappoint anyone, or argue for that matter. I was the first in our family, including cousins, etc. at the time, that actually attempted it (that's not a prize statement... I was the oldest!).

I can characterize my first year at college in one word – dismal… I didn’t know what I wanted to accomplish, I was too young to declare my future life’s path, and I had no interest in sitting in hours of lectures with tens of my fellow inmates, if not dozens of them – being lectured to by a guy or gal that was no more of an expert in the subject matter than I was. I learned to really disdain "teacher assistants". I declared three majors in less than two semesters; Marine Biology, History and then “Undeclared”.

Marine Biologists in those days were lucky to have grad work at a university somewhere. History grads were driving taxis in every major city in the country, if not leading platoons of army dudes in Vietnam. Undeclared was at least honest.

I was wasting my time, but more importantly my parent’s money (and it was not a lot that they had to share on a wasted investment like my non-aspirational education). I lasted one and a half semesters before I regained my sanity and dropped out to find a job that would provide me with a “real” education and relieve my parents of an obviously lousy investment.

Oh, did I mention that I had applied to the U.S. Naval Academy while a junior in High School? I did. I couldn’t pass the physical because of my eyes (that's my excuse and I am sticking to it) – another chapter in this story and one that has bearing on what was to follow later in my career.

Part 2:

To be continued…