Sometimes when I ride the motorcycle on coolish days such as Monday, rather than don jeans and leather pants I will just wear this pair of wool army pants I bought at a surplus store in Salem maybe 15 years ago.
The pants are fantastic: Heavy and warm without being itchy, water resistant in that way that sheeps’ fur is, and loaded with pockets. OK, so in the extremely unlikely event I were to crash they are not as protective as leather, but that’s their only real minus, and like I said, I’m not planning on going down (I realize no one does, but 52,000 accident-free miles speaks well of my ability to stay upright, wouldn’t you say?).
Those pants are but one of many military items among my possessions past and present. I never served in the armed forces, never even really considered doing so, just followed my brothers to OSU. But especially as I have gotten older, I’ve developed tremendous respect for those who serve and have served, including my senior league baseball teammates Trent Klug and Brad Fryman, my former co-worker Patrick Lair, and my current colleague Joy Pariante. Also the guy who got me re-started in handball, a career Marine named Ray Leidich who served two tours in Vietnam and retired as a lieutenant colonel in charge of OSU’s naval ROTC program. Ray moved to Virginia two years ago, a loss for the mid-valley.
Anyway, despite not having served in the armed forces myself, I have accumulated a fair bit of military stuff over the years, including:
– An army jacket, purchased at Andy & Bax in Portland, that served me from junior high through college. It ended its career on a garden scarecrow in the early 1990s. I used to love going to Andy & Bax, btw. I think it’s still there, on Grand Avenue in southeast Portland. All those dummy grenades and mortars, ammo boxes, etc., really fascinated me.
– A duffel bag given to me by my brother-in-law, a former National Guardsman. Ultimately, I filled it with crumpled newspapers and used it as a heavy bag, the boxing training tool. He also gave me a bunch of his uniforms. As a kid, I wore them while watching MASH, pretending to be Hawkeye.
– My dad’s army foot locker from World War II, plus other assorted items from his time in the service.
– A WWII helmet, doughboy style, that my childhood neighbor Joe Sedillo gave me. I was just telling a friend about the super authentic tacos my family used to eat at the Sedillos’ house; Joe had grown up in New Mexico. His last name, I am quite sure, was correctly pronounced Say-DEE-oh, but in those comparatively insensitive times of the early 1970s, everyone called him Joe Suh-DILL-oh, and I never heard him correct anyone
– And last but certainly not least, I have four WWII-era military issue baseball gloves. Two of them are catcher’s mitts, one of which I found at a second-hand shop in Lewisburg, the other a gift from a friend who knows I collect old gloves and keeps an eye out for them for me at second-hand stores. There’s also a first baseman’s mitt I came across at a used sporting goods store in Albany, and a fielder’s glove given to me a few years ago by a family friend from Milwaukie; the glove had belonged to his dad. Really something special about those mitts that our guys used to pass their free time while saving the world.
