Friday, January 07, 2011

It is one of the inevitable and infuriating facts of life that sooner or later (and one is not aware on how soon that seems when it indeed becomes so) one is seen with one’s wife by one’s offspring as “the old” folk.

When my eldest daughter Ale visits from Lillooet she likes to ease what she considers some of the vicissitudes of people our age. This means that in the winter, as she did this Christmas, she brought us loads of firewood for our fireplace. My wife Rosemary, a most frugal woman of Irish heritage, does not like to spend money on stuff that results in ashes. Ale might help us neaten up the garden tool storage shed or offer to help me file my photographs which are scattered over the basement floor near my many metal filing cabinets. And I know that in a phone call to her sister she might discus ways of lightening the load of the old folk. My breakfast tray, courtesy of my younger daughter Hilary, has an appalling quantity of containers of vitamins and other stuff to help my personal plumbing problems.

This year Ale was upset by the lack of a nice and tidy white grout around our white kitchen sink. She fixed this, although Rosemary is going to call our local Kerrisdale Lumber Company to find out why the silicone grout they sold Ale has yellowed, in but a month. Ale noticed a leak under the sink. I knew what it was but I didn’t want to tell her what the repair involved. She put a plastic pan under the sink to catch the leak.

Today Rosemary made the comment that the pan had filled too quickly and I knew what I had to do. I had to replace the Moen faucet fixture. The rubber/plastic gaskets that attach the fixture to the sink had pretty well collapsed. I took the fixture out, knowing that once I had done this there was no return. It meant I would spend the rest of the day on my back under that sink groping with tools that were never designed for such an undertaking.

I went to Home Depot and bought a new fixture, on sale for $99. The kind old man (he seemed older than I was so I call him that!) at Home Depot informed me I did not need to buy Teflon tape (it sticks to everything, your fingers as an example, except to the copper pipe ends for which you wan to use it. It seems that after all these years plumbers (or at least the plumbing industry) have decided to release some of their Masonic secrets to ordinary old folk like us. There are new pipes, made of an intelligent blend of metal and plastic that in their very flexibility prevent those terrible leaks that often occur when one is connecting fixtures, using and bending the old-fashioned copper pipes, to the water (hot and cold) source. I secured a couple of these new pipes and soon our sink was as dry as the Australian desert is just before a flood. I will be monitoring it all during the next days to make sure.

But there is one leak for which Teflon tape will not work and nature will have to take its course. Rosemary received the call, “I am not going to be there tomorrow. I am going with a friend downtown and see what we can do.” My Rosemary countered with, “Well you could come in the evening for our usual supper.”

She might or she might not, but I understand that today has been a day when one leak repaired has been followed by another that has no possible repair for the forseeable future.

That brand new, little red container of Teflon tape, will serve as a reminder of how quickly things change.

Thursday, January 06, 2011



I think I can safely separate the people of the world in two distinct types. There are those who upon hearing the sound of an airplane will look up and those who don’t. I am from the former category. I remember with excitement and fondness having been a passenger in a DC-3, a DC-6B with oxygen masks while flying over the Andes, a Constellation and a Super Constellation ( with handsome Pan Am stewardesses who offered me chewing gum before take off!), a Comet 4, a Convair 990, a Boeing 747 and all kinds of smaller planes from De Havilland Beavers to Embrauers.

Airplanes have been in my mind for the last month. It could have been because Rosemary and I have watched two excellent British TV series (borrowed from our wonderful Vancouver Public Library). One of the series is the 1982 We’ll Meet Again. It features Susannah York and is about an American B-17 squadron based in England. Rosemary asked me all sorts of question like, “What is an escort?” What is a fighter?” The other series we finished last night and it is A Piece of Cake. This is a 1988 TV Series (most of the actors then went on to make very good films). This show anachronistically is about the Hornets a fictitious Spitfire squadron initially based in France. It is anachronistic because Spitfires were never stationed in France but the makers of the series could not find enough Hawker Hurricanes (the planes that indeed were at one time based in France).



This show follows the pilots from the invasion of Poland, to the so-called Phony War and ends with the climax of the air battle over Britain. Most of the protagonists from the beginning die except for one by the end of the series. This show has little nostalgia and is quite brutal. They used real flying Spitfires and Me-109s. In the last segment (there are 6) there is a beautiful flying sequence between a Me-109 and a Spitfire, flying low and swooping over the chalk cliffs.

And it was a couple of weeks ago when I visited the Firehall Vancouver Public Library (near Granville and Broadway) where they have a stupendous used and withdrawn-from-the-collection bin where hard covers fetch $0.25. There I found Walter J.Boyne’s 2006 novel Supersonic Thunder. Boyne was the head of the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution until 1986 when he retired to become a consultant and writer, both non fiction and novels.



This novel begins in August 1, 1955 and ends February 10, 1973. It covers the Sputnik, the making of the U-2 and the Lockheed Blackbird. It tells you how Boeing’s 747 became and unlikely reality and how the Americans, the French and the Russians vied to get the first supersonic jet liner on the air.



But it is the chapter on the significance of the shooting down of Francis Gary Powers in his U-2 over the Soviet Union and this little section on cratology that fascinated me:

October 14, 1962
Approaching Cuba


“Cratology got me here.” Major Richard S. Heyser, the top pilot of the 4080th Strategic Wing, said the phrase aloud, 72,000 feet above Earth, at the controls of a U-2F borrowed from the CIA. With its Pratt & Whitney Yj75-P-13 engine developing almost sixteen thousand pounds of thrust, it was far more powerful that the J57 engine-powered Air Force U-2s that he had been flying for almost seven years.


The term “cratology” was coined a the National Photographic Interpretation Centre (NPIC by its director, the fiery, inspiring, hard-driving Art Lundahl. It meant the scientific study of the almost infinite variety of crates, boxes, and shipping containers that the Soviet Union used to protect its equipment en route and on site.
Supersonic Thunder, Walter J. Boyne





This novel is a gem and its next reader will be my friend Sean Rossiter who is the only person I know with whom I can talk about airplanes.

Last night I finished another book that had been in my collection for years but which I had not read in great detail. It is called The Bombers – The Illustrated Story of Offensive Strategy and Tactics in the Twentieth Century by Robin Cross (1987).


It was this that simply stopped me when I read it and it brought to mind how unrealistic most aviation action films and books really are. Here is the real thing and it involves my very favourite airplane, the Grumman A-6 Intruder:


On the night of October 30, 1967 a single A-6A Intruder, flown by Lieutenant-Commander Charles B. Hunter with Lieutenant Lyle F. Bull as bombardier/navigator [the sat side-by-side], took off from the carrier Constellation to attack a ferry slip near Hanoi. The Hanoi area was now bristling with the greatest concentration of anti-aircraft defenses in the history of aerial warfare. It was defended by its 15 SAM sites, at least 560 anti-aircraft guns, and by Mig-17s and 21s flying from nearby bases. To attack the landing slip, Hunter had to make a low-level night approach across the rugged, mountainous terrain surrounding the Red River, dropping his 18,000 pound bombs along an impact line of 2800 feet. With Lieutenant Bull interpreting radar echoes to identify landmarks and avoid dangerous ridges, Hunter had flown to within 18 miles of the target when his instruments and earphones told him that the A-6 had been picked up by the North Vietnamese search radar. Hunter brought the Intruder down to a level at which he hoped to slip below the radar horizon, but as he reached the Initial Point he detected a SAM battery locking on to him. Descending again and turning on to the bombing heading, Hunter saw a SAM rising towards him.


He recalled. ‘When I first saw it, it was dead ahead and above me, and it appeared that it would pass overhead. However, just as it got overhead, I could see it turn directly downward and head for us. To me the rocket exhaust looked like a doughnut.’



Declining to jettison his bombs and head for home, Hunter executed a high-g low-altitude barrel roll, a near suicidal maneuver. The SAM exploded within 200ft of the A-6A, shaking it violently as Hunter rolled out at 2000ft and commenced the bombing run within a few degrees on the inbound heading. As Hunter and Bull closed on the target they came under intense AA fire. At least five SAMs were also airborne and heading for them. For the last seven miles Hunter flew the Intruder at deck level on the radar altimeter, hoping that he was too low for the missile batteries to track and shoot him down. One by one the SAMs detonated 400ft above him, filling the cockpit with a blinding flash and buffeting the aircraft as it bored in on the target. The flack barrage lit up the sky and searchlights illuminated Hunter’s aircraft, enabling small arms and automatic weapon sites to add to the volume of fire directed a the lone A-6A. Flying through this inferno at tree-top height, Hunter located the ferry and released his bombs directly on the target, executing a seven-g turn as they fell away and four SAMs exploded aft and above him. Rolling out, Hunter streaked southeastward, varying his altitude and at one point jinking [quick evasive turn] heavily to counter a Mig-17 which had briefly got on his tail. Flak followed him all the way until the A-6A cleared the coast.


In June 1995 I went to a American Hosta Society National Convention in Washington DC and I took these Widelux swivel lens panoramic shots inside Boyne’s museum.

Captain Shork and his A-6B Intruder

Intruders

Wednesday, January 05, 2011


This might seem like a lazy blog but I have had a terribly weird day. For the last two days just about everybody has been able to see my blog (and the ancillary web page) but I have been unable to view it from my computer. I have been dealing with tech reps (extremely polite) based in Bulgaria. I wrote to them telling them of some of my stories dealing with Roumanians (I like to use the old spelling) but the tech reps politely informed me that they were Bulgarians. A few minutes before my present writing (Wednesday, 11:20pm) my web page and blog came back (did those Bulgarians figure it all out?). But I have been unable to edit any of the previous blogs (I noticed some spelling mistakes) and until a few minutes ago I could not even compose this blog. Therefore I will make it sweet and short in the hopes that it will post and perhaps tomorrow will be a better day.

I was approached by the chap below, a few days ago. It seems we went to kindergarten and first grade together. But would you believe that I am not in this picture? My guess was that I was sick. How many of you, around my age of 68 have a class picture of that vintage? What makes this picture interesting is that the Argentine quintuplets, the Diligentis (three girls and two boys) are in it. After the first grade the parents, under advice from educators, decided to disperse the quints to five different schools.  What is amazing is that one of the quints, Franco Diligenti, second from the right, must have a son by the same name and is listed as a real estate salesman in West Vancouver. I wrote in a previous blog that while in kindergarten I have the lucid memory of lifting up the skirts of the three female quints. They were very pretty and I knew I liked girls even then! The link to a people section in Time Magazine, 1964, reveals some interesing information about the quints which in a way explains the Fanco Diligenti living in West Vancouver.

Frank DiGirolomo is now retired and lives near Dallas. And would you believe it, he works at a gun store!

See attached picture. Then this must be first grade. I'm fifth from the right. Are you in it? My mother wrote numbers pointing out the quints and who she believes was Robert (Bobby) Zimmerman on the left end.


Small world or what? Met a lady, Renee Hudson (nee Otrola) here in Duncanville Texas that says she became a Braniff flight attendant with one of the girls (probably Maria Francesca) and it ends up that Renee (two years older) was our next door neighbor (2353 Superi) when we lived there. My father was with the US Military Mission to Argentina from 1948-1952.


I remember attending one of the birthday parties for the quints at their house, but which one has long been forgotten. Mrs. DeBenadetti (SP?) was out teacher. I was the one who broke my left arm while the family was at Mar De Plata. Not sure that rings any bells with you, but I sure remember it. Still have problems with the arm (never properly treated).

Thanks for the response.

Frank DiGirolomo

The Diligentis in 1964

Tuesday, January 04, 2011


The events that conspired to make my web page and corresponding blog to disappear yesterday, January 3 and even as I write this today at noon (others can see the web page and blog but I cannot) has again brought to mind how impermanent are those things we take for granted. In fact I would simply assert it as the impermanence of permanence.

For me nothing brings that idea as succinctly as my memory of that 1960 film The Time Machine, directed by George Pal and with Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux.

Rod Taylor finally has his time machine and he sits in it. We would now consider that machine as a splendid example of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s concept of Steampunk. Another brilliant one would be Captain Nemo’s submarine in Richard Fleischer’s 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Rod Taylor sits on this wonderful chair/time machine and with the lowly special effects of the time you can see as time passes quickly into the future. Cathedrals and mountains come crashing down; trees grew and then fell, fires and explosions suggest WWI and so on. In a dizzying speed of images The Time Traveller reaches 802,701 A.D.

Those ever-so-quick images of time passing hit home when I first saw the film. I began then to realize about my mortality and the impermanence of all I knew and thought to be permanent.

Sometime around 1987 Malcolm Parry, then editor of the exciting city magazine that Vancouver Magazine was then, decided to give me a job. I was given the lofty title of Director of Photography. At the time the magazine had no art director and Parry and a few others did the paste-up which was a pre-digital, dirty, elaborate method of putting a magazine together before it was sent to be printed. With my job as Director of Photography (a jazzed up title equivalent to photo editor) I was responsible for seeing the portfolios of illustrators and photographers. Parry would give me stories for which I was to find suitable people to illustrate. I took the job so seriously that I took myself out of many jobs I would have died to do but I found it a conflict of interest to do so. There was one job where I suggested a particular photographer and Parry simply said, “This job is particularly tailored for your talents, so you, must take it on.”

I enjoyed, even though I was still nominally a freelancer, the idea that I could go to my “office”. I liked being addressed by the people who worked at the magazine as one who now had a vaguely lofty duty.

The magazine went well for a while but I thought that the pressure of putting a magazine together while still editing it was becoming a strain on Parry. I suggested we look for an art director.

At the time I was highly regarded by Saturday Night art director, Bruce Ramsay. I had recently contributed a photograph of Peter C. Newman for an essay on how Canadians perceived water. This was for the one hundredth anniversary issue (derided by many to call the cover, which was a dull and uniform gray, the tombstone). I called up Ramsay to ask him to look for candidates in Toronto who might be keen on the job of moving to Vancouver. A couple of days later he called me to say, “Alex those who can don’t want to, and those who want to, can’t.”

I told Parry that the situation was getting desperate and that we needed to find a local art director. I knew of one who was working for a competing magazine and I knew he was not happy at his job there. Parry gave him the job.

One of the first orders of business for the new art director was to call me to his office to tell me, “You are history, here, as Director of Photography.”

Suddenly I had no office and nobody kowtowed when I subsequently entered the premises just as a photographer. I no longer had photographers and illustrators calling me up to invite me for lunch. I was suddenly and most definitely a nobody.

I learned my lesson and I never again accepted any kind of job that would have given me administrative obligations and a title. I have fiercely, to the detriment of good paying work, stuck to my guns of remaining and independent, a free lancer.

Back to Net Nation, who without prior warning (they used to send me cautionary emails in the past) pulled the plug on my web page with its ancillary blog yesterday. The reason was the non payment of a $13.38 yearly fee controlling under their wing my domain name (alexwaterhousehayward.com).

Once I dealt with a pleasant Rumanian tech-support man talking to me from his home country last night, I thought it would all fix itself. He told me that the auto-renew segment of my web page account was not set to that. I had made sure last year that the folks at Net Nation fixed so that this would not happen. But it did. The pleasant Rumanian predicted it would take 24 hours for my web page to come back.

Net Nation sent me emails in the middle of the night to inform me that I was up. This was not the case and I insisted they look into it.


We are sorry for the inconvenience caused; we can assure you that your website is up and running. You were not seeing it on your end most likely because of a DNS cache, in other word, your local computer "remembered" the old information (the website being down) and that is what you see. The DNS should be refreshed after you reboot or after a while and you should see your site up and running.


I first purged my DNS Cache (they told me that my computer was still looking for the address of the previous address). I was proud of myself that I was able to do that. No web page.

Then they asked me for my IP Address and for something called a traceroute output:

If you are still unable to load your website, it is possible that the cause is an IP block set on our end. In order to determine if this is the case, please reply back and provide us with:


1. Traceroute output to the website.


2. Your local IP address.


The first will show if you are unable to load the site from your location due to an IP block that has been set on our end. The second will let us know which is your IP so that we can unblock it.


We await your reply.


If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us again.




This I have done, and am I proud of myself! But no web page. No blog. In fact I am going to post this now. You will see it, I will not! To be fair, Net Nation has been polite and helpful (still no web page, no blog) and it is fruitless for me to get angry. The web page and the blog will come back, but more than ever I will understand just how fleeting is what we think of permanence. And so much for my permanent presence on the web.

Monday, January 03, 2011


It is human nature to compare and to contrast. And it is human nature to have favourites. There was a time, about four years ago when my granddaughter Rebecca (she is 13 and a bit now) would ask me, “What’s your favourite…?” Sometimes the questions were strange. As an example she might have asked me, “Which is your favourite cracker?”

My two daughters, Alexandra and Hilary were born at a three and a half year interval. My mother moved with us to our home in Mexico City in 1971. She had helped finance its purchase. Luckily my Rosemary and my mother got along very well. Both Rosemary and I worked long hours so my mother took care of Ale and did so until Ale was 4, which is when my mother died. I remember arriving home and listening to my mother say, “That Ale is a terca (stubborn). Today she refused to read her books with me and threw them out of the window.” My mother was almost in tears.

Before my mother had moved in with us she had sent a lovely dress for Ale from Chicago’s Marshall Fields when she had been visiting her son (my uncle) Tony. She always told us how much she loved Ale.

Then Hilary was born. My mother never had a chance to get to know Hilary as my mother was dead before Hilary was one. When she first gazed on Hilary the only nice thing she could say was, “She has beautiful hands.”

I see this pattern of having a favourite daughter and granddaughter repeating itself. It has to be human nature and all one can do is to try one’s best. For a long time my eldest was my favourite. Then she became quite independent. She lives in Lillooet. Sometimes when she visits I feel I don't know her. Then when I look at her sister, Hilary, who smiles just like my mother I feel complete tenderness for her. Is this a case of shifting favourites?

When Rebecca was six or seven we might have seen Gunga Din together. Now I cannot really watch with her films to match her age of 13 because her younger sister is around. I have to look for films that both can watch. That's tough if one eliminates the animated films (which I mostly deplore).

So my wife and I are trying some tricks. Rosemary and I both saw The King’s Speech. Rosemary then took Rebecca to see that film. Rebecca enjoyed it. Meanwhile I had taken Lauren to the Alberta Ballet’s Nutcracker at the Queen Elizabeth. I had seen a few Nutcrackers with Rebecca in the past. This time around it was just Lauren.

With Rebecca Rosemary and I traveled to Washington DC, Argentina, Uruguay, and Mexico three times. Lauren was left out because she was too young. This year we four plan to visit my friend Mike East and his partner Letty García in their South Texas ranch. This will be the first time that Rosemary and I travel with both granddaughters.

I love to photograph Rebecca but I have problems taking pictures of Lauren. She has a terrible and uncontrollable habit of closing her eyes for a majority of exposures. In the beginning I would get angry (shouting at a stutterer?) and of course it did not help at all. Little by little Lauren has improved a bit. I took 16 exposures of Lauren with different animal toys that were all previously owned by her mother and her aunt. She managed to close or semi close her eyes for half of them. But there are a few good ones. The one here proves that.

I will have to be more patient and wait for Lauren to catch up. Meanwhile I can report that I have been astounded by one difference that to me is fascinating. When I photograph Rebecca it seems that my portraits penetrate and expose her soul. With Lauren there seems to be a barrier. It is an intriguing one which I hope some day to penetrate. Meanwhile I enjoy watching how Lauren watches me without revealing in the least what her thoughts might be.

At the Nutcracker she did not ask me one thing. I mentioned, “There are going to be some giant mice, soon.” She replied, “I know.” The growing Christmas tree and the loud bang of the cannon did not startle her at all. She took it all as normal, part of the show.

Lauren is an enigma. She is my favourite enigma.

Sunday, January 02, 2011

Photo by Amy Chin

Rosemary and I have avoided New Year ’s Eve parties like the plague. One of the last ones we ever attended was a bash at Gary Taylor’s Rock Room where Roy Forbes (formerly known as Bim) sang out:


Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne?

while reading the lyrics from a piece of  torn paper!

Then, since Rosemary and I were up front we were sprayed by Forbes with Mëoet Chandon (the best!). Three Polish sailors came up to me and congratulated me for looking like Roman Polanski.

For me the idea of embracing someone I don’t know to wish them a happy new year’s is anathema, because it is uncomfortable. I make the exception with Polish sailors who for some three years after our first meeting sent me Christmas cards addressed to Alex (Roman) Watehouse-Hayward (Polanski).

Rosemary and I remember New Year’s past in Veracruz, Mexico at my mother’s. All the docked ships and those waiting to be berthed would sound their sirens and horns. We also remember another, 1968, in Mexico City. We had just been married and we were invited to the house of my friend Raúl Guerrero Montemayor. He had a friend, a Hungarian countess, Andrea Csáky who had escaped the Communist regime of her Hungary with only a few carpets and the man who  was to be her husband. The countess had brought a box of  lead soldiers and a silver spoon. Raul had a fireplace. She held the spoon in the fire with bits of lead in it. She told us this was German custom called bleigießen which literally means “lead pouring.” When the lead melted she poured it quickly into a bowl of water. The water immediately cooled the lead into pieces, no two of which were alike.

She retrieved the cooled lead pieces from the water for inspection. Sometimes she held the pieces up to a light to see if the shadow helped determine what shape the lead piece was. Whatever shape the lead was she told us it (one melting per person) helped predict what would happen to us in the coming year.

Since then Rosemary and I have quietly removed ourselves from any celebration of the New Year and we opt for staying in bed. There is one custom that persists which Rosemary learned from my mother. It is a Spanish custom. She buys grapes on the morning of New Year’s Eve. The idea is to eat twelve grapes, one for each bonging of our old French mantle clock. If the grapes are sweet (and they always are as Rosemary is an expert grape picker!) we will have 12 pleasant months in the coming year.

It was sometime around 2pm on the 31st that our friend Paul Leisz suggested that we all (including his partner Amy Chin) go for early dinner at the Mad Greek Restaurant on Westminster Highway and close to Minoru Blvd in Richmond. We found the name of the restaurant odd and Rosemary knows I detest retsina and calamari. I am so ignorant of Greek food that I call tzatziki, Suzuki sauce which I do tolerate. In years past (the 80s) when Orestes was the king of Greek restaurants in Vancouver I was commanded to attend Vancouver Magazine Christmas parties or such similar functions in either an Orestes on West Broadway or the one on Pacific Avenue. Both restaurants featured belly dancers which I loathe. I have a particular distaste for the little finger bells that these dancer play.

Rosemary and I showed up at the Mad Greek Restaurant (owned by a Greek Mr Liapis and his Chinese wife) with some concerns. We sat down with Paul and Amy. The restaurant is the largest Greek establishment in Richmond and it was full. It seemed odd to be in such an establishment and yet be in Richmond. We had been informed that we had to vacate the premises by 8:30 as the restaurant then would host a special new year’s celebration (belly dancers, perhaps? Dish throwing, perhaps?) This suited me fine as I wanted to be home early enough to see the New Year from the confines of my comfortable bed.

Our waitress had a jet black hair and was a dead ringer for that famous sultry Greek ruler of Egypt who might have had an affinity for snakes. I asked her (our waitress) if she feared snakes. She did not. She was pleasant, talkative and almost made me forget I was in a Greek restaurant even if I knew that she was, an authentic Greek. That she spoke perfect Spanish (a Master’s from UBC) made it all that much more pleasant for me. I asked her what Kotosoupa Avgolemono was. This was an item in the limited menu of the day (I was not going to be saved by being able to order pizza!). She told me it was Greek chicken soup. It was delicious. Rosemary and I shared one. We all had some sort of souvlaki (I ordered chicken and Rosemary lamb) and stuck to plain water and opted out of Greek gasoline wine.

The Liapis Family (aka The Mad Greeks)

The experience, I must admit, was most pleasant. The company was great, the food just right. When I asked our waitress if I could order some Turkish coffee she told me that not only did they not have it, they did not have the Greek version (Greek coffee, perhaps?). I asked her if we could throw our plates at a corner. She told us this quaint Greek custom had been banned by the Richmond authorities. It seems some musician of a new year’s celebration past had been injured by a flying dish fragment.

We left for home feeling comfortable inside and knowing that our friend Paul and Amy had made this New Year’s Eve celebration a success. And I must admit, too that Amy can take some darn mean good photos as this one here proves.

Rosemary did bring a plastic bag with grapes. We counted out 12 for each one of us and even though there was no bonging clock (it was 8:15) we rapidly consumed them for good luck in this year of 2011.