Over the years, I have had some strange and unusual things happen in my life. I call them 'coincidences' for lack of a better word. Especially since I don't believe in fate, luck, an 'invisible hand', etc. I think on the days these happened, though, it wouldn't have hurt to have bought a lottery ticket.
I have come to the realization from these events that I have to toe-the-line in whatever I do because it is very likely that there will be someone there, wherever 'there' might be, who will be able to point at me and say "Hey! I know that guy!" It's an awful burden.
1. I lived the first 16 years of my life in Southern California; specifically, Manhattan Beach, La Puente, and Whittier. The first three years of my four high school years were spent at Whittier's Pioneer High School. In the summer between my junior and senior years, I moved to Houston, Texas, and finished my high school 'career' there. As the school ended, I received a letter from the Selective Service advising me that I needed to register for the draft. This scared me silly. At the time, I gave little thought to the fact that, as a 17-year-old, I did not need to register until I turned 18. Since it was questionable at best not where, but if I went to college, I visited the Navy recruiter in downtown Houston. A couple of weeks later, I was on a plane to the U.S. Naval Training Center, Great Lakes, Illinois, just up Lake Michigan from Chicago.
The Recruit Training Center at Great Lakes was packed full of recruits. A spinal meningitis outbreak at the Recruit Training Center, San Diego had closed that base and all recruits were being sent to Great Lakes. Drill halls and circus-type tents set up on the parade grounds were filled with bunkbeds to house the deluge of incoming recruits. It was so crowded, that normal processing of recruits had gone out the window. We recruits were put in line for one type of processing, completed it, then got in line for lunch, then into another processing line. It went like this for a week or so.
The cafeterias were constantly running. Seating was a catch-as-catch-can affair. One day at lunch, I found a seat, sat down and began eating. The recruit across from me, got up and left, to be replaced immediately by another in his seat.
Hardly looking up to notice the recruit who sat down across from me, I was startled when he said "hello, Dale." I looked at him, but, he looked like me and the thousands of recruits around us with shaved heads. I had a moment's hesitation trying to place the voice and face (mentally adding hair to the head). It suddenly dawned on me that this was an ex-schoolmate from my high school in Whittier. Out of the thousands of recruits on the base, all pretty much looking like one another with their shaved heads and dungarees, an old buddy sits down across from me in the mess hall.
2. I lived for a few years in an apartment complex in Nassau Bay, Texas. It was close to work and the neighbors were friendly and we partied a lot together. One Christmas, I drove up to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to visit my mom and sisters. When I arrived and got settled, my brother-in-law and I went out to get some firewood from along Lake Michigan. We stopped at a K-Mart so I could buy some heavy duty gloves. While walking down one of the aisles, I noticed a girl walking up the aisle. We both looked at each other with a startled look of partial recognition: we knew we had met, but did not know where. It finally dawned on one of us (I forget now which one). She was the sister of my next door neighbor in Nassau Bay. She had come down to visit him some months back and I had attended one of his parties while she was there. They were both raised in Grand Rapids and their parents lived in Grand Rapids.
Further, her brother was in the store somewhere. I found him standing in the checkout line. I got in line behind him and bumped him. He took a half-step forward. I bumped him again. He took another half-step forward. I bumped him yet again. He whipped around and froze with a confused look on his face. He KNEW he was in a store in Grand Rapids, but here was his next door neighbor behind him in line.
3. While taking some classes at the local community college, a history instructor there was advertising for a Christmas/New Year's break trip to Europe. The price was right and, after the first pre-trip planning meeting, the others in the group seemed like a good bunch. We went to Amsterdam for 5 days, Lucern for 5 days--where we spent Christmas, and Salzburg for 5 days--where we spent New Year's. While in Salzburg, we took a trip by train to Badgastein, a ski resort sports area about an hour away. I had never skied before, so after taking lessons, we went out on the bunny slopes to play. At the day's end, we jumped on the train and went back to Salzburg.
Two weeks later, back at work at Johnson Space Center, I was walking through the lobby of one of the buildings at work. A secretary who knew me stopped and told me she had been to friend's house on the other side of Houston to see slides of her friend's trip to Europe. Her friend showed a slide of her son skiing, and my secretary friend was easily able to identify ME skiing by in the background. Her friend was on her own tour of Europe with her son and not a part of our group.
4. In 1965, during a one-year assignment to the Naval Communications Station at Keflavik, Iceland, I was assigned temporary duty onboard the U.S. Navy icebreaker, U.S.S. Edisto. It's mission was, after picking up additional crewmembers at Keflavik, to punch its way up into the Arctic ice pack and rescue some scientists who were stranded on an ice island. The airstrip on the island had cracked, preventing any aircraft from landing and rescuing them. As the ice island floated farther south into the warmer waters of the Denmark Straits between Greenland and Iceland, the ice island would break up even further. The icebreaker's job was to rescue them before that happened.
When I first got onboard and got familiar with the radio 'shack' where I was to spend my on-duty time. I found out there was a amateur radio station onboard, as well. I located it and the operator pretty quickly (the ship was only about 180 feet long). He checked me out on the equipment and we spent the next month in the ice pack making phone patches back to the States for the crewmembers. It was great duty on that ship: stand watch in the radio shack transmitting and receiving messages--there were a couple of reporter's onboard and they were sending out +1,000 word news reports each day. Then I would spend another 8 or 10 hours in the ham 'shack' making phone patches. The rest of the time was spent hanging over the bow (this was pre-"I'm King of the World!") watching us break ice (it is actually very beautiful--the initial break extends the depth of the ice, going from the white surface ice to dark, dark blue ice, before the water rushes in.
The scientists were finally retrieved from their predicament and the Edisto dropped me and the other TDY sailors back at Keflavik and proceeded on to their home port at Boston.
15 years went by.
One night, I was talking with--actually, I was using Morse code--another ham radio operator in South Carolina, via my amateur radio station at home in Houston. He mentioned something about the Navy. I said I had been in the Navy and was once stationed in Iceland. He said he had a friend who had been on an Icebreaker. I told him I had been TDY on the icebreaker Edisto for a month. He said his friend had been on the Edisto and was the only ham onboard. I told him about the guy I had met who took care of the ham station onboard. We were talking about the same person. The SC ham said he had a regular schedule to meet his friend each week. He gave me the time, frequency, and his friend's callsign. A week or two later, I tuned in on the frequency at the specified time, heard his callsign, and gave him a call. We had a great contact talking about that adventure up into the Arctic ice pack.
5. On a similar ham radio-related coincidence, I began my ham radio 'career' when I was 13 years old and living in Whittier, California. I belonged to the Rio Hondo Amateur Radio Club there. At one of the meetings, the program was a presentation on Standing Waves by an engineer from Bell Laboratories. It was an extremely interesting and graphic demonstration of standing waves using a wave machine made out of forty or fifty black white-tipped rods attached to piano wire. As one rod end was raised and let go, the 'wave' of that one rod was passed to the next and the next, creating a traveling wave effect. I remember after the presentation speaking with the presenter about standing waves and his wave machine.
30 years later, after calling CQ (general call to any amateur radio operator) on one of the amateur radio frequency bands, again using Morse code, a ham in Nevada called me. We exchanged the usual initial info (signal report, location, name, etc.) and the conversation progressed. He mentioned that he was retired from Bell Labs. I commented back about the presentation at Rio Hondo ARC meeting. He said he was one of two people in L.A. County who used to do those presentations at that time (~1959/1962 and it was likely he who was the presenter since Whittier was only a few miles from his home.
6. While in the Navy and after a 3-month cruise in the Caribbean aboard the USS Okinawa, we finally arrived back at our homeport, Norfolk, Virginia. I was eligible for a couple of weeks leave and so, called home to give my family the news. My mom was very excited and questioned me about whether I had, in the last year or flown down to Houston without telling her. I said "no, why?" She said she would explain when I arrived home.
When I did arrive home and had gotten settled, mom gave me an envelope she had received in the mail a couple of days before. It was addressed to Mrs. Dale L. Martin at our old address from about a year ago. I opened it and it was a doctor's bill for the removal of a fishhook from Mrs. Martin's hand. This had me puzzled. I was not married. I had not been home in the last year. And I certainly didn't know a Mrs. Dale L. Martin. The next day, I drove over to our old place and knocked on the door. I asked th woman who answered the door if she was Mrs. Martin. She said she was. I then asked if she was Mrs. Dale L. Martin, and again, she said she was. I told her I was Dale L. Martin and I used to live here in this very house before I went into the Navy. I then handed her the doctor's bill explaining it had been forwarded to my new address and had caused my mom some concern. It turned out that the Martin's had moved in to the house about three weeks ago. On my way home, I stopped at the local post office and told the postmaster what had happened. He didn't have a clue as to how only that one piece of mail and no others had been forwarded, except that maybe someone had substituted for someone else either on the route or in the sorting area and recognized my name as one that needed to be forwarded due to an old change of address card.
