Royce's Random Thoughts

Finally got the scans from my sister from "Front Page Detective" the magazine that featured my Dad in a story about finding illegal radio transmitters at Belmont Racetrack.



Sultry Cover is Sultry



That's my Dad, Raymond Leroy Day, in the upper right corner, demonstrating the gear the FCC confiscated.

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Reasons I Love the Internet (#512 in a series)

To the kids over to visit with my mom and have lunch with her. After lunch she dug out my dad's old jewelry case, asking if I was interested in one of his old rings (I wasn't. I don't wear any jewelry aside from my wedding ring). However I was interested in one artifact that Dad had held onto from his days as a radio operator for the OSS. During WWII he was assigned to monitor radio transmissions from OSS agents in Sicily, operating out of a hotel room in Corsica (after it was recaptured by the Allies). After the war ended and he was sent home to be demobbed, he held onto the key fob from the hotel he worked out of, which had the hotel's name and address on it.[1]

Some searching with Google Street View on Mom's computer revealed that not only was the hotel still there, it was still operating under the same name. I'm tempted to go there some day and see if I can stay in the room Dad worked out of, just to see what it might have felt like to him.

[1] Hotel Napolean Bonapate Ile Rousse to be precise.

Very strange, intense dream this morning that woke me up about a half hour ago. I was dreaming about a memory, if that makes any sense, of my Dad being part of a Space Cowboys style Apollo mission to the moon, using refurbished Apollo era equipment to fix something there He did this just a couple of years before he died, and if you had asked me immediately after I woke up, I could have described going down to Florida to watch the launch with my mom, watching the flight on the news, and our worry as they landed and only had intermittent communications with Earth.

This plainly ridiculous for a number of reasons. Never mind the idea of NASA actually having enough restorable Apollo equipment or the institutional memory to put it back together and pull off such a mission. My Dad, at the time I thought the flight was, would be older than John Glenn and suffering from emphysema after smoking for sixty+ years. Hardly astronaut material. Nevertheless, I was on the verge of Googling "Apollo 18" to convince myself it had happened when I first woke up. Because there was so much stuff my dad had done in his life that he hadn't told me about until he was close to dying*, that flying to the Moon and then not bothering to talk much about it would have been entirely in character with him.


*I had know, vaguely, that he had been in the OSS during WWII, and done one or two semi-impressive investigations with the FCC after the war, but until close to the end he'd never mentioned he flew on a blimp up and down the California coast looking for illegal radio transmitters. Or for that matter, most of his romance with my mom, which was sweet all of itself.