"Go East. young man".
The End!
But as those of you who suffered through all my series of tales over in the Lounge know, I grew up on the East coast.
The time was the 60s. I was in California. Marina Del Rey was still just getting started, they had built parts of the two channel sea walls but not the cross wall at the mouth. Waves rolled in and got funneled up between the two sea wall until they became a wave as high as the rocks themselves.
I was not making very much money so we had an apartment on the cheap side, a place called Venice. It was convenient though; straight up Sepulveda and over Little Santa Monica to the office which was just two doors from Frederick's of Hollywood.
Even way back then, parking in LA was scarce and so the office had lifts in the back, first car in parked on a lift and raised it up to double the available parking spots. We were designing and building CATV systems up and down the West coast and inland to Idaho and Arizona.
What was not scarce were beautiful young women. This was the era of see through blouses, topless gas station attendants (a neighbor always bought gas a gallon at a time just to get the free window wash) and even topless waitresses at the Hamburger Hamlet.
One day we went there for lunch and after ordering drinks, were working on a design for a future system in a new city being built south of LA in Orange County (mostly still orange groves back then). It would have all the utilities underground and so scheduling with the power and phone folk, maintenance and replacements issues and building infrastructure each utility could maintain without disrupting the other two were still totally new concepts and needed to be worked out.
Just about then the food and drinks arrived served by a beautiful (there were a bunch of them in case I forgot to mention it) young waitress and as she handed out the drinks her breast just grazed Al's martini. Without missing a beat he said "But I asked for an olive in my martini!"
Thus endeth the first lesson.
Bookmarks