Hey, anybody still out there? My mind is churning with ideas about Henry I wish I would write – but have been a long time away from this machine.
Working from today backwards: Since tonight is put out the trash night, decided I needed to start moving junk out of the garage. The goal is at least one sack of junk out to the curb for this week. Yes, well - things only got rearranged. In the process I came across:
1. The hand forged brass door knocker in the shape of a dolphin, a symbol of Malta. This Maltese Dolphin door knocker has defined our every house since 1967, it’s been on the front door of our houses in: Tripoli, Marsa el Brega, three houses in Abqaiq, in Ras Tanura and in Dhahran. We moved to Fort Smith where it stayed in a packing barrel with the bell collection for two years. When we unpacked to the bottom of the barrel and found it, Henry sighed, and indicated we would get that thing up – somewhere. The front door of this house has a leaded glass center panel, so, “we would think of something.” The brass dolphin was put on a shelf in the garage, and tonight, fourteen years later, I rearranged it to another shelf.
How this Maltese Dolphin came into our possession: During the 1960s I was a seamstress – sort of – and owned a cheap and not very dependable sewing machine. Actually, I bought that machine at Sears, used but refurbished, with the first 75$ I earned working at Uncle John’s Pancake House at 9th and Fremont in Las Vegas the summer Henry and I met. Eight years later, I aspired to a Pfaff – the miracle German sewing machine. “Everyone” I knew who overnighted in Europe on their way back from the States bought a Pfaff at a duty free shop. Henry worked with a man in drilling who spent his days off in Malta. He offered to have his good friend buy the Pfaff for me in Germany and then keep it at his place in Malta; he would bring it back after his next days off rotation. So, we gave him the money – it was quite a bit in those days, can’t remember now, but seemed a fortune at the time.
The plot thickens here – I was teaching several piano students, among them a lovely lady teaching third grade at the Oil Company School. She and the drilling hand had been to the house a few times for dinner, chemistry was evident, and they were about to be married. He made one last trip to Malta, to “finish up some business” and bring back my machine which had been waiting in his apartment.
He returned to Tripoli the next week, and there he stood at our door – flushed and embarrassed, and gave me, not a sewing machine, but a beautiful hand forged brass door knocker, The Maltese Dolphin.
The story: He was keeping his British girlfriend at his place in Malta while he courted the school teacher in Tripoli. Like a dummy! he wrote the girlfriend, told her he had decided to marry the school teacher, he was coming to Malta to settle up affairs and basically say goodbye. He arrived in Malta to find that the girlfriend had cleaned out his bank account, his apartment, and flown the coop with everything, including my paid for Pfaff sewing machine.
He didn’t have the money now to buy another Pfaff, so, he brought me The Dolphin as a consolation offering. He was SO embarrassed. I LOVE this Dolphin. I relish the story. They lived happily ever after. I never heard what happened to the girl friend. And, I do not miss having a Pfaff. I do miss having The Maltese Dolphin on the front door. That is one thing we should have tended to years ago, before Henry left us…
2. On the shelf beside The Dolphin is the hanging bell from Liberty’s in London. This is in two pieces, the bell with a most decorative bracket. When one pulls the chain to ring the bell a gargoyle goes up and down. This was also at the bottom of the bell barrel. Also put in the garage, to consider later what to do. Also rearranged to another shelf tonight.
We bought this bell on one of our several trips to London while living in Tripoli. This was such an exciting era of discovery in our lives. We learned to buy Peter and Allison’s clothes at Marks and Spencer (served as our JC Penny), we strolled through Selfridges, and always visited Fortnum & Mason because they had a department, Expeditions, that supplied the famous food hampers for British explorers going into the heart of Africa in the 1800s, and the Himalayan ascents in the early 1900s. We would walk through this place and revel in history.
I knew nothing of The Liberty Store – it’s famous scarves, it’s signature fabrics, the marvelous window displays, the absolutely lovely three stories (or is it four?) of amazing things I never knew I wanted until then. Of course, Henry was well aware of The Liberty Store on Great Marlborough Street. He had read about it, and could hardly wait to take me there for the discovery tour. I found this bell in the home wares section – objects no home should be without! - I had to have it, and lugged it back to Tripoli in the suitcase. Again, it was installed by the front door – our visitors now not only heavily banged the Maltese Dolphin door knocker, they also tinkled the bell. This bell weathered Libya, but after being outside in Abqaiq, it corroded quickly (would that be the Abqaiq Plant spewing something into the air?) The Dolphin didn’t seem to mind, but the bell was disintegrating, so at each move, Henry installed it inside the house by the hanging bell collection. Here in Fort Smith, he simply refused to put two screw holes into the lovely wood of this new house, he “would think of something”, and so went the bell to the shelf in the garage with The Dolphin.
3. And, here in the garage, beside the Liberty’s bell and The Maltese Dolphin, in an old plastic sack, are six house number signs, in Arabic and English. Remember the green signs with silver numerals, squared in a white wood frame, by every front door of every house in the old sections of the Aramco residental compounds?
It was just a few weeks before we were to move back to the States, the packers were coming soon, and Tim Sandin stopped by to visit and say goodbye. Tim, The Collector. Tim, one of The Original Aramco Brats, he attended the first kindergarten class in Dhahran way back in the Stone Age. Tim started his working career with Aramco as a teacher. We met him when he first arrived in Abqaiq as am employee – but still a Brat! Our friendship blossomed from the day I walked into his third grade classroom just as he was depositing Andy Goff headfirst into the waste basket. Tim looked up as I came through the classroom door, his hands around Andy’s ankles, in my surprise I didn’t say much, (very uncharacteristic for me), Andy was restored to an upright position – grinning, and without skipping a beat, classroom instruction continued.
Now, twenty one years later, Henry and I were living in the old part of Dhahran. Entire sections of seven units in streets close to us were empty and about to be torn down. Tim and I got to talking about what a shame, all that Aramco history about to disappear; one thing lead to another, he and I left in his car with Henry calling from his black recliner while reading The International Herald Tribune – “you will be arrested, and if I can’t get you out of jail I am leaving without you” – Tim and I took a claw hammer, a little stepstool, and “saved” as many house number signs as we could manage to pry loose.
I always expected I would take them to an Aramco Reunion and find children of the families who lived in those houses and give them their house numbers. Wouldn’t they be surprised?
These signs are so heavy. Maybe I can pull it off anyway, at the Aramco Reunion in Las Vegas this year. Tim took many for his collection, I kept only six signs.
Finding these artifacts of our past jogs the memory over a notch to:
One day, while teaching a piano lesson in the row house in Abqaiq, the front door was open leaving the screen door closed to keep out the Saudi National Bird – I know, a silly thing to say, but you have never seen flies like we had there – when, suddenly a sound, a loud but muffled “poof-boom” and the screen door, of it’s own, popped open quite wide then gently slid to a close. Startled, I got up, walked out to the gate – nothing. Quiet. So strange. In just a few hours the word was out, someone in the section of row houses across the street had been running a still in their kitchen – it exploded, and according to rumor the woman was quite injured, the Company got the entire family out of the Kingdom within twelve hours, the husband’s job was terminated.
I never knew their identity.
Our generation of Aramcons arrived in the decade after the little book,The Blue Flame, was standard issue, so I never saw it while living in Arabia. Those who did run stills seemed to have a copy, I always heard. It was the company’s way of facing the fact that since this activity would go on, people needed to be informed on how to correctly assemble the apparatus and cook brew that would not cause blindness (as happened in Brega, two Libyan lab techs decided to try what their Western counterparts were doing, they used the company chemistry lab, drank their own brew, and did go blind.) Within the last five years, someone gave us a copy of the Blue Flame, so our Aramco artifact collection would be complete.
After the incident across the street I became aware: a family living down the alley from our row house had brew always in a state of cooking or fermenting. The lady of the house was not happy to have visitors, as I discovered one day, dropping in with my cinnamon rolls. She was running a clandestine operation, I was not welcome. They made their money and left quite soon – wealthy - were the rumors.
A couple in the tennis club took us on a tour of their home – two of the three bedrooms were devoted to brew in various stages of cooking or fermenting. I vaguely remember several stills, all bubbling away. It was as interesting a tour as the Jack Daniels Distillery in Tennessee! These people were very open about their monetary goals – they invested the money in gold bars and kept a Swiss bank account. They made a considerable fortune – according to the rumors – and retired to Switzerland, because someone reported them to the IRS so they could never return to the States without paying zillions in taxes on unreported income. This was a juicy revenge story, in which we all took a peculiar delight in their plight – rich, but stuck.
My Close Encounter: Had a friend, she an accomplished pianist, who did not bring over much music. I had lots of music. I would take my music to her house, we played piano duets on a weekly basis. I loved this, so enjoyed playing with her. One day we were sailing along, caught up in the glory of the thing, and the phone rang. I could hear her husband’s voice over the phone line from my perch on the piano bench - she was far into the kitchen. Husband was speaking urgently, loudly, excitedly, intensely. One has to understand that there seemed to be an unspoken arrangement in those days, between the local police, stationed just outside the Abqaiq gates, and the Company. There would be periodic unannounced searches of the compound for stills and the product, but there was a Gentleman’s Agreement that there would be an anonymous warning of about thirty minutes before The Raid commenced. Jobs hung in the balance – homes found with forbidden apparatus and liquids were immediately vacated, the residents returned to country of origin to look for other employment – or, so went the rumors.
After the shouting over the phone, the music ended. The wife sprang into action. She disconnected the still and attached a garden hose to a pump, the pump into the barrel, ran the hose through the house, out the back door of the kitchen and the brew drained into the alley.
While she was doing this I was frantically instructed that I would be in charge of popping the corks of twelve cases of bottles and pouring the fragrant liquid down the sink. We were quite rushed. I quickly devised a system of getting four or five bottles emptying into the sink at once. Major trouble was the corks – as my inexperience slowed me down considerably. However, got all twelve cases taken care of, stacked the empty bottles back into the boxes and put away into the closet – my! That did look innocent… I finally went home, as my job was finished, while my friend was still pumping the several barrels empty; the alley a river of golden liquid.
Henry was home by the time I returned. He was horrified. First, at my very fragrant aroma – the stuff splashed, I wasn’t dripping, but I reeked.
He could hardly grasp my story. “What if the police had arrived and found you pouring the stuff down the sink???? I would have lost my job. You could never shop in London again.”
(Now, that WAS a real threat.)
Truly, and in all innocence, I answered something to the effect that, “So? I am on their side!! I didn’t make it. I don’t drink it. I was getting rid of it. Isn’t that what they would want? “
It never did occur to me I would be guilty by association.
Ah well.
We finished before The Raid.
I was home.
My friend and husband were “innocent”.
Thus ended my Brew Story.
Much love to you still out there – Bonnie and the Cook Family