This is Post #8 in the new Series “Going to Afghanistan”.

Air Mail Envelope with air tissue Hotel writing paper - Two Dollars Hong Kong postage stamp with the head of Queen Elizabeth, purple ink with royal crowns and swastika motifs in the corners.

Hotel Miramar - 134 Nathan Rd. - Kowloon, Hong Kong
Cable address “MIRAMAR” Telephone No. 61261-9

26 Sept. 1958

Dearest Lloydine, Don and Ken,

Thought I might write on the plane coming down from Tokyo but it was so late they turned off the lights and everyone slept.  Hong Kong has built up in the last seven years.  There are many new buildings, newly paved streets and twice as many people.

The Miramar (hotel) is quite satisfactory.  It too has expanded but it is still reasonably priced, neat clean and comfortable.  It is not fancy.  After talking to a couple who were married in Kabul I decided to get a suit of clothes here.  I get twenty-four hour tailoring service but have been tied down because of fittings.

I’ve met a Dick (Richard) & Jane Koken from Salem, Oregon and San Francisco who are going to New Delhi as mentioned before.  Last night we had dinner together at Aberdeen’s  on Hong Kong Island at the world famous floating restaurant.  The Kokens have invited you to stop for a visit in New Delhi.

I could write a book about my trip so far.  Wednesday I visited Pacific Architects in Tokyo where I saw their operations.  We have many mutual acquaintances including Grafton.  We had lunch in the old part of the Imperial Hotel.  I’m completely captivated by the Old Imperial.  It has charm and feeling beyond description short of a whole book.

At three o’clock on Wed. I went to she Suehiro in the Telecommunications in Japan.  He was delighted!  The Ministry then sent him a big Packard to take me sightseeing in Tokyo!  We drove by the Imperial Palace and up to the main gate.  We  saw parks, famous Ginza Street and Tokyo University.  Finally we had a snack in a Japanese restaurant!  You should see me handle chopsticks.

This morning it is raining.

I’m sending my first roll of film.  I hope I have some pictures.  Without this new camera I would not have had light enough for most of my efforts.  I hope they aren’t too bad.  I’m sure I’ve muffed some of them.

I must close now and pack for today’s’ flight.

I wish you were here and that we could travel together.  Lots of love.
Fred & Father

The Miramar is very near the much more magnificent Peninsula Hotel, which really was expensive and snobbish even then in a way that only British grand hotels could be.  He could have stayed at the Peninsula, but probably remembered too well the story about when Bing Crosby was thrown out of the Hotel Vancouver because he did not have a Tux to wear for dinner.  Fred lived for five months in a hotel just about across the street from the Vancouver when he was working in Vancouver B.C. on the new trans-Canada gas line project immediately after his return from Burma.

The “I could write a book” theme followed Fred throughout his life.  He had the experiences and talent to justify and write no end of stories but engineering always came first in the economy of time.  Another factor is that Fred was left-handed and found it difficult to write longhand which is why his letters are often short.   He never really learned to type, his fingers were short and wide, his hands large and the typewriter keyboards were designed then for the women (and their hands) that did most of the western world’s typing.  The keyboards and computers of today might have made all the difference in enabling Fred’s’ writing life, but they came out too late to make a difference.

My transcriptions of his brief notes and letters will have to do.

Note:  There is of course the other half of this trip to Afghanistan; the life and letters from the family left behind.  Every invasion of Afghanistan for the last two thousand years has involved these families left behind, not invited to march with Alexander or participate in the founding of Kandahar.  Tamerlane’s troops had families too, and the followers of Genghis Khan and the British “Kipling’s soldiers” and the Russians more recently - they all had families back at home, waiting for the life and death decisions, waiting for their loved ones to return or to be told of an often unmarked Afghan grave.

But now the US ships its bodies home.  It did too in 1958.  There was always risk of death in the foreign service; civilian or military doesn’t matter; the dieing is all the same and it is a basic tenant of traditional Islam that one cannot predict their time and place of death.  That was the outrage of the “Persian” poet Omar Khayyam when in the Rubaiyat ones own death was predicted.  Omar Khayyam was an Afghan by birth, he was born in Afghanistan.  The Omar Khayyam Restaurant in San Francisco was long one of the cities best, to even go there was a special occasion.  The inspiration for the Grateful Dead music group logo and first cover was taken directly from the most popular printed version of the Rubaiyat.

However, I wander and I digress.  The point is that the family left behind, in this case “Lloydine, Don and Ken”, continued a life in America that was now increasingly overshadowed by life (or the possibility of death) in Afghanistan.  There was no Twitter then, no web; telephone calls were almost impossibly expensive; daily contact could only be made by mail, and even by air mail was always delayed.  Messages would cross and miss over the Atlantic or the Pacific or get stopped in Karachi or a field office someplace else or maybe even get lost in the Department of State MailRoom - Washington 25, DC.

A waiting wife may be patient, but she must also be brave; more so if she has children.  It is for the home fires why people fight, or for Empire.  Wives can understand the home fire part, Empire not so much.

It may be argued that it is the mans’ work that is important, his life, what he does each day.  The TV Show Madmen set about this same period of time argues differently, argues the case for women in New York; big houses or more single girls, glamorous and romantic.  It really wasn’t like that in the big picture, it’s the little pictures that make the series work, the household things, the fads, the “I remember that” toaster in the corner.

Lloydine might not have been an average wife, but she lived a life more typical than those that lived in the east.  There was the expression then, “a typical New Yorker” or “A typical easterner” which was a stereotype of course, constituted “profiling”; perhaps even had a religious bent, a cultural bias certainly.

The point is that Lloydine lived in the west, in Nevada and had deep California roots with no small measure of Oregon, spiced with a bit of Kansas (but Kansas may or may not be west).  If you find her letters portray women a bit differently than Madmen you are probably right or you get my point (or something).

Anyway, the letters begin on September 26, 1958.  They represent “her” side of the story; her being Lloydine and not necessarily me, though I am mentioned fairly often, at least in passing, maybe more often than I realize.

The lyrics to “West” can be found under January of 1922.  Needless to say they didn’t build a Broadway Play around the lyrics but the Song and poem were wildly popular when Hoover (a Californian, westerner, and engineer) was President which is probably why the Dust Bowl people went west, not east, when everything fell apart.

The Hotel Miramar still exists, but it has changed beyond recognition.  This is what it looked like circa 1958

Hong Kong Island looking toward the tramway in 1958.  Fred was impressed by how much things had changed from 1951.

Another view of the Hong Kong Island waterfront and Hong Kong Harbor in 1958.

Fred liked taking pictures of people engaged in everyday life.  Here a sampan is pictured, for the owners it is both workplace and home.

[First posted:  2010.02.28 / Sunday - Hong Kong has changed, but it’s more about Tokyo]