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Eighteen More
Veterans Administration Medical Centers
Are Under The Ax
Ft. Howard Maryland
Veterans Administration Medical Center is the first VA
property that will be turned into a veteran and
non-veteran independent, assisted living and geriatric
care housing project. Eighteen more VAMCs are targeted
for the same drastic changes. If you are an American
military veteran, or someone who cares about veterans
issues, and one of these VAMCs, on the list that follows
later in this article, is not near your home, is not
your or your loved one’s source of medical care, it is
still important for you to be aware of what is
happening. Your VAMC could be next.
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Fort Howard, Maryland
Veterans Administration Medical Center
This concerns all of
America’s Military Veterans, though it is about a
Maryland Veterans Administration facility.
The Ft. Howard Veterans Administration Medical Center
property in Baltimore County Maryland is the last clean,
open waterfront property in the Baltimore area that is
not developed to the hilt. That is about to change. The
property is about to become home to many residents when
a housing project, named Bayside at Ft. Howard, is to be
built there where people can rent living space in a
continuing care senior housing community. The future
residents of Bayside will not be required to have served
in the United States military to qualify to be eligible
to rent there. It is not going to be a veterans
facility. It is a “mixed use” project, with veterans
given preferences on placement in rental units and some
discount on their rent. Those residents are going to
need substantial incomes or savings to be able to afford
to live there.
An Italian Nice
Guy
Tony was a nice little
Italian immigrant man who came up, from New Jersey, to
hunt Black Bears at the Maine hunting lodge where I
worked guiding bear hunters. He was there on a one week
trip with a six-man party of Italian guys from New
Jersey and New York. I learned a lot about him that week
from his hunting buddies, from what he talked about and
by the way that he handled himself.
The House Fire
In
the summer of 1968, I turned eighteen years old. I spent
fifteen days of that summer vacationing at my Uncle
Finley’s hunting lodge in Moro, Maine. On one of those
days, I was called upon to help out at a house fire.
The Day I Fell I Love With Patten, Maine
I
laid in bed that night thinking about how easy goin’,
peaceful and levelheaded Patten People are and how
bright, happy, good looking and friendly the teenagers
in town are and I went to sleep that night knowing that
I had fallen head over heels in love with Patten, Maine.
The Rocket
Scientist
One
of the most powerful examples of my experiences as a
bear hunting guide was the time that a Washington, D.C.
Rocket Scientist darn near shot my head off. It happened
in the summer of 1969, when I was a nineteen-year-old
kid from the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, working at
my uncle's hunting lodge in northern Maine.
Jungle Dirt
Jerry looked at Sam with
deep respect, admiration and wonder because of Sam’s
ability to make it through the mud and blood of Vietnam
without a scratch. Two of Jerry’s high school buddies
had been killed in Vietnam, and the nightly TV news
reports of body counts and filmed scenes of tired,
frustrated warriors had sickened him to the point that
he wouldn't watch the news anymore. Also, like many
other nineteen-year-old American lads at that time, he
was expecting to receive his military draft notice any
day.
Consequently, Sam was especially impressive to him.
Bananastein
Franky
Violet, Town Cop and Carpenter had misspoken those words
at a town hall meeting in Patten, Maine back in 1969.
That was the first time that local marihuana users were
the subject of discussion at a public forum in that
small New England town, which is nestled in The Katahdin
Valley area. Franky was sure that he knew who was
bringing the stuff into the area from the outside, and
who was buying, selling and smoking it. He had declared
a one-man war against the potheads.
The Easiest Way
to Carry a Dead Bear or My Uncle Finley Couldn't Handle
It
The
dead male black bear weighed 372 lb. on Katahdin Lodge
and Camp’s official scale. That hefty, dead bruin had
been shot and killed, at a bear bait, by one of the
lodge’s paying hunters. It was the biggest bear that had
ever been loaded up into a pickup truck bed by just two
men from the lodge, prior to that July day in 1969.
My VW Bug Trip to Maine
In June of 1970, I was on military leave from the U.S.
Army and was spending a week up at Katahdin Lodge and
Camps in Patten, Maine. My Uncle Finley owned the Lodge
and I had worked there for him and my Aunt Martha during
the year previous to me entering the Army. In May 1970,
I had graduated from U.S. Army Photographic Laboratory
Technician School and was assigned to report to my new
duty station on Okinawa in June. While I was attending
photo lab tech school, I had bought a white 1961
Volkswagen Beetle with a sunroof. Man o’ day that VW Bug
was fun to drive.
Then They Own
You
On my first day back at the Lodge, I got to do something
which I had wanted to do for a very long time, drive a
four wheel drive Chevy Suburban. I had wanted to buy a
Suburban since 1969, when I found out that Suburbans
have seats enough for seven other people to go along
with me on outdoor adventures but with the seats folded
down a snowmobile can fit in the back or a couple of
campers can sleep back there. The Lodge owned one
Suburban and two pick-up trucks; all were equipped with
two-way radios, and there was a base station to the
radio system in the lodge. |
