USAFA GRADUATE GET-TOGETHER

Bill Zersen

A great time was had on 3 March when Grads from the Orange County Chapter of the AOG gathered at Bill Zersen’s condo in Laguna Woods. It was a “bring a hors d’oeuvres to share” gathering where Bill set up the bar. A flyer announcing the party is attached.

The “Cornbread Washtub Band” (also currently known as “The Bayou Gators”) of JD (71) and Debbie McBriety (she played the Washtub bass) serenaded us with all sorts of music from Gospel, Country and Western and Zydeco. JD has written a number of parodies of well known songs which were hilarious – plus, everyone could sing along on the choruses!

As per usual, we ended the gathering all singing the Air Force song! Copies of the words were made available to the women attending the gathering (assumption was that all the GRADS still knew the words!)! Are the “doolies” still even required to memorize it? Or is the song passé with the reduction of fighter aircraft and the rise of the drones?

Those signed up for attendance were:

However, there is a bug going around here that requires an antibiotic to stop it – so our numbers were diminished! But, as you can see, the grads for our get-togethers normally come from a wide area of Southern California.

Also in attendance (Bill’s neighbor) was Wally Henningsen, 90 years old and a Pearl Harbor survivor . . . .

Wally ended up a Chief Pharmacist’s Mate when he left the Navy in 1946 (Chief in 6 years of active duty). At the time of Pearl, he was in the dispensary and the building was just missed by a Japanese airplane that crashed next to the building. If I am not mistaken, the Library of Congress has the write-up of his military experiences. By the way, Wally still plays golf and cribbage and donates his time to our local library!

One of Wally’s stories, when he was on a destroyer, was to deceive the Japanese to think that we had a lot of destroyers. The destroyer he was on would get up close to the Japanese and when detected, made a hasty retreat. Our destroyers could outrun anything the Japanese had. Once out of sight, the Captain would have the destroyer change the numbers on their ship and they would do it again.

One of the things I did this time – and I have never heard of anyone doing this way before – was to set up name tags so you knew who the woman came with! The Grad’s tag had their first name and below it the Graduation Class. The women had their first name on the tag with the Grads first name below theirs. Makes it a lot simpler to help figure out who came with who!(whom?)

The food, as typical of one of our gatherings, was way more than we could eat! However, Bill’s rule is that if the food you brought was not completely consumed, the person bringing it had to take it home! Eliminates a lot of throw out and Bill doesn’t have to gain excessive weight eating all of it!

By the way, the temp hit about 75 and it was a beautiful day!!!!!!!!!!! And where are you living? We were able to use Bill’s porch; therefore, we serenaded the local community – this included a number of people walking by (probably to see what was going on!).

>Here are a few other pictures from the party:

For those who might like to have some great entertainment for a party, contact JD and Debbie at www.cornbreadentertainment.com. They travel quite extensively especially doing charity events. This is the 2nd time we have had him at one of our parties.