Nearly seven decades ago, my father was an aspiring assistant district manager for Gulf Oil and his immediate boss, a fellow by the improbable name of Birch Zehner, had just been promoted to be the new manager of Gulf Oil in the Philippines. He and his wife came to our little house in Dayton one Saturday night - I remember it clearly as the Saturday Night Fights were on TV brought to you by Gillette Blue Blades (How are you fixed for blades...the advertising jingle went) and I remember them sitting on the corner sofa in our living room before I was hustled off to bed. That was the night he asked my dad if he wanted to go with him and be his assistant there.
The pot sweetener was that my dad, an avid golfer, would get a membership in the Wack Wack Golf Club in Manila's Mandaluyong City - the central part of Manila. If you note the picture to the left and the tall office buildings and then go up to the golf course picture - well you see Mandaluyong from either the urban Shaw Boulevard or from the luxury of the first tee.
My dad, some 8-9 years before had spent a rather horrific couple of years at war there and when the offer came up, Gulf was willing to fly him and my mom there to "take a look". My mom was all for the adventure of at least "looking - what does it hurt to look". My dad got as far as a refueling stop - in Hawaii I think - and he recounted to me that when they got off the plane to stretch, he was overcome by the smell of the tropics and had his "flashback" moment to the war and his mind was made up to say no even before they got there.
He mentioned his trip to me only once and how being greeted at the airport and whisked to a luxury hotel, shown a home of utter luxury compared to 334 Fountain Avenue in Dayton and then to lunch and golf at Wack Wack he was very much overwhelmed by the opportunity and clearly could see it to be a choice handed down from Olympus but it was too vivid in other ways and he admitted, when he could talk about such things at all, that he couldn't figure how to conquer the memories.
Slipping into my "graceful years" I wonder how dramatically my life would have changed growing up there instead of here - how it would be to call Wack Wack my home course - living in a culture I am only beginning to understand and in a place amazingly distant. Manila in the 1950s might as well have been the moon to a kid in Dayton as for all I knew it was just west of Indiana. Not so my dad and I was just thinking about his aversion. Just now. 7 iron rattling in the garage.