Coming up ahead. Yes its all pretty common for. A comfortable home we live in a car parked at the door. Apart from a kind of cool gadgets of all cars. Cool for every car has a right to expect going to be. Satisfying recreation for everybody. American you are. Here. To be. A. American very young. And i came from georgia my dad had a branch had a pump a shot and under still a major what we call back marketplace. 18 years old i decided mile just walking downtown seoul sign says sam wants you to put me in Aviation Council maybe they should back again i dont know but man he needed good grades passed along but we dont have a base impossible to see that we have won the rivers he says down on the beach so he gave me a check 2000. 00 in order to notice me. And thats where ive been ever since. In the. First district and. On october 14th 953. 00 i went into the countryside with a bicycle and some cattle and i saw a convoy of cars coming towards me. Hey stand back get off the road. Things were very authoritarian back then so i guess somebody important was coming alive and i. Could tell a person i was working at my office in the castle. And suddenly i know. Franco is here so i said sister what are you talking about franco yes she said franco is here so we went up to the keep and there he was. Franco was looking around and suddenly said could you please tell me where the salado riverdance. I said it was there behind those trees. Ok ok he said and that was it he looked around a while and then said ok very well. From the left and everyone was wondering what he was looking for and why he had come to rota but we had already read in the newspapers that spain had signed a treaty with the United States and what it was all about a legal eagle get up our. Spain was not in any condition to negotiate and this would become obvious in the agreements it signed because they did the country a lot of damage. From your american people. See the loss of a foreign country attack the base we have to defend and defend the americans. To defend their life but listen if you have the most impressive firepower in the world and aircraft an atomic bombs because there were atom bombs here what are we going to defend for you. Know im out of and then i was not there ok. Right here for them for you to. About anyone not about my father at a place on a plot of land near a computer. Used to store 4 or 5 barrels of wine there to sell every year my eyes were swollen from crying when they drove me off our land and i was 17 years old and they told us we had to go we left the doors open and all our stuff there and nearly killed me let me play em up out of me with what there was a huge upheaval and hit everyone hard some people took their own lives hang themselves and so on but the most remarkable thing was that nobody realised there were alternatives that only came later be no they put. You look at the media i remember the day i saw the 1st american jeep when they started surveying the area. I was looking after my columns and watched the monster drive into a pond and sink me. And my friends used to catch mackerel for a living. One day we were at a spot the 5 of us and a big guy came into the bar and said hey guys do you know where we can find some workers around here do you want to work so we started building the jetty. After wed finished a dutch engineer id met asked me antonio do you want to join the navy. I didnt have any more work so i said i dont have any papers he said it doesnt matter my uncle is the commander you want. Joint that i said of course man who doesnt you know so i was assigned to a tanker shipping oil from to the warships in codis. This was during the draft of the draft and if you werent doing well in school there was a potential to be drafted it was a combination of the seeing the girl for losing my job and went to school so i said i have to do something and i dont want to go to vietnam so i was Walking AroundDowntown Portland oregon and to recruiters at a place of the Old Post Office and the Staff Sergeant set up from his desk he looked nice and if you want to join the marine corps right son and i said i sure do he said and you want to join for 4 years right and i said i sure can and it was one time rake you over London England naples and here was a very true space are going to spain. So 2 times that i really. Did not have to go to vietnam during the sixtys. In army green. And. Name from the United States i was born in a small town of 5000 inhabitants in pennsylvania. Electronics was my hobby but my parents couldnt afford to send me to college so i enlisted in the navy. During the final training sessions into Spanish Air Force sergeants told me just go to spain where there are a lot of pretty girls there would be this by use by new. Which im heady bonython which i bonita so i said ok then ill go to spain as luck would have it us where i was assigned to kano post a submarine support ship because i was a specialist in measuring equipment calibration and there was a laboratory on board to service the submarines that said. That. There were only 2 main streets. Way downtown from the base and Everything Else would you think feel like. Special because it was like back home they remind me of. Your people only different and noticed that when i went to town back in america i would have always hamburger but over here i couldnt find a hamburger at the head top if you look at all the seats i didnt say that it was very Old Fashioned if you can i prefer to just say that it was very different cultures the cars the way people dressed the way the streets and buildings looked like they were all made from concrete and i came from pennsylvania where the houses were all timber and there were forests and things like that possible space ecosystem see. I think and there were about 10000 american soldiers and civilians and they need that if you need to go over what it was he will tell you i remember it like it was yesterday. We were kids playing in the street downtown and suddenly the jets flew over. We were all paralyzed by the noise what the hell was that. Took a base because they were small helicopters we called them little devils. My mother was outside doing the laundry as usual and fled into the house yelling i saw a flying saucer. Do. You know that when the americans arrived they were 1st met with rejection mainly because some locals had lost their homes and land and were in a very difficult situation. Of any kind on their head when the americans arrived they didnt waste any time they threw coins and other stuff into the waiting crowd. Almost all of us on the dock bent down and tried to grab Something Better ill. Get you on your arm we. Were difficult years in spain. It was the postwar period and there was a shortage of everything. So when we kids saw the americans in the street we ask them for money to set up a center. And they say. Give us coins are more candy or something. I can imagine that this was the tactic the americans used to build good relations with the spanish people on the flip. Side that might. Represent more far far fewer by all the forces of world war 2 we can strike anytime. That any. True let us say that wrote that the road to base played a very Important Role in the cold war because it was on the atlantic and also very close to the entrance of the mediterranean that made it there any silent mobile and use of the lifted missile submarines the most survivable element in our nation so money. Palermos Nuclear Submarines can carry up to 16 missiles with a maximum range of approximately 424500 kilometers can you look at those part of this little system from the usa it would have been too far to retaliate if the soviet union attacked. A city and pushed the stationing these submarines in role on and later in scotland made it possible to get them in and. Push. Tolo to possibly. I think it may have been because they ever do is a place where those ships can come in place where they can store whatever they want to store i dont know where they store their. Weapons. Have a good airforce forums theres a place for they could do the calculations for. Klyn. They have a submarine tender that was stationed there. Is a transition in place for europe for the minute training and. For hundreds of thousands of young people find employment here. Growing need to produce things which make life better in peacetime can be our greatest protection in time of war. The finish quickly became dependent on the military base it created new jobs in the Hotel Industry taxi business and leisure activities. When i became mayor and i worked to build good relations with the naval base because they were the ones who could help us come about the spanish they hardly supported us at all. At 1st the americans couldnt believe it they said your mayor you must make a lot of money but i didnt do it for money. I did it out of love for my hometown ties to the town develop quickly womanhood it was a time of great Economic Growth something on the. Last. Year old the king the workers of the world focus. On. My father took me to see a movie there was a scene where a plumber went to a house to fix a pipe he turned up in a car and i said to my father. Did you see that the plumber with the car its a feel my father said it was propaganda the way he said it was simply could not comprehend that a plumber could have a car. There go fund that will go to no question. Was. 1960 wonderful. Cars started appearing in town everyone believed that the americans were all millionaires. To be getting. Like. Signals the beginning about new era. Before the 1st manned moon shot like nasa brought the space capsule they would be using for the lunar journey here to test how it landed at sea like a plane flew by and started dropping parachutists 14 or 15 of them carrying flashing lights sometimes 2 or 3 men went missing at sea because their lights had gone out today what could we do you know i took my boat out to sea and stopped the engine i could hear one calling there yes i did that several times that one day they lost 5 men and i found all 5 of them can you imagine how it feels to be 7810 miles from the coast alone with a parachute in the middle of the ocean. Its incredibly lonely when they jumped into my boat they hugged and kissed me like it was their wedding day. That you guys are going to be. It was one of the little california my dad was in the navy and we moved from base to base to base and then we ended up in row to spank and i just remember getting off the plane and just hit by this wave of change. It wasnt so much a Culture Shock for us at 1st because we were on the base and on the base we had all the amenities. We were able to to stay on the base for the 1st few months that we were there and then we ended up moving off to school. When i got here in 1969 i remember we had a pad and pen. And her name was chiquita and she scared the hell out of us we had to do a mood test every morning with the bananas who she was going to bite us. When getting off base was just how Different Things were so there was a lot of places to explore and things to do but the people who i think you didnt have nearly as much as the stage today but i i do think. That thats humility i think i mean in people being so friendly and reaching out even though i dont have much what i have i will give you and then are made her name was it was anna like so many families that had the maids we kids we grew up in sheaf we felt like we were all want you know she would contents that she can oh well. And she just loved us thats why i would be so nice and my mother loved her as well to. See when the better i got up when they came into direct contact with american women. That broke the local moral code. All these women had their income was something almost unimaginable for the girls from delta were talking about the early 1960 s. They could easily obtain certain contraceptives that were not available in spain at the time. That women could do little more than read and write in your. Book market lady the opening up of the dictatorship that took place in the late seventys began him much earlier. And you really dont mean it and youre going to. Put. Out there last when the base was opened and i worked as an assistant to the nurses there one of them Mary Chisholm became my friend she asked me what my greatest wish was and i said joking i want to go to america one day and there are so when i actually arrived in new york i was so impressed where am i am i in a theater ive never lived wrote a before. Were only one even when you then we went to northwood massachusetts and most of. The country did their world wide roads and i thought why dont they build roads like this and spank things that. I looked at her parents house and went to high school. And today every week her mother gave me money but i didnt spend it i saved it all and i dont even want to tell our then no one then you know the cia im going to. I was like you know what that when i came back to spain i bought my mother a television the 1st one on our street all the neighbors came to watch it the neighbor across the street came to watch a bull fight when she saw the bull on t. V. She ran out of the house because she thought it was going to attack a. Nirvana recorded my brother was a famous bullfighter back then. When he had bought a cadillac and organized a party and. I never imagined id meet an american so when i saw this guy that i liked him immediately he was well built women dont miss that kind of thing when. We had a very nice wedding we were very well known because of my brother so a lot of people came a bullfight a system marries an american a black man he got a lot of compliments. And i didnt peter go for it on friday. I decided to break the new thermistor living in relative pay because i want to go he was a nice friendly person but he was coming nearer. Intensified investigation nothing in my life so in a way he finally got down to what you want to know how much money did you make a month. Pay was so high for him. To take care of the guy he said just want to know if people take care of you promise me when you take a very rich relax. I remember a part of the golf course was almost in the village so we kids used to go there i dont know there was a barbed wire fence there but there was 30 centimeters between the wires so we could slip through. The medium or into the last. We told each other if the americans catch us. Theyll shave our heads and make us play the drums in the hot sun until we drop. Without. A doubt it was a whole different world for us back then that there was a big gap between the backwardness in spain at that time in the American Standard of living that gives. Clinton and when we went on base it was like being in an american movie because what we saw in the movies really wants their way of life. Played a lot of people when they played baseball they set up stale us and we kids would go there and maybe get a pack of cigarettes or a beer. And they were like things from an alien world. We would have a 4th of july down we stuff forces here we have a rodeo and we had a big rodeo right across from the drive in theater and thats where they would invite spanish to come on the base and experience a slice of americana with us just so they would share the feria with the americans so it was very cool that cultural exchange. Supermarket symbol of the High Standard of living in this country today. And that is what interested the people in the outer most were the products in the socalled Navy Exchange the commissary which was actually the Americans Department store which the Navy Exchange just wanted to sell as much as possible they didnt care if you were american or spanish however they grew out of you severely in front of the base did. They checked us like they were running a customs checkpoint back to come and. They had magazines like penthouse and so on which we didnt have and sports magazines everything you can imagine every brand of tobacco a huge selection of food the meat for example was delivered from germany in refrigerated trucks it was fantastic meat if you could afford it. If. There were some American Products that you can buy everywhere today but at the Time Chocolate bars and cookies as well as rape and sunglasses were very popular in town the people who had access to the base put them in large quantities and then sold them out of their garages eloy in the army and. Although i always asked 1st i did get a lot of things from the base here. I went so far that one day an american commander his name was captain yang said to me father if you go on like this and take everything with you will have to swim back to america ok i took everything i could people who know me knew that i didnt keep anything for myself it was all for the people of wrote. Me one day the chaplain told me he wanted to buy a stereo for a friend but he didnt dare take it off base because the civil guard would confiscate it he asked me to pick it up for him i said sure so he bought it on the base and brought it to me i told him to put it in the car next to me he said but how will that work theyll see the packaging what i told them just put it there because im going to tell them the truth as i drove to the gate the civil guard stopped me and asked me what i was carrying so i said im smuggling their reaction was oh youre always making jokes father and they let me pass. Him in. The amount of the l. My brother a record player because it was very rare in spain back then because it came from the bass free philco the american brand of philips a little love to music yeah when i mostly go. Back but i was mainly influenced by a black man who was married to a woman from toronto his name was chase. He owned a bar chases place. He played bass guitar and i used to sit there and listen to. People and apparently he noticed that and that i loved his music and so he used to give me all the records he didnt want anymore. And thats how i started listening to blues jazz rock and all this other new music. He told us i mostly. Really used to look after the soldiers overseas to make the feel at home records went on sale there at the same time as they did in stores in new york or chicago or london. And my friends used to buy them and then go home and listen to them until the cows came home. Because like a look at my home of. The Radio Station to which we