1985 | San Diego
By the 1920’s, San Diego already had seven Navy bases, and today the Navy remains the region’s largest employer, still defining its landscape.
In the early 1990’s, I drove onto one of those bases to lead a digital photography workshop for Navy personnel. My long wait at the sentry booth was soon explained, as the entire base fell silent at 0800, came to attention and faced our Flag flying from its mast as the national anthem echoed from a huge P.A. system.
Years later, I came to know a civilian employee of the Navy, whose 45-year career began as a computer technician when disk drives were the size of wagon wheels and data cables were as thick as elephants’ trunks. (In the lab, her team would assemble, program, de-bug, and run-in a new computer, verifying its capability. Then the whole system would be dismantled and stuffed and threaded into the spaces on a ship, to be debugged and verified again. Then there were sea-trials.)
Now, in her retirement, on still mornings, when she can hear the strains of the anthem, she still stands and faces the distant flagpole, far out of view. I asked her one day about her devotion to the Navy. She told me that it was not her own relationship that was so important, but that of her late father, and of his service at sea in two wars. (He had a ship shot out from under him in the Pacific.) It became her personal practice to feel near him on those clean mornings at 0800, when the anthem was in the air.