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    A Doghouse Tale
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    A Doghouse Tale
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    A Doghouse Tale
    Ebook728 pages12 hours

    A Doghouse Tale

    By Bert Oldenhuis

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Case Devries, a cadet midshipman at the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point NY, is earning some beer money in Eugene Stein's textile warehouse on Saturday afternoons. Rosanne, Eugene's sexy little Italian secretary, picks him up from the Academy gate and drops him off each Saturday, and this leads to the inevitable - a relationship doomed to fail. Or does it? It is in any case it is the upbeat to an adventure that eventually takes Case and his buddy Brian O'Malley years later from their home away from home – the Seamen's Church Institute, otherwise known as “the Doghouse”, to India by way of a speck in the Ocean called Eniwetok, and from there to the ship graveyards in Kaoshiung with a ramshackle rustbucket of a freighter called the S.S. Flower Power. Aptly named for the era in which this adventure takes place and even more so the termination of the era as the Flower Power meets its final destination at the close of the sixties. The motley crew manning the good ship Flower Power couldn't have been more colorful had they been hand-picked by a madman. They range from the utterly chaotic captain Peachfuzz, to the straight-laced day-man George the Marine or the forty-five year old three hundred pound John Aruda, an able bodied seaman and a flower child who rises to every occasion . Such as organizing the marriage of George the Marine and his Filipino bride on the high seas with Peachfuzz having been bribed to perform the ceremony in order to legalize the stowaway bride brought aboard in Manila with the help of just about the entire crew.
    And then there is the mysterious container stowed aboard and buried underneath the load of chemical fertilizer they are carrying to India. What is in it, and is it true what Case learned in Eniwetok about its contents and origin? The contents of the container and the wheeling and dealing around its getting back to where it belongs eventually brings Case back into contact with Eugene and Rosanne; the two people he least expected to cross his path again. But after all was said and done it no longer surprised Case that things went the way they did – it was all meant to be this way and it all happened because it had to happen; it was in the cards and even if events are separated by years, it all makes sense in the end. He was the catalyst to start the series of events rectifying an anomaly in this particular space-time continuum; a messenger, a tool of convenience to make the pieces of the puzzle fall into their proper place.
    But prior to this philosophical note, A Doghouse Tale is the hilarious story of a motley crew sailing a ship held together by baling wire, paint and a prayer. It touches on the deplorable condition of the U.S. Merchant Marine in the sixties of the twentieth century, when a nation at war which should be able to rely on the best material for the massive logistic operations that all wars require, but in fact presses old battle wagons such as the Flower Power into service, making it the laughing stock of the maritime world. It is also a moving story in that it shows that when the chips are down, no matter what background or grudges the individual crew members may have towards one another, they band together as one to come to the aid of a shipmate.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXinXii
    Release dateDec 17, 2013
    ISBN9786162220289
    Unavailable
    A Doghouse Tale
    Author

    Bert Oldenhuis

    Bert Oldenhuis was born in the Netherlands in 1944 and emigrated with his family in the late fifties to the US, where his teen years were spent in Elmira, NY. He graduated from the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, NY, sailing in the capacity of third and second mate on US merchant vessels for a period of four years. After his sea-going days, he found employment ashore and almost immediately was dispatched to the Netherlands as sales support manager in the European Headquarters of his employer. He met and married his wife there and even though the USA beckoned, he could not persuade his better half to leave her beloved Holland, hence this is where he eventually settled and where he and his wife raised their three children. While in the various positions he held with his original employer and a subsequent number of others, he has had the chance to travel extensively within Europe, allowing him to gain more than a superficial view of the cultures behind the quilt that forms the map of this continent. He has written several research papers and technical articles in magazines dedicated to the Oil and Gas industry. However, time, opportunity, persuasion and encouragement has prompted him to venture more prosaic by weaving personal experiences and fiction into a humorous and readable account with the result of “A Doghouse Tale” as his first novel.

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