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A Doghouse Tale
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A Doghouse Tale
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A Doghouse Tale
Ebook802 pages13 hours

A Doghouse Tale

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Case Devries, a cadet at the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, is earning some beer money by working in Eugene Steins textile warehouse on Saturday afternoons. Rosanne, Eugenes sexy little secretary, picks him up from the academy gate and drops him off each Saturday. This leads to the inevitablea relationship doomed to fail. Or does it? It is, in any case, the upbeat to an adventure that, years later, takes Case and his buddy Brian OMalley from their home away from home, the Seamens Church Instituteotherwise known as the Doghouseto India, aboard a ramshackle rust bucket of a freighter called the SS Flower Power. Aptly named for the era in which this adventure takes place and even more so the termination of the era, the Flower Power meets its final destination at the close of the sixties. The crew manning the good ship Flower Power couldnt be more colorful if they had been handpicked by a madman. They range from the utterly chaotic Captain Peachfuzz to the forty-five-year-old, three-hundred-pound John Aruda, an able-bodied seaman and a flower child who rises to every occasion, including arranging a marriage on the high seas.
And then there is the mysterious container stowed aboard and buried beneath a load of chemical fertilizer that the Flower Power is carrying to India. The wheeling and dealing he has to do to get the container back where it belongs eventually brings Case into contact with Eugene and Rosanne, the two people he least expected to cross paths with ever again.
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 US Merchant Marines in the 1960s, when a nation at war pressed old battle wagons such as the Flower Power into service, making those ships the laughingstock of the maritime world. It is also a moving story, showing that when the chips are down, a multicultural crew bands together as one to come to the aid of a shipmate.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 5, 2014
ISBN9781496978554
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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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