Ace Carver here, P.I.

An APB was issued on the Indo-Instro-rock web site for information in connection with senior delinquents. Possibly still playing rock’n roll somewhere in violation of parole.

You know, I haven’t always been the hardboiled gumshoe that I am today. Once a pock-faced teenager with eighty-proof hormones rushing through my veins, more moons ago than I would care to divulge.

So I figure, I better fess up now voluntarily, before it gets ugly……

         Nu een washed-up, over-the-hill rock ‘n roller uit 1960, die week-ends lead guitar speelde  in dat kleine obscure dans schooltje van meneer Timmer in Den Haag wat tussen ons nozems beter bekend stond als the “Embers Club”. Waar de  Room Rockers ons met enkele jaren vooraf zijn gegaan en in deze club ook hun genesis hadden. Robbie Latuperisa zat op de Da Costa school waar hij af en toe, tussen gigs in Duitsland, een paar klassen kwam bijwonen en ons op de hoogte hield van de “Biz.”  Als mijn geheugen goed is heeft hij zijn studies uiteindelijk afgebroken en besloot ‘swerelds sombere nachten wat op te vrolijken met muziek. Voor mij zijn deze extra-curriculaire bezigheden oorzaak geweest dat ik als een baksteen ben gezakt.

 

Van onze school kwamen verder Dickie de Hoog (lead guitar, nu in California), Erik Berger (lead guitar),  Ronnie Robert, (Saxophone en Bass guitar), and last but not least, Richard v.d Wijck (Black Dynamites).   De kneepjes van het rock’n roll’n op gitaar heb ik geleerd van Rudy de Jong, waarna ik helemaal verdiept raakte in de surfer sound van ‘The Ventures.’ 

Het versieren van muziek instrumenten ging met kunst en vliegwerk. Een part- time job bij de gebroeders Metselaar van Toko Ajoe was net voldoende om de onkosten van mijn Puch brommer (with ape hangers en potje)  en mijn uit-jes te financieren.

De ouders van Ronnie waren Evangelisten die voor de kerk een Hoeffner gitaar hadden gekocht met een Geloso versterker erbij. Dat kwam stiekem goed van pas.

Eddie “Skinny Minnie” Haighton kwam van de vaart terug met een azuur-blauw gekleurde Fender guitar en Echolette. De grammofoon platen van de laatse top hits uit Amerika vielen ook beter in smaak dan “oldies but goodies”. Hij heeft mij op een keer uitzinnig blij gemaakt met een Wrangler spijkerbroek. Die waren hier alleen te krijgen bij Maison de Bonneterie op speciale bestelling.

Dit mode huis en hof leverancier was geen zaak waar wij djago’s gezien wilden worden. Wij hadden een reputatie op te houden.    

Via via hoorden we over een meisje die haar eigen drumset had. Een drum- set! Dat was het belangrijkste. Maar een meisje erachter? Daar hadden we nog nooit van gehoort. Winnie d’Ancona, aldus onze drumster, bleek echt talent te hebben en deed voor geen jongen onder. Haar beat bracht zelfs Skinnie Minnie aan het gojang. Rudy Liauw was ook van de partij en Ronnie Robert was terug uit Duitsland dus zo begon jamming at the Embers.

Voor de ouwe heer Timmer was dit een extra inkomen. Hij verkocht kaartjes bij de deur en kratjes Cola stonden naast hem in de gang. Als we de week-ends een uitvoering gaven hoefden we de zaalhuur niet te betalen.

Al eerder had Ronnie aangemonsterd bij Theo Boers en “The Canaries”. Zo hoopte hij de militaire dienst te ont-vliegen……In het nocturne leven, ergens op de buehne in Duistsland waar hij buiten de greep van de MP’s dacht te blijven.

Hij had echter niet gerekend op z’n moeder, voor iedereen “tante Ip”, voorgangster van de Pinkster gemeente, met oom Bernard en de Heer aan haar zijde. Resoluut als een pitbull zal ze zoonlief, al spartelend uit het slijk van de Goethestrasze in Muenchen onttrekken om hem bij de poort van de kazerne af te droppen. En voor twee lange jaren zal hij ‘smorgens met muziek in de oren worden gewekt…………..De reveille!

Hopelijk zou de drill-sergeant hem het verslapen afleren zodat hij zondags op tijd in de kerk komt. Maar dat was achteraf gezien teveel gevraagd.

Deze missie om Ronnie uit de greep van de wereld te redden moest gebeuren met hun ouwe blauwe Volvo. Die reed nog prima al kon je hier en daar de straatstenen door de vloer heen zien. Richard en ik werden gepaaid om mee te komen. Waarschijnlijk in de hoop dat wij Ronnie van z’n verkeerde gang konden overtuigen.

Wij sleepten en passant nog een hitch-hiker mee die een vrij tripje naar Duitsland niet afsloeg; Allemans vriend en bon vivant Jackie van Rooyen die niets had mee te nemen want al het benodigde zou hij wel versieren. Er was trouwens geen plaats meer want we waren bepakt en gezakt met segala lemper en rotti kukus, rijst in een bunkusan om het warm te houden en enkele bijgerechten met sambalans, en zo begonnen we onze trek naar Bavaria.

  Toevallig speelden daar vier Indo bands op een rijtje: Oety en z’n Real Rockers, The Black Dynamites, de “The Java-lins” en de Canaries. Wij vonden de “Canaries” in de Rhumba-bar. Een duistere gelegenheid waar, bij het binnen komen de zware bier-lucht tegen je gezicht sloeg. Een gevederde canarie zou hier subiet van z’n stokje vallen. De plaats was druk bezet met een mélange van amerikaanse GI’s enerzijds en leden van het edele ras anderzijds, die zo nu en dan hun verschil van mening hieromtrent met de nodige klapjes bijzetten.

Over de groupies zullen we het maar niet hebben en daar blijf ik bij. Invoking my fifth amendment right; Statute of limitation notwithstanding.

Na het spelen, meestal vier uur in de morgen, was er de gebruikelijke kumpulan om ergens te eten. Op een keer kwam Harry Koster van de B’Ds bij Ronnie zitten om zijn  hart uit te storten. Hij zat in de puree want z’n pianist had opgezegd. “Wel”, zei Ronnie, “Richard is hier, waarom neem je hem niet”. Richard zat aan de andere kant en gooide blikken naar Ronnie van “wat doe je me nou aan!” Want Richard had nog nooit op een podium gestaan en dansen vond hij koelie werk. Harry kon er wel wat van maken en het leger had hem al wat slag-vaardiger gemaakt,....... in de cantine; daar was het d’r op of geen vreten!

Long story short; Ronnie kwam mee naar huis en Richard bleef in Duitsland

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"The Web", a wonderful rear view mirror.

Peering into the past through the lens of our collective
memories, which many of us feel for some reason
compelled to publish on the worldwide web, I always
find trivial small facts of all kinds that I actually wasn't
looking for but stumbled upon nonetheless.
Thereby I imagine how those of us with way too much
time on our hands click away with our mouses and burn
the midnight oil... Or is it just me?

It starts after dinner, halfway through a marathon
of re-run shoot'm-ups on TV, after which I get up and shovel
to my comfort zone behind my little flat screen, as if guided
by remote control where I start off with a game of solitaire
until a spark of inspiration hits me to go look for
something I have yet to define.
One day these computers will define that for me too.

Giving in to that impulse, I usually find myself ending up
wondering through a rabbit hole. "Rabbit hole" is a
term aptly describing that feeling when I follow just a few of
the thousands of hits on my requests for a search.
And many of those hits linking me to yet another passage of this
labyrinth, which link me to yet another site etc. etc............. Or is it just me?

Usually we try to be gone from home around
Christmas time. I mean gone away. On a cruise or
a distand tropical island .Now all the shoppers seem to be
going exactly where I am going and I can't even
find a place to park the car. I find myself following
someone with car keys in hand, whom I assume must
be going away but then apparently has just arrived.

Then there is all the Christmas decorations I
have to dig up and sort and fix before I can hang them up.
I even found some rats nests among the dozen or so boxes.
Many of them don't even belong to me.
How did those get here?

Yeah, this year we braved the Christmas spirit at home
again, for the sake of the grand kids.
But the strings of blinking lights around the
house seem to lift my spirit too in these short
and dreary days.
I am definitely not dreaming of any white Christmas.
Unless it is on the white sand on some tropical beach.

Instead, this year I am editing and arranging beach
pictures we took in Hawaii when we were there in
the week of Thanksgiving. Still savoring the fun we always have.

Another contemplative moment

There are many stories about lost treasures and subsequent heroic adventures to find them. Some of these stories made it onto the silver screen, like “King Salomon’s Mines” or “The Maltese Falcon” or Indiana Jones and other stories of marauding evil doers who hid their loot and then got killed in a shoot out, leaving those treasures never to be found again. But there is one story that is close to home.This “tempo dulu” story which started on the Braga way in Bandung, Java and ended in Australia, during WWII grew an interesting tail, half a century later in 2006. Just about when everyone thought “that’s all she wrote…”. It became of special interest to me anyway because, besides contemplating wartime tragedies and heroic attempts of survival, the focus of this story, rightfully or wrongfully, attracted much attention due to the lost, found and lost again treasure belonging to my estranged grandfather David Davidson and his partner: A cache of diamonds packaged post haste in a carton box and hand carried to the airport for the last plane out, while the sounds of artillery from the Japanese invaders was approaching rapidly. I would never have known about this if my cousin Arthur of Newport, Australia didn’t call me one day and told me about it. And he heard it from someone else. Initially I was only halfway interested. I did not know my grandfather and who was to say that this man, written about in this book was indeed my grandfather. After all, how many Davidsons are there. Even after reading the book I was not entirely convinced. Only after meeting with David Davidson’s niece in The Hague, Holland was my curiosity confirmed. . Oma (grandma) and Opa (grandpa) Davidson. (Grandpa's first marriage) “….an extraordinary story of daring and luck, life and death, and fortunes found and lost”: The Diamond Dakota Mystery, By Juliet Wills.

The following links will serve to read more about it, and save me some work typing it. I can recommend buying the book. It is well written and suspenseful and I like a book which is documented with pictures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PK-AFV

CourierMail

Amazon.com

Pensive Vacation

            

            It was in nineteen eighty six. Thirty six years after we left Indonesia, when we could not resist the temptation to go back there on vacation. Relax, this is not going to be a travelogue to those all familiar places. Lest y’all flip the page and sigh: ”Been there, Done that!” Rather it is what turned out to be an unexpected journey into a dimension of time in which no one can enter but me, albeit a time only pertaining to my past. 

I had good memories of that country so there was no problem returning to my old stomping grounds. Besides, being an incurable dreamer, I am, "Often rebuked, yet always back returning to those first feelings that were born with me. And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning for idle dreams of things which cannot be".(Emily Bronte)    It was a different story with Barbara my wife, who only remembered as a small child, the misery of the Japanese camp and thus went back there with trepidation and mixed emotions.

Of course, we could not travel so far away from California and not swing by Singapore for a week first for some R&R from the 24 hour trip. There we spent a wonderful time of acclimating from jet-lag and pensively inhaling the various scents that whisk about like ghosts, leading me down the basement archives of my mind and dust off faded images of my own past.

My earliest memory of Singapore was when mom and kids went there to meet dad who returned from a Japanese POW camp and we all spent some time there in a tent camp, either Beatrix camp or Prins Bernard camp. I don’t remember which, but it was close to the beach. From there we were relocated to Tandjong Pinang on an amphibious PBY. Tandjong Pinang belongs to a group of tiny Islands of the Riow Archipelago, close to Singapore, but Indonesian territory. That is where dad’s new job was, to teach at a small grammar school. Mostly kids of the military and administrators, who were a small minority among the Chinese population. He seemed to be happy there with his new friends and played a lot of tennis; a lot of tennis, while mom was bored out of her skull.

She was accustomed to the genteel life of Bandung.Where grandma's large house provided for uncle Wim, Aunt Jo and family, uncle Emile and a few other families who were tenants in adjacent pavilions. With aunt Jo and her husband George Pikler, the band leader there was always some excitement going on. But now an occasional trip to Singapore was the only distraction she could indulge. So after a while the atmosphere at home got kind of tense. Mom wanted more parties with dancing, but the annual Koninginneball at the Resident’s house, where you obligingly watched your P’s and Q’s was not entirely her idea of fun. Eventually dad relented and we moved back to Bandung.

Come to think of it, I just remembered the Resident's name: Van Waardenburg. And I also remember one of his daughters’ names, Geesje, with whom I used to play on occasion. Out of curiosity and to check my memory, I Googled that name and something came up under the heading “The Indonesian Revolution and The Singapore Connection 1945-1949”. Wow! I always thought of Singapore as that clean and straight laced place. But there is always another side, is'nt there? Hotbed of spies, opium smugglers and arms dealers who tried to make a fast buck on the brewing revolution, cruising the Malaka strait in sampans.

A Dutch naval officer inspecting a vessel for smuggled goods.

And of course the story would not have been complete without mentioning a certain Captain, Raymond “the Turk” Westerling who, as the result of Special Ops. activity against the TNI , (Tentara National Indonesia) in Bandung, was now a fugitive wanted for mass murder.

He became the reluctant guest of Singapore authorities when trying to travel incognito with a false passport. The passport of a.....dead guy.......... who knows. Ironically he was put in the same cell with an Indonesian rebel and predictably a dogfight promptly ensued with the Indonesian suffering a broken jaw. Authorities dropped assault charges to deport the captain PDQ.
The TNI Siliwangi Div HQ, was located across the street where we lived and saw Cpt Westerling's brigade in action up close. We considered him a hero.
When the time came to move on to Jakarta, our next vacation stop, we had no idea where to go once we got there. But tante Ip Robert had earlier told us to make sure and visit her adopted son, Mr H. (name withheld to protect the guilty : ). So I called him from Singapore, explained who we were and that we were coming to Jakarta for a few days. It was just great to hear that he would pick us up at the airport and take us to a hotel that he would arrange. We packed our suitcases, including a little something for the customs agents, prominently visible upon opening of the suitcases, as was “customary”. (no pun intended). Mr H couldn't make it that day but he sent his son and chauffeur to pick us up. With the rest of the passengers we stood in line for customs declaration when Remy, mr H’s son picked us out of the line and whisked us passed the customs agents, as if he owned the joint, and out to a waiting car. We didn't even show our passports. (“Ahh, we’re home again” I thought, “and nothing has changed”). Well, this was only the first impression that soon would be corrected drastically when we saw the sights on the way to the hotel: Things did change!

That evening we had dinner at a restaurant with mr H and his lovely wife. Dinner was on the house since mr H. was the owner of this restaurant. (which was just one of many). It was a cozy place and according to mr H, served the best steaks in Jakarta. Something he took great pride in. During the course of our conversation it soon became apparent to me that we may well have been introduced to what I would characterize as “The Jakarta Connection”. There was some intrigue going on right then and there. Sitting at another table across the room were a bunch of Americans who seemed just a bit too familiar with mr H to be casual customers. He told me to go up to them and say hi, which I did. They were practically our neighbors, from Burbank California. Lockheed and General Electric to be exact. Mr H was probably just getting new engines and some parts for his private airplane. That’s what he used when he was going on vacation, sometimes returning with a couple of souvenirs like antique cars. I later learned from my best buddy that he was so far up the food chain that he “screens” anything and anybody if there was some connection with airplanes. (Hence the patronizing treatment at the airport.)When a small combo of the live entertainment came to our table to take requests I was tempted to ask for BTO’s “Taking care of business” (….And working over-time). But I settled for Malaguena instead since they were dressed as Mexican rancheros. They seemed to be surprised that I actually knew a tune they had in their repertoire and played it con appassionata.

Mr H had a humble start as one of many young people who sought temporary or not so temporary refuge in the home of Tante Ip and Oom Bernard who were evangelists, stretching the capacity of their home to the limit. When destiny took them to a fork in the road, mr H went one way while the rest of the “family” went the other way. Things became rather tricky. One day he returned for a visit when one of the uncles also came to visit. A hot headed KNIL man, armed with a sten-gun who did not know mr H with his long hair, characteristic of the unmilitary rebels. Taking aim to shoot, he was narrowly stopped by an aunt who jumped in between and frantically explained who the man was. Then came a time when that uncle was captured and imprisoned by the rebels and mr H came and used his influence for that uncle’s release and others. And so, I was sitting there at dinner, listening to those stories with details that get in the way of one’s judgment about who was good and who was bad. Details that one might refer to as the proverbial “fog of war”. In a way I was reminded of one of Hella Haase’s novels, with a difference between her Oeroeg and Mr H; Oeroeg growing up in the shadow of a condescending society of plantation owners and Mr H finding refuge in a family of caring evangelists whom I had the privilege to know.

During that time some three hundred thousand Indo’s had to or preferred to leave Indonesia for other parts of the world. Ironically, how many Indonesians have left Indonesia after the Indo's left. Many of them even going to Holland! And how many are still trying to get away. So from that perspective the Indo’s should consider themselves blessed. They can even choose to return to Indonesia to visit or live there with “AOW's” (Soc. Sec) gathered elsewhere and live high-on-the-hog (again).

LINKS.

The Indonesian Revolution and the Singapore Connection

Raymond "The Turk" Westerling

Tentara National Indonesia

Emily Bronte

 

Introduction

No Predictions on regularity of publications. No target audience per se. Just cluttering up the world wide web for now.
Before blogging came in vogue, I already had publications on the web. Among which; in an E-zine, Hobby exchanges, a web-page, a family tree page, and a digital photo album page.
Some providers went belly up, and others may follow suit. So from experience, I just stay with the biggest from now on.


Inspirational poems: Formerly At Geocities .com, and has been moved to an archival website. Poems by yours truly.(http://www.oocities.org/wekeas/)