Still going through that little red book, and I came across an entry for a Chris with a multi-syllable and rather unusual last name with an address in Fort Lee, Virginia.

It took me a while but I finally remembered. Yeah, that was Chris, the guy with the multi-syllable difficult to pronounce last name.

(Once again I’m withholding his last name because a simple search brings up someone who very likely is him along with phone and address. The dangers of having such an unusual last name. Much too easy to find. And potentially harass.)

After I had been working as an Inventory Management Specialist (i.e., item manager) for the Navy Section in the Directorate of Clothing and Textiles at the Defense Personnel Support Center in Philadelphia for a few years in the early 80s, there finally was an opportunity to send me to a class to learn the basics of my job. That is, me and perhaps about 15 other relatively recently hired (meaning in the last few years) employees. Well, not so much the basics of my job, more like the theoretical underpinnings of inventory management as it applied to the Defense Department. Or something like that. Memory’s a bit fuzzy; this was 40 years ago. I do know one of the topics was forecasting models such as linear regression.

Anyway, two military officers were sent to Philly to lead the class, both excellent teachers, but the one who had the more outgoing personality was Chris G. He was a Marine and I no longer recall his rank, but while the other fellow was merely a straightforward good teacher, Chris was an all-around fun guy.

He was staying at a Center City hotel not far from my apartment, so I suggested he drop by one evening, not really expecting he would take me up on the offer, but to my surprise, he showed up. I guess he was really bored in his hotel room. We chatted, I put on some music (he requested Streisand, which surprised me), and he made a call to his girlfriend back home.

Which ended up getting me into a little bit of a brouhaha. (Brouhaha? Ha, ha, ha.)

As I vaguely recall, some of the female members of the class became a bit, well, annoyed when they found out that Chris had a girlfriend back home (not that it was any of their business, but still), and accused him of lying about it, to which he correctly pointed out that he just hadn’t mentioned it, and I made the mistake of saying that I knew about his girl back home, I almost forgot— 

I should have kept my mouth shut.

Anyway, the class ended, we got our diplomas, there was a little ceremony (I did not make the honor roll; missed it by one question), and a bunch of us got together and took Chris out for dinner on that final day. And then he headed back to Fort Lee.

And his girlfriend.