23rd
I remember back on April 1, 1981, the day my friend John McCain retired from the Navy. It was about a year after he’d married Cindy Lou, who we always used to call Cindy Lou Who from that whole Grinch fiasco back in the 60’s, and while we always assumed John would take up some cushy job with his father-in-law’s beer company, we convinced him that if he was to become credible as a businessman it would be better to start his own company making his own products. Hell, anybody can work for their in-laws, but the voters universally admire a man with the pluck to strike out on his own.
After the retirement ceremony and mixed-company celebration, Cindy Lou grew tired and wanted to go home, so the after-party moved to a stag bar in the seedier part of downtown. John had mostly abandoned his hard-charging drinking days, but you only retire from the Navy once and some of the fighter jocks had a real potty sense of humor. They didn’t call it Tailhook for nothing back then, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, we were putting $10 bills into the G-strings of the dancers, doing shots, and getting pretty rowdy; so much, in fact, that the bouncers were starting to get anxious. None of them wanted to mix it up with a bunch of drunken Navy officers but John didn’t want any trouble, so he called on all of us to just calm down and make sure the celebration didn’t get too out of hand. Cigars and cognac were called for and the girls didn’t like the smoke, so they went off to look for greener pastures and larger denominations as those sorts of girls are wont to do.
We were all three sheets to the wind and started pitching various business ideas as we puffed on cheap tobacco and made wisecracks. One guy regaled us with a tale of how he’d hit an ammunition dump with a load of snake and nape from his A-7 shortly after breakfast, and told John he should invent a new type of cereal. “Flash Pops, the Ballistic Breakfast Treat,” he cried, and went on to tell us how a prototype could be made.
“Just take some Cocoa Puffs and grind them into powder, add a little water to make a paste, pour into molds shaped like Fat Man and Little Boy, and bake.”
Everybody groaned because this wasn’t very good, and another guy told us how his ass used to ache after a full day of punching out 5” folding-fin aerial rockets and making hard landings on the carrier to pick up another load. “After doing that all day, what you really need is something to clean out the system and provide that extra thrill that any Navy man can appreciate.” And thus was born the Rump Rocket.
Right before John moved to Phoenix, we engaged the services of a commercial advertising agency to come up with design concepts and the result is what you see here. But, John took the job with his father-in-law and it seemed he was headed for a political career, though after the Keating Five thing we thought we could revive the whole concept. But, it never worked out.This is a true story, I swear.
