Friends in Puerto Vallarta

Ron, Jo, Dave, Alice, Joey, Frank

It is cold on the beach

Tom and Sadie

Alice with one of her clams

We celebrated new years at the ocean with a bunch of our friends. It was clear but cold. Much colder than usual.

I think of the Washington Coast as over cast and rain.

Friday was Razor claming. This is a picture of Alice with one of her clams.

What is this?

It is a noise maker for Jayden. I bet it breaks very soon.

Jo, Joanna and Bob watching the flame go out on our dessert

Christmas is a great time for family and kids!

Friends at the Coolidge Municipal Airport.

Fly in at the Coolidge ariport

The Coolidge Municipal Airport was originally constructed in the early 1940’s by the U.S. Department of the Army. Originally constructed as an air transport command base, Coolidge Army Airfield served as an auxiliary operating base for Williams Field during World War II. The original airfield was constructed with three runways in a triangular configuration. Of these three runways, two remain: Runway 17-35 and Runway 5-23.

Phil and Lynne at the Christmas lights parade

The Christmas lights parade

Phil and Lynne did a great job of decorating their golf cart for the parade.

That is Phil and Charley Bear in the picture with us.

Dinner at our house we had pozole soup

Thanksgiving dinner at Palm Creek.

Veterans Day’s dinner at Palm Creek.

They had 6 of the Code talker at the dinner and they told stories about their time as code talkers. It was a very good dinner and we all had a good time.

Philip Johnston proposed the use of Navajo to the United States Marine Corps at the beginning of World War II. Johnston, a World War I veteran, was raised on the Navajo reservation as the son of amissionary to the Navajos, and was one of the few non-Navajos who spoke their language fluently. Because Navajo has a complex grammar, it is not nearly mutually intelligible enough with even its closest relatives within the Na-Dene family to provide meaningful information, and was an unwritten language, Johnston saw Navajo as answering the military requirement for an undecipherable code. Navajo was spoken only on the Navajo lands of the American Southwest, and its syntax and tonal qualities, not to mention dialects, make it unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training. One estimate indicates that at the outbreak of World War II fewer than 30 non-Navajos, none of them Japanese, could understand the language.^{[citation needed]}

Early in 1942, Johnston met with Major General Clayton B. Vogel, the commanding general of Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet, and his staff. Johnston staged tests under simulated combat conditions which demonstrated that Navajos could encode, transmit, and decode a three-line English message in 20 seconds, versus the 30 minutes required by machines at that time. The idea was accepted, with Vogel recommending that the Marines recruit 200 Navajos. The first 29 Navajo recruits attended boot camp in May 1942