Journal 4/23/1976
P8 The Nite Life, Ain’t no good life, but it’s my life Friday last week I met a friend, he was here 5 years ago, he is Charley Lanzillotta, he was a Peace Corps Volunteer here in the Marshall District. One thing that really surprise me, was the zorries he was wearing. They are the same zorries we went and bought together at Robert Reimers Store five years ago, but mine broke five years, but he’s still wearing his. When Charley was here he used to work with Zebedy Tarkwon at Economic Development office. Anyway, Charley said to me that there’s been a lot of change here on Majuro, like the road, the airport, and new buildings and the town is very clean, and new stores, and water system, and almost everybody get air condition house. After that, I asked him, what do you think about if Majuro became capital of Micronesia? He said, it would be great, especially with all this new building and within five years time, Majuro will be the Paradise of the Pacific because of all this improving going on here. So I told him, OK Charley, have one more beer on me.
Journal 4/26/1991
P5 24-hour laundry by Tom Panholzer I hate doing my laundry. I mean I really hate doing it. It is difficult to get to a laundry during working hours. And when I do get there, they are always crowded with women who love washing clothes and usually don’t want a man around when they are doing the washing. When I enter this environment, I try to act casual. I usually don’t have enough clothes to take up two machines, one for colors and one for whites. So I mix them. Who cares if my underclothes come out green and blue? But all those women just stare and start talking that woman talk about how stupid I am that I am mixing the colors. Then they watch me all the time to see if I put the bleach in correct and other special things that are supposed to be put in the water. I guess there is a whole science involved, but I flunked chemistry, so I can’t figure it out. Then I never put in the dryer that funny cloth that is supposed to soften the clothes and that gets them talking again. They really start to chatter when I take everything out and “fold” them. I’m so fat that my shirts do not easily or neatly fold well as they do for thin people’s shirts. So the situation becomes messy. Then I get to the pants and this is worse because the seams never seem to line up. Now the background chatter is reaching noise pollution levels, and I’m trying to get out of there before they throw me out, so I start cramming all the laundry into the bag which is of course too small for folded clothes. Things became so bad once that one lady came over to me and demanded, “where is your wife?” Good thing I don’t have one or else I think this woman would have led a contingent over to my house and lynched her for letting me loose in their sacred grounds. I meekly told her I didn’t have a wife, and pity crept across her fact. “We’ll get you one,” she said. I told her, “no thank you, I’ll find one,” as if all I have to do is go down to the store and get one…right. So up to now I’ve been afraid to go back to the laundry. I know she and the others are waiting in ambush to see if I’ve gotten a wife. Well, Jane’s laundry has saved my bacon. They are open 24 hours now. Now I will be able to sneak in at 3am and get my laundry done and I won’t be accosted or laughed at by these nice ladies. Or will they still be there?
Journal 4/28/2000
P6 How do you know? How do you find out if Jerry Kramer is off island? Call his company PII and ask? No, the surefire test is to call AMI and see how many times the phone rings. Say what? It’s true. Jerry has recently added to the AMI board of directors. One action he’s taken has been to try to get AMI functioning and acting like a business entity. To wit, he told staff to answer the phone by the second ring instead of keeping customers standing with phones at their ears and blood pressures rising. We were at Jerry’s office one day a few weeks ago and he picked up the phone, dialed AMI, and sure enough it was answered right away — much to Jerry’s satisfaction. But it seems AMI staff know when he’s on and off island, since a couple of times when he’s been away in the past few weeks, when we called over to the airline, it was back to 17 rings before an answer.