Journal 4/16/1976
P2 The Nite Life, ain’t no good life, but it’s my life By Stoney My friend Jim Duffy was really drunk last night when he came to the Reef, there’s one thing with Duffy, when he’s drunk you can’t understand what he talk about, like when he’s talking to you about fishing, and when you ask him, what are you talking about Duffy? And he’ll answer you, I don’t know! Anyway, he came to the Reef cause he want me to give him a ride home when the bar close. He live very close to my house, so I asked him, what happen to you that Sunday I invite you and your family to come down my house? Oh! I am really sorry Stoney! What happen was, we was just about to come, Ben Barry came, and told us to go with them, so we went.
We was down by Konosky’s place with those Hawaiian guys from Kwaj and Father Hacker performing some baptism, and he asked whose gonna be the godfather for the kids? Ben tell Father Hacker, let me be the godfather, father, and Father Hacker told him, over my dead body! Father meant that cause Ben never always go to church. Father Hacker ask Ben, you have to promise me first Ben, that you gonna come to church every Sunday? Sure Father, I promise you, start this coming Sunday, okay you can be the godfather now.
But you know what Stoney? Ben never keep his promise, he never go to church after three Sundays already. So I sold Duffy, you know Duff, all you American the same, always brake promises.
Journal 4/19/1991
P4 New whip at MIHS by Grant Gordon Word’s out. There’s a new guy running the discipline action at Marshall Islands High School. The new man in charge of keeping law and order is Jerre Bennett. Now Jerre has a bad reputation for running things very efficiently. I’ve seen him organize entire class schedules for his English department (he’s the department chairman) faster than the school’s computer could spit out the results. The department’s book locker is organized. Now who ever heard of an organized book locker? His lesson plans, his teaching strategy, his record books, his house and even his garden is organized! The students have told me that he “knows what he is doing.”
One thing should be mentioned also. Jerre knows everything that goes on here on Majuro and Jaluit and most other places in the islands. He has a spy system which is the envy of the CIA, FBI, IRS and KGB. Seems he has been teaching school here for a long time and he knows the parents and relatives of most of the students at the school because he was their teacher and he knows what they were doing when they were students. What leverage.
Journal 4/21/2000
P24 Are you aware THAT the Magic Circus of Samoa, complete with dancing ducks, amazing acrobats and cavorting clowns, played to packed houses for four nights in Kiribati last week and that the next stop on their magical journey that will include Majuro is Nauru? THAT yachts moored in Majuro are used to bottles and bags floating past their boats, but that one sailor reports seeing the navigator’s bible, the 1,524-page American Practical Navigator by Nathaniel Bowditch drift past her boat, followed by an IBM computer monitor? THAT over 500 Marshallese are employed by Arkansas chicken producers and that Marshallese impact is so substantial that at least one company has hired a translator? THAT American rock musician Frank Zappa, who would no doubt have enjoyed a jug or two of Taka Lager, once wrote: “You can’t be a Real Country unless you have a beer and an airline — it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer”?