For Your Eyes Only

(I've never mentioned this before, but Brian Williams and I have weekend jobs as undercover agents for the CIA.  This is a letter from Warren Sparrow originally addressed to a certain Betsy Villas White that we intercepted.  It is what we in the spy business call "The Smoking Gun"....which proves beyond a doubt that Obie Oakley and Warren Sparrow met and conspired at a here to fore unknown location on 29 January, 2015.)

LOVE'S Truck Stop

Love’s Truck Stop in Salisbury, NC, is not your dad’s gas station, the one at Morehead and South Tryon.  Your dad’s station was a Texaco, was it not?  He never expected his customers to pump their own gas, did he?  However, there is a similarity between today’s Love’s and your dad’s station:  An adjacent restaurant.  Yesterday, Obie and I met at the restaurant adjacent to Love’s.  It was no Honey’s.  It was McDonald’s.   We gave ourselves a break.

    We found a table and talked for a few minutes.  It seemed

McDonalds

like the natural thing to do.  After getting over the excitement of seeing each other for the first time in more than five years, we ordered Big Mac meals.  They were presented to us in timely fashion, complete with empty cups.  Like good soldiers, we shuffled from the counter to the drink dispenser. 

 While we were filling our cups, a remarkable thing happened.  Another customer noticed that Obie was wearing a ball cap adorned with the 101st Airborne logo.  He spoke to Obie, saying he was in the 82d Airborne Division.  At that moment I knew our lunch was already a big success.

    After filling our cups we returned to our

Obie

table and we began a two-hour conversation.  To make things easier I brought some props from home.  One was an 8 by 10 sheet filled with some short clippings from the 1954 Observer plus one from the News.    All of them were about our Hi-Y basketball team.  One article was about the city championship game which our team won when Obie made a long shot with five seconds to go and the score tied.  For years I have called it “the shot heard round the world.”

    I brought two “family” photo albums.  Most of the pictures were of our home and family members.  There were some special ones, the ones I took at the CHS 40th reunion.  You were in several of them, flashing your incomparable smile.

USS Wasp

    Another prop was a cruise book I thought Obie would like, given the fact that he was serving in Germany during the period covered by the book.  All the photos in the book were taken by Navy photographers who were assigned to the USS Wasp photo lab.  I was the ship’s photo officer in charge of the lab.  The Wasp left Boston in early February 1962 and returned in late June, having stopped in Scotland, England (Portsmouth and Plymouth), Holland, Norway and Germany. 

 It was the Germany part I wanted to show Obie.  The Berlin Wall was up.  The ship docked in Kiel, the first aircraft carrier ever to sail in the Baltic Sea.  I think Obie got a big kick out of that section and the book as a whole.  We had a wonderful time.  We even talked a stranger into taking our picture.  It did not turn out very well.  The sun was too much for the lens.  

Warren

  Oh, one final thing:  Not long before we were leaving a man came up to us and said he had overheard our conversation.  He was much younger than we and was eager to tell us how much he liked hearing us talk about our time in the service.  He said he appreciated what we did and that he had never been in the service and that he sometimes wished he had been.

 I Swear and Cross My Heart

    Thanks for listening.  Take care.  Good luck.   /s/ Warren Sparrow, 29 January 2015

Hillary at airport firing back

(PS...As weekend spooks, Brian Williams (shown at right) and I also discovered that the dirty rat who  fired at Brian's helicopter was the same "low life" sniper who fired at Hillary when she landed in Bosnia!
-Ed )