It was early July 1969, in Pensacola, Florida. I was there for Navy Class A School, and once I stepped off the plane I realized how far out of my Adirondack element I was.

I was wearing wool dress blues, and both temperature and humidity were in the low 90s. As soon as I hit the tarmac, sweat gushed out of every pore. It poured south, soaking my skivs, burning my eyes and making me feel that I’d just landed in the hubs of hell.

The barracks were hardly balm in Gilead either. They consisted of huge rooms jammed with bunks and “cooled” by ceiling fans, which is to say not cooled at all.

The classrooms were air-conditioned, as was the library, which became my second home till it closed at 2100 hours. As soon as I left the library, I walked into a wall of heat and humidity. Then I slogged through it back to the barracks, where I spent another night having fever dreams atop my sweat-soaked sheets.

All this resulted in a vow: I swore if I survived that hellhole, I’d never, ever, complain about any place being too cold.

—

Gettin’ from here to there

School ended in the Florida winter, which was a whole lot more comfortable than the Florida summer. The last week we got our orders and I lucked out: I got a two-year tour in Bremerhaven, Germany.

Ah, Germany! All I could think of was snow-capped mountains; oompah bands; jolly burghers in lederhosen, with walrus mustaches and a stein in each hand. Oh yeah, and maybe a blond, braided madchen or two, shod in wooden clogs and wrapped in a drindl.

And dig this: Unlike all the other guys in the school, I was flying there, not on a military flight, but on Pan Am, as befit a worldly sophisticate such as yours truly. When I looked at my ticket, I noticed something. The flight was to Frankfort, which when I looked in the atlas found was about 300 miles south of Bremerhaven.

Following chain of command, I asked my instructor, a rather dim bulb named Boykin, how I was supposed to get from Frankfort to Bremerhaven.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “When you get there, there’ll be someone to tell you all that.”

“Even at 1 in the morning?” I said.

“Huh?” he said.

“My flight arrives at oh-one hundred,” I said.

“Oh-one-hundred?” he repeated.

At that moment I realized he knew nothing about how I could get from Frankfort to Bremerhaven, if he even knew Frankfort was a city, not something he gobbled at ball games.

He repeated his original malarky about “someone being there.”

I ignored him and figured I was in for a travel disaster of some sort. Actually, I was wrong. I was in for a travel disaster of all sorts.

—-

Ice time

As stated on my ticket, the plane landed in Frankfort at 1 a.m. Not stated on the ticket was everything else. It began with my seabag arriving with the flight, but not my suitcase. I had all my uniforms, but no civvies. So I could do all my Navy stuff, but couldn’t go off base except in my dress blues, which in a German troop city was about as likely as my making admiral during my first hitch.

Then there was the issue of the guy who was going to tell me how to get to Bremerhaven. At that hour, there was only one other person in the building. He was an ancient geezer who looked like he got fragged at the Battle of Borodino. He was listlessly moving a broom over the floor in what was supposed to be a sweeping motion. Not only did he not tell me how to get to Bremerhaven, he didn’t tell me anything — at least not in English. When he shuffled by me he muttered in German, “I’m too old for this crap.” The effort of that sentence exhausted him. It also exhausted my grasp of German.

I walked around the lobby and finally saw a phone on the wall. A sign above it said it was an MP phone and any military personnel needing assistance only had to dial 16.

My heart skipped a bunch of beats. I grabbed the receiver, dialed 16 and waited for some army dude to answer. I might as well have waited for the Messiah. Not only did no one answer, the phone didn’t even ring. It was as dead as the Weimar Republic.

The old fart with the broom made a second pass and repeated his “too old for this crap” line.

“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, Pops,” I said.

“Vas?” he said.

I waved him off. I had no time for his carping. I figured I had a long miserable night ahead … and I figured right.

Morning came, and after a night of trying to sleep in a verkochte plastic chair, my head resting atop my seabag, I was wretched. I was hungry, thirsty, and felt like the Arthritis Fairy had hit me all the hell over with her wand.

By 0700 the lobby started to fill with soldiers — American soldiers. I felt like the cavalry had arrived. At last I had people to talk to, in English, and I could find out how to get to Bremerhaven.

It turned out there were two airports in Frankfort. I was in the German one. The other was at an American base, Rhein Main, and army buses ran between them all day. I hopped a bus and hauled to Rhein Main, where I got travel vouchers for the night train to Bremerhaven. At last, I thought, my problems were over, and in terms of just getting to Bremerhaven, they were. In terms of a whole lot of other things, they were just beginning.

First, there was the wait for the train. The train station was basically a huge Quonset hut, with both sides open. It protected peeps from rain, snow and sunlight, but was unheated and thus was as cold as the outdoors. And the outdoors were really cold: I’d arrived in in the middle of Germany’s coldest winter in 25 years. And there I was on a train platform clad in dress blues and a pea coat, which in that cold weren’t warm but were OK. What wasn’t OK were the dress shoes on my feet and the cotton white hat on my head. My feet went numb; my ears burned hellishly.

“I can survive,” I said to myself. “Train’ll be here in a half-hour.”

A half-hour later, right on schedule, the train pulled in. What did not pull in was the car for the American military. So much for vaunted German efficiency.

Another hour went by before they got the military car on the train. At that point I felt less like a sailor on his way to a duty station than a protagonist in a short story. The story was Jack London’s classic, “To Build a Fire” whose protagonist was a young nameless schlimazel who froze to death in the Yukon.

The car finally got attached, and I stumbled to it on feet that long ago had lost all feeling. I found my compartment, crawled in the rack fully clothed and got the second-worst night’s sleep of my life. My worst night’s sleep had been the one in the airport.

—

A promise made is a debt unpaid

The next morning when the train pulled into Bremerhaven, the mercury had soared to a balmy 5 degrees Fahrenheit, and any thawing I did overnight was, within minutes, as far in the past as my Bar Mitzvah. All I wanted was to get to the base, check in, take a long hot shower, and then get some serious sleep. As it was, I batted .500.

I got to the base, and I checked in. But forget the long, hot shower and the sleep.

Here’s the thing. The barracks were pre-World War II German air force vintage. They were big, brick and as cold as a politician’s heart. The shower wasn’t cold … but it wasn’t hot, either. So as soon as I got out of it, between the stone floor and the frigid air, I was covered with goosebumps as big as softballs and was shivering uncontrollably.

As I said, this was the coldest winter in Germany in over two decades. In order to earn that title, it couldn’t just be cold; it also had to stay cold. And stay, it did … morning, noon and night, till almost the end of April.

But guess what? Through it all I never complained about the cold. Nope, I stayed true to the vow I’d made in that Fryolator Pensacola.

And I’ll tell you something else. In the 45 Adirondack winters I’ve endured since then, I still haven’t complained about the cold. Not even once.

If you’ve started to admire me for my strength and steadfastness, stop immediately.

That vow, which I’ve kept scrupulously for the past half-century, is also the only one I’ve kept.