My certificate from the Friden Corp. for Flexowriter training. The Friden Flexowriter was the terminal device for the NavDAC Mark 1 Mod 0.

A menu from the Mardi Gras Restaurant and "Nite" Club, in Rochester, NY, where our Flexowriter class had its parties. Check out the prices! Coffee, however, was an outrageous 15¢ . We lived in hotel rooms, which were paid, and received a monthly allowance for meals. So even with a monthly pay of only $211.50, I could afford to eat here. And a live orchestra every night!

The Los Caracoles Restaurant was a favorite of the Bowditch Crew in Barcelona. The restaurant was on a corner with the dining room largely open to the street. On the corner by the front entrance was a rotisserie, with chickens cooking away.

The Los Caracoles ("The Snails") Restaurant was a favorite of the Bowditch Crew in Barcelona. The restaurant was on a corner with the dining room largely open to the street. On the corner by the front entrance was a rotisserie, with chickens cooking away. Forty years later, the Los Caracoles Restaurant is still in business at the same location, in a much higher class incarnation.

In May 2006 John Hansen and wife Nancy revisited Los Caracoles.

Also a favorite of the Bowditch crew, but of a different sort than Los Caracoles.

A card and a pin.

While stationed aboard the Bowditch I used a Kodak Instamatic camera for color photographs. The successor to the Kodak Brownie, most early models of the Instamatic (I think mine was a Model 100) were simple point-and-shoot cameras with an all plastic body and lens, and a fixed aperture and shutter speed. All of my color slides were taken with 24-exposure Kodachrome 126 cartridge film. As I (vaguely) recollect, flash bulbs came in 4 bulb cartridges, packed 6 in a row in a transparent plastic box.

Despite the modest equipment almost all of my slides from the Bowditch have survived.

The 126 cartridge was sold at the Bowditch ship's store, and came with a prepaid development mailer. Here's a box of slides as returned from Kodak. I took a few rolls of Kodacolor 126 cartridge color print film. These were also sold in the ship's store with prepaid mailer. The negatives from this film have survived very well; some examples are photographs of my stateroom. Only a touch of color correction and some mold and dust removal were required to produce these digital prints from the negatives.