CAMP PENDLETON — With sought-after strategy comms expert Helio “Fred” Garcia among the speakers, the First Marine Expeditionary Force public affairs office convened its second annual Communications Summit at Camp Pendleton earlier this week. MEF PAO Lt. Col. Chris Perrine credited his deputy, Maj. Staci Reidinger, with pushing the concept Read more…
On The Road: Past USMCCCA President and current Conference Emcee Fred Lash (standing) and wife, Donna (r), were lunch guests of National USMCCCA Executive Director Jack Paxton (2nd from l) and his wife, Pat on Sunday in the Villages, FL. Fred and Donna, Springfield, VA were on the way to Read more…
HOMETOWN BARBER IS NEWEST MEMBER — Ray Adams, a combat correspondent at Camp Lejeune and on Okinawa in the late 1980s, retired from the Corps after a successful line recruiter tour in 1998. Now, he cuts hair in national president Keith Oliver‘s hometown of Eustis, Fla. Ray well remembers working Read more…
Please join me in congratulating CC Col. Annita Lane Best on her retirement this week following 30 years of service. Elsewhere on FB news pages her ceremony at Camp Lejeune is pictured. Anita is a long-time member and strong supporter of the USMCCCA. We wish her well in retirement.
Col. John Glenn
America has lost one of its true heroes from a bygone era when space exploration was still considered a modern miracle. John Glenn passed December 8 at age 95. He was a highly decorated Marine Corps fighter pilot from World War Two and the Korean War and the first American to orbit the earth at a time when the Russians had already put Sputnik into orbit and we needed to save face.
I met John Glenn when he was running for president in the Democrat Party primary of 1984 on Tybee Island, Georgia near Savannah. He posed with a beauty queen because it was expected and Glenn, always duty bound, did what was necessary to show the world he was both dedicated, sincere and predictable. Someone who could and should be counted on to do the task at hand.
Chuck Beveridge
Chuck Beveridge, ‘laissez les bons temps rouler!’
One of my personal heros, Chuck Beveridge, passed away just a day before the 241st birthday of his beloved Marine Corps last November at age 90.
At the time I met Chuck, Mike LaBonne, Sally Pritchett, Bill Rowe, Charley Rowe, Angie Peraza, Angel Arroyo, Daryl Bennett, Mike Waters, Mike Rosas and a host of other Jarheads were running the nationwide Toys For Tots campaign from the 4th Marine Division/Wing Headquarters office in the 9th Ward of the Crescent City. We were located right next to one of those levies that gave way during Katrina.
The city was dirty, violent, wildly adventurous, filled with tourist traps and local joints known only to Gods and Cajuns. Chuck fit right in.
He was a living legend to us youngsters back then since most of us never knew an Iwo Jima “graduate” and, while he was all that, Chuck was also self-effacing, gregarious, creative as hell, a businessman with a great sense of humor and his own man living by his own rules.
What did we know about the Old Corps? As it turned out, nothing. Chuck broke the mold of the by-the-book Marines running our lives back then. He wasn’t a ‘Nam vet and he wasn’t some pompous ass flaunting heroics of a bygone era, though he certainly could have been had he chosen that route. After all, we were impressionable kids without knowledge of the hell he went through on Iwo and other island hoping campaigns in the Pacific Theater.