Radar Love

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The other day Ocean Tiara (@RebeccasFarm ) asked a question about old toys from childhood. (I’ll link the original discussion below.) I had mentioned that I had a teddy bear as a teenager that was a gift to me from a sailor who’d stayed at the motel my parents ran in Daytona Beach. So now to bore you all with the story. My dad got a wild hair up his butt that he wanted to run motels, so he took a correspondence course. (This was in the early 70s, long before “hospitality industry specialist” was a college major. ) We took off three times in 1973, eventually landing in Daytona Beach, Florida. For me, it was great! We lived a block from the ocean, my allergies dried up and blew away thanks to that salty sea air, and life was good for a teenager. (I was also away from all the taunting I’d suffered in school, which really made those years in Florida better.) My brother, meanwhile, had finished all of his schooling in the Navy and was on his first Mediterranean cruise, on the USS John F. Kennedy. I wore his old uniform shirts to school, that’s how proud I was of my big brother. Anyway, a sailor stayed at the motel while on liberty from up in Jacksonville. He chatted with my parents, who of course had a keen interest in anything Navy. During his stay he went to the boardwalk (which was a block and a half away from the motel) and played some of the arcade games. He won the teddy bear you see in the picture. Before he returned to Jacksonville he gave me the teddy bear. This was 1973, and M*A*S*H had been on for a year. Naturally, with a teddy bear, I named it Radar. As you can see, he’s retired at 50, living in a bag so his stuffing doesn’t fall out all over the place. Come to think of it, brother and I are also retired and should be in bags so our stuffing doesn’t fall out, either. Here’s Ocean Tiara’s discussion that prompted this one: