ABOUT THE OTHER A-2 JACKET

Today's post is about the other A-2 jacket :the US Navy intermediate cold weather jacket A2 .

the A2 superseded the famous N1 in 1960/61 and its first version was slightly different from the model known nowadays .

the first model had no adjustable straps at the waist ,but some at the cuffs.the other noticeable difference was the presence of a removable collar strap .To be noticed also its reinforced cuffs .

The model featured today is the second version of the jacket ,with smaller tag and the still reinforced cuffs.This jacket belonged to a seabees who was on board the CVA 34 during the Vietnam war .

 USS Oriskany CVA 34 was an aircraft carrier launched in October 1945. She made one Korean war combat cruise, from September 1952 to May 1953.

Following the end of the Korean conflict,she continued her Pacific Fleet service for more than two more decades, deploying regularly to the Western Pacific for tours of duty with the Seventh Fleet. She was out of commission from January 1957 until March 1959, during which time she was upgraded with a new angled flight deck, steam catapults, an enclosed "hurricane" bow and many other improvements that permitted safer operation of high-performance aircraft. In 1961, she became the first aircraft carrier to be fitted with the revolutionary Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS).

Oriskany's second war began with her 1965 WestPac cruise, during which her planes hit targets in North and South Vietnam. Several more combat tours followed as the Southeast Asian conflict waxed and waned. Tragedy struck the carrier on 26 October 1966, during her second Vietnam War deployment, when fire ravaged her forward compartments, killing 44 members of her crew and air group.She was repaired in the U.S., returned to the war zone in mid-1967 and rendered assistance to USS Forrestal when that carrier also suffered a major fire. Following twenty-six years of service, USS Oriskany was decommissioned in September 1976. She was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register in July 1989 and sold for scrapping in 1994. However, after a prolonged effort that exhibited the perilous state of the domestic ship-breaking industry at the end of the Twentieth Century, she was repossessed in 1997 and spent nearly a decade awaiting final disposition. On 17 May 2006, following careful preparations, Oriskany was deliberately sunk off Pensacola, Florida, to serve as an artificial reef and sport diving attraction.

SUMMER FUN WITH ARNOLD ROTH'S PUZZLES

This 1966 little book illustrated by the great Arnold Roth,is literally packed with millions of surreal mini illustrations and a fun read for your kids this summer ......

But who is Arnold Roth ...well !, i'll let him introduce himself with this little resume he posted online 

Arnold Roth had the luck to be born in 1929 on the cusp of the dawning Great Depression, learning the survival values of scrambling for gainful employment while growing up in Philadelphia. Early on, Roth fell in love with jazz and learned to play the saxophone. He also drew pictures and even sold a few. 

Upon graduation from high school in 1946, Roth was awarded a full scholarship to the Philadelphia Museum School Of Industrial Arts, but he was expelled at the end of two years because he was playing sax in jazz bands until the wee hours of the morning and couldn't get out of bed in time for class. He started freelancing artwork in the summer of 1948 and in 1952, he started to get lucky: he got in on the ground floor of TV Guide, married Caroline Wingfield, and met the Dave Brubeck Quartet, which soon led to assignments doing record album covers. He was selling regularly enough to such magazines as Glamour, Charm, and TV Guide, that he was making a living as a cartoonist.

Roth's big breakthrough came in 1957 when he started working on Trump, Playboy's satiric magazine, and on Humbug, a more penurious production, both the inventions of Harvey Kurtzman, founder of MAD Magazine. He also began doing illustrations for Playboy and cartoons for England's Punch magazine. His first syndicated cartoon Poor Arnold's Almanac, ran two years beginning in May 1959.

From the mid 1960's on, his work appeared regularly in major magazines including Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Holiday, Time, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and countless others. In 1983 Roth was elected president of the National Cartoonists Society.

He has won many gold and silver medals in the Society of Illustrators and received the NCS Reuben award. He was inducted into the SI Hall of Fame 2009. He has appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and on The Late Show with David Letterman. He has lectured at Princeton, Yale, and other art schools.

Residing in NYC, he continues to freelance to this day.