Grease Monkey

I was tagged in some pictures from my undergrad college days on Facebook, and I have received several inquiries about them from high school friends and people who don’t really know about my undergrad college life. So, I figured I may as well explain them here—and for those of you who haven’t had the luxury of seeing these pictures, I’ll try to post them here when I get my hands on them. No, they aren’t pictures of exotic dancing.

As many of you know, I set out to be a marine biologist after high school. The best school around for this was Texas A&M at Galveston, so that’s where I applied for my undergrad studies. They have a program where entering freshmen can go to sea on their training ship during the summer between high school graduation and the Fall semester, and earn college credit for taking a couple of classes—note, this is not a cruise liner, but a working ship and everyone pitches in. Texas A&M’s Galveston campus also has a Maritime Academy to train students as licensed officers on commercial ships—which is why they have this training ship. Anyhow, I went on the freshman “cruise” and talked a lot to the upperclassmen—found out that there wasn’t much money in marine biology, but there was a whole lot of money in operating commercial ships. Then I had to decide if I wanted to be a deck officer (ocean-going career path to a Captain), or an engine officer (ocean-going career path to a Chief Engineer). At that time, there were hardly any women engineers, and the only one at the school had a reputation for enjoying the fact that she was the only female engineer (I’m not talking sexually—I’m talking about bragging rights and clout). I had some ornery friends with me on that ship (some who are reading this now), and they dared me to announce my major in Marine Engineering—just to bust that bubble. With nothing to lose, I accepted the challenge and did it. And you know what?—turns I was sort of good at it and I really enjoyed it, so I stuck with it (and this girl was not such a b!@#$ after all). So as part of our training to be ocean-going officers, we had to work at sea on our training ship. Where I learned hands-on about oil-water separators, desalinators, engines, reduction gears, boilers, compressors, and lots of other more disgusting things. And I learned to weld. So that is why there are pictures of me, dressed in dingy, oily torn-up coveralls, grease on my face and sweat all over me—me and the girls who chose the same path sweating our butts off in 120-degree engine room heat.

This doesn’t explain the pictures of the crazy get-up of me and my surroundings out on deck. That, my non-mariner and non-Navy friends, is a Shellback ceremony. A test and indoctrination to sailor-hood: crossing the equator for the first time. I was already a Shellback for these pictures—I was administering truth serum to the poor Pollywogs. But that’s a whole other story.