Well, we’ve just driven them back to where each of them has his or her ‘current ‘dwelling’ now, and here we are again, the two ‘empty-nesters’, and I’m going to explain what did the two previous posts mean.
So, today’s the Mother’s Day, and it looked as a pretty good reason for them to come and visit us, - ‘their folks’. So, they did.
We get together tonight, our children ‘are visiting us’, - fairly rare occasion, by the way, - and Victoria has just invited everybody to ‘have a cup of tea’.
So. I’ll be with you in a second. Cup of tea 
Upon finishing the short term service in “Morskaya Aviatsiya’ Yuri was about to look into his near future as a ‘civilian’. He got experience flying bombers (he was a little bit short of one thousand hours on the Tu-16 logged in three years), and it might be regarded as valuable, but at that time such a career development wasn’t a sort of typical, and in his case he needed to get through a few ‘Red Tapes’ in order to convert his military credentials so that they would satisfactory fit for the civilian flying job requirements.
Yuri graduated the Krasni Kut college in the early 70s, and then there was a bit of twist in the beginning of his career.
The Krasni Kut flying college was known as a solid school to train pilots for flying the Antonov-2s, the versatile bi-plane type that was used in many applications all across the vast country. The main chunk of graduates would normally begin their careers as agricultural pilots on the An-2s.
But as an option (which was not a common thing at the time) , he was offered to join a short-term military service to fly the Tupolev-16 (’Badger’) bomber in the ‘Morskaya Aviatsiya’ (Naval Air Force). So, he easily traded off the ‘would-be’ career of the crop-duster for way more serious stuff, and went to serve ‘defending Rodina’ (’Homeland’).
This one is not a picture from other round of our correspondence, but it conveys the idea of environment he was in very well.
I should ask him for pictures of his own.
As I’m looking back into my ’salad days’ I can clearly remember that a ‘desire to fly’, a wish to become a ‘flying man’ came to me quite yearly. I’m able to recall myself thinking of it at an age of five, that’s for sure. Whenever I had a chance to doodle with paper and pencils (have done it occasionally until not long ago) a theme of the aeroplanes and flying was the most favorite;
(This picture of the Yak-18T was drawn in the late 90s, and you can read my comments to it on an old (’an ancient’, in fact:) Internet project me and my son started then) ,
When I went to school I already had an answer for one of the most typical questions the adults always ask kids of that age: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ - ‘A pilot’. Period.
And no kidding, - I got really excited when my cousin Yuri ‘appeared out of the blue’ one day wearing a flying college cadet’s uniform. I was in Grade 5 or, maybe, 6 then, and I didn’t even know that he joined a pilot course in the Krasni Kut flying college. That was a mind-boggling sensation!
He was having a short vacation from the course, and dropped by in our city of Semipalatinsk to see his relatives, us included.
After that memorable meeting we started more or less regular a mail conversation, and I got this picture in one of his letters.
For many decades various models of ‘ZiL‘ tracks (‘ZiL‘ is an acronym for ‘Zavod Imeni Likhacheva‘ - ‘The production plant named after Likhachev’) were dominant on the market… Oh, wait a minute.. What am I talking about?! - there was NO MARKET in the Soviet Union whatsoever.. OK, let’s put it that way: ‘they represented the most common type of the middle capacity truck in the country’s transportation industry‘, - how about that?
And of course, the mentioned Mr. Likhachev never was the plant’s OWNER
On this picture is shown one particular variant of a large track family originated from a core line prototype dubbed ‘ZiL-130′. Numerous modifications were built for utilizing a number of jobs, and with no doubt for very long they served a sort of ‘workhorse role’ for the industry. So, pictured here is a ’sedelnyi tyagach’, or a ‘trailer tractor’, and it was mainly used to haul a variety of long-sized loads, such as logs, poles, long concrete construction elements. My dad drove this track for a number of years. Before driving this one he worked on a few models of dump trucks, and all of them were of a ‘ZiL’ make. I can assume, that after having had so many years of driving experience on various models of ZiLs, he eventually became an ‘expert of this trade’
You may believe it, or not, but I saw the same vehicle just… less than a week ago. It was in Santa Clara, Cuba, where we were flying to on the charter from Halifax.
It’s funny, - a little bit of ’spying’ needed in order to get this picture! The Cuban security guys weren’t sensitive enough when I asked them to turn to my mode, and let me go over that part of tarmac and rejoice with a subject of my ‘nostalgia’
P.S.
A more recent picture, taken in 2008, - again, in Cuba. This time there were no trouble with security whatsoever! Oh, those ‘unpredictable Cubans.. Got in ‘full contact with the past’…
I’m not quite sure I remember who are the two guys in white shirts on the sides of this picture, but all other folks are absolutely identifiable.
Family reunions, gathering on public holidays and family occasions were quite popular. Our ‘extended family’ wasn’t an exempt. It wasn’t rare a thing that up to 50 people would get together. And HAVE FUN!
I think at that time (late 50s - late 80s) people socialized way more than they do it now in the modern Russia.
Being often asked questions by my colleagues and friends here in Canada about ‘What kind of life you had in the Soviet Union’ I’ve come to the idea of starting a respective topic, and this picture would be a nice introduction for such a ‘memoir’.
Here we are, my dad, and myself, being held on a fender of his ‘Zakhar’.
Early (’very early’:) 60s, Kazakhstan, Semipalatinsk. Wonder, what would be your comments on what you see here?
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