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And, had Kennedy given the go-ahead, Fred would have been among the first to have
landed in Cuba.
Singing for his suds
His next assignment brought him to Cherry Point, North Carolina, where he served
as a hurricane forecaster, working 24 hours on and 72 hours off. With so much available
free time, he and several of his fellow forecasters rented a house on the beach, in Moorhead
City, close to Cherry Point. At some point, Fred picked up a guitar and a ukulele.
“That was back when the Kingston Trio was big,” Fred recalls. “We had a little group
called the Beachers Three and we sang songs from the Kingston Trio and the Limelighters
and all that. And we’d start singing on the beach, the three of us, and there’d be [a small
crowd] around us. This guy came down from one of the bars and said, ‘Hey if you come
up and sing on my patio, I’ll give you all the beer you can drink.’ Well, for a Marine, that’s
pretty good. Even after I got out of the Marine Corps,” Fred laughs, “I continued to walk
up and down the beaches and sing for beer and tips.”
From there, he was shipped to Iwakuni, Japan, where he spent most of the rest of
Profiles
his time in the Marine Corps. He returned to Cherry Point, was released from active
duty in July of ’63, and began singing folk music with his guitar in joints from Virginia
Beach all the way down to Jekyll Island, in Georgia… and getting paid for it. Fred was
good enough to have played a place called Top of the Walk in Washington, D.C., and
introduced Joan Baez at the Cellar Door in Georgetown.
“The Cellar Door was kind of intimate,” Fred recounts. “Elizabeth Cotton used to
come through. She’s the lady that wrote ‘Freight Train, Freight Train, Goin’ So Fast,’
and she developed this picking style called cotton picking. She was probably eighty, at
least in her mid-seventies, and she’d walk across the bridge from Virginia, and come
winter
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spr ing
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