Dhahran had several mysterious teenage clubs, including the Galloping Cruds (GCs), The 666s, The Gobos, and The Rough Boogs. The girls had clubs but I was never able to convince any girl to fork over the secrets of their organizations.
Kenny Groat, a New Yorker, was a member of the 1950s crowd. I recall Kenny as jovial and he knew a lot about baseball. Kenny had one of those heartfelt laughs; it came from way inside and it sort of built as it rumbled out. He smiled as his whole body shook. The canteen was one of the four buildings at the center of Dhahran’s mercantile. The post office, the laundry, the barbershop and the canteen were important to kids as well as the adults. One day Kenny and a few of his friends were there the day the clerks put out the new white-brimmed hats. Before everything was khaki-color but these new hats were really something, stark white. I think they went for SR 5.75. It was Kenny’s idea that we purchase these hats to show our group solidarity; it was also his idea for the name, the Rough Boogs. “What’s a Boog?” someone asked. Kenny didn’t answer so that was that. But, he laughed! Some of us figured it was a New York thing, like Zoot Suit. Kenny also decided we should mark these hats in a special way. He took a black liquid shoe polish dauber and placed a dot about as big as a plum right on the peak- a black spot. Most of my friends and I knew about the black spot and since it was not on a page torn from a Bible, we figured it was okay.
So, there we all sat at the pool, the patio, the bowling alley, or the pool hall with our Rough Boog hats. The girls don’t say anything; their identities were strong and secure. We boys? Ours were as fleeting as a locust on the wing in a summer shamaal. Yes, we were fragile, hence the name- Rough Boogs.
I can’t remember all the Rough Boogs. I remember Kenny, of course, and Ralph Magruder, Bob Hardy, Billy Brown, Ed Bowers, Terry Sutherlin, Jim Johnson, Kenny Lebsock, Malcolm MacKenzie, Tim Wells, and myself. Near the back of the 1953 Scimitar (Dhahran’s yearbook), on one of the picture pages, is a photo clipped ‘The Boys.’ Kenny may be seen in his Rough Boog hat.
And what did the Rough Boogs do? Nothing. Oh, we hung out and we showed poor posture. We dyed our hair and when my mom made wild hats for the Donkey Races one Fourth of July, we worn those too. We were junior high young men trying to find our way with assumed identities like the Gobos and the GCs. The girls were organized too but in a much more sophisticated way. Let’s face it, girls are smarter. When you’re physically the weaker sex, you have to be! The girls were clever too. They made up a place called the Passion Pits. You might be walking away from the swimming pool, on the way home, and find a chalk message with hearts scrawled on the sidewalk. There would be an arrow and a brief message, ‘This way to the Passion Pits.’ A half a block away, there would be another sign, bating your curiosity with a poem or some other enticing message and another arrow. You might follow these signs all over camp!. One night, we followed the signs and they ended at the Davies Mansion; there was a triangular traffic island near the Davies home and it was landscaped with a low hedge. These were the Passion Pits.
Sometimes a group circulated a major story. The GCs were camping on the jebel east of Dhahran. On a quiet night, you could see the lights of Manama on the far off island of Bahrain. It was quiet that night and the boys were alerted to the Dhahran Air Field when an airplane started up engines late. The plane taxied to one of the runways and took off. It began to climb, then the climb steepened and the airplane fell off toward one wing and crashed in a fireball. I was not a CG but one of them told me the story the next day. Now, Dhahran was a small town and everyone knew just about everything about everybody. But, this is one story that did not make its way around on the grapevine. I never found out who was flying or what caused the accident.
The Rough Boogs never had a meeting that I remember. We roamed around camp a little and we sat together on Wednesday and Thursday nights waiting for something to happen. But we never did anything. And like so many other parts of our life in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, when we left, these realities didn’t even qualify for a history book. My lasting memory of Kenny is him standing between Tory Collins and Babs Lucher in their choir robes. They were the three best voices in school; they could make crystal dance, two sopranos and a tenor.