Email from Oregon The Prince & The Pauper Redux (Please forgive me, Mark Twain) By Buddy Mays
In early April of this 2021, my favorite Personage of Royalty, Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, and Prince Consort of Queen Elizabeth, died peacefully, at home, in bed at Windsor Castle, at age 99. It was a sad moment for me. I don’t know many Personages of Royalty, but I did know Prince Phillip. Or at least I met him. Once. More or less. It was the summer of 1962. I was an 18year-old seaman stationed aboard the United States Coast Guard training ship Eagle, a 295foot long, square-rigged “windjammer” used to educate Coast Guard cadets in the fine arts 8
of navigation and seamanship. We had been at sea for nearly two months, sailing from the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut to the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa, then north to the Azores, Antwerp, Belgium, and the British Isles. It had been an amazing voyage, especially for a naïve kid from New Mexico, who until the previous year had never even seen an ocean, let alone sailed on one. The Eagle reached Edinburgh, Scotland—her final stop before heading home—right on schedule and had tied up at the city pier near Leith. The crew was
