We spoke earlier about cumshaw artists, or people who get things done by crafty stealing or bartering. Alan Johnson from Plano, Texas, told us a story from his Air Force days in Vietnam, when he and some comrades stole a bunch of plywood by sneaking onto a Navy base and loading it into the truck. When a Naval officer saw them, they started unloading it and explaining how they’d come to drop off some excess wood. So the officer told them to get their wood out of there! Classic cumshaw artistry. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Cumshaw Artistry”
Grant, you remember talking about the term cumshaw artist?
Yeah, this is somebody who is really good at procuring things maybe illegally. To, like in the military, material and resources from other places in order to get their work done.
Yes, yes. We talked about it a while ago on the show. A guy who was a Vietnam veteran had called in and was talking about that term. And we got a response that I’d like to share. It’s from Alan Johnson from Plano, Texas. He was at an Air Force base in Thailand in 1972, and they used that word.
He was talking about the fact that they needed to add on to a building, but they were short of all the wood, the two by fours and plywood that they needed to do it. And as it happened, there was a naval base nearby. And so late one night, some Air Force guys from Alan’s base drove onto the Navy base with this flatbed truck, and they started helping themselves to the lumber that was stored at the naval base.
And then their sergeant spotted a Navy patrol coming at them, and so he ordered his men to start taking the wood off of the flatbed truck and just sort of stacking it into piles. And so the Navy shore patrol comes up, and they ask what’s going on, and Alan writes that the sergeant said to him, well, we had extra building materials at the Air Force base and nowhere to put them. So we knew that you had this lumber yard, so we brought this stuff over here to store it.
And the shore patrol officer said, oh no, you guys take that Air Force stuff back to your base and find some place to put it there. So as the shore patrol carefully watched, the airmen sullenly filled their truck and drove off to the base to take their Air Force stuff back to the Air Force base. So he writes, everybody was happy.
And it’s always one of those kind of Peter robbing Paul, right?
Yeah.
It’s just like it’s two different hands of the government.
Yeah, I love it.
That’s real cumshaw artistry, I think.
Yeah, because there’s always that element with the cumshaw artist. There’s somebody who’s really clever at getting a hold of things that are rare or hard to find.
Yeah.
