5.07 Wild Bill

507WildBill
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Ra: Circle up. Welcome to On on the Hash House Harrier podcast for interviews, history and stories. I'm your host, Ra.

Today on the podcast, we're back again on the left coast of America with a long time Hasher. It's been all around the world. It was a pretty interesting hashing resume, all seven continents, which I really wanna find out about because I just finished seven continents and he's hashed on a place that when we went to it was a blizzard snowstorm.

So we're gonna find out about all this stuff from Wild Bill. Welcome.

Wild Bill: thank you, sir.

Ra: , let's tell people your hashing origin story. It was 1984, but when, where and how did you get to your first hash?

Wild Bill: I was working for Hughes Aircraft Company and I was sent over to put in a radar system in Malaysia, and I was based at Butterworth Air Base and I was living on the island of Penang, and I'm a runner, so one of the things I wanted to do was meet with local people and interface with them and run a bit.

I asked. My secretary, who's, native Malaysian about that. I, said, do you know of a running group? And she goes, I know of a running group because she didn't know me very well. And she goes, but it is really not for everybody. And I said, tell me about it. And she goes, you're just gonna have to check it out.

So I had been touring the island of Penang. I would go up places like the reservoir and stuff like that, and there were a lot of walking trails, but they went up into the jungle of course I was brand new to everything and I was reluctant to go up there. So when I drove out to my first hash, they were just leaving.

At the time I got there and they were running right up those jungle paths that I was staring at and , had been afraid to go up myself. They were not only doing it, they were doing it with great enthusiasm. So I was immediately hooked and I followed them around to the end and, we had a few beers and introduced myself and I never looked back.

I joined right away and I stayed. With them for the two years I was there. then when I came back home, some of the Australians that had been there came to the US and looked me up and wanted to run with a hash. So that linked me up to the Long Beach hash house Harriers here in California.

And it goes on. That's where I met Alouette, who became my wife four years later, and we subsequently hashed all over the world.

Ra: , let's review back and Panag, Danza co-ed Hash. So that person in your office, did she go on the trail?

Wild Bill: She did not that day. I had to just show up, stag and introduce myself. Okay. And yeah, the, the hash house Harrier women ran on Thursday nights and the Penang hash guys ran on Monday nights, it was an all men's hash. But the women's hash was definitely co-ed. Everybody was welcome.

Ra: Did you run with both groups?

Wild Bill: Yes, I did. the men were more adventurous and stuff like that, but, I wanted to meet people and the locals and stuff like that. I didn't interface much with the Malaysian Air Force other than at work because they all lived on the mainland and I lived over on the island.

I might also add that I was given hardship pay for living on Penang Island, which. Was a Paradise resort. So yeah, it was awesome in that regard. I made a lot of friends there. the Australians were also part of the Defense Pact at the time, so it was a large Australian contingent who had, basically, the Aussies been there since World War ii, so they.

the recreational aspect down pat, they had stuff going all the time. we took bus trips up to other hashes, up to Song Claw and up to Thailand, up to Hagi and stuff like that. We went all over, but they had stuff going on all the time. I immediately became part of the local scene.

I did not just stay in my hotel.

Ra: Nice. What was the difference between the two groups besides being all men and like women co-ed? What was the traditions and how they ran, and how they did circle or singing or a on afters?

Wild Bill: They were pretty similar, , yeah, they really were. We, yes, , and they did sing.

And these were things that I was used to a running group that was not a hash group, and Instead of just running and looking at your watch and going around a track, we were running through the jungle with bugles and, playing tricks on each other, the false trails and this and that.

Then we'd get done, and then the parties started. we'd have a few beers before and after ,the men did not drink before. they were drinking ginger beer. the rule is that you had to run the run or you didn't get any beer at all. 'cause some of these guys would never leave the beer truck if that was the case.

we did that and then we usually went out to eat after that which is a wonderful experience in Penang because they had these outdoor food courts where you could just wander around and get a thing of noodles and get some sharks fin soup or this and that and this and that.

Then the evening just rolled by. It was just a wonderful way to socialize.

Ra: Yeah, that sounds the classic Hashing. What about people who were there when you started and all your subsequent traveling and events all over the world? Are there people from then that you have seen through the years that we're still hashing?

Wild Bill: Yes. one jumps out at me right away because he continued to travel internationally. He was just a local guy named Sammy Raja, and his hash name was Mr. Cool. . He supported all the inner hashes. He had, had experience living in Germany, I think with a family so he was quite comfortable with international travel.

He was quite comfortable socializing with. Non Malaysians he still lives down in by Al Lumpur. I think at Pedaling Jaya, but he's still an active Penang. Hasher 'cause he goes up there often enough to do it. And this is 40 years later. and as soon as I see the Malaysian contingent at any inner hash I go right over there and almost always run into Mr.

Kool.

Ra: That's great. Alright, back to Long Beach then in,fall of 85 . How did this work somehow? The Long Beach run had been running for six months by then I think, . Yes. So it was just some people you knew. how did you get to Long Beach and how'd you find out about it?

Wild Bill: Okay. this was , before the internet, so I came back. But some of the Australians that I had run with in Malaysia were coming to the US and they wanted to see Disneyland and I, I lived half an hour from there and I said, hell yes. And they said, and, mom and dad would like to hash. So I said, okay.

I did some calling around to my running friends and somehow it popped up and they said, you wanna see a guy named, Jerry Templeman? I called him up. Jerry Temple Man's hash name is Eject. He was one of the founders of the hash earlier that year, along with Jock and Zapata, he just.

Told me how to find the next run. It was down in Long Beach and it was fantastic. They said, meet us at Shady Acres miniature golf course. I said, so I showed up there. It was closed, but they had a cafeteria that somebody knew somebody. So when we got done running, the cafeteria was open and we brought in pizzas and beer , in their little restaurant.

I. And I'm going, this is pretty cool. it's city hashing and I'm not running through the Malaysian jungles anymore. But the camaraderie was there. the songs were there, the hash names were there. , I was happy to do that. Then a week or two later, my Australian friend showed up and I was able to take them hashing in America, which is what they wanted to do.

Ra: Great. Now you've traveled around. I know we've got a list of the hashes , and some of the interesting spots in some of the countries. What about, a decade later into the nineties, hashing in Iceland? What about the fire and ice hash?

Wild Bill: . again, I was working with Hughes Aircraft Company and we're putting in a radar system up in the Keflavik Naval Air Station for nato.

,I got the assignment in the meantime, I had met and married Neva Ingersol who became Alouette at the, long Beach hash, and we got up there. We were running with the locals, but they didn't have a hash, and we found out the closest hash was in Dublin. Which isn't all that far away from Reykjavik, Iceland, but it's still a little too far to go every week.

So we were doing some runs on the base and when we did one, this one little old lady came up to us, but she goes, hi, my husband and I are Hashers and we were hoping we could start a hash up here. And, oh, they're about to shoot the gun. Talk to me after the race. Boom. We MEUs and push through Methuselah was the.

Surgeon General on the base, and his wife, they were used to hashing, they'd hashed all over the world. That was in the wintertime. When spring started, we had already organized enough people that we started to hash as soon as it started to be summertime up there. in March or so.

With their help and called it fire and ice, because that's a nickname up there of Iceland because it's where two tectonic plates come together and they have active volcanoes there that sometimes erupt right through their glaciers is fascinating place. I had to wear two or three extra layers that I had, two in Penang.

But yeah, we really wanted to start a hash up there. the athletic director on the base was all for it. He'd been other places where they had hashes and he goes, there's a lot of guys up here that have nothing to do, and part of my job is to keep them active and healthy. And he goes, let's do it.

So we had outta trouble.

Ra: Yeah.

Yeah. the,, tell me about that founding, how many people showed up at hash number one then in 1996 at Fire, ice.

Wild Bill: Probably 30, I'm guessing right now. I can do some digging and come up with a lot better statistics, but enough of the people like Methuselah and Push through knew a lot of people.

the athletic director on the base, we called him, oh shit, I'll remember him too. But he knew a lot of people and we also got, The base TV station to run ads on tv. Just saying, look, if you're not doing anything next Monday night, meet us at the gym. You don't even have to have a car if you're up here without a car, we don't care.

We'll have enough people and we'll drive you off the base. We're gonna go hashing and we'll get you back to the base There were a lot of guys that were single up there. they had a two year assignment. They were living in a dormitory. they would kill to get off the base. So it was pretty easy to recruit.

We made sure we had, t-shirts and stuff like that right from the get-go. We named guys as fast as we could get 'em and got them haring. we set up shirts , your first *Hare*. You got, A Hare shirt it had a bullseye on the back. Wow. , it was easy to recruit a bunch, and we tried to do it every week initially to keep it going and build it Then once it, it was clear that like in wintertime, not everybody was gonna make it every week, but we were able to do it long enough that I was able to, notify the founder's hash that yes, we do indeed have an active hash up here in Iceland. It's the first one we knew about. , and Neva and I are hat number 13, members of the founders because of that.

Ra: Nice. Before we bump into it accidentally. Where and how'd you get your hash name?

Wild Bill: there weren't many Americans hashing in Penang, the last guy to hash in Penang, who I subsequently met down in the San Diego hash his name. Was John Kennedy. So he promptly became the , my name was William, and the only William that these guys knew was Wild Bill.

And I'm somewhat outgoing and subsequently earned the name as I went. yeah.

Ra: . I wanna hear a little bit more about, fire and ice. Do you still have t-shirt from Run number one? Yes. I. Alright, we always want to get memorabilia to the hash museum that's now in, ko.

And I know you don't, is don't wanna give this stuff up. Maybe some, a photo or a copy or something. We need to get that. Have you sent that, Hashi's virtual T-shirt Museum? Do you know about that? No,

Wild Bill: I

Ra: don't. Okay, so we'll talk about that. I wanna take a photo of that first hash shirt from the first run of a country.

That'd be great to get. There's an online virtual t-shirt museum and yeah, I'll talk about that. Okay. We do have

Wild Bill: a little story there. It's,, the shirt has a picture of Iceland on the front it's got the usual stuff, but we have little blurbs saying, little voice arrows saying On, on, and Are you, and stuff like that from all four corners of the hash of Iceland.

Those where the radar stations are that we were putting in for the government. And we had to laugh because you say, this is a classified t-shirt, but the tour books and everything say, yeah, and there's a radar dome up here and there's another one over here. But, yeah, it's a classified hash shirt.

Ra: Okay. Now what were the. Mismanagement. How d formalized did you make that , were you GM with Alouette together? What kind of committee did you have there?

Wild Bill: Yes, we were co GMs and, we got people on as quickly as possible. , we had a religious advisor. a good example was trying to decide when was an auspicious day to run the first hash.

We talked to our Icelandic buddies who were gonna run with us because we did work with some of the Icelanders and said, when's a good time? We were thinking of, let's say the 1st of April, first weekend in April, and they checked their Runes and they said, no, that ain't gonna work.

Do you want a Viking hash? That's Easter Sunday. , so we moved it back a week and did it the last weekend in March. And it was a benign day. It was really nice. It was a lot of fun. On Easter Sunday, we had one of the worst blizzards ever. We barely got off the base and ran, took four wheel jeeps to get us off the base to run number two.

But for the inaugural run, that would've been a disaster.

Ra: Yeah. So

Wild Bill: yeah, so we, we had our pagan, religious advisors from then on.

Ra: For the day. Yeah.

Wild Bill: Yeah. We had a song Meister, we had a complaint department. he was the biggest guy we had his name was Buttercup. And we said, if you have concerns, take your issues to Buttercup and he'll settle 'em for you.

Things like that. So we try to involve as many people as quickly as possible.

Ra: You have a lot of , exotic, more remote places on your list of where you've hashed Galapagos. Make sure we talk about Antarctica. I just went on , the second waan on hash crews and we hashed actually below the Arctic Circle and a few times we did a zodiac ash.

But you hashed on Deception Island and. I think when we got there, that was the one blizzardy snowstorm day. How did you have a hash on, deception on and not that big?

Wild Bill: it's not that big. and we wanted to do it, two teams on the boat, one sailed the boat.

The other were the adventure guys that took us off on the zodiacs off the boat to Deception Island and to all the places that we wanted to see. They took us to Deception Island, which is a volcano extinct. It's a Caldera. We sailed in through the gap into the Caldera and I talked to the adventure guys and , explained a little bit, and they go, we know all about hashing.

We've been around the world. I said, this would be my seventh continent. I'd really like to lay a hash there. We worked it out. So it would be absolutely zero impact. What we did, we got the avalanche stakes that you use and we just started at one end of the beach and we hashed him up.

Another hole on the Caldera that was reputedly. The first place where human beings ever saw the continent of Antarctica through this gap. A devil's hole,

Ra: maybe it's called Devil's Eye. Yeah,

Wild Bill: something like that. But we had a

Ra: Neptune's eye. Yeah.

Wild Bill: Okay. we had a little beer check there, but it was just, it was basically to say that we did it and then we turned around and went back.

To the start, and on the way back we picked up the avalanche stakes that I had used to mark the trail. So when we came back, there was just no evidence at all that we'd ever even been there. And it was fantastic. Then we went back to the boat and did down downs until nobody could see straight.

It was just really super, and yeah, we made up a shirt for that one too.

Ra: who was with you? How many Hashers?

Wild Bill: let's see. There was me and AlAlouette. I don't know if there was anybody else other than the adventure tour guides that were familiar with it, but it again, we're with a bunch of runners.

We were going down there to run. I. the Antarctic marathon on, I think it was King George Island. So we already had people that were adventurers, they were runners. It was easy to talk 'em into that. And then we said, and when we get back to the boat, I'll by the beer. So it was a slam dunk.

Everybody was a Hasher that day.

Ra: Yeah. Let's talk about travel to big events. you went to your first inter hash was Pattaya. Yep. Yes. And that's after you had already returned to Long Beach, so it was a bit of a trip. You weren't just hopping over from Malaysia. ,what do you remember about the first Interhash?

Wild Bill: for one thing, it was a slam dunk to get there because the Penang hash that I just left, they were sending a whole contingent so that everybody was just going, you gotta fly back here and we'll make all the arrangements. it was all taken care of. I just showed up and, We just had nothing but fun.

it was amazing. my biggest memory was, Tim Magic Hughes riding in on a pink elephant to welcome everybody and going, we, we ain't in Kansas anymore. This is great.

Ra: And then you went to the next one. the first place that I know for sure we were together was your third inner hash at Rota ru in New Zealand.

But you went to a bunch there in the nineties.

Wild Bill: Yeah, , Alouette and I were really active in the hash, but we. Liked the international crowds that we met at these inter hashes, and you started seeing the same people showing up. And so it wasn't like going and having to meet everybody.

you just showed up and it was old home week starting with Mr. Cool. But then it moved around to the people that were pretty much international bums, hash bums.

Ra: Yeah. who are some of the people that you look forward to seeing there in the eighties and nineties?

You recall? Anybody, maybe it's not around anymore or you haven't seen for a while that we're part of that time?

Wild Bill: I. Tim Hughes, who was of course, who was very big. I saw him at Rotorua. there was one night where the bars were staying open all night, and me and one of my Australian buddies from New Castle.

Music Man who also came from Penang and Music Man and I, and Magic, the three of us. We stayed out all night and I got in a lot of trouble for that.

Ra: But, great.

Wild Bill: It was those guys. It was a guy named Pauly. I'm trying to remember, this is back 30 years now.

Ra: yeah, it is.

Wild Bill: I recognized an awful lot of them and Southern California had a big contingent that went a lot too.

Although when Alouette and I got to places we usually didn't hang out with the people that we hang out with all the time. We went and found our friends from England. there was a guy named Shep and GBH, uh. I knew from Cyprus,we would go look them up then when the hash founder's hash started going to the inner hashes, it made it pretty easy to link up with our old buddies there too.

Ra: That's great. that inner hashing, traveling, finding people, you met one of the original founders of the hash from kl.

Wild Bill: that was pretty unbelievable. His name was Horse Thompson that was 88 we were on our way to, or it was to Bali, Indonesia, but.

, in the hash at KL was throwing a big party too, because it was their 50th anniversary. So a huge contingent of us from Southern California were doing all of that and. And I just happened to be in the right place at the right time and somebody said,, that guy's horse Thompson, he's one of the original Hashers.

So we went over and paid our respect, said hi to him, chatted with him a bit and his address at that time was somewhere in the Philippines. And literally he was one of those guys that, just kinda went tropo. he went down there and , I don't think he ever went home.

Ra: Yeah. Yeah. of course you went, you've been to the Langer Club, itself and the long bar.

Yeah. Yep. Okay. okay. Jump over to. At the continental level, the, you were at some of the early ones What was your impression of those? And if you were saying compare them or contrast 'em to World Inter Hashes Philly, especially Philly, San Diego, those earlier ones.

Wild Bill: Philly was our first one. , there was an earlier one That was in 85, but we didn't go to that one. Wish we would've. But Alouette originally came from Philadelphia, so she said, we're going to that one. And they set a very high bar because I think they had to know somebody in the city government because, , a good example was the one of the, one of the runs we did, we went right through the Philadelphia Zoo after it was closed. you're running along, you're going up , and it's evening and they swung the gates open and we got to hash through the zoo. , then . The first night we finished on the Rocky Steps of the Museum of Fine Arts that Rocky ran up and did his dance, and we had a police escort that we had police guards, they had an all girl rock band at the top of the steps.

So we did our down downs there and ate and danced the night away . Over across the way on the skyline of the utilities building the scroller up on top, scrolled Philly welcomes hash house harriers, and he scrolled it all night while we were partying, and then we had shuttle buses back to the hotels .

It was just. Awesome.

Ra: let's see what you remember. back closer to home in San Diego two years later. Speaking of police escorts, it's an infamous one , were you there when the police helicopters and everything happened?

Wild Bill: I do remember seeing one arrest at the down downs.

Alouette and I also ran with the Orange County hash all the time and la. Long Beach and Orange County were instrumental in helping organize the thing as well. So we were active at all the hashes we got done, I think it was the last hash, but it was up in Orange County and we were partying and everybody, they were giving out awards.

And the girl that , I think she won Miss Inter America's hash, promptly. Popped off her bra and swung it around overhead on stage. the park was open to everybody at the time, and so this was no jokes. Sheriffs came up and arrested her and took her down, but we did have a few Hashers that were also in the government at the time and they persuaded her to let her lose,

it was a little more , regulated, I would say, than the hashes we were used to. we started at the Omni Hotel and within the first couple hours, , a bunch of us were in the jacuzzi, and they just came in and hit the off switch and they said. The jacuzzi is closed for the duration of the weekend and , that was it.

So we're going, okay, we're sorry. We'll behave. Anyway, it was like that, but San Diego was also a really good one. It was well organized and well run. Loved it.

Ra: Great. , let's make sure we mention some of your other exotic stops, Easter Island. In Chile.

Wild Bill: Yeah, Easter Island was a good one.

There was, marathon Tours. Organization was running a marathon there. So again, I was with a running group we went down there and I went and, decided we had to lay a hash trail there and we did. it was easily supported, but there were two things of interest. One is I didn't know if I was gonna have any flower over there, so I bought a couple of kilos of flour on the mainland to fly over with me and we're landing on the Easter Island airstrip, and it was in a small plane, and AlAlouette just says, wow, this is great.

She goes. My husband has a couple of kilos of white powder,

and we said we'll explain it later, but , I didn't get in any trouble for that, but , we did lay trail and we were, I. Not all of them statues are standing. Some of 'em are still laying down in the pastures and stuff like that. So we were laying trail and actually when we were scouting, I going, I can't believe this.

We're gonna be hashing by a bunch of MOIs. I said, where else in the world are you gonna hash by a, some really old? Dead famous things and she goes,we've hashed in Hollywood,

Ra: yeah. let's talk about your moves into, mismanagement, both you and Alouette. you were moving around, going off to Iceland and back, so you didn't get into mismanagement until when?

At Long Beach

Wild Bill: alouette got involved very early. tomorrow, she'll be around to, to discuss it, but she wanted to be involved. She really liked the hashing, so she wanted to be involved that was easy. Because the GMs would rather just be GMs and let somebody else do the work.

so she started organizing things she worked in the background. She was the executive officer. she did it a lot , she decided we were gonna have at least one activity a month that it'd be an out station run or a camp out or something like that. Anything that we could tailor to hashing , that included taking raft trips down the American River on a raft organization's tour. We hashed and things like that. So we had something going every week. She made sure that , the beer was cold on and on and on, and she was also the historian. She started doing that, working with whoever was keeping the records right away.

She ended up becoming the hash historian. you've talked about the 40th annual book. She did the 20th. It took her a year to do it. They used that as a springboard for our 40th,

Ra: the work she's done there is kinda legendary for anybody that's seen any of that or asked about some of the data and Yeah.

And it is, it's great. It's so great to hear, when there's people that have passion for hashing and aren't worried about. They just wanna run a circle and that really keeps, of course, long Beach, a long lasting hash with a high attendance. Is it pretty much all through your years been that nearly triple figures a lot of times, huh?

Wild Bill: that's really true. They were really glad to see her back after she came back from Iceland after being away for a couple years. 'cause nobody came to her standard. Plus everybody loved her. she knew all the songs and she was also an excellent runner. She did the Boston Marathon five times.

Nice. yeah.

Ra: And what about your step into being GM there at the Long Beach? That's a big, that's a big hash to take on.

Wild Bill: it was, , I became involved when I lost the election running for gm Allouette and Async, and I ran and I was the third out at, and I only needed two. So I became hash cash, which was a good thing for me because I learned how things went and I also got to know everybody's name because I saw him every week and , that was really good for me and I subsequently ran and won later on.

I was also their religious advisor and stuff like that, which is a fun thing to do because you have a very wide latitude of what you can do. in some ways, that was more fun than having all the responsibility of being the gm.

Ra: Yeah. Just be funny. You were also not at the same time, but you got into mismanagement with Orange County, right?

Wild Bill: Yeah. . There were just a few guys that really wanted to do it, you were welcome to do it as long as you wanted, then , if you didn't want to then we'd have an election. One guy ran for 17 years and he finally said, I want somebody else to do it. And yeah, but that was fine,

I was running with Long Beach for so long. I said, I'm never gonna say welcome to Long Beach. I'm never gonna say it. And I think it was the second run before I stepped down that I finally said, welcome to Long Beach. And boy did I have to do down downs for that.

Ra: one thing also that's interesting with Long Beach, with all the data and Alouette spearheading that up and making sure that there's decades and decades of data and statistics and everything.

You also have these a lot and events, ceremony, and awards. You have on your CV about when you had Trail of the Year, , what's the deal with Trail of the Year? How big is it? Who picks it, and how is that presented and commemorated?

Wild Bill: every year when we have elections, that's one of the things on the ballot is.

Which one did you think was Trail of the Year? It typically was a special event. It was an out station run. one time we took a cruise through the Long Beach Harbor and stayed on the Queen Mary. it was usually something that had to be very special.

usually the run itself is pretty damn good. the first year we got it, it was up in Big Bear. We were running through, trails. It was a camp out weekend, you were way away from the big city . We had a real special beer check with a place that had a 360 view that was just killer and nobody cared when they left , , we were real proud of that trail and it one trail of the year, yeah.

Ra: What happens then? Is it, is there something more than a line in a book when you win that?

Wild Bill: yeah, we've got one guy. When you get Trail of the year, he gets some running shoes, makes a slash in them, and puts a beer mug in there, a plastic beer mug, and puts a lanyard around it.

So you get a beer mug in a running shoe that you can hang around your neck and just pop the top and take a drink when you want to, and it's become a very desired item. His name's Akey Breaky Fart, and that's one of the things that he does for us. they give these awards out at our annual celebration where we announced who the news committee is

and everybody's waiting to see who gets trail of the year.

Ra: What are some of the other awards or any other,

Wild Bill: what can I say? best legs, best buns, worst trail of the year, which gets usually a lot of competition. biggest whiner, best writeup because , every run has a writeup that goes in our s newsletter and some are better than others, yep.

Ra: Nice. You gave me a list of things, some, some of your other milestones and firsts and things. the Meridian beer check, was that a hash event how'd that work?

Wild Bill: Yes, it was, let's see. Cardiff Wales in 2004, we all went over to London and ran there, prelude.

One of the things they did on their hash run was , they took us to Greenwich. we had a beard check at the Greenwich Observatory and that we thought that was great. And for people like us that have hashed around the world, that Prime Meridian is something to brag about. Yeah, on that trip we also went down to South London to find the Gispert Family Memorial.

He died in the defense of Singapore, he was generally known as the founder of the founders his body was never recovered. after he was killed down there, but the, on the memorial, his name is recognized. And,on the hash history book that Magic Hughes, made up, there was a photo of it.

So when we were in London, we went on a quest and found the cemetery and had a Guinness at the memorial in his honor.

Ra: All right. let's talk then about some of your reflections changes in the hash over the years. when you talked about 1984 panang, it sounds like the hash we had Yep.

Two days ago in Toronto. It sounds like all the hash isn't around. if we drop somebody. Back from today into Penang 40 years ago. They'd know exactly what was in store form. It would be just the same. I'm not sure it works the other way. Take people who stopped hashing 40 years ago and we plunk 'em down in some different places around the world, hashing might look a little bit different or sound a little bit different.

what do you think about the changing in the hash?

Wild Bill: of course I'm old school, so Alouette, we liked it the way we found it. and most of us, the old timers figure, If you got the right 30 or 40 people there, you don't need the other a hundred. And, and, the logistics change a lot. Yeah. And when you come back to civilization where they have certain regulations about what you can and can't do, especially in a park or someplace where you've got that kind of freedom,

most of the young ones, in our opinion, feel like , it's just another party and it's really not. And we try to say, try hashing. You might like it. What we always tried to do, especially at Long Beach, is indoctrinate 'em, at the, we start with, in 1938, a bunch of hashers in Malaysia or formed a hash.

, we start with the basic history, and say, you believe me, we could party with the best of them. And we do. We say we have a party once a week, but. The focus is, let's get the run done. we'll leave right at 10. When we say 10, we wanna leave at 10. We'll keep it short.

it's not a marathon, it's not competitive. but then when we get done, we expect you guys to shut up and listen to the down downs the more people you get, of course, the harder it is to do that and enjoy it. so those are some of the changes. Some of the other changes, we used to really like to give out names and stuff like that fit the person that it was witty.

It could be little obscene, but it had to fit the person. And a lot of times they wouldn't name them until. They earned something. Okay. what we've seen over the last 10, 20 years is the more I've seen you can get it, the better,, if you could get a quick laugh when you're naming them, that's better than you go, you know what, we lose a lot of people like that.

You give somebody a stupid, disgusting name that they can't even tell to their mother. They're likely to not come back. We've just seen that. But ag again, it's the old school being critical of any changes. Like our founder, jock said, he goes, I never intended it to be this way, but there, it's like a kid, it grew up on its own and it's gonna do its own thing and they just, yeah, that's what the founders said, and I'm good with that.

Ra: it's interesting, bringing the history in certainly is a part that helps people feel like they're part of a tribe or the group or the community and that Yeah. it's not uncommon for a lot of people to agree with that, that the names sometimes are exactly anti-culture. , because they're like, I don't wanna be part of something that does that.

Yeah. that's all fair stuff. You're pretty gentle on this, I can tell. Obviously you love the hash you've been doing it for, is it's most of your life, isn't it? Yes. 40 years is more, is more than, . Okay. Good for you. And, I started just a little bit after you did, and,, what about.

And , your worst day of hashing as a runner, your training, you probably had some running injuries, so did anything happen to you on trail?

Wild Bill: I do know that Long Beach has attorneys and they have disclaimers and stuff like that, and they basically said it's hardly worth the paper it's printed on.

So most of the times our disclaimers, I can hurt myself if I want to. on one early run in Long Beach, I also got an alternate name of Cactus Bill. We were over on Catalina Island and Allouette set Trail, but she set a false that went down a real steep fire break, and I missed the false part of that.

I went tumbling through a stand of beaver tail cactus and I was covered with cactus when I got down. so I got the nickname Cactus Bill and a lot of people just called me that. Nice. that was one of the most memorable injury for me for sure.

Ra: . That's great.

So what about Ash traveling now? Are you still. Planning trips that are, around hashing events.

Wild Bill: I gotta say Covid kinda kicked that one in the teeth. we had signed up to go to Trinidad Tobago in 2000, and then they delayed that a year, then they delayed it two years, then they canceled it and,I think the next one was down in,

New Zealand and we'd been there, it sounded like more trouble than it was worth to go to a place we'd already been, and it certainly wouldn't have been the same as the original New Zealand trip. So we don't look. Actively for that anymore. We're now in our mid seventies but if we go someplace we'll, lay a trail.

Yeah.

Ra: Tomorrow we'll have Alouette join and, she won't know everything you've said about hashing and about her, but we'll pick it up there and continue. How's that?

Wild Bill: That sounds wonderful.

Ra: , while Bill on, on to part two.

Wild Bill: Oh on, buddy. Appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon.

Ra: To close the circle, here's the hash anthem sung by Mother hash.