SOME THOUGHTS - an Incomplete Autobiography
Introduction I never claimed to be someone of importance or anyone special. I simply had the good fortune of timely birth and the priviledge of growing up in mid-century America in a place called "fly-over country" by politicians.
CHAPTER 1 My earliest memory is of lying in a crib. The side of the crib was against one wall and the foot of the crib was a short distance from an adjoining wall. This second wall had a window with sheer curtains. The wallpaper had a diagonal pattern of large flowers in a light shade of yellow or gold and the background was beige or off-white. My memory may be faulty but I do have this distinct image in my mind. It was probably early 1939.We lived in a craft-style bungalow on south Olive Street in Sioux City, Iowa. I was probably about two years old when Allan, my twin brother, and I were horseplaying in the house when I tripped and fell hitting my forehead against the piano. The folks took me to the office of Dr. Berkstressor, or "Berky" as he was called, to have some stitches to close the cut.
Another memory is walking past my grandmother's bedroom. It was in the evening and the room was dark. But in the light through the open door I could see her rocking chair slowly rocking back and forth. There was nobody in the room. I was curious about this but not frightened. To this day I have no explanation. Then, one spring day, we were outdoors playing near the garden. My older sister, Marilyn, decided to make Allan and I some mud pies to eat. She was probably about eight or nine years old at the time. Allan and I refused the "meal". On summer evenings, the three of us would walk to an overpass above the railway tracks and watch the trains go by.
One Easter morning, mom called Allan and me to the bay window in the dining room. She pointed to some rabbit tracks in the snow going up the driveway and proclaimed the arrival of the Easter Bunny. I didn't believe it but I think Allan may have. Years later, he still believed in Santa Claus. Winters were cold. Although we didn't get much snow in Northwest Iowa, we did have a lot of drifting in town. Often the surrounding farmland would be swept almost clear of snow with most of it ending up among the houses in town.
In the summer of 1940 we piled into the 1936 Pontiac and headed west. In the Rocky Mountains, we threw snowballs and then on into California, south to Mexico, then back up through Arizona and New Mexico. Along the way, the folks bought pieces of Indian pottery. They were eventually passed on to me and I have donated them to the public library here in Shell Knob for all to enjoy. Some of the pieces were quite good.
I also recall at least one trip by rail to some relatives in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He was a retired dentist. He had a small wooden dentist's tool chest with perhaps half dozen round receptacles for the usual tools. He filled these holes with nickels, dimes and pennies and gave it to Allan and me. The folks didn't like that and insisted that we give it back. As we were leaving, he tried to give it back to us so that we could sneak it out. It didn't work. Oh well!
In January, 1943, Dad was transferred to Kansas City. The family took an apartment at 2444 South Benton Blvd. while Dad settled in his new location and the folks hunted for a house. The apartment was small and the building was so old that water and waste pipes ran up the wall inside the rooms. You could hear every flush of a toilet. After about three months, the folks bought a turn-of-the-century bungalow at 3204 East 29th Street.
It had three bedrooms and a reading room off the master bedroom. This reading room could be closed off from the master bedroom with pocket doors so it became the bedroom for Allan and I. The reading room faced the back of the house and had a fireplace.
The three regular bedrooms faced the front and each had a dormer looking out on the street. As you walked up the stairs to the second floor, the folks' bedroom was to the left, my sister's was in the center and my grandmother's was to the right. Immediately to the left was a door from the hallway to our bedroom and immediately to the right just past some linen storage built-ins was the door to the one bathroom. Off the bathroom and facing the backyard was a screened summer sleeping porch.
The front door opened into a hallway and at the end of the hallway were steps on the right leading to the second floor and steps on the left leading to the basement. On the right of the hallway was the living room which could be closed off from the hall with pocket doors and to the left was the dining room which could also be closed off with pocket doors. Just before the steps to the basement was a doorway on the left which led to the kitchen. Between the kitchen and the dining room was a small pantry with a spring loaded restaurant-style door leading to the dining room.
The living room, which extended from the front to the rear of the house, also had a fireplace which shared a common chimney with the one in the reading room directly above on the second floor. The living room also had french doors opening on the front porch as did the dinning room. The house was heated by a gravity hot water system fired by a coal burning furnace which doubled as a trash disposal system. Household tasks included taking the trash down to the basement for burning as well as hauling coal from the garage floor where it was delivered to the coal bin across the basement floor opposite the garage.
All in all, the house had a very warm feeling about it with its turn-of-the-century dark walnut woodwork, beamed ceilings and built-in bookcases. For a four-and-a-half year-old boy, it seemed very large and there was much to explore.
Yet World War II was raging in Europe and in the Pacific and we were constantly reminded of Pearl Harbor.
Nevertheless, Allan and I were able to provide moments of consternation to our parents. One day, while mom was hanging clothes on the clothesline in the backyard, Allan managed to crawl out of a window of the second story sleeping porch. Having a hammer in hand I began to pound on his fingers as he held onto the windowsill. Mom spotted us and screamed for me to stop. I did and Allan was able to climb back into the sleeping porch.
In 1943, I had my tonsils removed. But the doctor slipped and made an extra cut. I didn't mind the pain because that put me on an ice-cream diet for a week. Oh, the problems of a four year old.
In September, Allan and I, at four and a half years of age, were deemed too young to begin kindergarten. But at the start of the second semester in January, 1944, we were old enough to join the class we had missed the preceding September. Go figure!
We entered Benton Public School; the same one attended by Walt Disney. I remember Miss Kotter, the kindergarten teacher as a looming figure always dressed in black. She was intimidating and I received my share of the wooden ruler across the knuckles for misbehaving in class. Corporal punishment was the acceptable standard.
Superman comic books were a dime and Butterfinger and Babe Ruth candy bars went for the price of an Indian-head nickel. Much was affordable on the twenty-five cents a week allowance Allan and I each received for such tasks as taking the trash to the basement to burn or for vacuuming the living room floor.
In September, 1944, we started first grade. The class was taught by a pretty young lady, Miss Lane. She was very pleasantly disposed and for some reason I still have a vivid picture in my mind of her writing "January 4, 1945" on the blackboard next to the classroom door. It was in her class that I learned that if you filled a glass milk bottle with very hot water and then held the bottom of the bottle in very cold water, you could shear off the bottom of the bottle as though cut with a glass cutter.
We finger-painted and did the other things expected of first graders. Some of those other thing included the patriotic duty of carrying coffee cans full of grease salvaged from cooking to be used in the manufacture of explosives for the war effort. First grade was also our first exposure to reading and writing. I had an advantage since our parents had given us a set of Uncle Remus stories and I had already devoured stories of Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox and the Tar Baby.
Second grade was taught by Miss Fisher. I remember her as a very stern woman and much unlike Miss Lane. There we began learning arithmetic. Everything else seems so unmemorable except for my first school-yard fight. For some reason, a classmate chased me out of the building at recess time. I ran down the steps to the playground, stopped, turned and held out my fist. He ran into it and bloodied his nose. Then he ran back into the school building and into the classroom. We were both punished.
That summer of 1945, brought some wonderful news. It was a very hot August afternoon and I was inside playing when I heard shouts coming from the street outside. I ran out the door and saw the neighborhood people out on the sidewalks and in the street yelling deliriously. The war was over! Japan had surrendered! Had I been older, I'm sure the news would have had much more impact on me. Nevertheless, I felt that something marvelous had happened. But the year also brought sad news. On the northwest corner of 29th and Walrond, a banner with a silver star had hung in the window and the flag proudly flew from the pole in the front yard. At the end of the war the banner had changed to that of a gold star and the flag flew at half staff.
The end of the war also brought surplus sales. Mom bought a silk cargo parachute which I suppose she intended to make some item of clothing. But Allan and I decided to try it out by jumping off the back of the garage. Of course the chute didn't open. The end of the war also brought things like air shows. One day your mom, Allan and I took the train to the Naval Air Station at Olathe. My greatest thrill was to sit in the cockpit of an F4U Corsair fighter. The indecipherable instrument panel spread out before me was awesome.
There was a victory parade in Kansas City. The parade marshal was General Wainwright who had spent four years as a POW after the fall of Corregidor to the Japanese.
Third grade started that September, but I can't remember the name of the teacher. Also, about this time, Allan had an unfortunate accident. We both craved the comic strips in the afternoon newspaper so we would race to get as soon as it was delivered. One afternoon we were across the street playing in front of Mr. Lantz's house when the paper was delivered. Allan raced to the street but I saw an automobile turning the corner. The distance was so short that the lady driving the coupé didn't see Allan run out in front of her. Allan was struck and thrown several feet through the air and landed head first on the pavement. Mom ran from the house and cradled him in her arms and cried and the lady driver was hysterical. Allan was taken to the hospital where he recovered and eventually returned home.
During these years, we would take trips to the small town of Norwood in southern Missouri where my Dad had been born in 1895. In the years following World War II, Norwood was still a turn-of-the-century Ozark town with dirt streets and wooden sidewalks. There were mostly horse drawn farm wagons, a few pickup trucks and fewer automobiles. We would stay with a farmer and his wife that Dad had known in his childhood. They lived in a small cottage with a wood stove in the living room, a wood cooking range and water hand pump in the kitchen, and a small stream running behind the cottage that doubled as a refrigerator.
It's well known that there are sights, smells and sounds that imbed themselves so deeply in our memory that to come across them even decades later can evoke memories thought forever lost. Such was the odor of wood smoke and frying bacon that permeated that small house in the morning. On Sunday mornings, it was the sight of the farm families walking up the hill in the warm sunlight to a small, white church at the top of the knoll. The men and boys would be dressed in white shirts, ties and freshly washed bibbed overalls. The women and girls wore dresses which were most often made from feed sacks with pretty flower designs. Music was folk-gospel and played on an ancient upright piano.
These were wine colored days of carefree childhood.
CHAPTER 2 In the summer of 1947, Mom and Dad transferred church membership from St. Paul's Lutheran Church which was only a block away to Immanuel Lutheran Church half way across town. This was because Immanuel had an elementary school and offered school bus service.
Classes were held in two cottages across from the church, each with a single classroom. Fourth and fifth grades were conducted in the cottage on the corner while sixth, seventh and eighth grades were held next door. Our playground was the combined back yards of these two small houses. Kindergarten through third grade was conducted in a small addition to the back of the church proper. This annex also housed the schools office. Our teacher was Mr. Bernard H Arkebauer and Mr. Norman Brinkman, also the school principal, taught next door. Mr. Arkebauer, would continue with us through the seventh grade. Another teacher, Mr. Bierwagon, would come into the class for science subjects, provide playground supervision and coach our softball team.
Fourth grade at Immanuel came as a shock. At Benton we had not yet started division but at Immanuel, long division had already been taught in the third grade. In the fourth grade class was one student, Larry Gooseman, was not promoted. I had never seen a student held back from promotion and the prospect frightened me. Social promotion had yet to be devised. It was a struggle but I think that in the long run, the fact that Mr. Arkebauer taught the same class of students for a four year period was an immeasurable benefit. I did learn long division.
For the fifth and sixth grades, we moved to the church basement while the grade school was under construction. A floor to ceiling accordion partition divided the basement into two rooms. Again the fourth, fifth and sixth grades were in one section while the seventh and eighth grades were in the other. Our "playground" was now the street in front of the church. A regular assignment was street crossing guard at each end of this "playground".
During my fall semester in the fourth grade, I contracted flu-like symptoms which our family doctor diagnosed as pericarditis, the inflammation of the heart lining. Because the war was over, a new miracle drug that had saved countless soldiers' lives was now available. Without penicillin, I may have died.
In 1950, we moved to a smaller house on East 53rd Street Terrace in what was then the southeast part of Kansas City near Swope Park and the zoo. Riding the old wooden streetcars along Swope Park Boulevard was sometimes as exciting as a carnival ride. But in the wintertime, they were very cold. It was also a six block walk to the streetcar line.
The new school building was completed in time for my class to begin the seventh grade. Mr. Arkebauer continued to have our class. We finally had a real school with real classrooms, modern bathrooms and a cafeteria. It wasn't air-conditioned, but otherwise the facilities were the latest. No more cracked black slate boards. Now they were green. The old desks with cast iron sides and heavily initialed wood tops fastened to long wooden runners were replaced with new, modular, flip-top desks. Behind the school was an asphalt topped playground surrounded by a tall chain-link fence.
During the seventh grade, Mr. Arkebauer asked Allan a question about our math assignment. He hadn't done his homework and couldn't answer. In front of the class, Mr. Arkebauer told me to take Allan home and teach him math. I know that it hurt him, and it embarrassed me. I know that it lurks in the back of his mind to this day.
Mr. Brinkman was our eighth grade teacher. He wasn't as tall or as imposing as Mr. Arkebauer, but he was soft-spoken and very gentlemanly. He also loved baseball. We were treated to the 1951 Dodger/Giants game in which Bobby Thompson hit his two out, three run homer in the ninth inning to win the game for the Giants.
During the eighth grade, I started riding my bicycle to and from school instead of the streetcar. I would ride about fifteen blocks to meet with some classmates and then we would ride together for another five blocks to the school. The advantage was that I could ride down to Gilam Park for softball practice after school.
When we didn't have softball practice, some of us would gather at a candy shop on the corner of 43rd and Tracy, a block from the school. Besides candy, there was also an Italian gentleman who plied yo-yo's. He would demonstrate many of the tricks that could be done with a yo-yo such as "Walking-the-Dog" and the "Swing".
CHAPTER 3 In 1952, I started high school at Paseo High as a freshman. Transition from a parochial elementary school to a public high school was a trying time to begin with. About half a dozen classmates from Immanuel Lutheran also entered Paseo but were quickly lost in the student population of almost 2400.
There is a need for class awareness within human culture. High schools are no exception. It took about a semester for me to identify those students within my "class". Since most of the other freshmen had started Paseo as eighth graders and had already begun forming their cliques, it was a little more difficult for the small number of those of us starting as freshmen.
As I look back now on the time of my freshman and sophomore years, it seems a blur. My grades were always good and I had no problems in deportment or associations with other students.
I played football, a mistake. During my junior year, in a game. I took a handoff and cut behind the left guard. I was tackled after a six yard gain. I came down hard on my left knee and damaged the patella. That ended my high school football career. But not my love for the game.
CHAPTER 4 By the early spring of 1958, I was tired of school. I had been going year round since the start of my junior year at Kansas City's Paseo High School in 1954 and on into college. Now I wanted a job and some independence. I had dropped out and been trying unsuccessfully for weeks to get a full time job. When IBM turned me down for a job because of my 1A draft status, I decided that fulfilling my military obligation would solve all three problems. I enlisted in the Air Force for six years, four years of active duty and two in the reserves.
I chose the Air Force because I didn't like Navy uniforms or relish 20 mile marches in the Army or Marine Corps. I also scored high enough on my AFQT to have my choice of career fields. Since I had taken a radio theory course in high school and was generally curious about things scientific, I decided on electronics.
April 6, 1958, the evening of my departure for San Antonio, my girlfriend Juanita Clark and I drove to Union Station. We were sitting on a bench waiting for the train when my parents arrived. They clearly didn't appreciate my not telling them about my departure. Mom was hurt but Dad was angry and we had an exchange of words. He had no objection to my going into the military but he didn't want me to leave school without first getting my degree.
Since I was the first in my family to go beyond high school, he had high expectations for me. Especially since I had a full tuition, four year academic scholarship. I understood their feelings but I didn't think that they appreciated the stress that I had been under for the past four and a half years. We had our differences. Now, things that I had set in motion were beyond our control.
However, it was fortunate that they had come to the station. Nita was only fourteen and, although she knew how to drive, she didn't have a license. Dad drove the folks' car home while Mom drove mine and dropped Nita off at her house.
The ride on the MKT was right out of the popular ballad, "City of New Orleans". It was dark when the train pulled out of the station and we rode south all night. There were several of us destined for the Air Force at Lackland AFB or the Army at Fort Sam Houston as the case might be. We talked a little but mostly we watched the moon-lit countryside from the coach windows. Occasionally, the lights of a small town would flash by. The train stopped a few times to pick up or leave off passengers. Altogether, the train ride was pleasant. It was also the last time I ever rode a passenger train though in later years I would spend many hours commuting on the Milwaukee Road between Elk Grove Village and the Chicago Loop.
When we arrived at the station in San Antonio the next morning, depending on which papers we had signed, we were met by the appropriate Army or Air Force bus for transport to our respective base. It was exciting and exhilarating. Good-bye school and parents. Hello pay check and independence. I was on my own at last. At least I thought I was.
At Lackland, I was assembled with the other new enlistees from around the country. I also discovered that we now had a new name. We were called Rainbows because of the varied colored civilian clothing we wore. We stood in line for haircuts and then we stood in line for our issue of uniforms. After that, we were told to strip and we stood in line for another medical check. Then we were allowed to put on our uniforms and stood in line for another issue of equipment. Finally, we were assembled, introduced to our Tactical Instructors, or TIs, and marched off to our barracks. The TIs told us that we were now in the 3701st Basic Training Squadron, Flight 298. The rest of the day, we spent packing our civilian clothes for shipment home and getting acquainted with the Air Force. That night, as I lay in my bunk, the impact of what I had done struck home. It was a sudden feeling of being alone and among strangers. I thought to myself, "My God, what have I done?".
Considering the mission of the Air Force, basic training was as easy as I had expected. In short time, we became acquainted and formed friendships. We learned how to drill and were qualified on the 45 automatic pistol and the M1 carbine. There were also the field exercises, over-nights and gas mask drills. As the time went by, we assimilated the required military discipline and demeanor.
And there was humor. One fellow struck us as somewhat arrogant so we decided to short-sheet him one night. He was good natured about it. He got up in the dark, laughed and remade his bunk. We expected more of a response so we did it again the next night. Again, he got up and remade his bunk but this time he didn't laugh. Now it was a contest. We short-sheeted him for the third consecutive night. After lights-out, all we heard was the sound of a sheet ripping and then all was still. Job well done. Area policing was a constant activity and rows of recruits walking across the open areas was a common sight. When we were ordered to police around the barracks, we learned that crawling after any imaginary stray piece of wind blown paper under the crawl space allowed for an extra cigarette.
The only real physical pain came during a field exercise which included a tear gas drill. That morning, some of the troops were a little too loud to suit the TI. In retribution, he informed us that we would shave with cold water and without soap before entering the tear gas chamber. The exercise consisted of entering the chamber without masks after which the tear gas would be introduced. After what seemed to be an eternity, we were told we could put on our masks. The pain was excruciating. On May 1, after three weeks in the 3701st, Royce Haley, Billy Wilson and I were given orders assigning us to the 3276th School Squadron. We would complete the final seven weeks of basic training there and, after some elementary electronics training, go on to cryptographic machine maintenance and repair.
The 3276th had just been moved to Lackland from Scott AFB, just east of St. Louis. We were among the first Lackland students to go through the school though students from Scott had been transferred along with the school. The squadron was separated into two functional units. The technical training was conducted under Maj. Virgil Wollum while tactical training and personnel administration was the responsibility of 1st Lt. Eddie Young. Generally, we referred to the two entities as the "school" and the "squadron". The school itself was divided into equipment operator training and equipment maintenance and repair training. There was always a sense of rivalry between the "operators" and the "maintenance" students. The operators turned out to be better pinochle players but the maintenance students had more fun.
Basic training in the 3276th was a breeze. We pinstriped the road guard helmets and marched to cadences we composed ourselves. Bob Sandberg was especially good in leading the cadences. He was a dropout from MIT and probably the brightest among us. There was John Harden, whose father was in the insurance business in Atlanta. Obdulio Calderon was from Puerto Rico and Dave Cameron was the first of the bachelors among us to get married. There was Donn Crissinger from Ohio, Jack Fukamizu from Hawaii, Calvin King from Louisiana and Doug Matthes from Arizona that I would later room with. Joe Metzger was from San Antonio and had never been out of the state of Texas. He had enlisted in the Air Force just to get out of Texas. There were many good men that I had the pleasure of meeting.
Classroom training was conducted in old World War II barracks in the southeast corner of Lackland near the NCO base housing. The wooden buildings were long, single story, uninsulated, and had been divided into three classrooms each. They were enclosed in a compound surrounded by a ten foot chain link fence topped with barbed wire. On the perimeter were six guard towers, each manned by an armed Air Policeman during the day and a student detailed at night.
Entrance for staff and instructors was through a single guardhouse with two guards. There was one external door, an internal electrically locked gate and another electrically locked gate to the compound. Students entered in formation through an adjacent guarded gate that also allowed for vehicle access. Inside the compound, only military id cards, one personal photograph and cash for the vending machines were allowed. Classrooms were always locked when empty of students and instructors, even during the fifteen minute coffee breaks. This was at the height of the Cold War and security was always very tight. Students were separated into training for specific pieces of equipment. My first one was electro-mechanical and already obsolete. I suspect that this was because we were still undergoing background checks for our clearances. It allowed time for the CID to do their work. In my case it was pretty extensive because of the number of addresses my family had lived at and the fact that we had been to Mexico and Canada on vacation many times in the years before.
Beginning August 27, Billy Wilson, Bob Sandberg, Royce Haley, John Harden and I got twelve days furlough. While I was at home, I spent most of my time with the guys I had run around with in high school. I wrote to my folks very little but I hadn't written Nita at all. I didn't know that Nita was pregnant.
On September 10, 1958, I was granted my top secret clearance. That month we also began training on current equipment. The TSEC/KO-6 was a monster the size of three large refrigerators. It had over 1500 vacuum tubes and required constant attention and calibration. It was in SAC's inventory as the primary device for secure communications and supposed to be used in airborne command aircraft. It was installed at various ground locations throughout the United States, Europe and Asia, but I'm not sure that it ever became airborne. Until now all of the earlier machines were electro-mechanical such as the first one we had been trained on. The TSEC/KO-6 was all electronic and represented a new generation of encryption devices. It was capable of encrypting voice, facsimile and teletype simultaneously. Actually, it was three separate machines in a single cabinet using a common power supply. You could almost say it was six different machines because each function had independent send and receive sides. It could be doing six operations at once.
These machines, and others in development, were becoming too bulky and heavy to move quickly. Since it was impossible to evacuate them if the need arose, they were installed with thermite devices mounted on top of them for quick destruction. These thermite devices could reduce a TSEC/KO-6 to a puddle of molten slag in just a couple of minutes. Our feeling was that the TSEC/KO-6 was going to be short-lived because of its complexity. It was a Model-T but it was a sign of things to come.
The unbreakable rule for the TSEC/KO-6 was to never reduce the power below the level needed to keep the filaments warm. This was because the pulse driving circuitry, consisting mostly of 5814 dual triode power amplifiers, was sensitive to the characteristics of the individual vacuum tubes. Powering the tubes on and off caused them to age faster. It also caused them to explode.
The TSEC/KO-6 power supply also generated a considerable amount of heat. Normally, each of the equipment bay drawers would be left ajar to relieve as much heat as possible. The exception was that drawers were closed and locked during fire drills or other very rare occasions when the classrooms might have to be left unattended and unlocked.
Each of the three class rooms in the two buildings dedicated to the TSEC/KO-6 had four of these monsters. During a routine fire drill one day, someone threw off the circuit breaker to one of the buildings. I'm glad my classroom wasn't in that building. When the drill was over and the power restored, it sounded like popping corn as the tubes exploded inside their cabinet drawers. We spent two days on extra detail cleaning glass shards out of the bay drawers, replacing tubes and re-calibrating the equipment. Just before Thanksgiving, we graduated from the TSEC/KO-6 course. Next came the TSEC/KW-26A. It was a formidable piece of new transistor technology manufactured by the Burroughs Corporation. This machine relied heavily on miniaturized circuitry and used magnetic core memory similar to the new IBM computers being introduced at the time. This was a real step forward because of its reduced physical size and power requirements. It was only a third the size of the TSEC/KO-6 and without the heat problems. But troubleshooting was more complex because the circuitry was digital instead of analog and a new experience to us.
After six weeks of training on the TSEC/KW-26A, my class, the one prior and the one following were told that we would be retained for instructor duty. I was disappointed because I had always wanted to go to Europe. But, effective on December 4, Billy Wilson, John Harden, Royce Haley, Bob Sandberg and I received our orders assigning us to instructor duty. The 3276th was now our home.
After completion of the TSEC/KW-26A course we were given Christmas furlough for two weeks. When I got back to Kansas City, I looked up Nita. She had taken a one room apartment on the second floor of an old six-story walk-up in mid-town Kansas City. The rent was fifteen dollars a month. The apartment was long and narrow with bare wood floors. It was not very well lit and sparsely furnished with an old threadbare sofa and a worn dinette set. There was a kitchenette at one end and an alcove for sleeping on one side at the opposite end. I saw my son for the first time, I held him and I changed his diapers.
Nita and I had long talks about little things. We shopped, went to some movies and we did some other things together. The last night of my furlough, when we were in her apartment, I told her I had to leave to go back to Lackland. Nita asked me to wait a minute and went down the hall to a shared bathroom. She changed into an off-white cotton night-gown and returned. I was stretched out on the sofa, she smiled at me in her little girl way and sat down on my stomach. I knew what she was trying to say to me but I wouldn't listen. I told her again that I had to go. She got up and went to the bed. I tucked the blanket around her and my son, kissed her and said good night. Then I left. I never saw her or my son again.
I just wouldn't come to the realization that I should have any responsibility for them and I never told my family. Dad was very proud of the family name and I was afraid he would never speak to me again. Mom was always a kind and caring person and this would have crushed her. To this day I don't know what became of Nita and my son but now I spend much time thinking about them. The old phrase does turn; time wounds all heels.
When I returned to Lackland in January, 1959, I began thinking of a career in the military. The Air Force was short of pilots and over the previous several months several of us had received requests to apply for pilot training. They began "Your records have been reviewed and you have been found..." but they never got to the part of my record that showed I needed glasses. I never considered training for navigator or electronic weapons officer. I would have easily qualified for either. But, had I done so, I might be just a pile of bones somewhere in North Viet Nam today. One never knows these things. It was another path not taken.
Bob Sandberg and I applied and were accepted for Officer Candidate School. This would be the last scheduled OCS class for the Air Force since they had decided to require a college degree for future applicants. The Air Force was going to re-designate OCS as OTS or Officer Training School. I felt that this would be my only shot at a military career acceptable to me. Then, a roster was circulated through the school asking for twenty volunteers to go to Keesler AFB at Biloxi, Mississippi.
The purpose was to attend their basic electronics course and bring the course material back to Lackland. Bob and I both declined because we were scheduled for OCS. But, because my surname was the first on the roster with a "no", and there were only nineteen volunteers, my "no" was changed to a "yes" and I was volunteered. I had wanted independence but again I found how little I had to say about my life in the military. Now my budding military career would end with my enlistment.
Off we went to Keesler. I had bought a 1951 Mercury with overdrive on my last furlough. The overdrive solenoid was bad and I had driven the car from Kansas City to Lackland and then to Keesler in high gear. The high rpm wound the engine up like an eight-day clock and it was more than it could take. During the first week at Keesler, the engine blew up while I was driving down the Gulf Highway. With the help of TSgt. Calvin "CC" Lawrence, I was able to replace the engine with a 1953 Ford flat head I picked up in a junk yard between Biloxi and Gulfport. The Ford engine was so worn that I had to use STP "engine honey" instead of oil just to get enough compression to keep it running. That wasn't the last of my trouble with that engine but at least I had transportation.
We started classes in a completely different environment. No guards, no fences with barbed wire, no classified documents. The classrooms were in modern air-conditioned buildings, Wolfe Hall and Allee Hall, named for two World War II Army Air Force pilots who had been killed in Europe. We marched in formation to and from class daily in Commander's Review complete with march music provided by the base band. It was really inspiring. I suspect it was intended to be. In the evenings, we usually went to a bar on the Gulf Highway that featured a live band specializing in progressive jazz.
One day when I was walking back to the base I stopped at the bar that was just outside the back gate to pick up a local newspaper. As I picked up the newspaper from the rack outside the door of the bar a passing deputy sheriff said "Hi". On the front page was a story about out-of-state liquor that had been confiscated from some people returning to Biloxi hoping to sell it locally. Mississippi was a dry state at the time and good liquor brought good prices.
Biloxi had quite a night life and was a big tourist attraction. I don't know how it is now but the liquor and entertainment were plentiful then. The White House hotel has since burned and the lighthouse was later destroyed by a hurricane. But I know why the sheriff of Harrison County would spend so much money campaigning for a job that paid so little. The sheriff was also the local liquor distributor and his suppliers were the unlucky folks who got caught bringing it in on their own. He even had deputies stationed in Louisanna patrolling outside of New Orleans liquor stores looking for Mississippi license tags.
On February 20, a dozen of us were called into the squadron commander's office. We were briefed on a TDY, but we were not given any details except that we were not to discuss it with anyone. The next day we boarded a Navy transport and flew to Hawaii and then to Saigon. After we touched down in Saigon, we were issued helmets, M2 carbines, other field gear, and transferred to a large helicopter and flown to a remote site occupied by American MACV personnel. We didn't know it at the time, but we were in Laos just south of Ban Vat, an old temple city.
The site was situated just below a large rock outcrop. Our job was to set up and calibrate communications equipment for their use. The MACV people didn't avoid us but they weren't very talkative either. We never had much to do with them except for a captain that operated as liaison and took care of whatever we needed. We were told not to leave the site area.
Besides the MACV personnel, there was a Vietnamese woman and her son, who was about nine or ten, who lived nearby. She did laundry he was a sort of "gofer" and boot-shiner. Except for the communications shack, everything was housed in old Army tents. It was pretty primitive by our standards but we went about our work. The equipment they had consisted of Army field radios, teletypes and TSEC/KW-7's.
It wasn't what we had been trained on but with the manuals and test equipment they had, we didn't have much difficulty. We were surprised to find the TSEC/KW-7's out there in the boondocks but they were field portable and ours was not to wonder why.
One night, about a month after we arrived, while I was just falling asleep in my shelter, I felt something strike me in the middle of my back. What I expected to find was a rock tossed in by some joker. But it was a grenade. I threw it through the shelter flap, grabbed my carbine and scrambled out as fast as I could. The grenade exploded and one small piece of shrapnel grazed my side. I fired a burst at a figure I saw running up the hill past the rock outcropping. It turned out to be the son of the Vietnamese woman.
One round had caught him in the back of the head and killed him instantly. I'll never forget the feeling I had when I got to him. Was he the one who threw the grenade into my shelter? It haunts me because I'll never find out.
The boy's mother disappeared and I think the feeling of the MACV people was that whatever we were doing there had been compromised.
We finished our work, flew back to Saigon, Hawaii and on to Keesler.
In early June we started back to Lackland with the course materials from Keesler. Throughout the trip I had trouble with the car. After running for a while, it would sputter and die as if it wasn't getting enough fuel. Then, after sitting for fifteen minutes or so, it would start and run for a while until it died again. In Beaumont, Texas, I stopped at a Ford dealership where they replaced the fuel pump and fuel line from the tank. I was off again and thought I was doing well when it started the same cycle over again.
Since I knew it would restart after sitting for a while, I decided that I would just limp along until I got back to San Antonio. At one point, two Mexican truck drivers stopped and offered to help. I told them that there wasn't really anything that they could do and they drove off. Some time later, I came across them setting out flares. They had a flat on one of the rear dual wheels but didn't have a spare. I recognized the truck so I stopped to see if I could repay the favor they had offered me. They accepted a ride to San Antonio now just less than a hundred miles away.
By now, because of the car trouble, I had been on the road continuously for more than thirty hours. Around three in the morning, about fifty miles from San Antonio, I dozed off at the wheel. Suddenly I was awake. We were headed down into a ravine that looked to be miles deep and the Mexican truck driver sitting in the front seat was wrestling the wheel to steer the car back up and onto the highway. An act of kindness to repay another act of kindness saved my life.
A few days after returning to Lackland, I went to downtown San Antonio to Bexar Engine Exchange and had a rebuilt engine put in the Mercury. That still didn't end the problems with the engine.
July 29, some of us who had been selected for instructor duty were sent to the Technical Instructor Training School across the base. I thought that by flunking out of the course, I could still get to Europe. But the course instructors saw through the ruse and after some "counseling", I was convinced to complete the course. In September, I received my Instructor Wings in a very nice ceremony and became an instructor.
Doug Matthes and I were roommates in the squadron's permanent party barracks. At night, we attended San Antonio College. I was fortunate because Doug was a good friend and roommate. Bob Sandberg was in OCS that summer and I had agreed to paint his Vespa motor scooter in exchange for being able to use it in his absence. Against regulation, I painted it in the basement of the barracks. Well, somebody found the paint cans and reported it to the commander.
1st Lt. Harold Johnson, the new squadron commander, was on just about everybody's list. Rumor had it that when Johnson's commander in Europe was transferred stateside, the colonel brought him along just to torment him. Nobody liked the man and he wasn't particularly competent. Still, he was able to attach my name to the paint cans so he called me into his office. With my straightest face, I lied and said that I didn't know anything about the paint cans. In an empty gesture he threatened to have me take a lie-detector test, so I called his bluff. I wouldn't confess. The matter ended there. When Bob graduated from OCS, we threw a party for him at the Casa Mañana Motel coffee shop just east of Loop 13 on Highway 90. We presented him with a box about two feet on a side. Inside that box was another, smaller box. And inside that box was another yet smaller box. All told, there were more than half a dozen boxes before he got to the prize, an engraved Zippo lighter. He still has that lighter. We also gave him a walnut desk name plate. On one end was the open "US"
collar insignia of an officer and on the other was a shiny second lieutenant's bar. I still have the other "US" insignia of the pair. I don't remember who collected the dollar for the first salute, but we all had a very good time. Bob later retired from the Air Force with the rank of Lt. Colonel.
When Christmas, 1959, came around I took a thirty day furlough. Usually, I signed out at midnight so the afternoon before my furlough started, I drove to a service station off the base to get a lube and oil change and to fill the gas tank. Just off the base, the engine sputtered and died. This hadn't happened since the return trip from Keesler in June but I felt that it was still the same old problem. This time I was going to be methodical and do it by the numbers.
I opened the hood, removed one sparkplug wire and jumped the starter. No spark. So much for the money I had wasted fixing what I thought was a fuel line problem. Next I pulled the distributor cap and there the problem stared up at me. The ground wire from the vacuum advance plate to the points was frayed and broken. This was the distributor that came with the motor I had picked up to replace the engine I blew in Biloxi. The mechanics at Bexar Engine Exchange simply transferred it to the rebuilt engine. In five minutes I had the wire replaced and was on my way. When I left the base after midnight, I felt like kicking myself all the way back to Kansas City. Back at Lackland, things settled down into a daily routine at the school. The TSEC/KW-26A's had been replaced with model B's. We were getting promotions, spending weekends at the Airman's Club and many were attending night classes at the several local colleges. We took in movies and occasionally ate out at some civilian restaurant. Sometimes there was even some excitement. One night, a student detailed to guard duty in the compound was playing "quick-draw" with his 45 automatic and managed to shoot himself through the knee. And tragedy. A tech sergeant who was cross-training from some other field took some of his class notes back to his barracks to review before a test the next day. Even class notes made by the students were classified and stamped "TOP SECRET". He was arrested the next morning as he entered the compound. Later, he was court-martialed and sent off to Leavenworth. The saddest part was that he was a good student and probably wouldn't have had any trouble passing the test. He was married, had children and nineteen years in the Air Force. Sometimes we would get all night pinochle games going. The favorite game was at the home of an airman who had suffered a disabling accident and was confined to a wheel chair. He was a good player. At a penny a point and a quarter a set, he was able to supplement his disability check quite nicely. We didn't mind because we felt we were helping out a buddy.
1st Lt. Johnson, the squadron commander, was really a pretty mean man. He court-martialed an orderly room clerk on the charge that the clerk used his official position to further his personal gain. Technically, I suppose that this was true. But it was a real stretch. Because the clerk, an A/2C, processed the orders for outgoing personnel he knew whether graduating students would ship out on bus, plane or train. For two dollars he would take them to the bus or train station or the airport. For the students it was convenient and a bargain. Johnson had him reduced to A/B. Johnson, who had failed every previous promotion board, was finally promoted to captain just before his age would have required mandatory retirement. He was replaced by Captain Arthur Goldsby, Jr., a young man who had just transferred stateside. Capt. Goldsby was an enterprising man and immediately opened a hamburger stand in the back of a trailer parked just off base on Loop 13. His wife tended it during the day but in the evenings he put on an apron, cooked french fries, grilled hamburgers and wiped the countertop, too. It always seemed strange for him to command us during the day and for us to order up "...cheeseburger and fries with a coke to go..." from him in the evening. But the food he and his wife served was good, his hamburger stand was clean and the men respected him. He had a good attitude and work ethic, was honest and straight-forward with the men, and a relief from Johnson's martinet style. I now see just how much I learned from just watching this man go about his ordinary daily work. During this time, my attitude toward school also changed. I began to apply myself to the studies, and more importantly, to compete with my former attitude. The courses that I took weren't that particularly interesting or challenging, but I wanted those A's. I studied hard and I got them. This change in attitude helped me years later when I finally got my degree under the GI Bill.
One untoward thing did happen to me in 1960, however. When I arrived at the compound one morning I was told to report to the school commander. He informed me that a security violation had occurred in my classroom. A classified TSEC/KW-26B punchcard was missing from my classroom and could not be accounted for. Since I was the only instructor holding classes in that particular room, it must have been my fault.
The military operates under the Napoleonic Code where you are guilty until proven innocent. Even though I professed innocence, my name was pulled from the next promotion list. I was due for my third stripe and it made me feel helpless and victimized. But there was nothing within my power that I could do to defend myself.
Then I was rescued by circumstance and TSgt. Lawrence who had helped me with the engine replacement while we were at Keesler. We were in the school compound's coffee shop one morning when we heard some Burroughs employees at an adjacent table. They were joking about how they had accessed another classroom for a remote test. They failed to properly account for a TSEC/KW-26B punchcard they used from that classroom and some poor GI got blamed for it. We immediately went to the commander's office.
With TSgt. Lawrence's testimony, things were straightened out. I got my third stripe and was promoted to sergeant without even having to meet the promotion board. After that, almost everything I did warranted a letter of commendation. Those letters were invaluable later in civilian life when applying for jobs. I'll always remember "CC" with fondness and respect. This incident taught me another lesson. Never, never, never let anyone gain complete control of your life or affairs in a manner that leaves you defenseless. 1961 was more routine so occasionally we would take weekend trips to the Mexican border towns across the Rio Grande from Texas.
Nuevo Larado, across from Larado, and Ciudad Acuña, across from Del Rio, were our favorites. There, we would spend a couple of days of revelry in the "boy's town" or red-light district. Food, drink and other forms of entertainment were cheap and plentiful. Since the G.I.'s were a big source of income for these small towns, the local officials always saw that the girls were clean and had regular medical check-ups.
But the girls were a tragic story. Most were from further south in Mexico and still in their early teens, some as young as ten or eleven. Generally, they had been sold into prostitution by their families who couldn't support them.
There were also Anglo girls there; probably run-aways from Texas although some of them claimed to have been kidnapped. They were all so terribly young.
Sometimes strange things happened. One morning while I was walking down one of the dirt streets I heard a commotion in an alley. It was a fist fight between two nationals. Apparently, it was over one of the girls. She was beating on the back of the man who was getting the better of the fight. Soon, the police showed up with a paddy wagon. When they tried to put him into the back of the wagon, the girl changed allegiance and began to beat on the policemen. The man refused to get into the back of the wagon but allowed himself to be pushed into the front seat on the passenger side. The girl then went back to the man who was now on the ground Then, as the paddy wagon drove off, the victor waved to the cheers of the crowd that had gathered. It was hard to tell just who was the "good" guy and who was the "bad" guy.
Our TSEC/KW-26B's were replaced with model C's and the routine continued.
On pleasant evenings we would sit out on the lawn in front of the barracks and just talk. Sometimes we would surreptitiously pass around a bottle of tequila.
By late summer, most of us were marking our "short-time" calendars, some in months and some in weeks.
One evening on the way back from college, as Doug Matthes and I were approaching the interchange between Highway 90 and Loop 13, we encountered a car in the wrong lane. It was headed straight for us. We were in Doug's car so I told him that he ought to move over. Doug said, "But he's the one in the wrong lane." So I said to him, "If we don't move over, we'll be dead wrong!" It was a close call but we made it. Doug was like that.
He had a reel-to-reel stereo tape player. He also loved classical music as much as his opinion. When some of the guys complained that he played his music too loud he put the tape deck against the louvers of our room door. Then he draped a towel over it and played his train stereo demonstration tape at full volume. For almost an hour they got to hear a train race up and down the hallway. Finally, we called a truce.
That September, one of my evening college courses was in world history. In the class was a loud, coarse and obnoxious gentleman who always had something to say about everything. He didn't hesitate to contradict the teacher. Some in the class, myself included, were tired of his behavior so we started defending the teacher's side, right or wrong, whenever he opened his mouth. I sat next to him and once I even told him to just shut up.
One afternoon, near the end of the semester, I was sitting in the base library. He walked by in front of me, stopped, turned and looked directly at me. He was wearing the gold oak leaf clusters of a major and I was sitting there with sergeant's stripes on my sleeves. I don't know if he was angry or embarrassed and I didn't really care.
At Christmas time, I took my annual leave. I usually stopped at Big Cabin, a small town in northeastern Oklahoma, for coffee but I was tired so I decided to stop at an all-night cafe in Muskogee instead. It was about three-thirty in the morning. I always traveled in my class A uniform and when I walked in, I noticed two high school age girls sitting at the U-shaped counter. I sat down opposite them and soon I noticed how they kept staring at me. I think it must have been the uniform. The girls kept playing "Those Old Cotton Fields Back Home" on the juke box. The thought crossed my mind that they may have been run-aways. It has always struck me as strange how the sights and sounds of the scenes we pass through in life linger on for many years. I had been putting some money aside and planned to enter the University of Missouri at Kansas City after I was separated from active duty in April. But in early 1962, the building of the Berlin Wall intervened with my plans. The armed services were ordered to staff up. Most of the increase in the military was accomplished by extending the tours of active duty service personnel. While the Army and Navy simply extended all active duty personnel by three months, the Air Force policy was to extend everyone in certain critical career fields for a full year. Cryptography was deemed to be a critical career field. Even though this upset my plans I never had any difficulty in saving money. I decided that, with another year to go, I could get a newer car and still save up enough for the first year's tuition. This turned out to be the wrong decision because just sixty days after we were extended, we were told the extensions had been canceled and we would be out June 1. Now I had a nice '56 Pontiac Star Chief Catalina the size of the Queen Mary but not enough money to enter the university. School would have to wait.
Still, I was glad to be going home. In four years, one month and twenty-five days, I had grown as an individual and learned much from and about people. The boy who had left home was returning as a man. I still have my Instructor Wings and other memorabilia from those years. But more important is the deep sense of pride I have in the service I was able to give to my country.
CHAPTER 5 When Jan and I married in 1962, we started out in a small two room apartment in mid-town Kansas City. In 1964 we bought a split-level house on Colonel Drive in Independence.
I had a job in downtown in the insurance industry as a casualty underwiter. Jan didn't have a driver's license and felt trapped and unhappy. In 1965, I was promoted and transferred to the Fireman's Fund regional office in Chicago. We bought a ranch house in Elk Grove Village, a northwest suburb of Chicago.
The office was in downtown Chicago in the old Insurance Exchange building on the Loop. I commuted on the Milwaukee Road from Woodale, a small town south of Elk Grove Village. Jan still didn't have a driver's license and still felt trapped and unhappy. Mostly, she wanted to go back to Kansas City. But then, she was always unhappy about something.
Jan's Dad talked me into applying at the Bendix plant in Kansas City so we moved back. So in 1967, I went to work at Bendix as program manager in the Minuteman III and Mark 48 torpedo nuclear warhead programs. We bought the house on Oak Street. Her Dad, Lee, was the one bright spot in my marriage to Jan. He had three daughters but no son so he treated me like one. In return, I treated him like a second father. We had a remarkable relationship. Also, he had gone through a very bitter divorce with Jan's mom and this helped Jan reconcile with her Dad. When I was in the Air Force, I worked under a top secret security clearance in cryptography. Having to constantly watch where you go, what you say and who you talk to gets to be a burden. The freedom of private industry was a relief. But, now at Bendix, I was back under a security clearance. We made and assembled components for nuclear weapons under the old Atomic Energy Commission for the Defense Department. That's also when I got into computers. Finances got better and we bought the house on Greenwood in 1970.
In 1971, Lee had a fatal heart attack while on a business trip to Detroit. Shortly thereafter I left Bendix and went to work at the Kansas City Federal Reserve branch. I also did some contract work for Western Auto on the side. Jan resented the extra time I spent with the contract work but never hesitated to spend the extra money.
Three years into the marriage I began to feel that I had made a mistake but I tried to tough it out. In 1972, I decided to cut my losses, call it quits and divorce her. I bought her a car, taught her how to drive, got her a job with the government and gave her the house. It was better for me to start over than to get saddled with alimony.
In 1973, I went to work for the Department of Agriculture and in 1974 I bought the house on Indianola in North Kansas City. In 1974, a year and a half after I divorced Jan, I married Martha. If marriage to Jan was like raising a child, marriage to Martha was like marrying a parent.
In '76, another fellow and I were assigned a lengthy tour in southwest Georgia at the GFA Peanut Association, a farmer's co-op. It lasted about eighteen months and consisted of trips down to Georgia lasting one to six weeks each with a week back to Kansas City in between.
When I first drove up to the GFA offices in Camilla, I noticed bullet holes in the front window glass. An ominous sign of things to come.
We were supposed to write and install a new accounting system and upgrade the hardware. We were also told that there was "...a problem down there that needed to be fixed...". That was a blank check.
The manager, J.R. Harden, had been bribing department officials in Washington as well as soliciting bribes from association members for favorable treatment on government subsidies and loans.
The Association operated by managing loans for planting, loans for constructing warehouses for storage, and loans to shellers for processing the peanuts. Harvested peanuts were moved from warehouses to shellers for processing on "lot lists" drawn up by Hardin.
If Hardin didn't like a farmer or warehouse owner or sheller, there were no loans. Warehousemen were particularly vulnerable because they had to collect storage fees for at least six months so as to break even financially. If Hardin didn't like a warehouseman, his peanuts went onto a lot list almost as soon as they hit the door of the warehouse.
One evening, while we were working late, a warehouseman burst into the office with a shotgun demanding to see Hardin!
Hardin had very few friends, but he could demand loyalty. GFA profits were heavily invested in CDs and concentrated in small country banks that did business with the farmers, warehousemen and shellers. Moving the CDs from a bank would almost guarantee it's bankruptcy.
Roumors of his bribing high USDA officials in Washington abounded. There were lavish trips to Las Vegas for USDA directors, expensive trips to Washington including $1500 meals for himself and USDA officials. But like many, his arrogance proved his downfall. He made the mistake of filing for re-imbursement for these trips.
Late one Saturday night, I let myself into the office and xeroxed his expense reports, and leaked the information to the Dothan, Alabama, newspaper which was on the AP wire service. It didn't take long to get to Washington and the White House. Hardin's son worked there in the Carter administration as Director of Communications!
The Board of Directors, panicked over the threatened loss of their USDA contract, demanded his resignation. They gave him a generous pension and let him keep his company car, a new Buick. I found out later that he committed suicide because of the embarrassment.
While Martha had good personal skills, she wasn't very bright. I learned during the trips to Georgia that I couldn't rely on her to take care of the house or the cars in my absence. I wasn't going to make the same mistake again so in 1978 I re-financed the house, gave Martha half of the proceeds, and divorced her. Dad later apologized to me for insisting that I "...should marry that girl...".
Macy and I were married in 1979. She had been divorced for seven years so I felt that at least she could take care of herself.
CHAPTER 6 In 1981, I was offered a transfer to the Defense Logistics Agency in Columbus, Ohio. It was a nice promotion so I accepted. But because I was in the Missouri National Guard at the time, I had the option to transfer to the Ohio National Guard. Since the forward deployment area was the Fulda Gap northeast of Frankfort, Germany, I decided to leave the Guard. The Fulda Gap would have been the route the Soviet and Warsaw Pact armies would have taken in the event of hostilities. Our purpose was to simply serve as "cannon fodder"! No thanks.
In Columbus, I thought of looking at a ranch style house in New Albany, an eastern suburb of Columbus. But Macy fell in love with a huge two-story stucco on Littlejohn Drive. So we moved into a four bedroom, three bath, fourteen room monster. It was like two peas rattling around in a tin can.
DLA was responsible for 52 computer sites from Boston to Atlanta to Los Angeles to Spokane and everywhere in between. After dozens of trips between Kansas City and Albany, Georgia, for the Department of Agriculture, I was really tired of flying but at least the travel I had to do for DLA offered varied scenery and some airports with more comfortable seats than Atlanta's Hartzfeld Airport. On the flip side were the late Friday afternoon orders that come Monday morning I had to be in Battlecreek, Michigan, or Washington, D.C.
Macy worked for a telephone answering service in Columbus for a while but then got interested in stained glass. After taking a class, she went to work for the fellow who taught the class and had a shop on the side. She was good enough that he asked her to teach some of the classes. She kept it up for a few years after we retired until the arthritis in her hands began to bother her too much. She did two very nice panels for our house. She sold a lot of her work in area craft shows and gave some away.
DLA was an exciting place to work. The people were very professional and unlike most you'd ever expect to find in the Federal government. There were a few exceptions though. I sat on a review panel to interview 62 college graduates who were mostly from the Big Ten schools. Many couldn't complete a grammatically correct sentence but we hired 32 of them anyway. I kept the best ones in the systems shop and I've been in touch with some via e-mail since retirement.
There were trips to the Pentagon and the CIA in Langley, but never to the White House or Capitol Hill. However I did have to provide briefings for congressional testimony, mostly on personnel and budget matters. All in all, it was an exciting time and an opportunity to see the bowels of our Federal government.
In 1987, the Department of the Interior office in Denver announced that they were converting to the IBM large system platform and needed an experienced systems engineer to do the conversion. I volunteered since I felt I had done everything I could at DLA. I took along a communications expert and another systems programmer. Later they were married.
I didn't want to move 1500 miles just to look at the Rocky Mountains, I wanted to live in them. After looking at a dozen HUD fallback properties, Macy and I picked a new log home in Conifer. It was a beautiful place to live. At the same time, we were buying a house in Shell Knob on Table Rock Lake that we intended to use for vacations and eventually for retirement. Initially, Macy stayed behind in Columbus to take care of the sale of our house on Littlejohn Drive.
Living in Conifer, a tiny town in the mountains just over the front range, made us realize how nice small towns can be.
Management and the programmers at Interior resented having to give up their current systems but we got the job done in just a couple of months. Since the people there weren't very happy about being forced to convert to the IBM environment, the three of us; Ken, Barb and myself, started to look elsewhere as soon as everything was complete. We found that the Department of the Army was also being forced to convert to the IBM platform. The difference was that they seemed to be enthusiastic about the change. But that turned out to be a false image.
The Army, Navy and Air Force were consolidating all payroll and accounting systems to an IBM environment and just 5 centers located around the nation. Fort Benjamin Harrison, located at Indianapolis, was in the bidding to become one of those sites since it meant a large increase in personnel and importance. We found a house in Fortville which was about a twenty minute drive up Pendelton Pike from the Fort.
The programmers at the Fort were very poorly trained, even on their current equipment. Ken picked up quickly from his contacts in the communications area that there were even some who actually wanted to sabotage the effort to convert to IBM. But when Washington tells a site that they have to do something, and give them deadlines, it has to get done. The "culture" at the Fort, just like at the Interior, was a big problem. It was up and running in less than six weeks and we expected a "thank you" from management. It never came.
Concurrent with the conversion, management had downgraded the computer operators from GS9's to GS7's but wouldn't train the current programmers on the new IBM system. Then they expected Ken, Barb and I to do it, which was an impossible job because of the demoralizing effect that had on the operators.
Next came the payroll/accounting system. A small contracting company from The Washington area was employed to install the software. After a some weeks of futile effort, they admitted that they couldn't do the job. Management instructed me to complete the task so that the deadline could be met. Taking some shortcuts, I had it up and running in a couple of weeks. Again, there was no "thank you" from management although the division director received a nice award.
A few weeks later, the Contracting Officer and I were taking a smoke break on the loading dock. He informed me that the contractors had been authorized payment for the contract they never performed. A copy of the paperwork showed that management had signed off on it. I was fed up.
First there were lies to Ken, Barb and me. Then came the effort to delay or stop the conversion by the division. Now there was fraud on the part of management and the contractor. I filed a waste, fraud and abuse case with the Pentagon. For most of a year I fought for prosecution of the case but I was blocked at every step by the politics within the Department of Defense.
Finally, I took a transfer out of the division to wait out an early retirement. In effect, I was banished to that proverbial "basement office", except in my case it was the cafeteria. If I could retire before January 1, 1993, I could take advantage of a loophole in the regulations that would allow a lump sum payment of my contributions to the retirement fund. Otherwise, the contributions would be paid out along with my pension.
Ken and Barb, now with two children, transferred to the IRS in Memphis.
The final insult came when I discovered that my retirement application had been altered to show a date of January 3, 1993! Someone had used "whiteout" to cover the date and retyped the new '93 date. Fortunately, we had set up two accounts with the bank in Shell Knob, one for checking and one for carrying over an IRA. I learned what happened when the wire transfer of the lump sum arrived and the bank called and asked me which account the money should be deposited in.
CHAPTER 7 In February '93, Macy and I moved to our house in Shell Knob. It took me several years just to unwind.
It was the first house built in Big Creek Village from materials salvaged from a house in Aurora, north of Shell Knob on Highway 39. There are no square corners in the house! We ripped out all of the interior walls, insulated and replaced the pine boards. Then we converted the screened porch to a bedroom and laundry room, moved the hot water heater to the laundry room and converted what had been a bedroom to the room where I have the computer. When we added the sunroom, I converted what had been the windows to bookcases. Jalousie windows, salvaged from the original screened porch, were reused in the sunroom.
We completely tore out the kitchen and bathroom and redid both. The bathroom was originally a fraction of the size since the house had never been intended for year-round occupancy. We added the bathtub after we had the bathroom enlarged.
Now that we had a laundry room with washer and dryer, we replaced the 50 gallon drum used as a septic tank with a 1000 concrete tank and 450 feet of lateral lines.
My big mistake was to try to make the deck into two carports. I never should have tried to completely cover it. Now I have to brace the beams and re-deck it. Well, my career was computers, not carpentry!
Macy and I performed our obligatory civic duties during the first several years of retirement. We both served on the Chamber of Commerce board and as officers in the VFW and the Auxiliary. I started a computer club, gun club and was the first commander of our American Legion Post.
After Macy decided to finish with her stained glass work, she went to work at South Barry County Hospital as a hospice worker. The hospital moved the hospice workers from patient to patient so much, despite the complaints of the patients, that she decided to work on her own. She's done that now for the last six or seven years now. Most of her patients are terminal with cancer or just poor health and age.
AFTERTHOUGHTS AND LESSONS LEARNED For every day, there is a lesson to be learned. I've saved virtually every document that had my name on it from school transcripts, military records to my Federal civilian service records.