In my youth academia was a mystery to me, the only one I knew that had a college degree was my brother in law Ralph who had a degree in chemistry, it served him well and of course many of my school teachers, my natural leanings were toward mechanical things and how they worked. I could take things apart and put them back together at a fairly young age and I could imagine how things worked, yeah, I was pretty good at algebra and geometry and mechanical drawing came easily, but I never thought of becoming an engineer it was just one of those things that I thought at the time were above me so I lived in the world of fixing things that others had created. During the latter part of my AF career the importance of a college education became more and more important. The AF put out the word that all officers must have a degree, Majors must have a Masters and Colonels should have a Phd, and Generals certainly must have the top academic degree. I am not sure to this day that college has anything to do with leadership or the ability to fly or mange things,or get things done or to fight wars but some where in the bureaucracy. It became the norm, I had fought the system long enough, I decided to get a degree.

So that became my quest on retirement, I had taken many college courses while on active duty, the one I remember best was basic electronics which a German professor taught a MIT course nights at Hanscom Field I loved his teaching style and I learned a lot, another was taught by a female professor of biology she had it down pat and again I learned a lot. Eventually I got enough credits along with my many AF schools to qualify to attend two semesters in residence and I could get a degree if the grades were good enough. So that is how I got to Park College in Parkville, MO.

They had a very active recruitment program AF wide because they had learned that AF applicants were pretty bright and the GPI that we maintained gave the college a prestigious position with the rankings. I guess you could say I was sucked in. We attended a spring and summer semester. Natalie, worked at the college stables and Cochese adopted her, or was it the other way around, he was a beautiful paint horse, she rode him many times in barrel races, and they did well. They really had a love affair going, a day was not complete unless she had gone up to talk to Cochese. Robin worked after school at the local Mexican eatery and he did not like it much but it was something to do and he had a little spending money. He and I built one of those first home computers for one of my professors, who taught the basic digital electronics course that I had talked the dean into approving digital electronics in place of accounting which was about to be overtaken by accounting software as the computer age was overtaking that profession, he agreed traditional accounting was going the way of the buggy whip. Park College was owned by the Mormon Church and most of those in charge were LDS members, just before I graduated, Park college was sold to another church but I did not keep up with the changes that happened after we departed. Anyhow, I now had a degree, I don’t think any thing was transformed but I had a piece of paper that said I had studied and passed the minimum criteria to be awarded a BA in Business and Economics.

One of the more interesting professors was a recovering alcoholic and an ex smoker that kept an unlit cigarette in his hand. He taught the course, “Economic history, post civil war through the depression”, I found the readings he gave us each day and his lectures very interesting, we are going through some of those same problems today, “those that fail to heed the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them”. Any how I was gaining a respect for academia and I had to admit that some of them were really human. Yes, they put their pants on each morning one leg at a time and they were pretty much like every one else, just trying to get along. In other words I no longer put them on a pedestal, they were very much like me.

One Saturday Nelly and I went to the Mercedes dealer in Kansas City and looked at a 1974 VW Dasher that was super cheap I asked to drive it in it’s sick state, and I drove it to the VW garage and asked for an evaluation the German mechanic said the smog pump caused the exhaust valves and ports to become plugged up with sludge, he added, spray two cans of carb cleaner through it but be sure to put newspaper under the tail pipe to catch the sludge. Sure enough that worked and our Dasher became the family car. A lady that had just opened a flower shop asked if we would sell them our VW bus so when we moved to Florida the Dasher and the Lotus were our cars. It is interesting to note that the banker at Parkville that loaned me the money to buy the Dasher was really disappointed that I paid off the loan in a few weeks. When the VW bus sold we had more than enough to pay off the loan with some left over. That’s one thing that Nelly and I agreed on, debt is bad and we avoided it like the plague.

We drove the two cars to Huntsville to visit with Nelly’s cousin Nichole and Paige Moss, on our way to Florida. Things got interrupted when I started to have chest pains when I would roll out of bed or move quickly. Something was not right, I went to the Fox Army hospital at Redstone, they ran a bunch of tests and they could not identify what might have caused the problem. They wanted to operate and see what was going on I disagreed and said the children had to get into school and the family needed to be settled, so transfer my case to MacDill AFB, MacDill rejected my case and referred me to the VA hospital at Tampa, they intern rejected me and assigned me to the VA hospital at Bay Pines, it was one of those places they sent terminal cases. I went to Bay Pines weekdays and was home on week ends, I later learned that the VA liked patients like me because we filled a bed but did not require much work. Eventually, a young doctor got serious about finding out what might be the source of my problem, I had an accumulation of fluid in my right lung cavity, but it was diminishing so the hospital let me go home. I don’t know if it was he or one of the higher ups in the system but one day I got a letter that said I should never let this letter out of my hands, because it was so important, well sure enough I got a summons to come to the Birmingham VA hospital for evaluation as to my exposure to Agent Orange, the Doctor that had sent fhe letter, emphatically stated that my problems were a direct result of my exposure to Agent Orange, but they wanted to check them out and they wanted to copy my letter. I agreed and they disappeared, they took my letter and evaporated into thin air, I was screwed. Apparently the VA was so worried about what that Doctor had sent to us Agent Orange victims warning of a cover up, they had to act. Yes, I was naive and thought our government would never do any thing to harm us veterans. I was wrong, our government was waging a major effort to minimize the problems that Agent Orange had inflicted and it was huge. I hope enough Vietnam veterans read this to join with me to force our government to admit that they denied compensation to many of us that deserved it, I for one have not suffered too much, but there is no doubt that the government cover up of the agent orange fiasco is something that the American society should know.

We continued to Florida, got the family settled and I checked into Bay Pines VA medical center and made some applications to company’s that were hiring and I attended a few interviews. Nothing happened, the major industry of that area was sail boat building. Yes, I knew the difference between a sloop, a ketch and a yawl, but my knowledge base just did not fit the existing job market in Florida. So we made the decision to immigrate to Alabama. Nelly’s cousin was still living there and there was a hospital, a commissary and a post exchange. Huntsville was emerging as a high tech community, there are several colleges and many firms filling niche markets for specialized electronics and equipment that supported the NASA space program and the Army missile efforts. One of the major employers was developing software that lead the CAD/CAM revolution. Many garage shop start ups went on to become major players in the high tech world. My first job was with a small load cell manufacturer, the owner had dreams of buying an airplane so he hired me. The company had built the load cells and flexures that were used on the launch pad for the Apollo program, our load cells measured the thrust of the rocket engines and if and when they had enough thrust to provide a good launch the hold down devices were released and the missile would launch. I got the task of taking a polished steel bar to the National Bureau of Standards at Beltsville, MD to have it re calibrated, under a million pounds of force a four inch square bar on a 12 inch span would deflect a few thousandths of an inch and that calibration had to be revalidated periodically. We even rented our certified calibrated device to others in the area, I usually went with it to make sure it was not mistreated, I got to visit some interesting places and meet some very interesting people. My boss died of cancer and after I sold an almost million dollar big truck scale system to a Texas gas field operator, I knew there would never be a company airplane so I took a job with a small company that had a Piper Navajo Chieftain, it was a nice airplane, the chief pilot and I became good buddies but the owner was a wheeler dealer that I never quite understood. I finally got fired because I had brought George Dickle bourbon on board because Jack Daniels black label was no where to be found at that time and when the owner became furious so did I…

Corporate flying is not all that it is cracked up to be, too much sitting
around and waiting so I looked for other lines of work. By then I had a
computer a word processor and a dot matrix printer, one Thursday I was
asked to produce a users manual for an electronic mixer device used in
TV stations, the kicker was that the manual had to be ready so they could ship the equipment on monday, I burned the midnight oil and got the manual ready by the deadline and the customer got his video mixer with a users manual. I got paid well for that weekend of work and realized that tech writing might be a good occupation, that is all I did for the
remainder of my working career. I got pretty good at writing “what it is,
what it does, and how does it do it”, and if it was a specification I
added “how well does it do it”, that simple formula served me very well.

At my annual re check on the fluid in my chest cavity the VA doctors at
Birmingham found the fluid level was increasing again so they ordered me to check into the VA hospital, they took some biopsies, poked and probed, had a bunch more X rays made, they held many meetings where my case was the major topic, while taking another biopsy, they collapsed my right lung and they had to re inflate me, of course they drained the fluid, I think there was five liters of “a straw colored saline solution”. In a few days they had scheduled me for exploratory surgery called a thoracotomy. No they did not find anything but I have not had any similar problems since recovering.

Nelly and I hosted her mother and father for a summer and we took them to Washington, DC, Colorado Springs to see Robin at the Air force Academy, then to Albuquerque, El Paso, San Antonio, New Orleans, Mobile, a bit of Florida and back to Huntsville. A very nice trip. We went back to Colorado Springs for Robin’s graduation in the summer of 1982, he flew a glider to the graduation ceremony, along with several of his classmates, some even parachuted to their graduation, Nelly and I were so proud. A Korean family treated us like royalty because Robin had helped their son Kim, when he was having a hard time at the academy, I did not know what to do with all the praise, but I knew they were thankful for the help their son got. A year later we took my mom to Robin’s graduation from the Euro/Nato pilot school at Sheppard AFB, there are not many women in the world that have been to both their son’s and grandson’s graduation from AF flying school.

Natalie was working on her masters degree and was living with a friend
across town, we got together every week or two, we were equally proud of her when she graduated. I helped her buy a Honda Civic after some one ran into the car I had given her, the Honda turned out to be a really
good car, even though it had over 100,000 miles on it when she bought it. Natalie’s friend had been working at NASA at Marshall Space Flight
Center for several years and had risen about as high as she could at
Marshall and when there was an opening at the NASA offices in Washington that was in her speciality, she bid on it and got hired, wow it must be nice to be so talented. She is now working on a joint NOAA/NASA project and is again bumping the top pay bracket, any how they are doing well, in fact they just got back from a trip to visit Natalie’s grandmother and family in France. Natalie is teaching some college classes and is working on her Phd.

Nelly and I had bought a beach town house in Destin, FL in the late
1980’s which she loved, she scrounged hard and had it very well decorated by the time Robin and Suzan got out of the AF. They stayed there while waiting for a call from Delta Airlines where he is still happily
employed, with about 20 years of seniority he pretty well gets to pick
and choose which trips he prefers, that allows him to manage his time off
as well. The Delta museum has a Travelair 6000 an eight passenger single engine high wing airplane exactly like the one that they started
passenger service with back in the late twenties. Robin got to fly it on the 70th anniversary flight duplicating the initial Delta passenger service,
he planed the flight to Dallas so he passed through Huntsville on his way
there and we had a nice visit, of course I invited several of my close
friends. The airplane had been restored to impeccable condition and was
painted exactly as it had been in 1929. The aircrew and ground crew even had replica uniforms of that era, Robin had asked me to scrounge the thrift shops for antique luggage that would be appropriate for the
flight, I did not find any but I sure scoped every thing out. They went
on to Dallas Love field and flew the anniversary flight on the exact
date and same route to Atlanta, they had a great time. Later Robin took the Travelair to New York and some other cities on good will tours, of course there are many pictures to document those events, I have one on my liqueur cabinet. A few years later the Delta museum had restored their original DC-3, Ship 41 they had found it somewhere in South America and they had to rebuild everything, I mean they took it all
apart, even took the cockpit completely off the airplane, there is a book
of pictures documenting everything they did during the rebuild process,
it is fascinating to see what all they did. I wish they would publish
it, I would buy a copy if they did. Any how Ship 41 was much better than
new even the skins were polished so highly that they asked people not to touch the airplane, passengers were given booties to put over their shoes and were given white cotton gloves so the moisture on their hands did not tarnish any thing they touched. Yeah, ship 41 had become an
impeccable relic and it needs to be protected. There will never be
another like it, Delta can be very proud of their treasure.

On the 75th anniversary of Delta’s launch into their air passenger
service Robin flew as co pilot on Ship 41, we met up with him at Jackson, MS recreating that initial Delta flight again, but this time they had
both the Travelair and Ship 41, Geneva and I even got a sight seeing ride around Jackson.

9-11 had occurred between the 70th and 75th anniversary flights and ramp security was dramatically different. At Huntsville they let the whole group of us out on the ramp and we milled around with little or no supervision, at Jackson we had to go through security and we were escorted continuously, and restricted to a very small part of the ramp. There are pretty severe restrictions to access of aircraft ramps at almost all airports now, I think only grass airfields are exempt. Oh how, I wish we could go back to the good old days, but I am pretty sure they are gone for good, too bad.

Son Robin and grandson Max visited this week end, Max flew his latest
electric powered R/C model twice and we visited the local model store,
what a fascinating place, there has been so much progress in every aspect of the hobby world that I just sat in the store eating some free popcorn and every where I looked there was something new or extraordinary to what existed just a generation ago. We had a very nice visit and as usual I learned a lot. So till next time… Bob