Cold War Kid to Space Age Engineer via President Kennedy's last flight alive & RAF Upper Heyford (435)

32:10And so the recruiter gave me a list of different jobs that would fit that kind of general category. And my dad, rather than rely on the recruiter, my dad pulled copies of the actual job descriptions out of the regulations for me. and that's when I chose the precision measurement equipment specialty and working in a precision measurement equipment laboratory, which covered all kinds of instruments. Anything that measured anything eventually found its way back to the base. P-MEL, it was called, the precision measurement equipment lab. What is the importance of this within the U.S. Air Force? Can you just give me some examples on how important that role is and what potentially could go wrong if that job isn't done properly?

33:10Okay, well, the equipment that I worked on, that I specialized in, after I had a little try at everything, there were tactical navigation systems, which obviously are important that they work right so that planes can find their

33:38Keith Longstreth:target. the identification friend of foe system, but also little things too. Something as simple as a strut gauge. You know, the airplanes on the front wheel, they have a hydraulic strut that keeps the gear and the wheel on the ground. But you have to maintain a certain amount of pressure in there. and there was a case at my first base in upstate New York. My roommate had calibrated one of these strut gauges, and they're simple little gauges, just a little board-on tube that when pressure is applied in it, this tube tries to uncurl, and when it uncurls, it makes a needle move, and they go up to 3 ,000 pounds per square inch.

34:37Anyway, this guy had picked this gauge up and had dropped it on the floor, and then he just put it back on the shelf for somebody else to use. This is somebody that actually works on the aircraft, did that. And it turned out that this particular aircraft that somebody used that instrument to check was a plane that was on Victor Alert.

35:05Keith Longstreth:It was loaded with nukes, ready for takeoff within 15 minutes of notification. And the nose gear collapsed because somebody let out too much pressure because that gauge was faulty. We never worked on anything that was actually part of the plane. We were once removed. We worked on the equipment that the people use to check out. the parts of the plane. I understand you met your first wife in Plattsburgh. How did that come about? My roommate, the one that they, that had a caliber, that gauge, in fact, he was from Burlington, Vermont. He didn't have a car. I did. As the story goes, he got me, introduced me to a girl that I really kind of fell hell over heels with.

36:11And it gave me a reason to go to Burlington every weekend. And this place you were in in Plattsburgh, so this was your first posting. What was it like, you know, coming in as the new guy? You know, how was the place effectively managed? No, it wasn't. If it had been the only female I was ever assigned to, I would have never stayed in the Air Force. Yeah. It was one of these places where if you didn't go out bowling and drinking with the boss, then you just got treated like you were a third -class citizen. And actually, he treated everybody that was single and living in the barracks that same way, regardless of whether or not they went out with them.

37:15But apparently, I guess, if you're married and you're a kind of mid-range non-commissioned officer, like a staff sergeant or a tech sergeant, then you would need his endorsement to get promoted. But your next posting is more professional, let's say, I think.

37:36Keith Longstreth:It certainly was. And a lot different from New York. It was in the Philippines, Clark Air Base, which sadly got wiped out by Mount Pinatubo when it erupted years after I was there. But the laboratory there was actually not just a laboratory for Clark, but it was a depot-level laboratory for the entire Pacific area. And we also went out on site to do some calibrations. In fact, one of those places I went to, the calibrated equipment, was Hong Kong. And it was kind of weird because the equipment sat on a mountaintop. It was American-owned equipment that we took care of, but the place was ran by the Royal Air Force.

38:37Because nobody wanted the Chinese to know that it was American equipment. On the other hand, they kind of had to know that because it provided radar for the old Hong Kong airport, which was right downtown in the middle of all sorts of stuff. But still, it was a great temporary duty. 10 days in Hong Kong, which I spent about two and a half days actually working. And the rest of the time we went sightseeing and shopping. Fantastic. Fantastic. Yeah, I've heard landing at that airport was quite challenging because you're flying in between like tower blocks and things like that. The old Kai Tak airport.

39:24And in the Philippines, you were working on F-111s or the FB-111 at Plattsburgh. What about at Clark? At Clark, it was F-4s and C-130s. C-130 is the propeller turboprop cargo plane. They did have C-141s, which was a jet cargo plane. But Clark was also where they brought all the POWs and all the refugees when they were leaving Vietnam. They brought them all the Clark first. Clark had a major hospital for the region. They set up tent cities for all the refugees. I didn't see that, but the tents were still up when I got to Clark. Wow. Wow. So your next posting is to Griffiths in the U.S. Yes. And you're working on the venerable B-52.

40:33Well, Griffiths was a strategic air command base. Again, they flew B-52s and KC-135 tankers. The B-52, I can't believe it. It's still flying, and they're looking at keeping it flying past its 100-year mark. It's unbelievable. It is literally unbelievable. But, yeah, Griffiths also had some fighters that were part of the NORAD. They acted as interceptors for airplanes that may happen to stroll across the North American Air Defense Line by accident, or not by accident. But mainly it was the SAC base. and you know I grew up grew up on sack base and I always believed that this sack had or they said anyway I believed that too until I got to Upper Hayford which we will come to in a moment now Griffiths you you when we had the the call beforehand you were telling me about the calibration of the tail gun of the B-102.

41:59Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's an instrument that one of the other maintenance squads used to calibrate and check the accuracy of the radar that guides the tail gun. And that's done with a piece of equipment that sends a signal to the radar that makes it think that there's a plane following it. And as this piece of equipment rotates, then the gun will rotate with it. And it's kind of unnerving when you're standing next to it and your equipment rotates and you see this four-barrel, big gun, tail gun following you as your equipment moves from one side to the other side. Yeah, I guess you're always very trusting that they've disarmed it properly before you're doing that sort of test.

43:02Yes, absolutely. Wow, wow. And Griffiths gets a lot of snow. First, going from the Philippines to Griffiths. The first year I was at Griffiths, we got 150 inches of snow. And the second year, we routinely had temperatures of below minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. So anyway, really, really cold. So it must have made Scotland appear almost tropical then. Yeah, it really did. But they dressed us well, warm. We had full Arctic gear. Yeah, and it was a very big laboratory. In terms of people, it was bigger than the one at Clark. The Griffiths one had 75 people, technicians, because there was a large research and development center there too, and that was mainly why they had so many more people.

44:15When I was at Clark, my supervisor and trainer, we became good friends and he had been at Upper Hayford before. So he, from Clark, he went to New Mexico for a year and I, for two years, and I went to Griffiths in Rome, New York. For two years. And we both decided we wanted to go back to England. And we both applied for, and to make sure that we got accepted, we volunteered for a long tour, which normally a tour with families three years. And we volunteered for a four-year tour. And we both got assigned to RAF Feltwell, which is where their laboratory is for Lake and Heath in Mildon Hall. And we both asked to be changed from Feltwell to Upper Hayford.

45:21And they changed us. And he got there about a month before I did. but yeah he was the first person i saw when i got the hayford brilliant brilliant that must have been very welcoming to see a familiar face who you know you you'd worked with before and you were friends with yeah it was and but that should not have been the first person to greet me i mean we we have a sponsor system, and the lab at Upper Hayford was so backlogged that we were working 12-hour shifts six days a week just to try and get caught up. And it shouldn't have been that way. It was due to the manager of the laboratory. He would never tell us until Friday if we had to come to work on Saturday.

46:30When he left, things changed. We were running like, at one point, almost a 60-day backlog. so people were bringing equipment in and it would be like 60 days before we could get it calibrated and back to them and a lot of shops couldn't wait that long so they would send a priority letter which meant we had to stop what we were doing to do this piece of equipment on a priority and eventually everything became a priority Well, he left. New management came in. And the first thing he said was, we will know on Monday morning whether or not you will need to go work on the following Saturday. And he would say, and it's based like this, if the backlog is down to a certain point, you won't have to work at all on Saturday.

47:35and if it gets even lower, then we'll give you a half a day off during the week. It got to the point where we were working only three and a half days a week because we were just staying on top of the work. And not only were we staying on top of the work, but the quality of the work had improved too. Choice Hotels gets you more of what you value. Here's a little tune to help you remember. Same drive, different day. Don't you wish you were getting away? Pack your bags and come on through. Texas, Ohio, Alaska, we're up there too. Comfort Inn, it's calling your name. Save on the stay. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim.

48:26Well, I hope you like my little song. Book direct at choicehilletales.com. Still waiting in line? again? That's time you will never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to Stamps.com and use code PODCAST for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply. The customers were happy. The inspectors were happy.

49:08Yeah, and you were only working half a week. Brilliant. Everybody wins. Everybody wins. It must have been really weird being back at Upper Hayford, sort of 10, 11 years after you'd been to school there. It was. It was very different looking. In fact, I was talking to a fellow Hayford guy last night and explaining to him the difference, how it looked. And when I was in high school and we would come across from the west, Hayford sat overlooking the Charwell River Valley. Lower Hayford was in the middle, in the bottom of the valley, and upper Hayford was on top. And when we would come over the edge and going down to the Charo River Valley, on a sunny day, all you could see was the buildings of the school and they were all white.

50:07I mean, they stood out like glistening, white sparkling buildings. When I went back, everything was painted, all of drab. What couldn't be painted had camouflage netting on it. They were building bomb-proof shelters for each and every aircraft. And the shelters were coated with paint that induced the growth of moss so that it would reduce the heat signature if you were looking at the shelter from above. so you couldn't tell if there was a plane in it or not. Yeah, everything had changed. Something had drastically changed, and it was the tension between the Soviet Union and NATO. Because you were there in the early 80s when the, well, particularly the Soviets were getting very paranoid about the possibility of the US or NATO carrying out a first strike, so attacking the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons first.

51:26So I guess you were involved in a number of TAC evals there. A TAC eval is a tactical evaluation exercise. So these were exercises to test the defences of the airfield on both the ground and in the air. Well, TACOVALs, and they had usually one a month, and they lasted a week. Sometimes we knew they were coming. Sometimes we didn't know. One time there was a NATO TACOVAL, and we didn't know it until a German F-4 made an imitation strafing run of the runway. and then the attack valve said, you're on. And yeah, so they would stress everything. They would simulate launching the planes that are on Victor Alert immediately and then they would simulate drops of like mustard gas or nerve gas, and on one day, usually the Thursday or the Friday of the TACUVAL, it would always run through the scenario where a nuclear weapon got dropped on London and the fallout was drifting toward Hayford, and we had to generate, meaning launch every single plane we had.

53:10And I believe at that time we had around 40 planes. And to keep it more realistic, each and every plane taxi down the runway to the ammo area. A real nuke got loaded on the plane. And then they taxied all the way down the runway again and then back, and the nuke got offloaded. A training bomb got put on, and then the planes took off. And I've been told by pilots that were at Upper Hayford at the time The normal range they went to is they would go east, out over the North Sea, hang a left, go north as far as Loch Ness. They'd turn over Loch Ness, and this is all at like 50 feet off the ground. and fly the length of Loch Ness, do an inverted rise and back down, electronically drop the weapons, and then fly back to Upper Hayford.

54:32Wow. Well, yeah, I've got an interview with an F-111 pilot. I have to send you the link for that because he tells an entertaining story there about flying over the locks with a trainee. Now, what was your role during a tachyval? What were you tasked with doing? I'm presuming you're carrying a weapon during that, yeah? Well, no, although I had to be ready to. In fact, before I even was accepted to go to Upper Hayford, I had to requalify on the M16. And I had a sign, NATO required that I sign a statement saying that I would not draw or put my weapon into working position unless I was going to shoot the kill.

55:28So no warning shots. If it was serious enough to do a warning shot, then you just didn't do it. It was like all or nothing. and we weren't playing games. That was kind of unnerving to me because it had been years since I didn't grow up with guns and it had been years since I had shot an M16. But fortunately, I didn't get to do that. There were some people in PML that that was their job. There were security police augmentees, they were called, and they were usually the really young troops, the one and two stripers that got stuck doing that. Some of the female people were on the runway repair team, so that if a bomb got dropped on the runway, making it unuseful, then the rapid runway repair team would pull it in and put steel over top the hole to make it useful again.

56:37But my main role was the radiation detection equipment and making sure that it was all calibrated and working during an alarm black situation. which says that there's a gas present, either a nerve agent or a mustard gas or something like that. But there was always the presumption that the returning plane would have gone through, if they had dropped a nuclear bomb, he would be covered with radioactive material. So there was an instrument called a PAC-1S that I calibrated, everyone on the base. And the technicians would run it over the aircraft, particularly around the doors and stuff, to make sure that the aircraft was clean of radiation.

57:40And if it wasn't, then they had to go through a cleaning procedure before the air crew was even allowed to get out of the plane. so that was i guess my contribution to the tech valves was taking care of the radiation detection equipment i presume you were spending quite long periods of time in your chemical suit with your helmet and gas mask as well yes you know i was there for three years and three months So that's like 39 months. So that's 39 months times five days. That's over 180 days. I wore that chemical suit with my gas mask and the helmet at my side. And the chemical suits, they were really hot.

58:44And, you know, I worked inside most of the time. And I can say, I know this is funny, I can say thank you very much that most British restrooms, the dividers go all the way to the floor. and the doors go all the way to the floor so that somebody could take their mask off when they're sitting in the loo and catch some fresh air and nobody would be able to know it. And that's what we had to do. After wearing the gas mask for 12 hours, you have a headache that you just cannot believe. And we were fortunate in that the calibration lab was on the other side of the runway from most of the base. So we had permission to drive our private vehicles directly to the lab.

59:52And if you were driving a military vehicle, you had to wear your gas mask. But if you were driving your private vehicle, the driver could take the gas mask off. But not in the military vehicle. A guy I worked with, he had this recurring dream or nightmare of sitting and holding his son while he was wearing his gas mask during a gas attack, knowing that there was nothing he could do to save his son because his mask would not fit his son. And if he tried to make it fit, they would both just end. They would both just die. They always told us that there would be time to get the families out and back to the States, out of harm's way and back to the States.

1:00:54That's what they told us. And we said, yeah, we believe you. But honestly, if that was the case, why would they need airplanes on ready alert?

1:01:15It really begs that question. If you can have time to get the dependents back, then you don't need planes ready to go, loaded with nukes, ready to take off in 15 minutes. There was something else that just popped in my head. I mean, not only was the issue with the Russians, but at the same time that that was going on for our concern, when we did a lot of off-site calibrations, and we had two trucks that we used. One was an Air Force blue truck that said United States Air Force on it. The other one wasn't. The other one was just an olive drab truck. and we would never take that truck if we didn't have to because we were so afraid that we would be mistaken for a British Army truck and the IRA would hit us.

1:02:18So we always tried to make it obvious that we were American and not the British Army. Wow. That's interesting because this was at the height of the IRA attacks on the British forces in Germany particularly. Yeah, and it was all happening at the same time. So the rule at Hayford was the Queen's Highway went right to the middle of the base. If you were on the south side of the highway, which is where all the housing and everything was, you were exempt from the exercise. Once you cross a highway, you were not part of the exercise anymore. But there were some things that normal people had to get to, like the Postal Service Center, which had all the mailboxes that people had, and they would go and check the mail every day.

1:03:14That was on the north side. That was in the part of the base that was affected by the exercise. So I was out with a friend. The alarm went off. Exercise, exercise, exercise. Alarm black, alarm black, alarm black. Which meant this is a gas attack. Take immediate cover. the closest cover we had well first was put your mask on and then we took cover inside the postal service center which just had long hallways just with full of mailboxes and they would turn all the lights off and we were all sitting in there sometimes these alarm blacks last hours and there There was dozens of people sitting in there with gas masks and helmets and chemical suits on.

1:04:18And there was a woman came in with a little boy. And he just started screaming. He got so scared that she had to take him away. He wouldn't give her the opportunity to get to their mailbox so she could check their mail. It was just so frightening to that little boy. Because you guys with all these suits and masks on would have looked like something out of Doctor Who, I guess. Really, not quite a Dalek, but close. And there were people, well, there was the wife of one of the guys in the lab who worked in the munitions system where she was loading a flare. And the flare went off accidentally. and she got burned really terribly.

1:05:13And the exercises were, in order for them to be real enough, they also had danger attached to them. Yeah, it was tough. You're absolutely right about the dangers. I've always wondered on the numbers of people injured and killed in exercises or training through the Cold War, because they're sort of like the forgotten casualties. There's no memorial to those people. You know, here in the U.S., they don't consider the Cold War a real war, but because there was no casualties as a result of fighting. But there were casualties. I heard of stories of people getting run over by tanks when they're wearing a gas mask and a helmet and they can't really hear, you know, and the tank can't really see them.

1:06:20Yeah. Or somebody trying to land an airplane on a highway in Germany and they skid off. And we lost aircraft when I was there. There were training, and even before when I was in high school, there was an RF-101 that crashed near Lower Hayford, the other little village there. The pilots stayed with the plane to be sure that it would not hit the school. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what was it? There was a line from the movie Red October and Sean Connery says that the Cold War was war, no battles, but lots of casualties. Absolutely. When do you, where do you progress then from Upper Hayford? Because you're there until, I've got the date here, 1983.

1:07:25What's next for you? Well, I had decided that I needed to get out of PMEL. I'd already worked on every piece of equipment they had. Can you just tell me what PMEL stands for? The Precision Measurement Equipment Laboratory. Great. Okay. And I was actually a precision measurement equipment technician. A specialist would have been one lower, a technician was higher, which meant that I could do, I should be able to do every task with no help. Whereas a specialist could do every task but could use help in the most complex parts of it. I didn't want to get in the management of a laboratory. I just didn't want to play those games, and I wanted to be an engineer.

1:08:29And the Air Force had a program called Airman Education Commissioning Program, where if you got accepted, they would send you back to college for three years maximum. They get an engineering degree, and then they send you the officer training school and then off to a job as an engineer. And that's what I did. I took night classes because I had to have a minimum of two calculus classes and either one physics, calculus-based physics, or calculus-based chemistry. and I did that at Upper Hayford going to night school and then I applied. There's a lot of paperwork involved and yeah, they get endorsements and the gentleman, the deputy commander for maintenance, his name was Colonel Thomas Ringley.

1:09:36I want to thank him so much. I mean, he had picked me out as an NCO of the month early in 1982, and then he named me maintenance NCO of the year. And he put that on my package, on his endorsement, saying that this is the kind of people we want to be officers. And I truly believe that that's the only reason I got accepted. Because there were other people in avionics that applied that did not get accepted, even though they had better grades than I did. But the Air Force was looking for the all-around person. You would have thought I would want to be an electrical engineer. I didn't. I was in you know where the Upper Haven had that hardened avionics building and I was in there one day working on the ECM test console and there was an engineer there from Westinghouse who made Westinghouse made the ECM the electron countermeasure pod and in all honesty he asked me Why, when he sticks his probe in an electrical outlet for an oscilloscope, the oscilloscope shows like 212 volts instead of 110.

1:11:18And I looked at him like this, and I said, you're kidding me, right? And he said, no. And I said, because an oscilloscope is a peak-to-peak responding device. It's not an average responding or a root mean square. Anyway, what it showed me was that you can be an engineer and have no common sense. So my first choice was astronautical engineer. Second choice was aeronautical engineer. And third choice was electrical. There was a nuclear engineer option too, but I didn't want to do that. I'd had enough radiation stuff. And then I got accepted for astronautical engineer. That was before Christmas of 82.

1:12:17And the Air Force said, now you have to get accepted at a college. And all that really matters is that the college has either Air Force ROTC or some other in-place way of billing the government, billing the Air Force for my school. And, of course, they had to have the program you wanted. And I called them up and said, I don't really care where I go. I want to go someplace where I can stay in government housing. And they said, Ohio State University in Columbus. There was an old base outside of Columbus that wasn't completely closed, and the Air Force maintained the housing there. So we stayed in the housing for three years.

1:13:14I went to school and got my degree, went to officer training school after 90 fun-filled days in San Antonio, and then went to Colorado Springs, where I was a satellite engineer for the global positioning system. I did that for three years. I got an assignment change for humanitarian reasons to the Boston area where I got assigned to the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory. This laboratory consisted of four science divisions, earth science, atmospheric science, near space and deep space, and then the aerospace engineering, which is where I worked. So the scientists from these other divisions, they would come to us and say, hey, I got this experiment.

1:14:18I got to get it up to this altitude for this length of time. This is how much money I have. So we would look at what he's got, how much money he has. We would decide if we could do it on a balloon or if it has to go on a rocket or put it on a shuttle or even a satellite. And then we would make that happen and fly the experiment and hand the data back to the scientist. Hi, this is Rhonda in Virginia, and I support Cold War conversations because I think the work that Ian is doing is critically important. I think it's vital to record the firsthand accounts of people who lived and experienced the Cold War because it illustrates history in a way that a book never can.

1:15:10So thank you so much for the podcast. It's my favorite podcast, and I look forward to it every week. to be like Rhonda and help to preserve these incredible stories of the Cold War. As a monthly or annual supporter, you'll be able to listen ad-free, you'll become one of our community, get the sought-after Cold War Conversations drinks coaster as a thank you, and you'll bask in the warm glow of knowing that you're helping to preserve Cold War history. Just go to coldwarconversations.com slash donate to find out more. When you think like an athlete, setbacks don't stop you. But mindset alone doesn't get you moving again.

1:15:53That's where Icy Hot steps in. Ice works fast. Heat makes it last. So when the rest of the world settles because of a setback, Icy Hot accelerates your comeback with fast-acting, powerful pain relief. Icy Hot. You're so back. It was a fun job. nearest you ever got to getting into space huh yeah there was one incident with it was a joint air force nasa and european space agency where we were launching rockets into thunderstorms that triggered lightning and i didn't actually go out on the launch my role was to predict the trajectory of these little tiny rockets. These were two and three quarter inch folding thin aircraft rockets.

1:16:46They were left over from Vietnam. So we had kind of an unlimited number free of charge. And we were launching at the Kennedy Space Center. And our target was to have the thing land in a lagoon. And I did about 1 ,400 launch simulations under different conditions, different wind directions and wind strengths and stuff like that, to come up with safety criteria where they can launch it and make sure the rocket went into the lagoon. Well, there was a French gentleman that was out there doing some work on the pad and there was a rocket in the pad and he accidentally ignited the rocket and it went i was so excited it went right in the middle of the lagoon where i said it was going to go unfortunately because it wasn't supposed to go they hadn't cleared the lagoon there's the guy there fishing and he got pretty close he was really mad so NASA said that's it you guys are out of here so they packed everything up and went to a mountaintop in New Mexico where nobody cared about anything and the whole point of that was to see there's an effect called triggered lightning where if you have a rocket or even an aircraft under certain conditions going through charged air, it will trigger a lightning bolt.

1:18:28In the case of the space shuttle, they had a really unusually low level that they had to meet. I had an experiment go up in the space shuttle in January of 1992, and we got delayed for two hours because the electric static meter readings were above a certain point. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. It was perfectly blue. and but eventually the meters got below that point the shuttle got launched the it was the shuttle discovery and yeah i got to see the launch therefore sent me down there not for the launch even though i was invited by nancy for it they sent me down for the press conference the day before in case somebody had questions about my payload nobody did it was to measure reflected light from intergalactic and zodiacal dust which means light bouncing off dust within the solar system and outside the solar system in the star system yeah i can imagine the press not getting very excited about that yeah but the the u.s naval graduate school was running a refrigerator made out of a pioneer woofer they got excited about that yeah but um actually the work that i did that experiment laid down the basis of of all the anti-missile systems that we have.

1:20:32Because there's three phases of a missile. During two of the phases, it's easy to track. The first one is when it's launched. There's fire coming out the tail and it's easy to track, but it's a long ways away. The second one is when it's re-entering coming back into the atmosphere. It's heating up. It's easy to track, but you got like one chance. The ideal time to hit it is when it's coasting through space. But essentially what you have is a cold black body against the background of space. So in order to be able to track it, you have to know what the background of space looks like. so you can see if something is blocking it.

1:21:25And that's what my experiment did, is it updated our database for the background of space. And that allowed the companies that were testing these rockets to make their sensors more sensitive and give them a higher probability of hitting the target. That was part of a bigger program called LEAP, which stood for Lightweight Exile Atmospheric Projectile. And these were called kinetic kill vehicles. There was no warhead on these missiles. I mean, the rocket is traveling at six kilometers a second. And if you just hit it, it's going to hit it with anything. It's going to get hit. splintered that wasn't part of the SDI the strategic defense initiative program they were paying for it it was the beginnings of it yeah my last assignment at the geophysics lab I did some neat stuff it was a fun great assignment yeah we're working with the space shuttle that's that that's pretty cool so when did you retire from the U.S.

1:22:46Air Force what rank were you I was a captain. And I wasn't going to get any higher. I was allowed to stay in long enough to retire as an officer. Normally you need 10 years commission time to retire as an officer, but they had so many officers that they cut that back to eight. So I did eight years as a total of just under 22 years, and I was able to retire as a captain. But, you know, it's a small world. I run into people. I run into people that I work with at Hayford. Talking about the schools at Hayford. My son started school at Upper Hayford in the very same buildings that I went to high school at.

1:23:46He started school. When we lived in Colorado Springs, he met a guy in school. They weren't really close, but we moved to Boston, and he was in the same Boy Scout troop. And then his dad retired and I retired and I don't know why they came to Ohio. We didn't plan on it, but we ended up here. And they ended up in the same high school and they graduated high school together. That's an unbelievable coincidence. It's very serendipitous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think in your notes, you tell me that in, and this is like 30 years after you've seen this plane, you're working at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

1:24:49Can you tell me about that? Yeah, this was 30 years after I saw President Kennedy walk up to the top of the steps and into the plane. And many, many years later, there's a new president that gets a new fleet of Boeing 747s. And what was left was this plane that Kennedy had. And it ended up at the Museum of the United States Air Force, which is here at Wright-Patterson. it's the largest aviation museum in the world and I went down during lunch one day after they had put it on display and I reached out and I touched the airplane and I know I wasn't supposed to do that but I touched the airplane anyway and I was just overwhelmed by this feeling that the plane wanted to tell me everything that it had done since I saw it that fateful day in 1963.

1:26:03And I still, every time I go to the museum, I go visit that plane. When they restored the plane, they felt that it was, well, you know that when they brought Kennedy's body back, the crew refused to have it in the cargo hold. so in order to get it on the plane where the seats are they had to cut a bulkhead out so they could get the the coffin in there and the bulkhead is there now you can see where it was cut it's yeah it's an amazing experience the episode extras such as videos, photos and other content are available via a link in the episode information. The podcast wouldn't exist without the generous efforts of our financial supporters and I'd like to thank one and all of them for keeping the podcast on the road.

1:27:10The Cold War conversation continues in our Facebook discussion group. Just search for Cold War Conversations in Facebook. Thanks very much for listening and look forward to seeing you next week.

1:27:34The End

1:27:54By the morning sun, an army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana. It was a lovely SUV, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it. Tonight, we feast. An offer you can feast on. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees, may I buy. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task. unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them.

1:28:39With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer.