Party Time! I spent the year following high school graduation basically having a good time. Yeah, I attended the University of Hartford (their first year as a university) but much of my time was spent organizing a new fraternity (Omega Kappa Delta), touring with Hillyer's 'Scarlet Tones'... a men's singing group (you've never heard of the group?... that's surprising. Why we were on WTIC one time... at 5am on a Sunday morning), working lighting for Hillyer's little theater group (and the Oval in the Grove Theater in West Hartford)... let's see what else. I changed my major from Accounting to Psychology to Liberal Arts (all inside one year). By summer 1959, it became obvious to my father that I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. His advice: Get a Job!... remember the 1957 hit by the Silhouettes? So, I did. Freddie Marcantonio and I had earlier been kicking around the idea of joining the service and we had talked to the Army and Air Force recruiters. So, it was a pretty easy decision. Join the service or starve... I joined the Air Force. (Fred later joined the Army.) Off We Go, Into The Wild Blue Yonder...As with Ralph Noel's story, the Air Force tested me and found (to my very great surprise) that I might be able to do a few things in electronics. So, off I went to Basic Training... very exciting... truly exciting time in my life. I was on my own... in charge of my own destiny (well, more or less... there were a few Drill Sergeants in basic training who had other ideas). After a month of basic training in September 1959 at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, I headed for Chanute Air Force Base, Illinois for six months of aircraft electronics training. There, I learned the B-47 and B-52 aircraft systems. For the first time since 7th grade in Upper Frenchville, Maine, I was back to getting top grades. It felt good to feel proud again of my grades. My first assignment (Spring 1960) was Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire... a brand new Strategic Air Command (SAC) base. It was 5 miles from the beautiful beaches of New Hampshire, 50 miles from North Conway's fabulous ski slopes and 50 miles from swinging Boston. But the most exciting aspect of this assignment was the flight line... what a thrill to work on those sleek, silver flying machines. I eventually was placed on flying status and flew with the B-47's as they positioned these planes at several strategic locations in Europe (England, Spain and North Africa) and other glory assignments like Thule, Greenland; Goosebay, Labrador; and Fort Churchill, Manitoba, Canada. (Ugh!). And Along Came Rosemary... Aside from the sleek, silver flying machines, another exciting thing happened to me about a year after I arrived at Pease. I met this girl from Wethersfield. She had just graduated from Katherine Gibbs School in Boston, so she and I had a ready-made common love of Boston along with many other things. Her name was Rosemary Vicino. So, for the next couple of years, life was very fun both off and on the flight line.... By 1962, I was quickly coming up against the end of my enlistment and had some decisions to make. One was to convince Rosemary to marry me, and (2) convince the Air Force to retrain me for missiles, specifically the Minuteman ICBM which had just begun its deployment in Montana. If they would do that, I said, then I would re-enlist. Remember that the early sixties was the heyday of the ICBM... a new strategic weapon and a new Cold War strategy: flex those muscles and keep the Soviets at bay. SAC called it 'Peace through Deterrence'. Well, I was pretty successful: Rosemary and I married a year later on 15 June 1963 in Wethersfield... That was the first time I believe that an Airman First Class had ever entered the hallowed halls of the Wethersfield Country Club. After spending a week of honeymoon in Bar Harbor, Maine, Rosemary and I headed out with all of our worldly possessions stuffed in a six foot U-Haul trailer, to the cornfields of Illinois (Chanute AFB) to start our new life. And, the following month, I started my training on Minuteman electronics. How I long for those days... those were truly exciting days. While there, I enjoyed some of the finest pheasant hunting in my entire life. Nine months later, we were heading for the 'wild west'... Cheyenne, Wyoming to help deploy Wing 'Five' of America's six wings of Minuteman missiles. This was the land where the sun shines 364 days a year... the one remaining day, we usually had a blizzard. This was also 'home on the range' where antelope, mule deer and elk play. This would be fun! The Missiles of Cheyenne. Rosemary and I started our little family with a little girl with big black, guggly-eyes. What a thrill when she was born! What a miracle! WOW! Was it possible? we asked. We named her Nicola Ann, after Rosemary's father, Nicholas. Our second daughter, Jill Andrea was born two years later. While Nikie had an olive complexion (Rosemary's Italian side) with beautiful dark hair, Jill was blue-eyed (the Acadian Theriault eyes) and blonde haired. Jill was the very demure little girl but very independent... Nikie was the tom-boy with the bouncy ponytail but so eager to please. The two were very different in appearance and we learned as they grew up that they were also very different in disposition and interest. With the two of them, life was full of surprises and thrills. We loved every minute of it. As I continued my work on Cheyenne's Minuteman missiles, I became critical of the systems that I was working on... they were very difficult to maintain. In my thinking, I believed that I could have done a better job in designing these systems to make it easier for a human being to maintain. Gosh, to remove the cannon plugs off some of those cabinets required the arms of a orangutan!! By 1967, I had decided to see if I could talk the Air Force into sending me back to school. I had developed this 'fire in my belly' to become an electrical engineer. Only one problem though: since 7th grade, I had become convinced that I just didn't have the God-given mental tools for math, and I was being told by my counselors that I would have to be a math whiz in order to succeed in electrical engineering. Whoa! this is pretty heavy stuff, I thought. Hmmm. So, You Want To Be An Engineer? So, I thought I'd 'dip my toe' a little and try an evening course in College Algebra at the University of Wyoming campus. My instructor was a young fellow by the name of Larry Johnson whose strength was applied math. Not only could he teach math, but he could show us how to use it... very appealing to me. I lose interest in concepts very quickly, unless I can see that there's something useful that I can do with it. To make a long story short: at the peak of the Vietnam War, while the 'grey mailed fist' of SAC was trying to grab me by the collar and reassign me to airplane duty in Okinawa, Japan, I succeeded in convincing the Air Force Institute of Technology (the organization which includes the Air Force Academy, its graduate school and service schools) to send me to school full-time. They assigned me to the University of Wyoming where I graduated in January of 1971 with my B.S.E.E sheepskin in hand. I declared myself a very lucky man... for many reasons. Adding to this great fortune, about a month before I graduated, the Air Force asked me if I would be interested in returning to graduate school after completing Officer Training School (OTS). I couldn't believe my luck! My response? "Are you kidding? Where do I sign?" WOW! What an absolute thrill... and what luck! So, here was the game plan: go back to Lackland AFB, Texas in March 1971 for OTS and then four months later, start Graduate School at the Air Force's Resident School of Engineering in Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio. Rosemary and the girls would have to live with my mother in Plainville, Connecticut for that duration which would be a little hassle for them. But it would be better than staying in Cheyenne by themselves. A New Mustang is Born... OTS was no fun in the beginning... I was one of the old guys (30 years old) and certainly one of the few with so many stripes. Those college kids in the OTS upper class had learned about my arrival at OTS and were very eager to 'welcome' me. Well, it wasn't pretty... their main interest was to rip my stripes off my sleeves along with some pretty serious hazing. I let them do their tricks and get their kicks... it was 'all in the game'. When our turn came to be the Upper Class, I had the great fortune to be selected by the faculty to be the Officer Trainee Wing Commander for the student body. Now, it was my turn to make a difference: introduce a new form of professionalism to the OT Corps and get rid of hazing. I was very proud to graduate as Distinguished Graduate in May 1971 and to receive that shining new 'gold' bar. I was now a 'Mustang'... an old nickname for someone who works himself through the enlisted and officer ranks. So, now, we were off to Dayton, Ohio and graduate school. We were soon moved in and back to normal. It was good to have our little family together. Rosemary and I were quick to welcome the life of an officer and an officer's wife. The camaraderie, while different than the enlisted camaraderie, was very good. The parties were a little more elegant (sometimes) and we loved the Officers' Club at Wright-Patterson. Life at school was difficult but it was fun... I thoroughly enjoyed my course work. Had I known that graduate work was so enjoyable, I would have skipped over the undergraduate part... :) I graduated in March 1973 with a respectable 3.2 GPA. Not bad for someone who shunned math and science in high school. Dad... How Come You Don't Go To Work? When I graduated in 1973, I had been going to school for six years (two years part-time and four years full time). My girls were beginning to wonder whether there was anything wrong with their father. I was glad to emerge from academic life and 'hit the deck running'. I was eager for the 'real world'. My first working assignment as an officer was the Air Force's Electronic Systems Division at L.G.Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts. There, I was one of General Robbins' boys. Our charter: computer performance... tune the Air Force's super computers to their peak efficiency. For three years, my team-mates and I traveled around the country with our trusty HP scopes and our performance test equipment, evaluating the performance of some of the Air Force's super computers. It was a blast and while I didn't mind the traveling, I didn't particularly care to be away from the family for long periods. This early period in our daughters' lives was important and I wanted to be there to be part of it. It was a delicate balance but I think I pulled it off. I worked other assignments but before long in 1977, I received a call from an old boss, Colonel Mel Emmons who had been re-assigned from Hanscom to the new Space Shuttle Test Group at Vandenberg Air Force Base. His question: would Rosemary and I come out to Vandenberg to be part of his organization? STS-1... Ready for Launch. In the late 60's and early 70's while watching the progress of that phenomenal Apollo program, I wondered whether I would ever have an opportunity to be part of our nation's space program. Well, here I was in 1977 and Mel Emmons was asking me this question. My answer again: "Colonel, where do I sign? and when can we come out?" Well, it wasn't very long before we watched a moving van head out with our household goods. Rosemary and I packed our girls, our Basset Hound and the rest of our worldly possessions into our 1977 Volkswagen Rabbit and headed west once again. This time, it was California or bust! The trip was fun. We stopped to visit some of our Air Force friends at different bases along the way. And we managed to get ourselves to Vandenberg without any problems. We settled into base housing and started our new life on that beautiful stretch of the California Central coast north of Santa Barbara. I was assigned to work with NASA to develop the 'Blue Shuttle'... the Air Force's own Space Shuttle vehicle. From 1977 until 1981, a good part of my life was spent 'commuting' back and forth between California and Florida's Cape Kennedy. My boss, then Major O.C. Severo headed a small group of 7-8 engineers who was on-loan to NASA to help with the development of their Launch Control software and also to participate in the development process. Some day we might be able to handle it ourselves for our own Space Shuttle. That assignment (with the exception of the frequent hops from LA to Orlando) was choice... very choice. It was a most exciting assignment. I felt very honored to be part of the team to work on the first Space Shuttle mission: STS-1. But I wondered whether I would ever be able to see the launch as part of the team. I had set my plans to retire in 1981 after giving the Air Force a good 10 years as an officer which I owed them... It was important to me that I pay back the Air Force's investment. I felt that giving them 10 years would be fair pay-back. Also, I wanted to retire early enough to start a second career and give that career a full 20 years. It's All in the Timing. But with my retirement date set to May 1981 (which was now coming very fast) and when NASA set February 1981 as the launch date, I started having serious doubts that I would be part of the first launch. Adding still to the suspense and as we fully expected, the launch was slipped to 11 April. But come April, things were still looking good and so, late on the night of 10 April, we started the launch countdown. But it was too good to be true. In the wee hours of the morning, a problem developed with the on-board avionics and the launch was scrubbed! I thought for sure that I would never see the first launch. However, as the day wore on, the gods smiled upon us... the problem was corrected and the launch was rescheduled for the next day. Late that night, we again restarted the countdown and this time, we took it all the way to a spectacular launch early on the morning of 12 April. What an absolute kick! To have crawled all over that orbiter and to now see that orbiter standing on its tail and roaring towards the heavens was an unbelievable 'high'. This was without a doubt, the absolute epitome of my career. The following day, I flew back to Vandenberg and on Tuesday, 14 April, I signed out early, deciding to use some of my leave time until my retirement in May. I returned on 12 May for my retirement ceremony. I already had a few weeks of civilian life behind me and was now working as head of the Software Engineering department of a little digital communications company in Santa Maria, California, called Quintron, Inc. My flying days with the United States Air Force were over. |
