Interviewed by Rachel Wu and Elyse Decker
I’m from Pennsylvania. I’m a Vietnam era veteran which means I didn’t step on Vietnam soil. My training was on a base in Texas and took 8 or 9 weeks. The first place I was stationed was in Arkansas, which was a B52 base. From there I went to Alaska. I loved it. Anyone who goes there will fall in love with it. There is ice fog and the sun stands up, circles around, and never goes below the horizon in the summer.
I worked in the air force and I served for 13 years, pretty much in radio the entire time. I worked with KC 135s and B-52s on the aircraft radios, fixing the transistors, since, when I first went in, they had very limited transistors and that was the way they had to communicate. I liked tinkering with technology in the past but now I have shakes so I don’t anymore.
After Alaska, I worked on KC-135 tankers in Nebraska. I fell and really hurt my back in ’81, twisted all of my muscles. They put me in the hospital and did surgery. After that, I was trying to recover and came up with cancer, testicular. Then I got out and healed. Now I have prostate cancer.
All the people that I knew that were around me fought dying. Dying of cancers and everything else. There were bad chemicals in Arkansas. If you had less than two stripes, you got to go on jobs and we used to spray along the fence and you could see where we stopped because where we were spraying was dead. We were marking the grounds to make it clear where you could and could not enter the base.
There were a lot of people that did more than me and that did less than me. A lot of people defend the constitution. I have trouble with that now because of who’s in office now.
I have a lot of favorite memories. I like going to Alaska because of the Aurora Borealis, especially since I worked the night shift all my life. Another favorite is of my daughter on Easter standing on a snow mound. She’s 45 years old now. I just have one daughter, I couldn’t deal with two. My daughter is about 15 miles from where I am and she’s not having a good time in life right now. She had a divorce because her childhood sweetheart decided to wander around. Problem is he got caught. They’ve been together for almost 25 years.
Music sort of relaxes me if I am having a really bad day. I listen to pretty much everything except for gangster rap. Well, I’m also not good enough to understand operas.
After I was discharged, me and the first wife that was in Alaska got a house that she wanted so much. So she gets the house then she gets, “Oh I don’t want to live here anymore,” and we divorced. Then I hooked up with a lady from Delaware. We ended up married.
I worked for the Delaware state park system as a volunteer. I volunteered for a fire company. I did a volunteer job for the ranger. I have very light steps. You can’t hear me. Yeah, tell the wife that. You know, I will follow up the hall and she doesn’t know I’m there. Or I stop in the bathroom and come up the hall. It’s part of my ancestry. Blackfoot Cherokee. The only reason I know this is that my mom had jet black hair.
In school, I majored in fine arts and commercial art. I still do that. I arrange flowers – silk flowers. I worked with model trains and I try building different circuits to form flashlights and all that good stuff, as a hobby. I have two Nikon cameras, a p1000 and a 7001. I enjoy it and I have a Cannon XAH1 or whatever. It’s a videotape recorder. High definition! I photograph anything that looks interesting. It could be a plane going across the sky or the man in the moon. I did like to cook. Since I’ve gotten down, my wife does most of the cooking. I’m trying to retire gracefully. But I’ve had a good life. Wouldn’t change anything, you know? I’ll say this. Every day is a holiday. It’s what you make of it. I’m done.