After OCS, attended Ground Radar Officer training, graduating first academic place. I immediately returned to the old ways: right back into the USAF Security Service, where I stayed for the next several years. I had one CONUS assignment and some overseas ones, including Taiwan.
When my wife and I returned from that assignment, we spent the next five years in CONUS: at HQ USAFSS and an assignment at a Missile Wing in Kansas, where I was the Electronics Support Systems officer until 1972. I became a private pilot, at least for a short time. I finished my undergraduate work and was well on my way through graduate school when the old tap on the shoulder came for SEA.
I spent the next 11 months in Thailand, at the 621st ACS, back in the radar game, with regular excursions “over the border” to our sister units in Vietnam. Upon my return, I was again back in the black arts at Hq. USAFSS, in San Antonio. I remained in San Antonio after my discharge in 1976.
I immediately took to the information technology hardware sector, working for Burroughs Corporation (now Unisys) for the next 8 years. During this time, my marriage, stressed by internal differences and too long hours on the job, simply collapsed. I continued with another company, Digital Equipment Corporation. Compaq Computer Corporation bought DEC (1995) and Hewlett-Packard Corporation bought Compaq in 2002. I continued to work as a senior hardware support consultant through the mergers.
I remarried in 1985 and am ecstatically happy with that situation. Charlene and I have two great boys, who themselves are married. We have five grandchildren. My daughter, Katrina, now widowed, still lives in San Antonio with our eldest granddaughter. Our son Keith and his wife live in Amarillo with their two children. Our younger son, Jeremy, lives in Middletown, NY. We see all of them quite often and carry on a lively telephone, email, and snail-mail correspondence.
In 1996, Charlene and I, both tired of the endless hot summers in San Antonio, made a deliberate decision to move away. She worked for JC Penney at the time, and they wanted to relocate her to the corporate headquarters in Dallas. After considering it over supper, we decided to move to Vermont instead, but first we were going to Oregon to visit some of my relatives. When we got here, we changed our minds again (not about moving, just where we would move…) and moved back onto my old family homestead. We remain here today, living in the same house in which I was actually born.
