California Here We Come!

California Here We Come!

With our 1960 Rambler American station wagon fully packed we left Mississippi to head for Beale AFB in Marysville, California. The Air Force would pay moving expenses so we packed up a lot of our stuff in a trunk and had it shipped, but we still had enough left over to fill up the old Rambler. I had 10 days to report so we decided to head up to New York to visit the families for a few days first. That would end up being the only time during our marriage that we visited. My parents had come to visit once in Mississippi but I think it was before Donna came down. I don't remember Donna's parents ever visiting us. After a short visit in New York, we headed west mostly along I-80 directly to California. Interstate 80 was not complete at that point, at least not in Nevada and Utah. In Pennsylvania 80, in those days, ran down towards Philly and by Pittsburgh. It's I-76 today. It was a toll road so we avoided it, but we did pay the tolls in Ohio and Indiana. To save money we slept in the car at night either at a rest area or just along the side of the road. Our last night sleeping in the car, we were in the mountains in Nevada. It was a very dark night, no moon, and cloud coverage. We found a flat place to pull over. It looked like a pretty big area but with it being so dark I could not see too much. I backed in enough to get the front of the car well off the highway. In the morning I got up and went to get something out of the back of the car. When I got to the back of the car there was nowhere to stand to access the back. I had backed up to a steep cliff with a very big drop-off. The back bumper was hanging over the edge of the cliff. I just stood there for a couple of minutes taking it all in. Donna came out, took a look and kind of freaked out. It's still kind of unsettling when I think about it.

We pulled ourselves together and got back on the road. Donna was reading up on California history, particularly the Donner Party. As we drove into California Donna read aloud, the gruesome part, the snowed in for the winter with the cannibalism part of the story. Our $190 Rambler had been doing OK up to that point, but as we got close to California it started to struggle. We kept going but it quit running as we got to the top of the Donner Pass. I managed to pull in to a rest area there and the car just stopped and would not start again. Luckily it was May, not November and it was 1970 not 1846 but it was still a bit eerie after listening to the Donner Party story. We sat there for an hour or so trying to figure out what was wrong. Finally we got it to start up again and we limped down the Sierras into the Sacramento Valley. We made it to Marysville. We got a motel room at a motel on the main drag in Marysville and parked the car on the street in front. The next morning the car would not start. We found a one bedroom railroad type apartment, with cockroaches, just a few blocks down the road. We lugged all our stuff to the apartment. That car never started again. There was a Toyota dealership down the street. We went over looking for a used car and ended up buying a new Toyota Corolla for about $1600. They gave us $100 for the Rambler which they towed away. We used the $100 as a down payment and took a loan for the rest leaving us a $50 a month car payment. We made it. We had a place to live right in town and a car. We had $30 left from the travel money the Air Force provided so we opened a savings account at Bank of America. It was just a couple of blocks down the street. 

The next day I reported to the base. Beale was a SAC (Strategic Air Command) base and the plane I was assigned was the famous SR71, aka “The Blackbird”. The SR flew at very high altitudes (80,000 ft) and very fast (Mach 3+). Mach being the speed of sound so it could fly over three times the speed of sound. I was told it once was timed flying from southern California to Florida in 45 minutes, not counting take-off and landing and that it held the speed record for a manned aircraft. Just about everything about it was secret or above and the little that wasn't, was classified. We were not allowed to take or even have a picture of the aircraft. Of course Revell, the airplane model kit company, sold a model of the plane with the classified specs included. It was a Lockheed plane and I had to attend another 10 weeks of training by Lockheed on the SR71's navigation system. It had an astro-inertial navigation system, meaning it navigated by the stars. A map of all known stars and their location would be loaded into the systems computer prior to take-off. By finding 3 stars the system was able to pinpoint the location of the plane or any destination or target the pilot wanted. My first day on the job I was taken out to the flight-line to observe the pre-flight activities. When the pilot and co-pilot came out to board the plane they were wearing what looked like space suits. It looked like it was the space program, WTF? They needed pressurized suits due to how high the aircraft could fly. Before each flight someone like me would have to put in the plane's coordinates, best guess anyway, and then let the computer in the navigation system align itself prior to take-off. Depending on how accurate your guess was this could take from 15 to 45 minutes. There was always a little competition on who could get the closest, align the system the quickest.

There were pre- and post-flight tasks as well as repair tasks on navigation units in the shop. Some were just routine maintenance and some were repairs for faults found during flights. The description given for all faults was always the same, “It's Fucked-up”, very helpful indeed. If the problem was considered significant, and it's hard to know what's more significant than “fucked-up”, a Lockheed contractor would handle it and we would not be allowed to touch it. So here I was with something like 50 weeks of training, like all the other airmen in the shop, restricted to just fixing only simple “fucked-up” stuff, that turned out to be something we all could have learned with a couple of weeks of on the job training. Oh well, that seemed to be the military way, we will train you but we will never really trust you.

I was in California, ironically the place I was originally planning to go when I dropped out of Valparaiso University almost a year and a half ago, but didn't due to the draft. I was done with training, survived the trek across the country in that old Rambler, reported in on time, and on a new assignment. Still about 3 years to go. Perhaps I might manage to get through this unscathed after all.