Part One - the Army Years

I will try, in the ensuing narrative, to describe briefly where my journey has taken me, and how we ended up sinking our roots down in Wichita, Kansas.

Let us start in June 1968, when I finally graduated from Caltech with a B.S. in Economics after taking a leave of absence in the fall of 66 and spring of 67. After graduation, I packed up my meager possessions in my '54 Mercury 2-door with a 4 0nOn the floor shift conversion, and headed to Washington, D.C. to see if they needed any inexperienced B.S. Economists in the federal government. After 3 days of trying to find a place to stay, one night in the local YMCA hotel, which was a real experience, I headed back west to Tucson, Arizona, via Rock Island , Ill. and some visiting with Steve Teigland's Folks and sisters. The gov't. agencies I looked into were not in a position to hire a 1-A Selective Service classified young man at the height of the Viet Nam war! Surprise!

So I spent the summer hanging out with my parents in Tucson, and waiting to be drafted, which happened in early September of 1968. The Army was a real shock. I was really depressed when I got my draft notice and reported for induction in Phoenix, but once I was in, I tried to maintain a positive attitude and do my best at whatever came up. I did my basic combat training in the U.S.Army at Fort Lewis, Washington, and declined an opportunity to go Officer Candidate School because it required an additional 3 year commitment if and when you successfully completed the school.

After Basic Training, I was assigned to the Signal Corps and specialty training at Ft. Gordon, Ga., just outside of Augusta. After completing my training, I served a stint as an instructor at the Instructional Methods Division of the Signal School, teaching officers and non-coms the basic principles of writing a lesson plan and delivering a unit of instruction. I served with IMD for about 6 months until I was levied for Viet Nam in August ,1969. The stint with IMD was very stimulating as most of the instructors were civilian employees, who were school teachers before, and most of the enlisted personnel were college grads, some with advanced degrees.

My arrival in the Republic of Viet Nam in August 1969 was characterized most notably by a sense of the exotic accompanied by a blast of heat and humidity. I was soon assigned to Radio Company, of the 44th Signal Battalion, at Long Binh Army Base, South Viet Nam. Long Binh was a huge logistics and command center located about 25 miles northeast of Saigon and about 5 miles from Ben Hoa Air Force Base. The Mission of 44th Signal battalion was to provide telephone exchange services for Long Binh base, and maintain a portion of the vhf radio network which made up the "long distance" telephone service for the U.S. military within Viet Nam.

My Military Occupational Specialty(MOS) upon arrival in Viet Nam was " radio relay and carrier attendant" which involved a rather boring routine of babysitting the equipment used to maintain the vhf radio telephone links in the " long distance" network. Before I was assigned to a work station, a sergeant came around getting acquainted with the new troops and asked if anyone knew about PLL operations. I raised my hand , having given a practice lesson plan on PLL back in IMD at Fort Gordon. PLL is the acronym for Prescribed Load List, a compilation of repair parts authorized to be held in inventory to support a military unit, company, battalion, etc., it is a repair parts supply operation. The next day I was assigned as the new company PLL clerk. In the beginning I worked with an alcoholic career sergeant who had prior experience in the operation, and when he rotated back to the U.S., I took over as the chief of the operation, and they made me an acting sergeant, which meant that I wore the stripes, could go to the NCO clubs, but was still paid as a SP4. I eventually was in charge of 3 parts supply inventories with 4 or 5 subordinates, and had things running smoothly, so I decided to extend my tour in Viet Nam, rather than returning to the States after 12 months.

I finally returned to the U.S. in May of 1970, after spending 21 months in Vietnam, and being awarded a Bronze Star for meritorius service. I was released from active duty at Oakland Army Base May 1st, 1971, and immediately went to Berkeley to look up friends from CalTech, namely Chris and Arlin Peters.

Thus ends Part 1--The Army Years.

More to come. Hope you find some of this interesting and informative.

The Berkeley Years

When I was separated from active duty at Oakland Army Base, on May 1, !971, I was immediately accepted into the open arms of Arlin and Chris Peters (CalTech Class of 67), they were my life support system for decompression from Viet Nam. You have to understand that being in Viet Nam with the U.S. Military was like being on another planet, in fact, g.i.s referred to the United States as "the World", going home to the U.S. was " going back to the world". Most soldiers didn't have a transitional life support team to help with the transition. I was lucky, I did. After a couple of days with Chris and Arlin, we decided that I was fit for a trip on PSA Airlines to LA and a re-union with my sister and her husband whom I hadn't seen since their wedding in 1969 when I did my best with "The Windmills of Your Mind" from the Thomas Crown Affair.

When I came back from Nam, I had a rudimentary plan. First I would buy a van, so I could go "truckin'", then take a road trip to get reacquainted with a number of people who were important in my life at the time. Coincidental with my return to the World was Steve Teigland's move from the national Office of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in D.C. to the Regional Office in San Francisco. We had corresponded during my waning months in Nam and agreed to share Housekeeping along with his girlfriend Doris, somewhere in the Bay area, so I went back to northern California after purchasing a 1968 Chevy van in Tucson , and found a place in Berkeley where we could all live. Another element of my master plan was to get a job somewhere in the San Francisco Regional Office of the U.S. Dept. of Labor, so I got the ball rolling on that, and headed east for my re-union trip through the middle of the U.S.

First, I went to visit Steve's family in Rock Island Ill., then down to Wichita to visit a friend I hung out with in Vietnam. Little did I know at the time how pivotal this visit would be for the rest of my life. From Wichita I went to Houston, Texas to visit Jack and Agatha Williams, parents of George Williams( CalTech class of 67?). After Houston , I headed back to Berkeley with a stop in Tucson to pick up the stereo equipment I had shipped from Nam. While I was traveling, I rigged up an apparatus which would hold a can of beef stew on the exhaust manifold of the engine, to heat up while I was driving down the road. 30 minutes later pull into a rest stop, open up the engine compartment, and, viola, hot meals on wheels! Poor man's microwave!

Upon returning to Berkeley, I settled into housekeeping with Steve and Doris, and soon landed a job with the Dept. of Labor, Manpower Administration, as a Project Officer, administering manpower training contracts with a number of different federal programs. My first day on the job I was introduced to a foxy lady named Marty, and little did either of us know that we would spend the rest of our lives with each other! Marty was the executive secretary to the Assistant Regional Manpower Administrator (ARMA) for my area, my boss's boss, and the guy who had to sign all the contracts in the area. I think Marty actually signed a bunch of the stuff for him.

My work at Manpower Admin. involved riding herd on a variety of manpower training contracts within a specified geographic area, including Neighborhood Youth Corps, National Alliance of Businessmen JOBS program, liaison with the State Employment Service, and the rudimentary Manpower Area Planning Council. My responsibilities included seeing that all necessary paperwork was completed when contractors applied for renewal or new contracts, representing the Dept. of Labor at meetings relating to manpower issues within my geographical area, and monitoring and reporting on the performance of the manpower training programs in my area. I was able to master my functions within a few months, but soon became frustrated with the sluggishness of the bureaucratic system and began looking for greener pastures, or at least a new pasture with a different kind of grass.

Parallel to my growth in the work situation, a relationship was slowly developing with Marty. At first, I don't think either of us realized what was happening, we just found ourselves sharing thoughts about books we were reading, or our personal life philosophies. Then we began to go to lunch together, and one thing led to another, until Valentines Day 1972 when we began sharing housekeeping.

While my personal life was blossoming, the work scene became more frustrating until an opportunity opened up during the summer of 1972, in the form of the Intergovernmental Personnel Act.

This was a pivotal time in the Manpower Administration, The Nixon Administration and the Republicans in congress were pushing a concept called revenue sharing in which categorical federal assistance programs were to be replaced by block grants which states and localities could them apply to programs which would theoretically be better suited to the needs of the local area than were the standardized federal programs. Of course it was in reality a carrot for local politicians to give them more clout in their local communities because they would now control the purse strings. The MAPCs , Manpower Area Planning Councils, were set up to theoretically have a board in place which would have the expertise to make these decisions if and when manpower revenue sharing became a reality.

The Intergovernmental Personnel Act was a program mandated by congress to facilitate the downsizing of the federal workforce involved in administering these categorical programs. Under the terms of the IPA agreement, a federal employee could accept a position with a local government entity and effectively take a leave of absence from the feds, but still remain technically under the wing of federal civil service. If the local job turned out to be unsatisfactory, the person could resign and return to active status with the feds. If this program had a theme song, it would be " Getting To Know You" from The King and I.

The IPA agreement was my ticket to different pastures. I found a position with the Alameda County Manpower Area Planning Council, headquartered in City Hall, Oakland , at a considerably higher salary than I was making as a GS5 Project Officer. I was the first person in the Pacific Region of the Department of Labor to apply for an IPA agreement, and with the help of a very savvy lady in our personnel section, I was the first IPA position awarded. So it was off to Oakland for Marty and me, and it was around this time that Marty decided to resign from her civil service position and become a full-time homemaker!

The MAPC was a fantasy world which really didn't do anything, and I soon became disillusioned and began looking for the next move. Looking back on these times, I am not sure that anything would have been a satisfying work situation. I was restless and idealistic, not quite ready to settle down to the mundane pace of things in the real world, so I always kept looking for the next step. That opportunity came when Bobby Seale, former Black Panther leader, registered as a democratic candidate for Mayor of Oakland. By a somewhat circuitous route I made contact with Seale's campaign organization, and agreed to work on his research committee, researching back-up material in support of Seale's issues and programs.

This of course was not the kind of activity one could engage in while employed by the City of Oakland or the federal government for that matter! So I burned my bridges, simultaneously resigning from the Alameda County MAPC, and my civil service slot with the Department of Labor. You may reasonably ask why I would do such a thing. In one sense, I was making a statement, rejecting the established status quo and putting my energies, for a short period of time, toward working for the establishment of a new order. More to the point, I simply had not found , in DOL or the MAPC, a work situation that I could feel satisfied with as my life's work. It was time to move on.

My experience with the Bobby Seale campaign was both interesting and bizarre. For the most part, the people I met and worked with were just well-meaning folks who were working to give the City of Oakland a more people friendly municipal government, but there was definitely a radical ultra-left wing contingent and my encounters with them were, for me, a rather bizarre experience. One incident from this time sticks in my mind as a poignant vignette. I was attending a meeting relating to some kind of campaign activity, and there was this kid there , maybe 10 or 11 years old, and he was carrying around a copy of the little red book, The quotations of Chairman Mao, and rattling them off from memory, chapter and verse, like some TV evangelist. I felt sad that this kid wasn't out playing baseball or socker, and I wonder what he grew up to be.

Well, Bobby Seale won the democratic primary solidly and went on to make a good showing (35%) in the general election against the incumbent Republican mayor. While Seale did not become Mayor of the City of Oakland, the campaign served as a wake up call to local politicians and significantly influenced the tenor of future politics in Alameda County.

After the election, I began looking for work again, but with little success. It was difficult to offer an appealing explanation for why I resigned from both the MAPC/IPA position and the federal civil service at the same time, I had truely burned my bridges in the social services sector.

In October of 1973, our lease on the house in Oakland was up and the owners wanted to sell it, so with no job prospects in the offing, we decided that was an omen telling us to move on to the next phase. After discussing things with my army buddy in Wichita and being assured that the local economy was going strong, we decided to strike out for the plains of Kansas and make a new start. We had a moving sale to pare down our worldly goods to those we felt we couldn't bear to part with, then I brewed up some alcoholic beverages using a couple of different canned fruit juices, and naturally carbonated them in some recycled quart beer bottles, aged about 2 weeks, and threw a farewell party on Halloween weekend. The next week we loaded our belongings in a rental truck and headed east, thus ending the Berkeley- Oakland days.

The road less travelled--Part 3--The plains of Kansas

Today Marty and I made our first wood run of the fall season, a 90 mile trip one-way to southeast Kansas, the Kansas Ozarks, to pick up a cord of white oak firewood and haul it back to stack in our woodlot. It is a ritual we have repeated 4 times a year for about the past 20 years and it is symbolic of the reason we moved to Kansas from the San Francisco bay area, to find a more basic lifestyle more in tune with that of our immigrant ancestors. We burn woodstoves as our primary source of heat in the fall and winter seasons.

Our life here in Kansas has evolved, on one level, into a quest to understand and practice the preindustrial technologies which made it possible for our ancestors to survive and sometimes prosper in this new world. For Marty and me, Kansas became our "New World".

We left the Bay Area in October 1973, taking the high road, through Utah and the high plains of Wyoming, experiencing our first taste of winter weather when we spent the night at a rest stop in Wyoming at -10 degrees F. Our two cats weren't quite sure what to make of it and we lifted up the blankets at the head of the bed(in the back of our 68 chevy van) and they shot down under the covers to our feet and stayed the whole night. It was definitely a 2 cat night and we all snuggled up together to keep warm!

When we arrived in Wichita, we were received by our Kansas support gruop, my Army buddy from Nam, and his new wife, and all of their friends. We stayed with them for about three weeks while we looked for a house we could buy cheap, and it was an almost continuous party for those three weeks! We were warmly welcomed to our newly adopted home, an attitude which we found to be typical of this central part of the country. When you drive down a country road, you wave to strangers, and they wave back. It's a Kansas thing.

After checking out several leads on the low end of the real estate market, we finally found a turn of the century house we felt comfortable with and which was within the price range which we could afford to pay cash for, and avoid the complications and requirements necessitated by a mortgage, like having a source of income. We settled into our new home in November of 1973, and spent our first Christmas in Kansas.

Over the next 18 months, I tried out a couple of "white collar" positions, finding them not to my liking, and spent considerable time living on unemployment compensation. In the spring of 1975, with my unemployment compensation eligibility running out, I decided to jump off and try my hand in the building construction trades.

It was not really a precipitous move. I got my first taste of the building trades while I was in VietNam. Out of necessity, we had to build our own quarters in the open metal buildings that were our living area. We scrounged 2x4s and got recycled pieces of plywood from packing crates discarded by the post bakery. It was during this building project that I first got to know Gary Frogatte, a young electrician from Wichita, Kansas. In addition to being certified electrician, Gary also had a working knowledge of basic building construction and carpentry and was extremely helpful in acquiring materials, due to connections he made in his role of battalion electrician, a position which was not listed on our TOE, but which certainly made life easier in our battalion compound! With Gary's help and advice, I went on to build several "security cabinets" to store personal items, including stereo equipment which were subject to being ripped off by itinerant thieves, and found that I had an innate talent for woodworking. Gary and his wife later helped to make possible our transition into our new life in Wichita.

My venture into the building trades began at the bottom, starting with the basement footings for a sprawling house being built for a local "nouveau riche" businessman. I spent over a year on that house, learning on the job, everything from steel reinforced concrete to interior trim carpentry. It was also during that job that Marty and I decided to make our relationship official, and we were married in June of 1976.

Over the next several years, I worked my way up in the carpentry trade gravitating toward the specialty of cabinetmaking. I worked as a cabinetmaker for a small commercial construction company for several years, building specialty cabinets for the ongoing jobs, including a rather elaborate house which the company owner built while I worked there.

In 1989 I had an opportunity to move to a firm which manufactures interior furniture for business aircraft. When I started with Hiller, Incorporated, they were in the middle of a contract with Boeing to build furniture for two 747s which were designated as Air Force One, the presidential aircraft. After a few months of learning the techniques of aircraft furniture manufacture, I was finally assigned to build a couple of the pieces for Air Force One. I have been with the same company now for over 11 years, and were are quite happy with the overall situation. I have sort of developed a specialty niche of doing the initial construction of new products, taking initial engineering drawings and working through the bugs , applying standard fabrication techniques and making necessary modifications to the engineering design to facilitate manufacture. The company likes what I do, and I enjoy the challenge, and I get paid for it! What more could one ask?

Parallel to my work in the building industry, I developed a keen interest in old woodworking tools and hand tool methods, and the making of hand tools. At the same time, Marty became interested in the methods of processing fiber into thread, yarn and cloth. This began in the mid-1970s and has steadily progressed. Over the years, Marty has become an accomplished hand spinner and weaver, and we now have five spinning wheels and three looms. I have to confess that I have done a bit of spinning myself, but can't claim to be accomplished. My interest in hand tools and the making of hand tools led me into the art of blacksmithing.

In the spring of 1991, I enrolled in a two day class on basic blacksmithing at Wichita's Old Cowtown Museum, a "living museum" which portrays life in Wichita, circa 1880. That was the beginning and over the intervening years I have slowly acquired some of the tools of the trade, hammers and tongs , several forges, both coal and gas, and several anvils. I have slowly developed some of the skills of the blacksmith, attending workshops and demonstrations put on by local organizations dedicated to the preservation of the skills of the blacksmith trade. In similar fashion, Marty has developed the skills of handspinning and weaving and acquired the tools of those trades. We continue to grow in our avocations while producing many things that we use and decorate our home with.

The reconditioning of our house is an ongoing program. Every few years, we have selected a room and carried out a renovation project, usually involving tearing out old lath and plaster, repairing any bad framing found, insulating the exterior walls, then new sheetrock and finally new trim molding and cabinetry. These projects take a great deal of time, since we do all of the work ourselves, but the satisfaction when a project is completed is very rewarding. When we rebuilt the entry to our house, I decided to build the new front door by hand. The result was a red oak, 3 light frame and panel door with a Scottish thistle motif hand carved into the central panel. It took all of one summer to build, but I am sure it will outlast my lifetime.

My last year with the CalTech Glee Club was 1966. It was a wonderful year. I sang with the Madrigal Society, the Varsity Quartet and was a featured soloist, but my grades suffered and I decided that I needed to leave the Glee Club and concentrate on graduating from CalTech. That was the end of organized singing for me for a long time. Over the intervening years, I have often thought of getting into some kind of singing group or chorus, and maybe taking private voice coaching again but I never got around to it. Finally, in the spring of 1996, it was time. Marty and I joined the choir of a medium-size Methodist church a few blocks from our home. We have both enjoyed this association over the past 4 years, singing a variety of interesting and challenging musical works. Last sunday, Palm Sunday, 2000, we sang Schubert's Mass Number 2 in G major. It was a thrilling experience!

Mine has not been a conventional career, but over the years, Marty and I have built a life together which is both satisfying and fulfilling, and we have come to look upon life with both joy and wonder!

The Road Less Travelled continued (03/29/01):

I want to tell about an interesting happening which came out of this website. On Feb. 26, 2001, I got an e-mail from a guy who was in my battalion in Vietnam during the period of my service. Michael Walter wasn't a personal friend, but I think I ran into him in my work duties. He found me by surfing in on the Class of 66 webpage. Trading a few e-mails stirred up many dormant memories for both of us. Since then, we have found 3 more veterans of the 44th Signal Battalion at Long Binh, Vietnam. Michael, who has worked in the computer field since the last 70s, has added a 44th Signal Battalion page to his personal website, including an address book of the 44th Signal veterans we have sound so far and will find in the future. The URL is http://www.hbci.com/~mwalter/44th_signal.htm We hope to locate more vets of the 44th to share stories and pictures of our service at Long Binh. When I was in Vietnam, I thought that I just wanted to get it over with and forget about it. That is why I did not take any pictures over there. Over the past 30 years, my attitude has changed. Now, I find it exciting to make contact with other vets from that time and place and share some memories and some of their pictures.