Not your typical first day of college

 It was one of the longest days…. My Uncle Don pretty much slowed his pick-up down just enough for me to hop out in front of the Bring Me Men ramp, where I was greeted by a very attentive group of loud people with berets and white gloves.

I waited in a line for a bit till we had a gaggle, then went in serpentine fashion to some office where they told me none of my paperwork had made it to in-process me. So, I had to sit down and spend the next hour or so trying to recreate it… As if an 18 year-old knows much more than his Social Security Number.

Because the registrar thing was such a SNAFU, I didn’t get my buzz haircut till after lunch. I got to sit at tables and gaze “freely” at the building chaos around Mitchell Hall. That was the end of normal life for the next 40 years!

Time passed. My head was shaved, lines were stood in, uniforms, toiletries, bedding, underwear were accumulated, stuffed into duffle bags and dragged around campus until at some point later, after learning what a “smiling sock” was, I found myself crowded high up in the Field House with my hand in the air mumbling something noble about “…protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America! So help me God’”

Then it was a shuffling ‘march’ back up to Vandenberg Hall, where my Element Leader dumped me and my two new best friends into our room, with the direction to “write your parents.”

I was hot, exhausted and pissed!!! My Dad saved that letter. I read it not too long ago. Oof! 😂

Figuring out where to go to college

 I wanted to be a pilot like my Dad for as long as I can remember. Since like Kindergarten. I thought what he did was the neatest thing ever.

When I was about 9 or 10, the two of us would sit at the kitchen table for hours after dinner and he would describe flying fighters, the maneuvers they made, guys in his squadron, the latest missions he flew, what worked, what went wrong… I understood very little, but I was fascinated by the stories and the process. I thought that was the only way to spend your life!

When we moved to Las Vegas, we lived at 6B Hogenmiller Circle. It was in the Manch Manor housing area, across North Las Vegas Boulevard from the main gate at Nellis Air Force Base, where he was an instructor at the Fighter Weapons School. Hogenmiller Circle was up on Officer’s Hill, at the far end of the housing area. All the residents on our street were officer families. Two houses down was one of my best friends, Greg Madonna. His Dad, Don, had been in the first class at the Air Force Academy. His house had lots of paraphernalia from the Academy, including this framed cover of Life Magazine, which had his parents walking out of some chapel after getting married on graduation day. It’s a great picture.

I decided that’s what I wanted to do: go to the United States Air Force Academy. Like West Point or Annapolis - Only for cool people that flew planes.  The fast track! (Talk about dreams exceeding your grasp!)

When I was a sophomore, I started doing my research, got a book, sent my application in to the address indicated, and got back a: “Thank you for your interest, but you can’t apply until the spring of your Junior year.”

So, the next year, I did all the things: Wrote to the Academy for the application; wrote letters to my Senators and Representatives, filled out the surveys, took the tests, interviewed with the Liaison Officer….

By my Senior year, I was living in Phoenix, Arizona. Looking at the odds of getting an appointment out of the Phoenix area, I was not that confident. I was a good student, but going from one school to the other, the grading systems changed, and suddenly I was “high ok” vs. the “very high” I had been doing at Rancho High School in North Las Vegas. So I decided to apply via Washington state, where my Mom and Dad were actual residents. Lucky choice! I got picked up by a Congressman Lloyd Meeds, who represented Anacortes and Skagit County. But after all the tests and paperwork, I received a letter that said I was the 6th or 7th alternate. Who could blame him? I didn’t even live in the state. I think I was pretty realistic about it, but very disappointed.

I did have a back up plan: I applied to a couple of other schools: the University of Washington, because I loved the pacific northwest and had a ton of family up there, so I wouldn’t be completely on my own; and Northern Arizona University because they had both a Journalism major and ROTC. I figured if my Dad could get into flying through ROTC, I could too. It also helped that my best friend at Agua Fria High School, Don Snyder, wanted to go there too. It was close to home, and by April, 1978, I had a girlfriend, who was a junior, so I could come home and see her fairly easily. I got into both, but chose the best friend/girlfriend route: NAU.

I was all set for NAU, never visiting a single college to see if I liked it, when my Dad got a phone call one Thursday in mid June. I had been out looking for a summer job at some Phoenix newspaper or another, just to get my feet wet before I went off to college to become the next Woodward or Bernstein. I walked in the door, and my Dad said, “you can quit looking for a summer job. I found one for you.”

A LOT happened in the interim, but two weeks later I was in Colorado with no hair and all the supervision a guy could ask for.

Luckiest guy on earth.

Boys will be boys!

 One of my favorite childhood stories involved an Easter outing with my Grandmother when we lived in Italy. She had come to stay with us for a couple of weeks in the Spring of 1971 or 1972… it gets hazy exactly which. It was an exciting time. I think it was the one of the few times anyone in our extended family came to visit us anywhere, much less when we lived overseas.

At some point we all (except the girls) bundled up, and took a train to Rome. We stayed there a couple days, right downtown, in the middle of a national garbage strike, and toured the city. It was great! The train ride was fun, (We caught it in Venice), and of course seeing the Colosseum, St Peters, Trevi fountain, and all the art works and statues.

Fast forward (or rewind) to Easter. We got dressed up and took Grandma on a picnic. The weather was terrific; warm with blue skies. Somewhere Dad found a field on the top of a hill overlooking a highway. we laid out chairs and a blanket and had a nice picnic lunch near a stand of trees. The adults sat around talking and us kids set off to explore and play.

Found out the slope down to the road below was really steep, and the road below fairly close. Too close. To this day I am sure it was Dave’s idea (How could it be mine?), but we decided to see if we could throw rocks that landed on the road below. There was a lot of traffic whizzing by, and it was pretty noisy as they went by. We threw a bunch. Suddenly one car puts on his brakes and slows down as he passed us. We ran as fast as we could back through the trees in hopes he hadn’t seen where the rocks came from.

No such luck. A short time later a car came up the dirt road to where we were parked and a VERY irate Italian man started waving his arms around and pointing to the cracked windshield. Despite the language barrier (he knew more English than my parents knew Italian), it became clear what had happened and we fessed up.

Man, what a tanning we got that day! I’m pretty sure Dad paid for a new windshield, but was more angry that we would do something so dumb. I thought about that a lot as a parent; things you wouldn’t think sane individuals would try often seem to be great ideas at the time. Thank goodness they don’t happen too often.