They weren’t just jobs, they were adventures!

 My first job was during the summer after 7th grade. I was basically a farm worker: I picked strawberries in the fields around Mount Vernon, Washington. Five days a week a bus would swing by early in the morning, just like for school, pick a bunch of kids up, and head over to the Mount Vernon area where we would get out, grab a crate with about 12 cartons, and start down a row, on our knees, pulling strawberries, taking off the stems and loading up the cartons. We’d get paid by the carton. In was pretty miserable work. Wet and sticky in the morning, hot and sticky in the afternoon. I think I made $76 dollars that whole summer.

My next “job” was probably 9th grade, teaching little kids swim lessons at the Nellis base pool. I had passed Junior Lifesaving, and they needed someone to teach the really littles the basics of water safety, so I would take them in the water and get them to not be afraid of going underwater, how to push for the top, and some basic strokes to move towards the edge if they fell in. I wasn’t paid, but it was a fun way to spend a summer!

After that, I only had a couple of real part-time jobs. Dad had a policy (for me, anyway): play sports or get a job. So… for the most part, I played sports. However, there were a couple times I didn’t play. I think the winter of my Junior year, before we moved to Litchfield Park, I got a job as a clean-up guy at Woolworths down on Freemont. I would mop floors, clean the bathrooms, do a little restock; about three hours a night after school.

My Senior year, during the winter season, I bused tables at a small restaurant right outside the Luke AFB front gate on the main drag in Glendale, AZ. I can’t remember the name, but it had “Bull” in the title. It was an okay job, but I didn’t do it more than about six weeks. As soon as baseball season started, I was gone like a shot. When that didn’t work out, it was track.

After graduation from college (2 June, 1982), it was Nav School; Advanced Nav (i.e. overwater nav); NBT - Navigator/Bombardier Training; B-52 Combat Crew Training at Castle AFB, in Merced, CA; then finally to my first assignment as a B-52 Navigator at Ellsworth AFB, SD on 23 January 1984.

I flew on a hard crew for about a year, then upgraded to Instructor Navigator, and moved to Training Flight to oversee training for all the Squadron Navigators. While I was there they announced the Squadron was converting to B-1s and we all had to move to new bases, so I convinced my bosses to send me to upgrade as a Radar Navigator (Bombardier) enroute to my next assignment at Griffiss AFB, in Rome, NY. I knew if I showed up to my next base as a Navigator, it would be a year or more before I upgraded, just because the guys there were already lined up. It didn’t make me any friends at my next base, showing up as a 1Lt Radar, but it didn’t change anyone’s life there either.

At Griffiss, I flew as a crew Radar for about 2-1/2 years, upgrading to Instructor and then Evaluator Radar Navigator. As the Radar Nav, back in the Cold War days, you and the pilot were primarily responsible for the nuclear weapons while on Alert. It was a huge responsibility, and pretty cool as a 28 year-old to sometimes have 16 nukes at your disposal. As an Evaluator, I moved up to the Wing, gave flight checks, managed all the Flight Evaluation Records, and flew on bombing competitions until we decided to get out in late 1989.

In May of 1990, I left Active Duty and moved with Laura, Kara, and a very young Jill (born in February) to Pittsburgh. I had no job, except the Reserves, but a decent education and experience as an Air Force Officer. I remember being nervous, but confident we’d figure something out.

As it turned out, I got a job in Canonsburg, PA as a Quality Control Engineer at Cooper Power Systems, an electrical transformer manufacturer. I really wanted to say I was part of creating things. It was very educational, if not very fulfilling. I think I got more out of it than I thought I was getting at the time. There was no real Quality Control program in the plant when I got there, save visual inspections. My boss and his boss both knew what they wanted to implement, and it was up to me to put it in place. So I went around the plant, talked to the guys who had been building transformers for decades, and figured out where typical problems occurred, what could be measured, and then put together recording sheets for inspectors, entered it all in spreadsheets; created line charts tracking types and locations of errors, etc. You do one or two of those, and suddenly everyone’s ears prick up. Next thing you know you are invited to production meetings, and then making recommendations. That was pretty cool.

In the summer of 1991, however, the plant went on strike, and everything closed down. I was kept around for about six months, then furloughed. Luckily, the Reserves were busy, and I “bummed” (“Will fly for food”) for the next 18 months, as we did ORIs (Operational Readiness Inspections), Bosnia support, Counter Drug missions to Central America, and a dozen other things.

All good things come to an end, however, and I think it was the summer of 1994, after the Airlift Rodeo, when the money suddenly ran out. The Director of Operations walked in one day and said the gravy train was over and the long term orders were done.

Somewhere along the way, Laura or I had met a guy named Gene Miklausic. He was the former Commander of the Port of Pittsburgh, and a Naval Architect. He had built a small, but growing business doing Department of Transportation Drug Testing for truckers and people working the rivers, but wanted to do engineering things too. Somehow we started talking and I offered to be his gofer boy/project manager/office manager for the engineering firm. So I started working part-time with him and part-time with the Reserves. I would put proposals together for projects. On the ones requiring true engineering, he’d do it or have a contact we’d hire for the job, and I would put the packages together.

The US Coast Guard came out with a ruling that required all the oil terminals along the rivers to produce Oil Spill Containment Response plans, proving they they had a response plan and enough containment to contain any oil that might leak, before it got to the river. I could read government rules and regulations better than almost anyone (I had been in SAC!), so I put dozens of those together at $3,500-$10,000 a pop, depending on facility size.

I helped manage a project in Harmony, PA, just down the road, where we built on an addition to a generic diaper manufacturing company. Very educational. Learned about contractors and Time & Materials! Managed the design and construction of a dock for the Pittsburgh Voyager down in front of the Carnegie Science Center. We also designed and managed the replacement of a water discharge pipe from a steel plant in Homestead, PA. All cool projects.

However, in the Spring of 1998, things were slowing down and I wasn’t getting paid, so I started looking for something else. Luckily, a fellow Navigator told me US Airways was starting to ramp up it’s Training department because they were about to buy a large number of Airbus aircraft to upgrade their fleet, which meant more pilots, more flight attendants, and more training. So I put my resume’ in and interviewed. The test was to stand up and give a 10 min presentation on any subject: I taught all about the AN/APN-241 Low Power Color Radar on the c-130. They loved it, and I got hired.

I really loved that job. We taught 17-20 days a month, bidding for classes that had the most credit value but least time teaching. I started teaching Non-specific courses, which generally meant fuzzy stuff, like Crew Resource Management, Security, Aviation Weather, regulations, etc.; anything that applied to any aircraft or to any crew position (we taught both pilots and flight attendants Crew Resource management as a group).  

Eventually I gained Seniority enough to bid International, which taught overwater navigation and planning procedures to the very senior pilots. Finally, as a Nav, I had a position where I carried total credibility. it was a lot of fun, and by the deep dive into the subject I needed to teach it, it was very helpful for all the ocean crossings I was about to do after 9/11.

So 9/11 hit. I almost immediately went on Military leave and flew out to McChord AFB in Washington and sat alert for a month with a Chem DECON team in case there would be some kind of attack on the west coast. Luckily it was a one-and-done attack.

In the Spring of 2003, my Reserve Squadron was notified we probably were deploying to Turkey to prep for the invasion of Iraq. That petered out when Turkey refused to allow us basing rights on their soil. But the day after that next Thanksgiving, we were notified we’d be activated on Dec 3rd for a year, headed to Kuwait. I think we left on the 8th, landed in Kuwait on the 12th, and were flying missions into Iraq by the 15th.

In January, our 1 year orders were extended to two years. That was eye-opening…. but then someone on some staff decided we couldn’t have all these crews going without training for two full years, so they came up with a rotation plan; several months in Theater, several months, at home, repeat. For two years.

Meanwhile… US Airways decided to move the training department to Charlotte, so for me to stay teaching when I came back, I’d have to commute, or move the family to North Carolina. The family consensus was we didn’t really want to do that. At almost the same time, they instituted a furlough of instructors as the hiring surge had passed.

Concurrently, Pete Kehoe, a long time ART Navigator, retired, which opened up a full-time GS (Civil Service) slot in the unit. In January, 2006 our orders ended, and the Squadron offered me the job. So I asked US Airways to furlough me in lieu of someone junior, and I took the full-time GS Squadron Navigator job. I was able to stay on furlough and retain return rights for about 3-1/2 years until they had recalled all the junior guys back. By that time I was fully entrenched in the 758th, and had no plans to move to Charlotte, or go back to US Airways.