I’ve been fortunate enough to live in a bunch of different places. My Dad was an Air Force fighter pilot, and there was a lot of moving around back then. I would say that before I graduated High School, we moved an average of every two years.
The fist place I live was in a apartment somewhere close to George Air Force Base, just outside of Victorville, California. Obviously I have no memory of it, but a friend of my Mom’s mentioned it recently, because they lived in the same complex.
Then we moved to RAF Bentwaters, in England, where my brother Dave was born. I don’t remember too much about that, other than it was on base housing, with the backyard up against a fence on the flightline. I remember the engine noise as they did engine runs, or got ready to take off. The F-100s had a very distinct sound.
When we moved back to the States, we moved to George AFB again, where Dad flew F-4s. That lasted about a year, then Dad went to Vietnam with the 433rd Tactical Fighter Squadron, and we moved up to Anacortes, Washington, into the house on the beach that Mom & Dad bought from Ken and Carolyn. We were there from 2nd half of Kindergarten, to the first half of first grade. Then it was back to George AFB again.
After the girls arrived, Mom & Dad bought a house in Victorville. It was white with gray brick or gray bottom trim. Dad put in an entire sprinkler system, front and back. Pretty sure it took most of the summer to install.
In 1969, Dad was assigned to Wheelus AFB, Libya. So we pack up, sold the house in Victorville, and moved across the Atlantic to Africa. We lived on base there, in a standard military housing building, probably a duplex, right across from the high school. There was desert behind the house that went several hundred yards to the sea. The only beach with sand and access was further up the road in a different housing area. We could go swimming there in the summer.
That lasted almost a year, until Libya had a coup d’etat, and the US decided to pull out of the base. We packed up again, and moved to Aviano, Italy, where my folks found a house in the town of San Giovanni d’Polcenego. Aviano had no base housing, so everyone eventually had to find a place, “on the economy” to live. Ours was the top two floors of a 3 story house. (the bottom was reserved for the owners, who were never there.) It backed up to grape fields, and across the street was a bread bakery shop and a butcher shop. The girls went to Azelo, the local church pre-school, and could speak Italian better than English. School was on Aviano at the Department of Defense Schools, so we rode to school and back every day on a big touring bus. Very strange. but very luxurious.
This was a fun house. Marble floors, everyone but the girls had their own rooms. Mine was the top right with the balcony. You can imagine I loved that.
These are the fabled marble steps up to our part of the house. Susan rolled a bowling ball down them one day, and cracked them all. A not too happy Dad had to replace them all.
When we came back from Italy, Dad was assigned to a remote tour in Korea for a year, so we headed back up to Anacortes, and our house on the beach. By then I was starting 7th grade, was playing sports in the band, and had friends from around the island. My cousins, Kenny, Becky, Rick and Kathy Holland were doing things like going to college, getting married, getting jobs, and going off to the US Coast Guard. Mike and Lane Crawford lived up the hill, and Dennis and Loree DeVries lived a bike’s ride away, all on Fidalgo Island.
When Dad came home, we moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, and Nellis AFB. We lived in base housing again, at the top of the housing area on officer’s hill. 6b Hogenmiller Circle. Typical block concrete base housing duplex. Painted yellow/beige. No real yard per se, just a metal carport we would climb on top of and throw water balloons from.
The last place we lived before I left for college was 345 Trontera Circle, Litchfield Park, Arizona. Nice ranch house in a planned community just outside Glendale. Had a golf course and resort called the Wigwam in it. Palm trees on all the streets, and a small lake across the road from our house. It was a nice house: Dad shocked all of us one day by announcing he was having an in-ground pool installed. It was glorious!
After college was a series of apartments and Bachelor Officer’s Quarters until I reached my first assignment at Ellsworth AFB, in Rapid City, South Dakota. I initially started out with an apartment shared with Kent Sjolund, a guy I went through Nav School and B-52 training with. But after I met Laura, I discovered that she could not take Kent’s smoking or even the smell of smoking (the apartment wreaked!), and after a couple of months of dating, we decided to move in together, because I was always over there anyway.
She lived in this nice community of homes in a Quadplex on Serendipity Lane. we were on the bottom floor on the right. After she left for the Pentagon, I stayed on there until I left for Radar Navigator/Bombardier upgrade, enroute to Griffiss AFB, in Rome New York.
The first year I was at Griffiss, I lived in a townhouse in Utica, just down the road. But after we got married and it looked like Laura was going to get the Joint Assignment to the Rome Air Development Center at the base, we started looking for houses. We found a nice 3 bedroom ranch with a big kitchen and living room on a pretty decent piece of property at 6222 Lorena Road, in Rome, NY.
It was a new build, so we had some say in the last couple of things that were done prior to finishing. I remember visiting and thinking how quiet the neighborhood was. What we didn’t realize was that we were on the extended flight path from the Griffiss runway, and when a heavy weight B-52 took off, it stayed low and loud for a long while. We got to enjoy the sounds of freedom pretty much every weekday morning and late afternoon. It was only really noticeable during the take offs. When they came back into the pattern at the end of a mission, they were pretty lightweight and they could go around for hours and we wouldn’t notice.
In 1990, Laura and I decided to leave Active Duty, primarily because our ability to get more joint assignments was quickly diminishing. As Laura rose in rank, her assignments would focus on Command positions and very limited weather opportunities, while my career path in B-52s would be at schools, bases and headquarters assignments. The chance the two of us could flow together was very slim back then. With Jill on the way, it just seemed right to try something different, so we came home to Zelienople.
Once we got here, I had a job in Canonsburg and was flying with the Reserves, we needed to find a place to live. Laura made the astute observation that while living in the South Hills might work well for where I worked now, I could get anywhere from Zelienople now that I-79 and I-279 were open. So we decided to look in town, and found 115 Wayne Avenue, down the street and two left turns from her parents house. It was a nice house, and about the same value for the house we sold in New York, so no big stretch on the income.
The idea was to stay in the house about 5 years, then move into something different as the kids grew in size and number. That never quite happened. A.) We loved the location - in town, on a dead-end street, quiet neighborhood, bordering the park and walkable close to Main Street. B.) everytime I thought about moving, something else put our income in jeopardy. I got laid off from Cooper Power Systems; Spectrum Engineers ran into financial challenges, so I joined US Airways. Then US Airways was going to go out of business, get bought out by United, the Flight Attendants were going to go on strike, etc. And then I started deploying…
Eventually, the kids all grew up and out and the house is kind of the right size again. We have slowly started to upgrade it: New furnace/Air Conditioning; new water heater, new roof. My goal: new front porch, new landscaping, new kitchen and baths. We still love the location. Now to make the house the dream place we want to come home to from our travels!
