This page is a blog from the past of some personal pictures and memories from my three year tour of duty as an officer at McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento. These pictures have been in a shoe box for about 40 years now. I am posting them here in hopes that some of the people pictured will see them.
My tour of duty was Jan. 1, 1965, to Jan. 1, 1968, although I was released in mid December 1967. I was assigned to the McClellan Central Laboratory (MCL) in the 1155th Technical Operations Squadron (1155th TOS). I primarily worked as a support engineer in the Mass Spectrometry Laboratory. Our outfit was part of the Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC), which reported directly to USAF Headquarters. If you are not registered as an alumni, you should go to the AFTAC link and click on "Member Locator/Change your info" to register your name in the data base. The 1155th was a tenant organization at McClellan AFB. I worked with some great people there and I hope that some of them find their picture on this page.
In the summer of '67, I had a new Miranda 35 mm reflex camera that I didn't quite know what to do with. One weekend, I wandered to the California State Capitol in downtown Sacramento with my camera. This beautiful red rose was growing on the grounds.
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This is a scan of the front cover of the squadron telephone directory. It was dated 1 September 1967.
This picture was not made when I was at McClellan AFB. But it is the only proof that I attended Air Force ROTC summer camp at James Connolly AFB in Waco Texas. When the photographer told me to say "sh-t," I broke out laughing. The plane was just a prop for the picture.
Ted Rapp sent me this picture of him at ROTC summer camp at Lockbourne AFB (now Rickenbacker AFB), Ohio. Ted served in the Chemistry Laboratory at the 1155th from '63-'77.
This is a picture made when several of us junior officers went to Lake Tahoe in 1965 to camp out for the weekend. We had just pitched camp. Pictured are Marshall Leach, Dan Trainor, and Gary Smith.
The next morning, Stu Pattison, Marshall Leach, and Gary Smith went to this small lake in the mountains above Lake Tahoe near where we camped out thinking that we could wash our face, hands, and feet. We didn't succeed in cleaning up because the water was too cold.
Gary Smith and Dan Trainor are preparing our breakfast. We had grits, eggs, bacon, and coffee. I was the only one in the group who had ever eaten grits. The others seemed to like them.
One Saturday, the group of us traveled to San Francisco to check out the emerging hippie scene there. This picture was made at the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, the center of the hippie movement. That night, we wanted to go to the Fillmore Auditorium, but we were told it was sold out. Instead, we went to the famed Avalon Ballroom to hear a rock band play before a crowd of hippies. During this period, some of the bands and artists that played at the Avalon were Capt. Beefheart and His Magic Band, Janis Joplin, Steve Miller Band, Bill Hayley and the Commets, Bo Diddley, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, The Doors, Canned Heat, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. I have no idea who was playing the night we went there.
Accompanying the music was a colorful liquid light show that was projected on a large screen behind the band. I was curious to know how it was done, so I went up into the gallery to find a projectionist with an overhead projector. On the projector, he had a mixture of oil and droplets of different colored water between plates of glass. By rocking the plates, the colored water droplets would pulsate about in the oil to create the liquid light show. If you have never seen a liquid light show, the link button shows a small animated gif that simulates one. As I remember, the one we saw at the Avalon had more colors and a lot more action than this one. At this writing, the Avalon has been converted into a mattress company. You can see some great trivia about the '60s in San Francisco here.
Our group went to the Monetery Bay area for a weekend camping trip. Shown is Dan Trainor outside the tent in which we slept in a sheltered area off the highway that ran along the Pacific Ocean. Dan and I shared an apartment in the BOQ for several months after I first arrived at McClellan. We checked out the tent and sleeping bags from the base recreation supply. I thought it would be wise to get an air matress, so I went to the GEM store near the base and bought one. When I got into the sleeping bag, I turned over and started to hear a hissing sound. Something on the ground had punctured my air matress and it slowly deflated. The next morning, a highway partolman drove up and told us that camping was not allowed there. Before we left, we went down the clifts across the road to the beach and cooked grits, eggs, bacon, and coffee for breakfast. It was early in the morning and it was cold. The surfers were already out riding the Pacific waves. My buddies had never eaten grits, but I believe they liked them.
We went to the beach at Santa Cruz and thought we would try to surf. Here Stu Pattison, Dan Trainor, and Gary Smith hold a surfboard at the Santa Cruz beach. The water was very cold and none of us succeeded in surfing.
Dan Trainor and Marshall Leach with their surfboards.
Stu Pattison and Marshall Leach with a surfboard.
Although not a picture from our visit to the Monterey Coast, this is a picture of me after a ride on Stu Pattison's motorcycle. The picture was taken outside our Royal Villa apartment. Stu and I were roommates for 1.5 years after we moved out of the BOQ at McClellan.
Lunchtime in our office (room 171A) at McClellan Central Laboratory (MCL) in the 1155th Technical Operations Squadron circa 1966. I am sitting behind my desk with the camera. My boss Jim Smith is on the right. I am still working on trying to remember the name of the officer wearing the white lab coat. (I think it might be Jim Meiggs.) My good friend Jack Courtney pans for the camera by pretending to make a phone call to "the colonel." I found out that Jack died of cancer at the age of 64 on November 9, 2002, at his home in Baton Rouge, LA. He retired in 1998 from a 27 year teaching career at LSU. He was a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society.
Here is a picture of Jack Courtney imitating James Bond in the doorway of his apartment at Royal Villa Apartments. The pistol he is holding is a fake one. My apartment was to the right of his. The Royal Villa Apartments had a pink stucco exterior and were located across the street from American River Junior College. I once asked the apartment manager why the buildings were painted that awful pink. He replied that all the apartment buildings in Florida were pink. I eventually got used to it.
One night, Jack invited Mary Jane Guiry, her roommate, and I to his apartment to play cards. I don't remember the game we played, but I certainly remember the deck of cards. Jack dealt them out face down. When we turned them over, we found pictures of naked women on the faces of the cards. This is a poor picture, but you can see the cards on the floor. Jack was one of the most fun loving persons I have known.
Jack's obiturary and a great picture of him from 1999.
I worked primarily supporting the electronic systems in our mass spectrometry laboratory at MCL. Terry Cantrell, who headed the unit, had a fall party for the group of us. On the left is Al Mochnick, I am in the center back. I am still working on the name of the guy on the right with the Beatle haircut.
Here is a second picture from the mass spec party. On the left is "Mac" McAuliffe. Terry Cantrell is in the center right wearing the white shirt. To the left of Terry viewing the picture is Dave Blanchar. In front of him and to the left is his wife Carol. After working for Hewlett-Packard for 24 years, Dave has joined his wife in launching a consulting company.
This is a picture of the instrumentation and data collection system for one of the mass spectrometers in our mass spec lab at MCL. The box at the lower center right with the coaxial cable connected to it and the box directly above it were the brains of the system. These were made by a company named Technical Measurements Corp., or TMC for short. Our mass spec lab had five of these systems. They were designed to completely automate the data collection. The data were stored in magnetic core memory and output on punched paper tape to be analyzed with an IBM 1620 computer in our computer room which was run by Major George Jubber. The first major job I was given at MCL was to find out why the data collected by the TMC systems were not in agreement with the data collected and analyzed at the General Electric Knowles Laboratory in Schenectedy, NY. The system was so complicated and I had such a limited experience in electronics that I was intimidated to say the least. The officer that I had replaced told me before he left that the TMC systems were "a can of worms." I was so dismayed that I was ready to ask for a reassignment after he told me that. Fortunately, I was able to diagnose the problem and redesign some of the circuits to get the system to produce accurate data. One morning, our MCL Commander Col. Fred Westfall called me and Capt. Terry Cantrell, head of the mass spec lab, to his office to commend us on the improvement in the quality of the MCL mass spec data. He informed us that the data we were producing were better than the data generated at GE's Knowles Laboratory. That visit to Col. Westfall's office was the most gratifying experience I had during my three years at MCL. In three short years, I felt that I had gone from a total tyro to someone who had made a positive contribution to the mission of our squadron.
This is a picture of the mass spectrometer. It consisted of two electromagnets with a copper waveguide through which the accelerated ions traveled. On the right is the source end. On the left is the detector end.
This is a picture of the source end of the mass spectrometer.
This is a picture of the dectector end of the mass spectrometer. The box with the coaxial cables connected to it is the circuit I built to amplify the pulse signals that were detected by the detector above it. In the right background is the current source for the mass spectrometer electromagnets. The first task that I worked on at MCL was to determine what was causing transient variations in the current output of all of these supplies. I discovered that there was a problem in the way that they were connected to the safety ground and neutral in the three-phase ac power system. This caused a ground loop in the power supplies that caused the problem.
In late fall of '67, MCL had a Christmas party. As part of the entertainment, Sgt. John Solgat played his guitar and sang. He worked with me in the mass spec lab, had arms as big as Arnold's, smoked cigars, and listened to Sacramento's country giant KRAK-AM.
Sgt. John Taylor, Sgt. Dan Oliver, and Sgt. Clarence (CJ) Havlik at the Christmas party. Sgt. Taylor was our machinist. Although I got along well with him, he could be a grouch and he intimidated some of our junior officers. I still laugh at the time that a 1st Lt. came to my boss Capt. Jim Smith and asked him if he would submit a work request to Sgt. Taylor because he was afraid of him. Dan Oliver was from Minnesota. He was meticulate in everything he did. When he went to a restaurant, he carried his own steak knife because the knives in the restaurants were never sharp enough for him. He also worked with me in the mass spec lab. Sgt. Havlik was in charge of our electronics maintenance shop. He was always smoking a cigar.
In 1965, my first of three years at MCL, SMSGT Frank Kuntz retired. I remember him well. His lab was next to my office and I often went there to talk to him. I ran across this great picture of him and the MCL Commander Col. Jones at Frank's retirement after 20 years of service. Frank is on the left. (Thanks to Bob Chaney for helping me remember Col. Jones' name. His sucessor was Col. Westfall.) After leaving the Air Force, Frank worked 3 years for Eastman Kodak and 27 years for Ford Motor Co. He died on September 12, 2006 in Michigan .
Before I left the Air Force in December 1967, my friend Jack Courtney had a going away party for me. Our apartments were next door to each other, so we opened both apartments for the party. Pictured here are Jim Oviatt, Terry Cantrell, Dan Trainor, and Jesse Hall. Growing up, Jesse and I lived across the street from each other and graduated in the same class from high school. It was a coincidence that both of us were assigned to the 1155 TOS.
A second picture at my going away party. Sandy Trainor is on the right. The spiral metal object at the top of the lamp is the UHF antenna to my TV set.
A third picture at my going away party. Pretty Mary Jane Guiry is in the yellow dress. She is drinking from one of Jack Courtney's Playboy mugs. To the right behind her is Tom McCracken.
A fourth picture at my farewell party. Al Pavik is pictured at the right.
My last day of active duty at the 1155th was on a Friday in mid December of 1967. About 2 weeks before that, the 1155th TOS was hosting a "Hail and Farewell" party at the Officer's Club and I was on the farewell list. For reasons I never understood, I had been assigned to be squadron duty officer that night. This required me to stay 24 hours in the building. The only other person there was the non-commissioned officer of the day whose primary task was to man the encripted communications machine. It was my task to check over 100 safes and to assist the NCO with any emergency situation. I got to sleep on a cot in a small room while the NCO had to sit at a teletypewriter the entire night. This picture is of me at my desk at about 10:00 p.m. that night. It was made while the other officers partied at the club. You can see my GE transistor radio, my TMC coffee cup (with the stick-on label bearing the initials WML), my Air Force sun glasses, and a jar of Borden's coffee creamer. I still have the radio and the coffee cup. The glasses were dropped and broken not long after that. I have bought several replacent pairs over the years. For those of us in the Air Force, it was considered to be "cool" to wear them. Not long after that night, I packed up at my apartment and left Sacramento to enter graduate school at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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This page is not a publication of the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology has not edited or examined the content. The author of this page is solely responsible for the content. Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.
