I have great memories of my time [at Ft Lawton] as a 30352. One of them had to do with our CO, CWO Quentin Sellers and our First Sgt John Nunley. One day we were scrambling around after one of our height-finders had had a failure and our data stream to SAGE had been interrupted. Sellers, a normally quiet, proper, exceptionally-responsible (and very nice) person, was in an unusually upset mood, expressing his dissatisfaction with the matter in terms that were surprising to all of us around him. "#&*%X@, why does this have to happen just now, when (something, a mission or other) was happening?!?!" More ranting and raving. Sgt John Nunley, as cool as a cucumber, turned to him and said, in a deadpan worthy of Jack Benny, "Quent, in this business, things can go bad in a microsecond." I had to leave the room to laugh before my coffee spurted out my nose.

Another memory…I too was assigned the GPS-T2 (am I remembering that right…the target simulator that gave the scope dopes missions to run?) and luxuriated in a dedicated UPA-35 that was not a cannibal lode. The T-2 was my sole responsibility, "my baby". I was troubleshooting the UPA-35 one day with the lid open (I seem to recall that the lid hinged up or a drawer pulled out…that part’s vague), and I was wearing a T-shirt and had a St Christopher medal on a chaina round my neck. I leaned over the scope reaching for something, and the chain around my neck slid out of the T-shirt and landed on the 15,000V aquadag tap on the CRT. The next thing I was conscious of was waking up, sitting on the floor with my back to the wall on the other side of the room.

Another memory: if you look at the photos on [radar museum web] site, especially the third one dated 12 Jan 04, you’ll notice a faint diagonal discoloration running NE to SW from the building at the base of the tower to a point just south of the antenna structure. I believe that may be the remnant (possibly asphalted over in the photo shown) of a cable trough that ran between the building and the two height-finders at the SW corner of the site. When I arrived at FT Lawton from Keesler I weighed 113 lbs, and was by far the skinniest kid there. One day a new coax and some other cables needed to be run through that cable trough, which would ordinarily have required many of the large concrete covers over the trough to be lifted. The covers were heavy enough that a truck could be driven over them; so we’re not talking trivial effort here. Anyway, I was asked whether I would (not told to) crawl through the full length of the trough carrying a messenger cable that could then guide the remainder of the cabling through. I did.