We had a small (less than regulation size) basketball court, weight room, two lane bowling ally, very small library (very old outdated books), two pool tables and a couple of foosball and ping pong tables. I had an extra job running the site Movie Theater where I made two hundred dollars a month. The Air Force sent us five movies per week and on Friday nights, we initiated an all night movie fest with a small popcorn popper and plenty of cold Michelob beer. We generally watched all five flicks back to back. The Outlaw Josey Wales with Clint Eastwood , Taxi Driver with Robert Deniro along with Big Bad Mama with Angie Dickinson were our favorites, especially Angie Dickinson! Disney’s Blackbeard’s Ghost failed to interest many of us. Where’d the Air Force get that brilliant idea? Ok, we weren’t overly picky.

Our maintenance guys built heavy steel four man sleds that we used to race down our ice packed roadbed on Sunday afternoons in late winter. I always rode in the front and had the challenge of steering at 40 or 50 mph with ice crystals and snow pelting my face. Another high-risk venture but a great adrenaline rush. I loved the thrill.

The entertainment pinnacles of the year were our two U.S.O. shows. Wow, did we enjoy seeing these gorgeous singing young ladies. They came in by helicopter, rock and rolled for two hours and then vanished without a trace into the black Alaskan night. I think they left us in more of a blue funk than they had found us. After a few too many beers at the club, we wondered if we hadn’t just been imagining the whole thing. Bring on those mashed potatoes.

Most everyone had impressive stereo systems bought through our Overseas Exchange Service. Pioneer and Sony Stereo Corporations owe much of their early and continued success to the G.I’s worldwide who spent large sums to outfit themselves with audio systems.

Joe Hatfield always had KC and the Sunshine Band and Abba blaring, Sadlowski wore out the Boston album and some of the Goat Ropers grooved to Willie Nelson and Freddie Fender. The hallways in our quarters were rarely quiet. When I hear those songs today, I’m immediately immersed back into the romance of those good but lonely times.

We had excellent food at Murphy. Two cooks and a baker provided us with four all you could eat meals a day. Our head cook, Julius, a big happy-go-lucky always glad to see ya type black guy, used to make the most unbelievable huge egg omelets. Mounds of mushrooms, onions, bacon, and cheese all cooked to order. I make a lot of omelets today and I rarely make one without thinking of him. Thanks Julius. Fresh rabbit and king crab legs were served almost every week as well. Midnight chow was always enjoyable to attend with your buddies whether you were hungry or not. Early in my tour, My Mom and Dad being concerned that we might not have access to fresh fruit sent me a small basket of Jonathan apples they had picked in Waverly Missouri. I savored each and every one.

Our club (about 30 by 40 feet) played nightly hosts to a handful of regulars and on the weekends, things generally got pretty well wired up. The older NCO’s (Lifers) spent more time and money there than did the younger guys but everyone got along real well. After all, we had a lot in common and our camaraderie showed. If you’ve not had the opportunity to observe fifty guys on a mountain top chugging beer and telling war stories all night, you’ve missed one of life’s more barbaric acts. I remember shortly before I was to come home, I went into the club with R.A. Fellows (Ottumwa, Iowa) for a cold beer when our new site commander came over and bought me a tall shot of grain alcohol. Not wanting to offend my new boss, I reluctantly slammed it down only to have it come immediately back out my nose, which made for a real impressive sight.

Spring finally arrived in mid May and ushered in millions of mutant sized mosquitoes. Ten or twelve of us were playing football on the helicopter pad one day when a giant black tornado of bloodsuckers descended upon us. Without saying a word, we just took off running in a mad dash for the barracks.

Tom Sadlowski and I backpacked West down towards the Chatanika River some 14 miles away to stay in a real neat old cabin that had been built there. We got caught in a torrential downpour and with the river flooded, found ourselves without clean drinking water for a couple of days. I remember we took gauze out of our first aid kit and tried to filter the muddy water. I guess it worked, we were incredibly thirsty.

I did have the special opportunity to play out my sporting ambitions on a couple of occasions. One of our controllers had a Mooney Statesman hangered at the Fairbanks airport so Sonny Wolf and I would study the air charts and locate some likely remote fishing destination. We’d chip in and pay for his fuel and he’d fly us out to any location in the bush where he could safely land. We made two fabulous trips to places where few if any sport fisherman had ever experienced. He’d just drop us off and come back three days later and hope we were still there. On one occasion above the Arctic Circle just East of Kobuk, we were victimized by two recently befriended Native Alaskans who thought it would be funny to drop Sonny and I off on a distant and isolated sand bar some 20 miles up and across the wide Kobuk River from our pick up point, Kobuk Village. They got drunk on the Jack Daniel’s whiskey we brought them and after 12 or so hours, they miraculously remembered to come back and get us.

I distinctly remember late night conversations on duty with Joe Hatfield where we talked about what it would be like someday to return to Murphy Dome after it was dismantled and wander the dark empty dusty hallways, visualizing it as a ghost town so to speak. It was such a bleak and eerie place. So removed from the raucous fast paced real world in the lower 48 most of us knew and longed for.

I left the Air Force as scheduled. My four years in the service were truly a positive and memorable experience. I’m proud to have served at Murphy Dome. Just between you and I, I still have occasional dreams about my year at Murphy Dome and I frequently reminiscence about those unique times. I can recall with vivid detail, my buddy’s faces and their laughter, the continual buzzing of high voltage radar equipment in the Ops Center on a quiet midnight shift and the incessant clanging of the metal clasp on the flagpole outside my room. In fact, most of my Murphy Dome experience is permanently and indelibly etched into my memory.

I’ve lost track of everyone I knew at Murphy and often wonder how life after the DEW line has treated them. Are they still alive? Are they married? Do they have kids? What are they doing? Do they ever think about our year together or is it just me that’s a little weird? After all, this wasn’t Vietnam and to share it with the likes of similar hardship stories would be completely ridiculous and blasphemous towards those who served and perished there.

I searched for and found the phone number for what’s left of Murphy Dome this last week on the Internet. I anxiously and somewhat nervously dialed up and spoke to a very nice civilian contractor who with one other technician currently lives on site. When I proudly announced to my 12 year old, Katie, that I had called Murphy Dome, she asked curiously, "who’s that"? The radars and two white domes are still on the hilltop and operational. With advances in technology, they currently serve the military and FAA in a similar capacity. However, the site I and several hundred others called home over the course of some 35 years is gone. Sometime in the mid 80’s, the facility was dozed down and buried. I am told the hilltop is void of any signs of the original facility and is covered with small shrubs, trees and grasses. So….I’ll never have my chance to walk those old spooky corridors like Joe and I had fantasized about. But someday…..….. I will return to Murphy Dome, and I’ll sit up there amongst those shrubs, right where Julius used to make my omelets, and I’ll look out South towards Mount McKinley and wonder………….with a lump in my throat, were those girls from the U.S.O. show really here?

To all my old buddies at the 744^th :

Ken (the Wild Man) Murray
Tom Sadlowski
Joe Hatfield
Rudy Telado
R.A. Fellows
Sonny Wolf
Wes (Grizzly Adams) Bentley
Don Poindexter
Sid Duffer
All the others and …. Julius

Man, I hope you’re all doing well. ----- " Mails Up" !