CH5F01.jpg: Bellows AFS, some time around 1970.
Photo courtesy of Bill Benner.
I became fascinated with chess. I have always become fascinated with various things, and it may be a great weakness or a great strength, depending on how you want to look at it. This trait is probably responsible for my lousy grades in high school (although I did make the honor roll one year), and is certainly partly responsible for my flunking out of college. I started hanging out at the student union where the chessplayers met. I also learned to play hearts, which didn't help my grades either. I remember sitting in a lecture class and being unable to resist opening a book on chess. I felt guilty and knew I was in danger of flunking out, but I couldn't help myself. Fortunately, several years later I realized after several years of tournament play that I would never be great at chess (because I didn't have the temperment, the killer instinct, the need to win) and gave up chess almost completely. There is a big difference between fascination and obsession.
Music at the time included the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour and the White Album.
I passed all my fall classes and enrolled in the spring semester. I loved my gymnastics class even though I wasn't very much good at it. I tried hard and got an A. I was weak in the upper body and I think the instructor was impressed when he saw me doing pull-ups in addition to the prescribed exercises (mostly bar dips).
Toward the end of the spring semester '68, getting Fs in several classes, I dropped out completely and moved to San Jose to live with my girlfriend Camilla, who was pregnant at the time with our son Timothy. We had an apartment down town and I got a job at a Union 76 service station in Santa Clara, owned by Joe Vasquez. Every day I would walk several blocks to the bus stop and take the bus to work.
Music at the time included Donovan, Steppenwolf, Jefferson Airplane Crown of Creation and Iron Butterfly.
In the fall we found an inexpensive apartment on Park Avenue in San Jose close to Santa Clara so I could walk to work (across highway 17). In January of '69 Timothy was born. My father encouraged Camilla and me to get married, so we did, at a civil ceremony with a San Jose judge. Dad bought us an American Motors used car as a wedding present. Unfortunately, the car's transmission failed in a few weeks. It was months before I got it running again with Dad's help.
I was happy living with Camilla and baby Timmy. She would fix me breakfast and pack my lunch. I thought my happiness would be complete if I could only have more than half an hour for lunch. The work wasn't hard, filling cars with gas, changing oil, cleaning windows, etc., but it was a nowhere job. In the evenings Camilla would fix my dinner and I would study science books or chess over a board. I worked six days a week and sometimes evenings. I missed watching Neil Armstrong land on the moon: I had to work.
Music at the time included Deep Purple Book of Talisyn, Procol Harum, and The Mothers of Invention Freakout.
Knowing I would be drafted into the Army soon, I went downtown to the San Jose Air Force recruiter and took the exams. I got 95s (the highest possible percentile score) on all four areas. After a while I received my draft notice: "Greetings: You are hereby ordered to report for induction into the armed forces of the United States of America." I had a wife and child, but due to a technicality in the law, if one has ever held a 2S (student deferment), one may not then have a dependency deferment. The next day I went to the Air Force recruiter and showed him the draft notice. He looked at my test scores. Then he picked up the telephone and called the Oakland induction center and spoke a lie. He said that I was already in the Air Force. My draft order was canceled and I was signed up for electronics school to start in August '69.
I flew to San Antonio and a bus took the several new recruits to Lackland AFB. We were met by a training instructor (TI). The first thing he said, to one of the others, was "Wipe that shit off your shoes, airman." He had us form up and marched us, very sloppy and in civilian clothes with our bags, to the barracks. It was about midnight, and we went to sleep.
We woke up at 5:00 AM every day for the next six weeks. First we got our military clothes. Then we had all our civilian stuff stored away after it was inspected for contraband. I had a paperback copy of Desmond Morris' Naked Ape, a popular anthropology book, which I had finished reading on the airplane. It was confiscated and destroyed. We were able to keep a few personal effects with us in the barracks. We would have about an hour in the evenings after dinner before lights out at 9:00 PM to read, write letters, and socialize in the barracks. I was allowed to keep my travel chess set, and one evening I played chess with Michael (Mic) Sheeren, from Whittier, California. I didn't play chess much because after just one game most people realized they would never have any hope of beating me. Mic and I later became good friends in tech school at Keesler AFB. Mic had been a cast member at Disneyland and had a cool Mickey Mouse watch on a wide leather band.
Every day we would have exercise, classes, and drill. Marching is easy and fun. When you get good at it you do it without thinking. Later in tech school, my friend Woody and I would play chess while we marched to class and back. We went to the rifle range twice, once for dry fire and once for live fire where we fired 70 rounds from an M16 for record. I hit a man-sized target 68 times from various positions standing, kneeling, prone, sitting), two short of a marksmanship ribbon. The obstacle course had simulated explosions while we crawled under barbed wire. There was a smoke tunnel about 20 feet long. You can't see a thing when you enter it, it's like running blind. August in Texas gets pretty hot. Near the end of the obstacle course run I started to red-out, due to overheating, the first and last time that ever happened to me. I stopped running and the red vision went away, but a TI got on my case anyway.
After basic training we received our continued training assignments. Mic and I were assigned to tech school at Keesler AFB, Mississippi. No leave was authorized.
It's ironic that the Vietnam war and draft were justified on the grounds of fighting communism, when military life is very much like living in a commune. We were basically slaves living in barracks, marching to work or training, and eating in the communal (chow) hall. Even after the hurricane cleanup, when training began, we had routine work details mopping and buffing floors or working in the kitchens. The "pay" was far below civilian standards. Only after I had received several promotions did I receive enough money to support a family.
I was assigned to a barracks in a training squadron near the runway in the so-called triangle area of Keesler AFB. We were bunked three to a room, with one bunk bed on one side of the room and a single bed on the other side. There was a radiator for which steam was enabled in October, and a dark linoleum that had to be polished to a high gloss for inspections.
Allen Woodrow (Woody) Betz III from Metairie, Louisianna was one of my first roommates and a fellow with a master's degree in philosophy was my other roommate. Woody had two degrees, a bachelor's in petroleum engineering and a master's in business administration. Woody could have gone into officer's training if he wanted to, but he didn't want to be a pilot. He was going to put in his four years and get back to the family business in New Orleans. Woody was a lot of fun to be with and always had interesting observations about life. We were both in the same career field, radio relay equipment, and we went through tech school together. We used to play chess occasionally while marching to school. We both went through the self-pacing program. Woody wanted to finish the fundamentals section quickly so he could attend Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I don't think the Air Force really knew what to do with the windfall of intelligent airmen the draft was giving them.
Mic Sheeren had a grandmother who lived in Metairie, and he and I took the bus several times to stay at her house. Mic really liked Led Zeppelin, whom I thought were all right. Mic had a friend from Austin Texas on base with a car and we would drive to the Edgewater Mall just outside Biloxi on the Gulf Coast road. We would drive or just sit in the car and listen to 8-track tapes of Spirit, Grand Funk Railroad, Led Zeppelin, Cream, and other music groups.
Clyde Engels injured his knee in crashing his MGB and walked with a slight limp. He and I were walking through Biloxi one Saturday evening to his girlfriend's house and were cutting across a corner gas station that was closed up for the night. Two local guys were setting in a car there drinking beer. One of them said something insulting and Clyde responded. He was of a small build and wore glasses but he had a high sensitivity to a perceived slight. I had wanted to keep walking, but Clyde turned around and said something like "oh yeah, want to make something of it?" I told him we should keep walking. The two guys got out of the car and came right up to us. One punched Clyde in the face, breaking his glasses and driving a shard of glass into his face below his eye. The other one squared off with me. Immediately I saw a half a dozen other local guys come running up the street to us and I thought we were dead. The next thing I knew, they were all fighting among each other and Clyde and I slipped off and made it safely to his girlfriend's house.
Before Camilla decided to join me in Hawaii, I lived in the barracks at the transmitter site at Bellows. There "Swede" Swenson, of Norwegian descent, taught me weight lifting. Bill Benner and Dave Galeni taught me boxing. Dave had a very pretty chemist wife who lived with him in Lani Kai. Bill Benner was from "Philly" and was very good at the electronics, and he and I both signed up for the Cleveland Institute of Electronics (CIE) Federal Communications Commission (FCC) license course. We took the licensing exam together in Honolulu and we both passed the first time.
In December of 2005, Bill Benner contacted me, having read this chapter on the Web. We exchanged some emails and he subsequently scanned some photographs and sent them to me for publication here.
When Camilla joined me, we were so broke we went to the Red Cross at Hickam AFB to ask for a loan so we could pay deposit on an apartment and buy some food. The Red Cross worker gave us an outright grant of $500. We were very grateful and I will always support the Red Cross. We were staying in the weekly rental cabins at Bellows at the time.
Roger Taylor was a friend with whom I could talk easily about philosophical topics. Roger was going to get a chiropractic degree when he got out (of the Air Force) and return to Texas. His wife, who wanted to be a teacher, was from Michigan. Roger and his wife had rented a small house in waikiki, just makai of the canal. Led Zeppelin had just come out with their third album that Roger played on his stereo with lousy speakers along with Jimi Hendrix' Band of Gypsies. Later Roger moved to a house on Hui Street in Kailua.
Sometimes I would amaze my friends by beating them at chess while sitting with my back to the board. Tony Lacsina was a local guy from Waimanalo (right by Bellows) who was a teller of tall tales. One time Tony and Bill joined forces against me in a chess game on second shift in the maintenance office of the transmitter site. I had my back to the board and they lost.
The transmitter site plan was like a plus sign: three wings of radio transmitters with one wing with offices and mess hall on the first floor and barracks rooms on the second floor. There was a third floor air conditioning room over the center of the cross, where there was also a weight bench and some barbells and dumbells. Swede was the only one using the weight room up there when I first got to Bellows so I started going up there to work out and Swede would show me the standard weight exercises: presse, curl, French curl, bench press, etc. One transmitter wing was inactive and the equipment was removed, so we got permission to set up a gym in that ground floor wing. We had parallel bars, tumbling mats, weights, boxing gloves, and a ping pong table.
I would hang out with Bill and Tony in the gym and play ping pong after working out and sparring with the boxing gloves. Dave, Bill, and Tony were all stronger than I was and would always beat me at boxing. I steadily improved my defense and never got hurt, but when fighting by the boxing rules, the stronger man will generally be able to blast through a defense and score a hit. I used my boxing skills later in Sacramento when I would spar in a boxing ring with an amateur boxer.
In 2004, after reading this page, Tony's daughter April wrote to me asking for more information about her Dad who passed away in 1988. I had lost contact with Tony and hadn't been aware of his death. Tony used to take me with him surfing on the North Shore to his favorite spot, Ehukai, just to the right of Sunset Beach. Only the locals knew about it because you couldn't see it from the main road. There's one big rock right by the sand, just under water, that you need to know about when body surfing there. I went moonlight fishing with him and some friends, including his brother-in-law, Bobo, off bridges around the island. We would catch crabs sometimes. We smoked Kools and drank Primo beer. Tony liked to play golf with our mutual friend Bill Benner of Philadelphia. He also liked to play chess with us.
One of the true stories Tony told us was about his experience in Viet Nam. They would put sandbags around the radio communication wagons to protect themselves from small arms fire. Tony told us about a time when he was interacting with an Air Force general concerning the testing of some electronic equipment. He told the general that he recommended doing a "smoke test" in which the equipment was turned on to see if it would smoke, thus revealing a fault. The story is funny for two reasons. First, it's not very often that a relatively low ranking enlisted man would interact directly with a general. Second, it's not very likely that a general in the Air Force Communications Service wouldn't know that a "smoke test" is an inside joke among electronic technicians. One would never actually do a "smoke test," it's a euphemism for totally screwing up a repair job.
Tony was a "character" so that everybody who knew him remembers him. He was known for his entertaining stories, told as if they were true, but many were obviously impossible. He would always embellish his stories and half the time I didn't know if he was pulling my leg or not. If pressed, he would swear he was telling the truth. This is not to say that was bad. Everybody exaggerates from time to time. He never intentionally deceived or harmed anyone that I knew. I trusted him implicitly. Waimanalo at night could be a dangerous place for a haole guy in the military, but with Tony and his friends I felt right at home.
Tony was tough and confident, somebody I would want at my side in a fight, but I never saw him in a violent mood. He never started a fight that I knew of, but he wouldn't take anything from anyone either and everyone respected him. I am truly sorry to hear he is gone, because I am sure if I had ever run into him again we would be friends just like we left off. In the military, one gets used to leaving and making new friends frequently. I don't have any photographs of him, but I can see him in my memory as if it were yesterday. He had a real love of life and he was a pleasure to be with.
Another true story, confirmed by April, is that he used to referee basketball games in Waimanalo. One night, after a game, a disgruntled partisan of a losing team walked up to him and shot him in the shoulder with a .38 revolver. He showed us the scar. If you have any memories or photographs of Tony Lacsina or any of his friends from this time, you can send them to me at "Rick dot Wagner at NGC dot com" and I will see that April gets them. The cryptic notation for the email address is to foil spammer bots that go around the web scooping up email addresses for spam. I have had to remove my explicit email address from all my Web pages due to the spammer vermin.
Sgt. Charlie Van Meter was an expert at electronics and wanted to move to Australia when he got out. He taught me a lot of things about troubleshooting transmitters. He lived upstairs in the transmitter site barracks along with the other single guys like Bill Benner. Charlie Van Meter was also an audiophile and had a superb stereo system. Bill had a great sound system too. I had read some books on audio engineering so I knew the ins and outs, but had not much money, but I was content to listen to the music of others. Bill liked the Kinks, Elton John, Yes, and Rod Stewart.
There was a legend that the Bellows transmitter site had been built on an old Hawaiian graveyard and that the place was haunted. There was one superstition, if things were going well, that one should never remark to that effect. Van Meter believed this superstition, and knowing that, one night at the start of midnight shift, after the swing shift had left, said in a very loud voice "It looks like it's going to be a quiet night tonight." Van Meter was very upset with me and I just laughed. We went into the office to sit down. I had just gotten my feet up with a Time magazine when we heard a loud "bang" out in the transmitter wing. One of the HF transmitters was down with a catastrophic failure. Van Meter and I were up all night troubleshooting it, and it still was down when the day shift came to work.
The Air Force instituted a new program of merit promotions. Since I was always very good at taking tests, I was promoted to Staff Sergeant (E5) with less than three years in the service. The next year that program was killed due to the resultant upsetting of the older non-commissioned officers (NCOs). That was to be my last promotion even though I spent six more years in the service. I received orders to go to the 2nd Mobile Combat Communications Group (Second Mob) at Tinker AFB, Oklahoma.
Col. Tinker was the first American airman to be shot down in the War (WW II). The Second Mob had a few dozen MRC 113s (Mark One Thirteen, a mobile radio communications system). The main electronics shelters were made out of honeycomb aluminum sandwich and could be shipped by truck or airplane. We could also attach wheeled "bogeys" to them and pull them as trailors. Most were setting on 4 x 4 blocks in a field. They were sort of in rows, but very sloppily placed and at odd angles. They didn't look neat, so the squadron commander assigned me to straighten them up. I arranged for a mobile crane, and we picked them up, one at a time and put them back down in alignment by sighting down the edge of one to the next. I had them all nearly perfectly aligned and the commander complimented me on the job.
I was assigned as a site commander for a MRC 113. The site was on a hilltop on base and had two tropospheric scatter tranceivers with large dish antennas operating in the high VHF (very high frequency) range, powered by klystron tubes. Each klystron was as big as a man and consumed 10,000 watts. To set up the site we had to drive 2 1/2 ton trucks (duece and a halfs) pulling trailers. It was winter and there was snow on the frozen ground. The dirt road to the hilltop was impassible at that time, and I was advised to wait a few weeks until it thawed out. However, I decided to set up the site immediately. I devised a way to proceed, where on the steeper parts of the road where the wheels slipped, we shoveled dirt under the truck's drive wheels, and we made it to the top without incident. A few weeks later after the snow melted, the road was so muddy as to be completely impassible. My decision to move quickly was vindicated.
Camilla worked in a bank in downtown Oklahoma City. One evening she had to go down there for a meeting so I drove her and wandered around the streets. I came to the Oklahoma City Chess Club and walked in. They were having a tournament so I entered it and walked out later with the first place trophy. I continued as a member of the chess club and played every Tuesday night. The club moved shortly from downtown to across the city on the West side.
I played in the Tinker AFB chess tournament and won the first place trophy and a trip to Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, for the Logistics Air Command chess tournament, which was won by my friend Airman Whistler, who had won second place at Tinker AFB and who drove us there in his car.
Camilla became pregnant and gave birth to Robert Ashley at the military hospital on base. We moved from our rented house on Mallard Drive in Dell City to a house on Rickenbacker drive in Midwest City. I built a small black and white TV set from a kit. We visited Camilla's sister Corky and her husband Mike in Baton Rouge, Louisianna, where I played the game pong in a bar. You put a quarter in the machine and used a rotary pot to control a paddle that bounced a spot back to the computer's side of the cathode ray tube.
I started taking night classes at Ocar Rose Junior College in Midwest City, Oklahoma. I took college algebra and trigonometry. I disciplined myself to do the homework by not allowing myself any chess analysis until my work was complete. I had bought a hardback copy of I. A. Horowitz's Chess Openings, Theory and Practice in Hawaii and loved to sit down to a chess board and work through the variations. I got As in both classes. We were short of money so I got a part-time job at a local service station. I was due to be discharged when my enlistment was up in '73, but this was during Nixon's recession after the stock market plummet in '69 and the OPEC oil embargo. There were very few jobs at that time in civilian life. The Air Force offered me several thousand dollars as a reelistment bonus, so I extended for four more years.
I led an installation team to install a closed circuit TV system for security at a command situation room at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio. I had learned at team chief school that the first thing I should do was to introduce myself to the base commander and brief him as to my mission and the base resources I would need to do my job. I booked an appointment with the commander's secretary. The commander seemed puzzled to see me, as if he had never received a similar visitor before. Perhaps as a high ranking Air Force officer (lieutenant colonel) he was not used to interfacing with staff sergeants. He was polite and assured me of the full cooperation of his staff. I thanked him and got back to my team.
I was sent on temporary duty (TDY) by myself to the Air Force research and development laboratory in Kansas City, Missouri where I was the assistant lab manager for Mr. Johnny Pepple. He had a number of civilians working for him on a number of electronic devices for the Air Force. I spent about three months there and took kung fu classes on base from a military teacher. The real power behind kung fu is the one armed pushups and one legged squats we did. I was able to do 15 of each on all four appendages. I bought a 1965 Ford Fairlane for $200 and drove it back to Sacramento.
We rented a house in Rio Linda, just north-west of Sacramento, near the base. I enrolled in night classes at American River College, taking English and Philosophy.
I visited Walter at his apartment in Berkeley and we both entered the California Open Chess Tournament in 1975 at a hotel in Berkeley, he in class C and I in class D. I won first place in my class with a $200 prize and a trophy. The tournament director cheated me out of most of the money, claiming he didn't have enough to pay me the full amount. One time Walter and I stopped at the physics department at UC Davis, which is on the road between Sacramento and Berkeley, and visited some of his friends. In the basement of the physics building was an IBM mainframe computer that the students had interfaced with a cathode ray tube and on which they were playing the game asteroids.
Camilla and I went with friends to a rock concert at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco and to two indoor rock concerts in Sacramento, seeing bands like Grateful Dead, Jefferson Starship, Kansas, Santana, and Steppenwolf. Bill Graham put on the show at Kezar and he addressed the crowd from the stage and introduced the acts. When a heckler in the crowd yelled "Led Zeppelin" (who were not performing that day), Bill Graham said "Look, yo-yo, we don't need Led Zeppelin."
Marty Balin had been with the original Jefferson Airplane band and Grace Slick joined the group for their second album, Surrealistic Pillow. Marty had been a key force in the band as evidenced by his singing and writing on Surrealistic Pillow. As the group morphed into Jefferson Starship in the '70s, Marty's role diminished, and he was present only in "Carline" on their their then-current hit album Dragonfly. During the Starship's performance in Sacramento (with lead guitarist Craig Chaquiso dueling unsuccessfully with electric fidler Papa John Creech), Marty wandered out onto the stage and hung around behind the musicians in the shadows, lacadaisically banging on a cow bell with a drumstick, looking like he wanted to ask "what am I doing here?" Grace dragged him to the front and induced him to sing a duet with her to a rousing ovation.
I enrolled in night classes with the University of Hawaii (UH), taking health and psychology. After three years of night school at three different colleges, I realized that if ever wanted to get a bachelor's degree I would have to go to school full time. My supervisor in the Air Force, Master Sergeant Hector Favella, helped me. He allowed me to work only swing and mid shifts so I could go to school in the daytime. I bought a Honda 250 motorcycle and enrolled full time at the UH Manoa campus. My first semester I took 19 units and got a 3.98 GPA, making the Dean's List.
I became friends with SSgt. Jack Gardner who also worked at the satellite ground station. He and Hector and I played on the Air Force tennis team there at the Naval Communications Station against the Navy teams. Jack and his wife Tassoula lived in the older base housing at Wheeler AFB. Jack was a history buff who also played guitar. Jack had a VW microbus and loved working on cars. He eventually got out of the Air Force and got a job at Top of the Hill Volkswagen in Wahiawa.
Vince Vicini was a karate black belt with a gray Corvette. He knew a lot of boxers at a local gym, and we spent a lot of time together. Sometimes we would pick up girls on the beach and take them out on dates or beach picnics on the north shore. Vince was my best man at my wedding in 1981.
Sonya Shell had been studying music in India and had stopped in Hawaii for a week on the way back to San Francisco. She was staying in the New Otani hotel at Sans Souci beach and I met her on the sand. We went out for pizza and I took her riding on my motorcycle around the island to visit various beaches and to do some sightseeing. She had to return home and I never saw her again.
I met Diane Boone in the summer of '79 at a party and talked with her for a while. I ran into her a few days later at the Sans Souci Beach in Waikiki and we went out on a few dates. She was a nursing student at UH. I was really falling in love with her when after one month school started up and she wanted to focus on her studies. I was very sad, but I respected her wishes and left her alone. Not long after that I met the woman I would marry later, Andrea Johnson, also at Sans Souci beach.
I first saw Andrea from a distance. I was at the terrace restaurant of the New Otani hotel at Sans Souci when I saw her walking Eva near the water. I knew that she was a woman I wanted to get to know better. A few days later she was on the small wooden pier and I sat down a short distance away. In a little while a fish jumped out of the water right in front of us. This was a remarkable occurrence because fish were rare that near the shore at the popular reef-sheltered beach. It provided an ice breaker and we went out on a date later that night. We quickly fell in love and spent a lot of time together during my final semester at UH. Andrea worked for the National Atmospheric and Oceonographic Administration (NAOA) office near campus.
I graduated from UH with a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering in December 1979 with a 3.2 GPA. I interviewed with several aerospace recruiters on campus that fall and received job offers from Boeing, NASA JPL, and TRW. I accepted the offer from TRW because they brought me to California for an interview and they offered the most money. I started work at TRW's Space Park in Redondo Beach on the 7th of January, 1980.
This page created April 9, 2002.
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