Autobiography

 

 

A Boy from Unity

            

                                                                       

Robert F. Duncan

Autobiography 2011

 

 

 

 

Table of Contents

 

Preface                                                                     

Years on the Farm                                                    p 5

University                                                                   p 32

Texas & Mississippi                                                   p 36

Washington                                                                p 41

Australia                                                                     p 55

Back in the States                                                      p 60

Sonitrol                                                                       p 62

Accident                                                                     p 64

Retirement                                                                 p 74

 

 

 

PREFACE

 

The children have grown, moved on and are busily raising families of their own. The day-to-day activities that came with business life are done. It has now been five years into our retirement and Anne and I have managed well with the transition.

            The home we purchased on Hillcrest did not come with a garage. A design was settled on and late in 2007 its construction was finished. My idea for the garage had been a bay for Anne’s car and a bay for mine. In Anne’s wisdom, however, she recognized that I had not developed hobbies that would keep me from spending the days on the easy chair reading instead of out in the world doing something more constructive. It was decided that I should return to automobiles as a side interest. I had located a 1971 Triumph Stag in an acquaintance’s barn in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Long time neighbor and good friend, Jim Leroy, joined me in my pickup drive to New Mexico in the late summer of 2006. We brought the Stag to its new home city. So, my hobby began.

            The garage layout wouldn’t accommodate a project vehicle without leaving one of our two cars outdoors. The solution was to add a third bay, a project bay to the garage’s design. I saw this as the right time to invest in a hydraulic lift and I had it installed onto the new cement floor. Now, I was ready to work on the Stag.

            With my creature comforts looked after in my new Man Cave, we turned our creative efforts into designing a room for Anne’s sewing and quilting. The Hillcrest home has a room on the west end adjoining the kitchen and the carport. This room had been used by the last owner as a dance room. It was much larger than the space Anne would need for her crafts so we decided to use sofas to divide it in half. The half with sofas would be used as the grandchildren’s play area, and the other half would be Anne’s.

            A lifelong seamstress collects machines that specialize in different types of sewing. What this meant to me was I had to come up with a work surface layout that would be handy for her to leave all of the machines set up. A horseshoe design worked out well. Today Anne can busily create new quilts while the kids are occupied with play or TV. Anne has become the go-to lady for friends with garment repair needs. She enjoys every minute of it, and sometimes the days aren’t long enough for her work.

            Retirement has also brought the opportunity to travel. Anne and I have both enjoyed many trips to Savannah to visit Chris, Jennifer, and their boys. We have also driven many times through America’s southwest in enjoyment of the wonderfully diverse landscape and the opportunity to visit with friends in Utah and New Mexico. Anne has taken time out to travel with her friends to Europe. I have visited Vietnam twice: once with Anne’s brother Tim, who lives in Queensland, Australia, and once with my friend, Jim Leroy. When with Jim, we also finished our trip with a visit to Tim at his home in Cairns. Jim and I have also spent a few weeks in Thailand.

It hasn’t all been separate worldwide vacations. Anne and I have been to Hawaii with our friends from Adelaide, the Langes. We have returned to South Australia every few years to visit Roger and Cherri Lange and our geologist friend from my teaching, John Mignone. This spring Anne and I joined our friends from Albuquerque, Patti and John Stanalonis, for a three week intercontinental trip that included a week in Scotland, a week in England, and a week in Norway.

I have enjoyed, mostly for my own recollection benefit, keeping daily travel logs while visiting new lands. I have included them as attachments to this book.

Retirement has also brought me the unavoidable time to be able to reflect on the past activities of my short tenure, and what special, if anything, I have made of it. In this piece I have tried to empty my memory of unique events and spans of my life that I would like to leave behind in thirty or more years. With this writing I am documenting the rural upbringing of a boy growing into a young man of the Baby Boomer generation.

When each of us looks back we will find we have led unusual lives, if compared by those of other viewers. I have found my personal history to be fulfilling, fun, and sometimes exciting. You will find it different than yours. All the same, it was mine.

   

                                    YEARS ON THE FARM

 

            Rob was happy and he was a very fun loving boy. He was raised with his two brothers and sister on a farm a couple miles north of the small town of Lowell, Oregon. His folks were the hardworking owners of the local dairy. Rob was next to the youngest of the four kids.

            Christmas, of course, comes every year, but this Christmas was going to be very special. Rob was probably around 6 or 7 years old at the time. The family had gone through the glee of opening gifts from each other. His dad asked Rob to come outside with him for a minute. That’s when he received his first bicycle. It was a Schwinn Racer; complete with full fenders, large fat tires, and a firm pedal-brake. What a treasure!

            It was tradition that the family always sat for an orderly breakfast before gift opening could begin. Today had been no exception. Since this was to be Rob’s last gift, no gifts remained under the tree for anyone else, and breakfast was completed, there was no reason why he couldn’t spend some time riding up and down the driveway on his new bike. What a day of magic this one turned out to be.

The year was around 1952 and Rob would have been about 8 years old. This was a particularly cold winter. It was the only time in memory that Fall Creek had frozen over. There is no recollection of which adult, if there had been one, had given the kids the ok to play on the ice below the Unity Bridge. What a tragedy could have come from that afternoon of youthful, slippery frolic. There was an unusual abundance of snow that season, also. To make the most of the snow, Rob’s dad had used a rope to attach a sled to the hitch of the tractor. He then spent a great deal of the day pulling the kids around the large front field. The long tugging turns had been the most fun. What a wonderful time they all had.

            In much earlier years, as a young adult, Rob’s dad had become a very accomplished downhill skier. Every year the family would load up in the station wagon and make at least one trip to the Willamette Pass. Whether there was snow in the valley, the pass predictably had an adequate cover to permit opening the resort’s single rope tow to the top of the mountain. This is where his dad seemed to disappear. When his father started out skiing there were no rope tows to conveniently hall you to the top. His father told stories of how he and a couple of other people had been the first skiers to have opened up California’s Mt. Lassen. He recalled how difficult it had been to climb the mountain by splaying his skis, toes out, in an exaggerated manner while striking the slippery surface with the sharpened inside metal edges of the skis. Leaning into the climb caused the ski’s edge to bite down into the snow and permit him to take one more step up. The thrill, of course, was the trip down after a rest at the top. There were no wide open groomed slopes back then. The skiing was done by artfully dodging trees, and other natural obstacles, while studying the slope ahead looking for the next open pathway in your accelerating journey to home base. A day of skiing back then consisted of one trip up and one trip down. Backpacking a lunch, together with some liquid supplement, was no doubt savored after they had reached the summit. Today’s cross country skiers enjoy a bit of the drudgery Rob’s father must have gone through to reach the summit back then, but without the continuous vertical challenge

Many years before the farm became a dairy, it was a nut orchard. Rob’s family grew filberts in the top fields, and English walnuts in the lower fields. His dad would hire transient workers to pick the crops each year. One of the jobs Rob had during the harvest was to fill burlap gunny sacks with the nuts brought to him in pails by the pickers, and then he stitched the sacks closed. In short time, however, he could be found neglecting his sack duties in favor of climbing the trees.

            Today, filberts, aka, hazelnuts, are in big demand. The family always sold the bagged nuts to a Grower’s co-op in Eugene. One year Rob’s dad announced that they would no longer raise nuts. Apparently, the demand for the nuts had fallen, and so had the price. The family was no longer nut farmers.

            The process of clearing the orchards seemed a blur to Rob. Sometime during the next year a caterpillar showed up and began pulling out the hundreds of filbert trees which forested the upper fields bordering the highway. The large walnut trees of the lower, creek side fields weren’t going to give way as easily as had the filberts. The giant front blade of the Cat was used to reach up to the lower branches of each of the trees. From that leverage point the walnut tree quickly became up-rooted. Timbered carnage lay everywhere. Memory doesn’t serve Rob as to what eventually became of the timber. It was no doubt burned in collected piles; when it came to the smaller, spindly filberts. The larger English walnut tree-trunks were probably husked of their limbs and sold for use as lumber. The walnut limbs were left to be collected, piled, and burned.

            The season which followed clearing the fields of their nut trees is the only time Rob can remember his dad using either the tractor pulled plow, disc, or harrow. Each of the newly cleared fields was left scared with orderly rows of pock marks where the trees had once stood. After many days, each of the fields was plowed and debris removed so that the freshly turned soil could be further sliced with the stone weighted disking machine. The final treatment, before spreading the grass seed, was done with the harrow.                

            Until the war came, Rob’s father had been a civil engineer working as a surveyor who helped map the oil pipelines, which had been buried in the desert land of southern California. When the Second World War started, his father, who was already beginning his early forties, joined the war effort as a tool and die designer for Norman Rockwell Corporation. In 1945, when Rob was about half a year old, the family moved to Eugene. From there, they would begin a new life. Rob remembers he was not part of the decision making regarding his transfer, but he felt at the time that getting out of the southern California mayhem was a good move.

            Rob’s mother had inherited sufficiently from her parents to permit the family’s move to Oregon. They purchased the farm outside of Lowell, where they settled in with the existing nut orchards. After the nuts, and before the dairy, Rob’s dad raised sheep. The transition into sheep is still a bit of a mystery.

            The sheep were raised to produce wool. Every year the farm was visited by the sheep shearer. Memories of the sheep shearer still bring images of one of God’s most loathsome creations. The shearer slept and worked in a shed which would one day become known as the Cottage; for, some years later, it was remodeled into a one bedroom rental home. Social contact with the shearer was limited to the evening dinner hour when he joined the family at the dinner table. No one ever smelled as bad as that sheep shearer. He was on the farm for several days with each visit, and it took many weeks for the lingering odor to finally completely dissipate. One of Rob’s tasks during the shearing period was to bring sheep into and out of the sheep shed. While in the shed, the shearer would use long, wide bladed sheep shears to snip the wool from the sheep. The shearer’s day was spent wrestling with one sheep at a time until the floor had large piles of the wool waiting to be bagged. There was no secret where his smell came from. The sheep’s wool was loaded with lanolin, which got all over the clothes and body of the shearer. There was no casual bathing it off. In fact, the shed didn’t have a bath tub, and he wasn’t going to be allowed to use ours. The shearer was imagined to be a bit of a nomad. He would arrive one day, spend a few days, and then wander off to the next farm which needed his services. He must have had a name?

            No one lived on a farm who wasn’t involved in 4-H. Early on, Rob’s sister, Sara Jeanne, raised a Holstein heifer, which she named Daisy. Daisy was trimmed and pampered in every possible way prior to her showing at the County Fair. Memory is a bit short as to whether or not Daisy brought home any ribbons, but she turned into a fine milking cow when she finally grew up. His sister then turned her energies into culinary kitchen crafts and eventually became a gourmet chef. During Sara’s 4-H years, however, the family had to take part in her chosen fair entrée for repeated dinners until she felt it had been perfected for the fair’s judging. One year the choice was chicken cacciatore. If Rob had been the judge, he probably wouldn’t have let her enter the fair grounds.

            One year Rob decided he was going to raise a sheep for his 4-H project. Most of the sheep were black-face Suffolk. Rob chose a lamb and looked after it away from the rest of the herd. He gave it milk from a baby bottle and played with it on the back lawn. The lamb and Rob spent a lot of time together. One day his mom told him enough was enough when she discovered that the lamb had followed Rob into the house. The lamb and Rob ended up at that year’s fair. The lamb had been carefully groomed; its black hoofs had even been polished. Animal judging consisted of leading the lamb into a small corral and hoping it would stand still. Ribbons were awarded on the animal’s presentation. Perhaps the family came home with a red ribbon that year.

During this time on the farm there were only a few milking cows. The cows needed hay to supplement their diets during the winter season. Hay was cut and hauled from the N.E. corner of the hillside. This corner of the hill had a couple of acres of flatness and it was void of brush and trees. The hill was not used for anything else productive to the farm. At the lower, northwest corner of the hill, near the big corner on the road, was a natural spring which seeped out of the hillside. Water from the spring was collected in a spring box. The spring box was probably only a few feet deep and it had a gabled shake roof over its 6 foot by 8 foot perimeter. The spring box was sunk into the ground to within a few inches of its top lip and it was made of concrete. One end of the roof had a small hinged door which permitted one to look inside. It was always very dark, and the spring box seemed bottomless. The spring box was connected to a tap near the house. A pipe, of unknown type, had been deeply buried under the road, and across the large field, by the last owner of the farmland. Only once, in Rob’s memory, was the spring ever called upon to supplement drinking water for the home. However, perhaps it had been the primary source of water before the well was drilled behind the maple tree in the back yard. This wasn’t a subject which youthful minds dwelt on.  

After being cut, the field of hay on the hill lay drying for a day or two. Besides the sickle blade, which attached to the rear of the tractor, the only other tractor powered implement was the dump rake. The dump rake was the immediate processor to the windrow rake, which, like the sickle blade, was powered from the power takeoff hitch at the back of the tractor’s rear axle. The dump rake was like a giant curved comb. The comb was drug behind the tractor until it was filled with the dried, fallen hay, then the driver would pull on a cord which lifted the comb and dumped its load in a 10 foot long pile. The comb was then lowered again and the process repeated until the end of the field was reached. When headed the other direction, the driver could form rows of hay across the field.

When the raked hay was fully cured by the sun, the tractor was used to pull the hay wagon to the top of the hill to begin hay collection. This required more than one person; one to drive the tractor alongside a row, and another to pitch the hay onto the trailer with a fork. When loaded, the trailer was taken to the farm’s original lofted barn where the hay was hoisted through the loft’s gable doors to the barn’s floored second storey. Someone once took a photograph of the trailer, stacked a good 5 feet high, and topped with Rob, his brothers and sister, and the family’s guest resident child, Mary. All of the kids were filled with grins and happy to be kings and queens of the castle.

          Memories of the original barn are slight. The barn sat at the far end of the barn yard and it opened to the west with two large hinged doors on the southern edge of the front. The hay loft doors were under the gable of the roof. There are only two memories of the barn for Rob; one was for bird hunting, and the other was when it burned down. Rob’s dad kept a shotgun just inside the barn door. It was up on a shelf on the southern wall. Next to the gun was kept a box of shells. It was accepted policy that crows be discouraged to as much as possible from stealing the soon to be harvested walnuts. Shooting crows in the lower walnut orchard was nearly a daily thing. The boys were taught how to properly handle rifles at a very young age. These included the shotgun for bird hunting, the 30-30 for deer hunting, and the 22 for general target practice and plinking at gophers. On this occasion, Rob retrieved the shotgun from the barn, along with a couple of shells, and hiked down to the walnut orchard near the creek. After very little skulking around the orchard, he came upon a couple of crows in one of the trees. Prepared, Rob took careful aim and let one of the birds have it. The result wasn’t at all what he had expected. Rob hadn’t pulled the stock of the rifle tightly into his shoulder. The resulting blow by the butt of the stock left his right shoulder very sore. This was enough game control for one day. Besides, he had missed the bird and had sent those two crows, and a couple others, flying far away.

            One fall, after the loft in the barn had been filled with hay, Rob’s dad decided to make the lofting process a little easier for next season’s crop. He had designed a rope and pulley affair which would be used to lift hay up to the opened loft doors and then slide it inside. Just how it had been done before seems to be a mystery to Rob; the hay just seemed to get into the loft. His dad hired the assistance of a local welder to attach the harnessing to the barn’s gable. This is about when the best laid plans went foul. A spark from the welding landed in the nearby hay and quickly smoldered into a blaze. There is a little memory of an air filled with lots of excitement for a fairly short period of time. Rob never would remember exactly what was done in the lower part of that barn.

            Milking cows in those days was done while sitting on a stool, resting the forehead against the side of the cow, and gently pulling down on the cow’s teat while the encircled grip of the hand squeezed from the thumb and forefinger down to the pinkie. The grip was then relaxed so the teat would refill with milk and the cycle could be repeated. This was all done in an open walled shed located near where the barn once stood. The cow’s heads were locked into stanchions for their milking and they were fed fresh hay to help keep their minds off of what they could be doing with their rear feet. The whole milking process seemed to take only about an hour for the few head that the farm had.

            It is not quite certain what became of all of the milk which was harvested those evenings in the barnyard. Most of the milk was consumed during meal times. Some of the milk was treated differently in the wood shed, which was attached by a short roofed breezeway to the rear steps of the house, Rob’s mom kept a milk separator. The separator was a large open stainless steel bowl which had a crank attached beneath it. With some sort of fluid magic, when one cranked on the bowl the milk’s fat content was pulled away from the white stuff. What was created had no fat milk, but some rather thick curdy pale colored liquid. The end purpose of separating the milk from its fat was to use the fat to make butter. Lots of time was spent pumping up and down on the handle of the butter churn on the back porch of the farm house trying to convert the curd into its final buttery consistency.

            While Rob was growing up he only knew one set of grandparents, his father’s folks. He has fond, albeit short, memories of the two of them. Most memorable was the one time they visited the farm. Grandmother was fairly short, and stout. She had a very warm and laughing nature. His memory was that she seemed interested in whatever he had to visit with her about. She listened very graciously. One particular occasion stands out. He had just told her something and she reached out and pinched and wiggled his cheek and proclaimed, “Oh, that’s so ducky.” And she commenced to break into a tender giggle.

            The memory of his grandfather was a little different. The image in Rob’s mind is that his grandfather was quite tall and imposing. His dress seemed formal, being of a coat and tie, and there wasn’t the jocularity that came with grandmother. He has no memory of visiting directly with his grandfather. He was just there. Rob assumes that most of the time his dad and grandfather were visiting in the living room, while everyone else clustered about the dinner table engaged in board games.

            Nothing much is known by Rob about his mom’s folks, except that they had passed away. His mom had been born in New Jersey, so her folks must also have been American. Apparently this grandfather was a chinaware importer and his claim-to-fame, in the eyes of the grandchildren, had been that he had outfitted the Hindenburg with all of its place ware. In one corner of the dining room Rob’s dad had built a china hutch. It had framed glass doors on top and wood doors on the bottom. The white hutch fit tightly into the corner of the two walls forming the living room and dining room divider and the main dining room wall will large picture windows overlooking the eastern field and the hillside. His mom kept her special china displayed on the top shelves of the hutch. On the shelves at the bottom were kept some treasures which meant a lot to Rob. Among those treats was a slide viewer which allowed one, with a flick of the index finger, to scroll through a magical accounting of story-land characters achieving wondrous feats; such as flying on a magic carpet, or trekking in the jungles of Borneo. All of this could be enjoyed during a few recreational moments from a round disk filled with small color transparencies.

            His mom would use her china to set the table on special occasions, such as for Christmas dinner. At other times the china was just stacked in the hutch, that is, until one eventful day. Rob probably wasn’t old enough to be in school yet. His memory is that it was sometime in the afternoon. He had hunched down to open the doors to contemplate where in the World he should travel on the slide viewer. While squatting he balanced himself by holding onto the tops of the lower hutch doors. All of a sudden things came crashing down upon him. The hutch had not even tittered, it just fell over. Fortunately, there was no immediate injury to Rob. The top of the hutch had landed on his dad’s end of the table and that had protected him from being squashed. The manner in which it came to rest, however, permitted the two top doors to fly open and to expel the shelves’ contents. Most of his mom’s treasured china was ruined.

            What amazed Rob next was his parent’s reaction to the shattering noise. He of course was very scared by the event. They apparently were, too. He remembers his mom’s first action had been to insure that Rob was alright. He recalls that his dad’s concern had been similar. At the time there wasn’t a lot of discussion over this major Rob screw-up. Over the years, however, the subject would be brought up by one of his brothers, or his sister, in the form of a bad-memory jab. It sticks in his mind that the most humbling aspect of the accident was the fact that he had not been severely reprimanded for having caused it. Perhaps his folks figured he was too young to have anticipated the outcome of his pulling against the doors.      

            It’s not recalled whether the phone rang before or after the trauma created by Rob and the china hutch. What he remembers is that the telephone was just inside the doorway from the dining room into the kitchen, and that it was mounted on the wall space between the doorway and the kitchen cabinets. What had attracted Rob’s attention hadn’t been the phone ringing, but how his father had taken it. His dad was in the arms of mom and he was crying loudly. Rob had never experienced such emotion from his dad. He stood next to the two of them witnessing the calming his mom was performing to sooth the apparent hurt his dad was in. In a few moments Rob’s mom told him that his grandfather had just passed away. Rob didn’t absorb any sadness from this news. Perhaps he was too taken back at seeing his father crying.

            As Rob grew older his dad gave him more responsibilities on the dairy. During the summer months he had to move the irrigation pipe in the morning and again in the evenings. This eight hour period of strip watering brought the dairy the greenest fields in the valley. Lane County, in which the farm was located, usually received an annual rainfall of around 50 inches. The summer months, however, were usually without significant moisture. In order to keep the field grasses growing actively, the un-pastured fields required regular watering. The inner fenced sides off all of the fields were bordered with a six inch diameter aluminum pipe line. This pipe began at a creek side pump on the bank of the Big Fall Creek River. All but two of the farm’s fields shared a fence line with the river’s bank. The six inch feeder pipe was pumped full and a high level of water pressure was always maintained by the pump.

At sixty foot intervals along the feeder pipe in each field is a sprinkler riser. The riser holds a valve onto which a three inch field sprinkler line can be attached. Once the sprinkler line is laid in place in the field, water is allowed into it by turning the valve which has been placed on the riser; much like with the operation of a fire hydrant.

The first watering line is placed thirty feet away from the field’s side fence. Each of the rain bird sprinklers has a watering radius of thirty feet. There is a sprinkler attached to one end of each of the thirty foot sections of three inch pipe. An end cap is connected after the last sprinkler on the line. The idea is to have the sprinkler line just long enough to water the patch of field, but not to also water the adjacent highway. After the water has been turned off and the valve moved to the next riser on the feed line, the loose end of the first section of sprinkler pipe was raised a few inches off the ground, pushed, and then turned to release its connection from the next piece. Once the pipe had been separated it needed to be drained. Since Rob began this daily chore at such a young age he had difficulty lifting those heavy water filled sections of pipe above his head to drain them. This had to be done before he could balance the empty thirty foot long pieces and move them to their next position. His dad had placed white markers at sixty foot intervals on the roadside fence so that the new line’s location was properly spaced. This procedure happened every day, once in the morning and again in the late afternoon, in all fields which weren’t being used by the herd.

One of the certainties of each fall was that Rob, together with his younger brother, Bill, or friends, would build a hay fort. The fort had to be located in just the right place at the top of the stack, in the barn full of new bales. Location was important for reasons of convenient access, as well as to ensure its survival. Building a fort in the center of the hay stack would have been foolish, because that is where the bales were first drawn to feed the cows below. Somewhere near the front corner was usually the best location.

            Once the loft area was decided, then came the clearing of several layers of bales to facilitate placement of the entry tunnel and the fort’s main room. The boys could sit inside a fort which had a ceiling which was two bales high. Care had to be made in the layout of the main room. For the room to be wider than the single bale-wide tunnel there had to be provision to stack the hay over the room’s expanse. This usually meant some bales were in the middle of the floor of the fort to suspend the covering bales.

            Naturally, each of the boys had been cautioned, repeatedly, not to build hay forts. This was because of the real danger of collapse. Rob, of course, knew how to build a fort which wouldn’t collapse. In fact, he, and his brother and friends, spent many hours inside these hay forts enjoying the magic of adventure brought together with flashlights and comic books.

Looking back there was only one calamity of note which happened in or around the forts. One fall Rob and his brother, Bill, decided they would have a gun fight around their new OK Corral. The best of warring intentions were meant by both boys at the time. Rob was making a retreat from the area of the fort when he received a wound to his lower shoulder. Bill had hit him with a pellet from his B-B gun. Rob could have followed through with their game, after receiving the near mortal wound, by tumbling down the front of the hay stack, but instead, he turned and complained to his brother about not playing fair. Years later there was still a small mark which could be attributed to that cowboy and Indian brouhaha.

By the age of nine Rob had been promoted to driving the tractor when it was being used to pull the farm’s large flat hay trailer. The 50-acre dairy had five irrigated pastures. Up to 80 head of cattle would spend several weeks on a particular pasture, and then that field would be shut down to be irrigated and re-grown and the cows would be rotated to another field. In the late spring there were always one or two fields which hadn’t seen the cattle. Those fields had been set aside to grow and mature for a hay crop. It seemed to go without fail that by early June, and again in late summer, the hay would be cut. To be a successful farmer one must also become a meteorologist. Rob’s father seemed rarely to miss the call as to when the best time was to mow the fields.

So, as the hay wagon tractor driver, Rob would slowly drive from bale to bale while his dad and older brother, Dave, hoisted the 50 pound string tied bales onto the trailer and pile them into an interlocking and stable stack. Starting with the bales at the outside of the field, he would drive around and around creating a diminishing spiral as the outer reaches of the field were cleared. This would continue until the trailer had four layers of bales, or about 100. Then, the trailer loaded with new, beautifully fresh smelling hay, would be slowly pulled to the hay barn. With considerable trailer readjusting, lots of quality coaching, and sufficient brotherly haranguing, Rob would eventually get the loaded trailer backed into the barn. By the end of the day the barn was swelling with the new crop and everyone sat at the dinner table that evening with darkened tans, a little bit of hay dust grime, and lots of personal pride.

Getting hay into the barn was preceded by several very important and labor intensive steps. These included: cutting, raking, and bailing the tall fescue and clover grasses. It all begins with mowing. Rob grew into the responsibility of operating the haying equipment as he began his high school years. Milking, moving pipe and haying were all a part of growing up on the dairy. This was expected life on the farm.

            The first lap around a field with the tractor and mower blade is always the most anxious and difficult. The mower blade is released from its vertical traveling mode and now it hangs horizontal above the tall grass at the right hand rear of the tractor. The entire blade assembly is attached to the tractor’s three point hitch and can be raised or lowered as needed. The sawing action of the blade is driven by the tractor’s power take-off gear. The power take-off drive is initially engaged with a lever and then started and stopped by releasing or depressing the clutch. 

The field’s opening cut is done going counter clockwise with the tip of the blade tracking as close to the fence as possible. Once the fence line is cut the remainder of the field is driven going clockwise. This way, the tractor is always driving over the last swath to be cut and it isn’t crushing standing grass. The blade has many pointed shoes which allow it to slide on the ground without stubbing in the dirt, while at the same time guiding grass into the rapidly sawing blades.

Rob’s father taught the boys how to maintain and repair the farm equipment they were expected to operate. Regular greasing and inspections were part of every day’s process during the haying season. The spearhead shaped mower blades needed to be kept extremely sharp so they wouldn’t clog with uncut grass as the blade arm was traveling invisibly beneath the newly cut hay. Occasionally, however, the blade did get jammed. When this happened the blade arm would automatically break away from its perpendicular angle to the tractor’s side and swing towards the rear. This action was meant to prevent compounding a problem caused by a stopped blade. Having stopped the tractor the first order of business was safety. The power take-off lever must be put into neutral. The blade arm was then unclogged and swung back and re-latched. The cause for grass jamming was always found to be a dull or nicked blade head that had been injured as a result of running through a gopher mound. Backing up the tractor to the point where the jam happened, lowering the blade arm and re-engaging the power take-off prepared the driver to resume cutting.

Once the freshly cut hay lay on the ground it needed two to three additional days of fair weather  to properly dry it, bale it, and haul it to the barn. After the grass had been cut there seemed to always be a lot of additional looking up at the sky. Maybe it was an act of speaking to the rain gods and praying that the fair and drying weather would continue for the additional short time needed.

The fields were always cut in the morning. This allowed the grass to dry out as it lay in the afternoon sun. If the weather was hot enough, the field was ready the next morning to rake into wind rows. The wind-row rake replaced the mower on the three point hitch and power take-off of the tractor. This equipment is a string of spinning wheels with steel tines, or fingers that toss the grass to the side. In this way a swath of cut grass is formed into a fluffed up row that is a couple of feet wide and perhaps just as tall, depending on the density of grass in the field. The formed row can now benefit by getting air circulation which speeds drying. Again, depending on the day’s temperature the wind-rows may need to sit for a day or two. Also, if the grass was very thick the rows may have to be turned once again to bring the grass at the bottom to the top for proper drying. Ironically, Rob’s dad always insisted that raking the new hay always be done in the morning while there may still be a bit of overnight dew moisture on the grass. The reason given was to preserve the integrity of the clover and to not lose their leaves in the tossing process.

A second purpose of the wind-row step is to prepare the loose hay for easy feeding into the gaping mouth of the hay bailer. The bailer is towed like a trailer and is subject to similar limitations when turned in the field. The mouth of the bailer will swing out on a wider than the tractor does when making a corner. For this reason the windrows need to be formed carefully at the bends. Rob’s day scolded easily if the tractor was not slowed down as the raked corners were formed. Driving too fast on a corner would cause the hay to be thrown and spread out onto the ground. This meant having to re-rake on the other side of the row to properly shape the mound and create a good radius for feeding the bailer.

Using the bailer to take in, cut to width, and hammer into a 50 pound rectangular prism secured with two carefully knotted lengths of string is an energizing process to watch happen to dried grass. The large spinning wheel driving the hammer’s fulcrum creates an endless surging of motion and noise as it pulses and jerks the forward motion of the tractor down a windrow. The large Briggs & Stratton engine revs as its governed carburetion system senses a heavy loading condition. A large wire brush across the funneled mouth of the bailer sweeps the interwoven windrow up and into a spinning spiral drum that directs the hay into the bailer’s chamber of death. At the end of the surging fulcrum is a large cubic steel head. With each spin of the large wheel the head plunges into and then retreats from a wear polished tunnel. Inside the tunnel the hay delivered by the spiral drum is cut to width and packed onto the preceding mass. In a few moments, with metric precision, a pair of pointed needle arms swing from underneath and carry the line of bailing string up and through the packed hay to a set of well adjusted knotting assemblies. Once wrapped and knotted the completed bail is pushed further to the rear with each impact of the hammer as more hay is packed in. Eventually, the bail falls from the rear and is left to lie in the newly cleaned section of the field.

The speed the bailer is pulled depends on the thickness of the windrow. When large interwoven sections of hay are drawn into the bailer it is important to press down the clutch and slow movement. If the fulcrum drive wheel is put under too much of a load, it will cause the fracture of cotter pins. The pins are designed to sheer and thus prevent severe mechanical breakage. When this happens the hammering stops instantly, the motor’s rpm revs up and the wheel spins freely. During the ensuing repair time the machinery cools down and the bailing window of opportunity begins to close.

When you are bailing hay there are three directions you can be driving on the field: upwind, crosswind, and downwind. For Rob, the worst part of the entire haying season was pulling the bailer downwind. He remembers the clouds of dust that suddenly struck the sweaty back of his neck and made him shudder, bringing goose bumps to his arms the moment the track shifted to downwind. He recalls, also, the enjoyment of the relief he felt when the tractor once again turned upwind or crosswind. If it hadn’t been for the downwind dust collection, the end of a proud bailing day would have just been another sweaty experience.    

None of the boys had chores involving the cattle on school day mornings. For the evening milking they took turns bringing the cows in from the fields to the loafing shed. The loafing shed was simply a tin roofed corral that was attached to the western end of the hay barn. The shed had a narrow entry ramp that guided the cows into the milking house. The shed was mucked out daily by Rob or one of his brothers. When the pile of corral refuse grew large enough it was loaded with the tractor front shovel into the manure spreader. When the spreader filled it was pulled to a vacant field where the content was flayed in a showering fashion from the rear of the spreader. This waste recycling in this manner ensured adequate nourishment for the grasses. A pile of sawdust was kept just outside the corral so that a fresh, dry layer could be spread on the ground for the animal’s ritual loafing and cud chewing comfort.

This was a Grade-A dairy. What that meant was everything had to be kept very clean, even the cattle. During the wet months keeping things clean always turned into a messy business. The ramps which led from the fields to the loafing shed were all up-hill from the fields. The ramps weren’t maintained in the manner of the shed and they would acquire up to a foot or more of mucky refuse near the bottom. One evening while Rob was bringing the herd to the loafing shed for milking he walked in the field beside an old slow Guernsey. This cow had been with the herd for as long a Rob could remember. All of the cows had either names or ear tags with numbers. This identification was important for record keeping. With each name was connected a behavior personality that was unique to that animal. This cow was always very mellow and quite unafraid of people. He touched the cow’s shoulder and the cow stopped. Then he ungracefully climbed up on to the cow’s back. No additional direction was given to the cow. It slowly plodded along and carried Rob all the way into the shed. Even though he wore knee high rubber boots, Rob wasn’t going to take a chance that they might not be adequate for the depths of the waste at the bottom of the ramps. Those were certainly times he would always remember. 

            During the wettest of the winter months the daily treks to and from the fields were minimized. The grass was growing too slow to properly maintain the herd. Instead, the cows were kept penned in the corral and had the luxury of grazing on that summer’s hay crop. The hay was dropped into a large wooden trough from the top most reaches of the stack in the barn. One of the boys would break the bails and spread the hay evenly from one length of the trough to the other. The cows would then be able to stick their heads through evenly spaced stanchions on the intervening barrier wall and munch to their content. When they became either filled to their content, or bumped out of the stanchion by another animal, the cows would meander into the loafing shed to spend several hours regurgitating the crop and chewing their cuds. 

Hay wasn’t the only sustenance the cattle received during the winter months. His dad would also fill the two adjoining silos with ground field-corn. Field-corn is not much different from table corn except that it doesn’t ripen to become as sweet an ear. I don’t think anyone has ever asked a cow what her sweet tooth was like.

Rob’s dad always set aside the same lower field to raise the corn crop. This field was known by all as the orchard field. The original stands of English walnut trees once grew in this field. The hardest part of the late summer corn harvest was the need to use a machete to cut the corn stalks. This was definitely a Rambo kind of thing, albeit before Rambo’s time. The stalks were cut close to the ground and laid into piles with heads all pointing the same way. The large flat hay wagon was loaded with a high stack of the corn. The corn was carried to the barnyard near the silos. During the ride to the silos we would all cut off pieces of corn and suck the sweet sugar nectar from the stock.

The loaded trailer was parked alongside the International Harvester. This large, noisy, dangerous, and very orange piece of farm equipment is normally pulled in the field behind a tractor and used to cut, chop, and blow the plant product into a trucked container. The harvester has a six foot wide cutting blade; a continuously turning conveyor belt; a very nasty set of high speed spinning blades; and a large, governed, Briggs & Stratton engine. Whatever got a ride up the conveyor belt of this beast came out as minced meat from the blower tube at the rear end. This is how the corn stalks became silage. Lacking a suitable truck, the corn was hand cut and the harvester was left parked at the base of the silos. The stalks were fed by hand and blown out onto a conveyor belt which went from the ground to the top of the silos, where its load was shunted into one silo or the other. As the chopped corn made its way toward the silo, it was lacquered with a coating of molasses and sprinkled with a rabbit pellet form of nutrient meal. These two additives ensured proper nutrition and a palatable meal for the cattle.

            There was a down side to putting up the silage. After a load had been sent up to the silo it had to be leveled out and packed down. This chore prepared the silo for the next load. This was sticky, icky work. Rob would climb up the silo’s ladder, jump in and start marching around in circles. Once the perimeter was packed, he had to scrape from the domed center to begin to level it out. The result was: scrape a while, and then stamp a while, until it was flat, and packed. He would come with his legs and hands sticky, stinky, and messy. It was interesting that as the winter wore on the odors from the silos got better and better as the sugary concoction began to ferment. On colder days when the silage was pitch forked out from the top it would land steaming on the cement deck below. Indeed, Rob thought, if I were a cow, I would have very much enjoyed this crunchy cocktail for lunch.

            Rob didn’t mind adding additional responsibilities as he aged. During a period of the last two years of his high school he and his best friend, Mike Legault, volunteered and were given the responsible for doing all of the evening milking, changing all of the pipe, and cutting, bailing, and stowing all of the summer’s hay. They were rewarded for their work, of course, and that was good. But the most valuable thing about the extra work was that Rob got to share it all with his best friend. Rob’s mother and father did not have opportunities to take time off as a result of their commitments to the cattle and the land. They got a breather while Rob and Mike tended to many of the daily chores. These times with his friend were always serious, but they were also up-beat and fun.

            Life wasn’t all work on the dairy. During his sophomore and junior years Rob build a hot rod. Nobody in Lowell back then was into anything cool if it didn’t have something to do with their first car; either lower the front end, put noisy mufflers on it, or customized the metal work in some way.

Grandma and Grandpa Leslie lived on the farm next to the dairy. Their grand daughters, Katherine and Janet spent many weeks each summer on the Leslie farm and were very dear friends of Rob’s sister, Sara. The two neighboring families had been close friends from the beginning. In the early 50’s television was just starting to appear in some of the nearby homes. The Leslies had been retired for many years and this new form of evening entertainment filled an important need for them. Rob’s folks were nowhere close to accepting television into their home. The family still clustered on the living room floor at the base of the Stromberg Carlson radio and listened to daily episodes of The Lone Ranger and other narrated entertainment wonders.

Once it became known that the Leslies had purchased a TV set there was short lived peace in Rob’s home. He and his brothers ganged up on the parents and finally won a concession to visit the Leslies on one evening each week to watch a program. This tradition lasted a long time. Before they left home to walk down the hill to the Leslies, Rob’s mom would give one of the boys some money to put in the Leslie’s church donation jar. Grandma Leslie usually spent the majority of the time of our visit cooking in the kitchen. The once a week visit was always a double header treat: TV, and warm, freshly baked cookies.

When Rob was fifteen he was hit by the car bug. He knew just where to go to get his first car. It had been several years since Grandpa Leslie had done any driving. Rob knew that Grandpa Leslie still kept his last “old reliable” in the garage next to their house. It had been a long time since the car had seen the light of day. So, down to the Leslie’s he walked. There was a two-lane trail which went from the garage at the dairy, across the lower field, and over a rickety plank bridge that spanned the small creek running from the highway to the Big Fall Creek River. Across the bridge lived the Leslies.

Grandpa Leslie was home, and he was delighted to have Rob look at his car. There was no reservation in Grandpa Leslie’s cordial visit that suggested Rob shouldn’t buy the car. Of course it was for sale, and he should get it; but for how much? This sort of bargaining wasn’t something Rob had any experience doing. I think Grandpa Leslie read that fact straight away and played seriously on the importance of setting the price just right for both parties. So, Grandpa Leslie came to a decision on what the fairest price would be. Rob bought his first car for $25.

Now, for a 15-year old back then $25 was no small investment. An agreement for a work advance was made with his dad, and the money was quickly taken down to Grandpa Leslie. The car required a little attention because it had been stored for such a long time. The tires needed air and the battery had to be charged. In short order it was backed out of its old home and was driven to the garage of its new home. One day this Plymouth would be noticed around the neighborhood.

Today, this car would fetch thousands of dollars, even as it sat that day in the Leslie’s garage.  Specifically, it was a 1936 Plymouth 4-door sedan. The interior had a very plain and simple dashboard and it had gray fuzzy fabric bench seats in front and back. The rear doors opened into the wind and the car carried a dull green paint that looked like it had never been polished. The engine was a straight six and there were raised headlights mounted on the thick steel fenders. No one thought about how many miles this car had seen; to the church and to the store and back for 30 some years. It wouldn’t have added up to that many miles. The upholstery was in very good condition. It was not torn or stained. The body was likewise unblemished, just a dull green.

In 1959 the price of gasoline at the Unity station was 25 cents a gallon. The motor seemed to run ok, but without a driver’s license Rob was limited with what he could do with the car. The public highway restriction didn’t end up to be much of a problem. The 50-acre dairy seemed to have limitless tractor trails that Rob knew by heart. Driving in the lower pastures wasn’t ideal, but it provided an outlet opportunity for Rob to get to know his new car.

It was perhaps just a few weeks after Rob had the car that his older brother, Dave, took it out for a spin. As a matter of fact, his brother may not have even asked if he could use it. Rob doesn’t remember ever being told exactly what happened to the car, but the next day it sat in the garage with a ruined engine. This was sad, but there was never any discussion about seeing to its immediate repair. Rob was going to take this opening to replace the broken engine with a better one.

After what must have been a tedious task at the time, it was finally decided that the replacement engine would be a 1952 Chrysler Hemi-Head V8. The transmission would be changed to a LaSalle 3-speed on the floor. And the rear end would be converted to a Ford type with a 4:11 gear ratio. Now, it turned out that Rob had already secured leads at Eugene area junk yards where these pieces of hardware could be bought. Through an intra-family debit plan, all of the replacement parts were purchased.

Across the road, and up the hill lived a blacksmith. If there was ever anything which needed to be fabricated with metal at the dairy, Mr. Billingslee would get a visit. It was with Mr. Billingslee’s help that Rob got new motor mounts made. The transmission had to be interfaced with the bell housing of the motor. And a drive shaft that mated the transmission on one end and the new differential on its other end had to be constructed. Mr. Billingslee helped Rob work this all out.

One of the new engine installation details Rob had not given any thought to was just how wide the large hemi V8 motor was compared to the original in-line six cylinder engine. It was quickly discovered that the fenders couldn’t be remounted because the V8’s heads were in the way. The Plymouth’s hood was tapered down from the width of the windshield at the rear to the width of the radiator at the front. The remedy was obvious; the fenders had to be notched out to make room for the heads. Also, as a result of the size of the new engine, the hood would no longer close to the fenders on the sides, so the car would be driven without a hood. This didn’t strike Rob at the time as being a bad thing.

A year had passed since Rob had bought the car and he now had his driver’s license. The car was almost ready to go. Some of the final detail work was done at Brinkman’s Garage, in Lowell, where Mike and his dad helped with some final carburetor linkage details. Having never started the Chrysler engine, Rob decided that it should have two 4-barrel carburetors instead of just one. The twin manifold was the only modification done to the stock motor. Two seemed at the time to be much better than one. The motor gods must have been in the garage that afternoon. The car fired up with no difficulty. There didn’t appear to be any need to dwell on fine tuning or laborious adjustments, it was time to take the car to the street.

The fuel pumps at the Brinkman garage sat a little lower than the surface of the main road through Lowell. There was perhaps a small bit of driver’s exuberance when the Plymouth’s rear wheels crested over from the gravel onto the pavement. The tires squealed and smoked for about fifty feet. There must have been some adjustment needed on the linkage to those two carburetors.

After work on Saturday night Rob and a couple of his friends would decide whose car would be used to go to Eugene in. They would then pool their gas money, top up at the service station and head for town on Hwy. 58. Saturday night was when young men strutted with their cars to both admire and be admired for what they have created. The favored route through the gut of downtown Eugene was to start at 6^th & Willamette Streets and noisily motor from stop light to stop light out one-way Willamette Street to Thirtieth Street and the A&W root beer restaurant. The A&W parking lot was generally full, but if the guys were lucky enough they would back into a space and be able to watch and comment about the many cars that would follow them through without being able to stop. Root beer mugs were delivered to the opened car window and left of a door tray. Long periods of time were spent on Saturday evenings sipping sodas and verbally redesigning every car that passed in front.

After each car in the circuit that night had been seen at least once, it was time to head back to downtown. The return to 6^th Street was just as exciting as the Willamette trek had been. At 18^th Avenue the street from the A&W stopped being a two-way road and required one to continue to 6^th via Oak Street.  There was never any discussion why this was a traditional thing for all the guys to do back then. It wasn’t just the boys from Lowell who showed up, but guys on the street represented all of the rural towns from the greater Eugene area. In retrospect, there was always a lot of pride and ego associated with having what you believed was a really cool car. Overtly, “dragging the gut” was for the singular purpose of meeting girls. However, nothing seemed to ever happen, except maybe some yells as we passed a car full of chicks, or maybe the opportunity to park beside a carload of girls having a root beer at the A&W.

            Rob never seemed to do any homework during his high school years. He would only put enough energy into his studies to get at least a grade of C. To Rob, school was an obligation. He enjoyed the opportunities to hang out with his friends during classes and at the lunch hour. There just weren’t any classes that caught his interest or any teachers who inspired him.

Rob had been playing the coronet in the grade school band and he continued with band class in high school. Music was a large part of his family’s home life. His father had been a drummer in a band he had put together while in college and his mother was a very accomplished pianist. The kids were all expected to select an instrument they wanted to learn to play. Each youngster was also automatically going to be part of the grade school music program. Rob remembers observing his dad tapping his fingers on the arms of his oak chair near the fire place. During the rare moments he was found to be relaxing, Rob’s dad enjoyed listening to music and mimicking the role of the drummer in the song.

Rob’s mother was much more reserved in her musical tastes. Perhaps that came naturally from playing the piano instead of the drums. Her favorite music times were when she was by herself in the house. She had a 33-1/3 record player and a large collection of classical “elevator” music. Rob would come into the house, hear the music, and find his mother lounging for a spell in the living room enjoying a book. She was an avid reader and she always found time to make reading a part of her day.  

            The years Rob was in high school his class size had only a few more than twenty students. During the early 1950s the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers built Lookout Point Dam on the Willamette River. The town of Lowell sat on the northern bank of the Willamette about 25 miles east of Eugene, and it is located at the northwesterly base of the dam. The dam was the world’s largest earth filled dam to be built at that time. The two main purposes for its construction were for flood control and the generation of electricity. The reservoir behind Lookout Point backed water on the Willamette for ten or more miles along side Highway 58, which linked Eugene to Oakridge and points east. Lowell grew during the construction years of the dam. The town reached a population of 1000, and it became a city. A city the size of Lowell is still a very small place.

Most of the kids in high school had been together since the 1^st grade. Within the ranks of the two dozen students there were cliques. The cliques weren’t conscious social separations, but just kids who had more in common together than with the others. The group that Rob tended to hang out with most was composed of the boys and girls who were more socially alive in school activities. Somehow Rob ended up being elected the junior class President. He is not certain today just how that came about. However, the other officers in that year’s leadership group were also part of the crowd he always hung out with. There was never anything of special significance decided or created for the junior class that year.

In the spring of his junior year Rob went out for track. Sprinting seemed to be his forte and he was very good in the 50-yard dash. Rob also contributed well for the Lowell Red Devils in the relay events. Throughout his life Rob had always been skinny. Putting on weight was just not in the cards he had been dealt.  His dad had been a football star for his college team in Detroit and as it was with music, football was something each of the boys needed to try out for. Rob went out for football. During the short season that year he got to see action in one home game. The coach had put him in as a defensive guard. Putting Rob in a football uniform was really kind of silly. He couldn’t have weighed even 120 pounds back then. That sporting activity didn’t last long.

            Rob was a star during gym class. Because he was so light, and because he was always doing heavy work on the dairy, his body was very well toned. Rob excelled on the bars and on the rope. He could do an endless number of chin-ups, and he was the only guy in the class who could climb the rope to the top of the gym without using his feet. Rob was also one of the only kids who could do double back flips on the trampoline. One night during a basketball halftime the coach had the trampoline brought out for entertainment. Rob and a couple of other students got to show their skills in front of the home and visiting fans. He did alright that night.

            School changed for Rob at the start of his senior year. He had been elected Student Body President. He remembers being stopped one day late in his junior year by Fred McDaniels while they were on the covered walkway between the band room and the main building. Fred was a senior and a year ahead of Rob. He asked if he could be Rob’s campaign manager for a run at being president next year. Rob had not given any thought to running, but he agreed they should try.

The campaign speeches were coming up soon. This was when those running for office had to give their pitches to the entire student body assembled in the gym bleachers. Rob had prepared the outline of his speech on a 3x5 card and he remembers going over it with his mom one evening at the dining room table. Most of his talk centered on creating a good image of the high school in the eyes of the Lowell community. Some of the speech was about maintaining strong academic standards for the student body. Giving this public presentation was a very nervous event. He doesn’t remember who his opposition had been during that race, nor by how much he had won, but in the process of winning that election Rob had unwittingly set new and high expectations for himself for the coming senior year, and he knew that speech writing wasn’t going to be part of his future.

Being chosen to be the leader of the entire student body was a responsibility that finally morphed Rob into becoming a real student. For the first time in high school he began earning grades that were higher than a C. All of a sudden he was getting A’s in some of his studies. Rob was no longer the class clown and goof-off. He discovered he was walking with pride in the halls of Lowell High School.

Each year during the graduation ceremonies several students were selected to represent specific positive traits which caused them to stand out among their classmates. Some specific selections were: the most cordial, the best dressed, the most studious, for example. What committee did the choosing for these distinctions was left a mystery. This year, Rob was chosen to be the most likely to succeed. What an honor that was for him. 

 

                                         UNIVERSITY

 

            The fall after graduation Rob found that he was one of less than a handful of kids who went on to college. Rob had decided before starting at the university that he was going to major in chemistry. He discovered that chemistry had been the only class that really sparked his interest in high school. He doesn’t know today whether that interest came from the enchantment of the study of how things were structured, or whether it came from some magic in the way Mr. Gustafson taught it.

            His first term at the University of Oregon was not an academically successful one. Rob ended the term with a D; in both his general chemistry and in the first year math course. When the rubber met the road, Rob realized that having just coasted through his high school classes had taught him nothing about the rigor of study that would be needed to be successful in college. This was also the first time Rob had ever lived away from home, excepting the occasional summer camps with his scout troop. Every freshman going to the U of O had to either live at home or stay in a dormitory for the first year. Rob was assigned to Omega Hall and to a roommate named Marshall Hunter. He and Marshall had little in common. Marshall had been recruited by the school to be a punter for the football team. He seemed to spend most of his time in the dorm visiting with other residents, or practicing his punting techniques in the dorm room or the hallway. Marshall had good follow through form when he kicked. His toes reached above his head and almost touched the ceiling. Getting settled in to a good study routine took a while for Rob.

During that first Christmas break he must have reflected a lot on where he was headed, because Rob never repeated his first term grade report. His freshman year finished with a GPA a little above average. During the year he had befriended a boy who lived in the Eugene area. The student’s name was Lynn Bertelsen. Lynn had also been raised on a farm and his interest was to go into animal medicine and become a Vet. Lynn had a brother whom Rob had been introduced to who was a pharmacist. The tie in seemed logical, pharmacy was at its core just chemistry. During the summer between school years the decisions were made. Lynn needed to be studying at an agricultural school, like Oregon State University in Corvallis, and degrees in pharmacy were only offered in Oregon at OSU. Rob and Lynn agreed to team up the coming year as apartment roommates in Corvallis.

The sophomore year at OSU was much more settled. Rob had a roommate who was a serious student and that quickly encouraged a good study routine. Another year of chemistry, more mathematics, a few introductory pharmacy classes with labs, and a number of additional liberal arts core classes made up Rob’s study year. All was not academics, though. Because Rob and Lynn lived off campus, at the northern edge of the city, they were committed to spending non-class time and lunch on the campus.

Similar to the Student Union at the U of O, OSU had a center called the Memorial Union. The MU had a cafeteria and it was the social hub of the campus. Special tables became coveted spots for coffee, light study, and visiting. Faces in the MU started to become common to Rob, and some of them even anticipated. One girl in particular seemed to always catch his eye. She was a petite black haired beauty who always seemed to have a smile. In time, Rob finally gained enough courage to make introductions. Her name was Anne, and she came from Oakridge, which is just a few miles east of Lowell.  

            Four years later, graduation came on schedule. That early June day in 1966 Rob mustered with the entire graduating class on the lawns across from the Student Union. They were all wearing their robes and were organized into groups that would sit together after walking to Hayward Field for their diploma presentations. There was a gray cloud in Rob’s head that day. One of the requirements for a degree in Chemistry was to have taken a year of German language study. Actually, the requirement was to have passed a year of German. This language came very hard for Rob. Final grades had not yet been posted for the year’s third term and he did not feel confident he had done sufficiently well. 

At the ceremony Rob accepted his token Bachelor of Sciences degree in Chemistry with trepidation. The folder graduates were handed actually contained no certificates, those would be mailed later. This procedure avoided delivery errors and kept the pace of congratulations by the Dean of Students moving quickly. The anticipated notice did arrive, and Rob had indeed passed his German class.

Attending university after high school wasn’t something Rob remembered being talked about at the dinner table.  As it was for doing jobs on the dairy, it seemed to Rob that it was just something that was to be expected of the kids. His sister, Sara, had graduated a few years earlier from OSU and was now married and living with her new Army husband. Rob’s dad had gone to college in Michigan where he received a Civil Engineering degree, and his mom had studied at prestigious Vasser. Rob was very fortunate that his mom and dad had put aside monies to pay for him to attend university. There wasn’t any family contract regarding how the money spent for his education would be repaid. Rob took it for granted that he would work, as usual, during the summer months.

Reflecting back on all of those years working on the dairy, he had never received a wage. Rob would simply go to his mom whenever he needed a little money for his car, or to cover for a date. There was no direct cost to Rob for gasoline. It had come out of the same farm tank that fed the tractor and the other machinery. There seemed to be an unspoken code between him and his folks; work hard and don’t waste money. Well, not too much money. This had meant that the only work Rob had to do while at school was to study and learn.

            Back then, all males, 18 or older, were eligible for military draft. Everyone going to college automatically received a 4F deferment from the military. This meant hands off from the enlistment centers. When schooling finished, however, the deferment went away and, if you didn’t sign up in one of the other three branches, then you would automatically get drafted into the Army. America was actively involved in Vietnam at the time and the Army wasn’t going to be Rob’s choice.

Deer hunting season around Lowell was something all of the community looked forward to each autumn. Rob was no exception. Before each hunting season he would renew his skills with the Winchester Mdl.94, 30-30. On a couple of years his father had hired someone he could train to tend to milking the cows while he took the family on a short hunting/camping trip, usually to some remote location in the eastern Oregon bush country. All years, though, we did some deer hunting on the hillside of the farm. Up until the start of hunting season there was always a small herd of deer that would jump the fence near the woods at the field across the road and spend the early evening and night consuming dad’s pasture. They either listened to the news or heard the practice rifle shots, because they seemed to eat at some other restaurant once the season started.

Carrying a rifle wasn’t something Rob wanted to do as a vocation. After graduation he signed up with the Air Force at the recruiter’s office in Eugene. What pending airman doesn’t want to fly airplanes? Rob was given a pilot aptitude test by the recruiter and he was not successful. His alternative choice was electronics. That opportunity of study was guaranteed to him upon his commissioning from the Officer Training School (OTS). Entering the military with a college degree automatically meant one was eligible  to become an officer if desired. There was no doubt in Rob’s mind that an officer’s road was going to be a better way to travel the next four years.

 

                                    TEXAS & MISSISSIPPI

 

OTS was a very rigorous three month long boot camp in the hottest and stickiest part of Texas at Lackland Air Force Base, on the out skirts of San Antonio. While he waited for the date to arrive and he had to report in at Lackland, Rob tried to prepare himself physically for the endeavor. He ran every day on the road and he left for Texas in fairly good shape. 

Rob traded in the Austin Healy 3000 he drove in college and he bought a new Karman Ghia from the Salem VW dealership. The first night on his trip south brought him under “The Biggest Little City” sign that arched across Virginia Street in downtown Reno. He remembers driving on Virginia Street; windows rolled down, the evening’s hot desert air against his face, and the cacophony of machine noises coming from the open front casinos. He found a motel with a vacancy at the south end of the street. After checking in for the night Rob walked back to the casino strip. It was like magic, on the sidewalk it was still hot, but when you walked through an invisible cold air curtain the heat went away. On some of the casinos a large section of the street side wall was open and environmentally separated from outdoors by the downward air flow from enormous fans.

The OTS experience was academic and physical. It was menial and nitpicky. The officer trainees arose early, made bunks that had to bounce quarters, sprayed Pledge on all surfaces and wiped them down to remove any dust, and performed their assigned barrack duties. Rob’s job was to clean the latrine. University training hadn’t offered Toilet Cleaning 101, but he became good at it. While breakfast was being consumed, Rob’s squadron commander, a First Lieutenant, would inspect his section of the barracks. If the room was not prepared correctly, or the latrine wasn’t cleaned satisfactorily, then he would issue gig slips to the offending trainee. Rob only received a few demerit points during his stay.

The mornings at OTS were for lectures and classroom work. There was a several minute break between classes. During some of these very short periods Rob was able to collapse on his bunk and achieve a couple of minutes of very deep sleep. Then it was back to the classroom. In the afternoon there was always calisthenics on the practice field. Exercise involved pushups, stretching, pushups, jumping jacks, pushups, and running. When Rob completed OTS he was more physically fit than he ever thought he could be. Rob was the only Second Lieutenant in his training unit who had actually gained weight during the training. He peaked out at 156 pounds. Rob was also then able to run the mile in a low five minute time. His earlier track training, and a strong set of lungs, had paid off.

            Rob said the most exciting part about graduating from OTS was when the gold bars were pinned to his collars and the new officers got to throw their uniform caps into the air after the commissioning ceremony. It was customary that a few of Lackland’s support airmen would be at the parade field after the ordeal. If they were the first uniformed person to salute you, then you were expected to reward them with a dollar. Rob doesn’t remember the name of the sergeant who crisply snapped him a salute as he walked by. 

There was a little over a week’s time before Rob needed to report to his new training base in Biloxi, Mississippi. He was assigned to training in his field of choice – electronics. He would be stationed at Biloxi for at least one year of communications and electronics schooling. When finished with this training he would be next assigned as a 3031, or Communications/Electronics Officer.

            The curriculum of training was set up in weekly and bi-weekly modules. When one tested out of a module, he went to the next. The school had a fast track program which offered the opportunity to advance through modules at one’s own pace. Rob had to prove his capability, though, before he was accepted to enroll in the fast track program.  He went to the school’s commander and asked for the fast track training option. The commander asked him only one question, “What is the definition of a diode?” Rob remembers that he was blown away by the simplicity of the question. Because of his senior year of study in physical chemistry and physics, he knew all about the elementary components of electronics. His request was granted.

            Rob lived off base with two school roommates in an apartment on a strip of the beach highway called Pascagula, Mississippi. Pascagula was about ten miles to the west of Biloxi. This never really seemed like a town to Rob, but rather just a collection of homes and apartment complexes across the road from the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. He and his roommates kept separate daily schedules and they often never crossed paths. Living on the beach had its benefits, however. Rob spent many weekend hours lounging on the sand developing a first class tan. His focus on study and hard work during the duty at Biloxi shaved three months off of the one year course. What had never occurred to Rob during his studying, and it wasn’t something he was working toward, and he learned about it upon completing the last day of the final module. The instructor announced that Rob had finished number one in his class of graduates. Now that his preparatory training was done, Rob was ready to see what the Air Force had in mind for him.

            The school’s administrative offices were located in what seemed like a little shack. Rob seldom ventured anywhere on the base that didn’t have to do with his schooling. As a result, he didn’t know what to expect as far as how the buildings were presented. On one occasion, Rob and another Lieutenant found themselves on a road near a small radar dome. This was no accident. They brought along a couple of fluorescent light tubes to wave at the dome. They had read that radar waves would excite the fluorescent gas in the tube and cause it to light up. It is true. What the two officers held in their hands was really the precursor to Star War light sabers- Men before their times.

The administration building had a short hallway. On the wall were posted the graduate’s first full-time active duty assignments. The place was crowded with eager Lieutenants trying to scope a non-hassled view of their destiny. There he was. What Rob read next to his name didn’t make any sense. What was he going to do at Headquarters U.S. Air Force Command? And where was Suitland, Maryland? Scanning the entire list, Rob noticed that he was the only officer who had been picked for this place. This may not be a choice assignment to start off with.

            During the next month Rob was on leave. In the Air Force each officer accrued a month of leave a year. During this first of his military vacations Rob came home to marry his college sweetheart. Anne was a most beautiful and fun filled girl. They had met during his sophomore year of study at Oregon State University. They quickly became a steady couple. When Rob left OSU it was because he realized that a career as a pill sorter wasn’t going to be that exciting. He returned to the University of Oregon for his junior year in chemistry, Anne transferred with him. At Oregon they lived apart but saw each other daily. Friday nights were particularly special for the two. They would join Anne’s mother at her Eugene apartment for dinner and an evening of television, red licorice sticks, and beer. The next year Anne returned to OSU to spend her junior and senior years getting her marketing and textile degree. Rob completed his senior year in chemistry at the U of O.

            While Rob was at Biloxi he worked hard to complete the course early. He and Anne were in continuous communications with weekly letters. Writing about how you missed someone wasn’t the same as the actual feelings. Anne flew down to be with Rob during the Spring break of her junior year. Prior to her arrival he did some shopping in Biloxi. One of the things he bought for Anne was a beautiful yellow dress. They spent an afternoon and evening in New Orleans on Bourbon Street. They ate dinner at Al Hurt’s club. It was while at Al Hurt’s that Rob gave Anne the second gift he had purchased. He asked Anne to marry him, and she said yes. What a wonderful horizon had opened up to Rob.

Anne was raised as a Catholic. For Rob, being a Presbyterian, he had to attend some classes with a local priest. With that additional training out of the way, things were cleared by the Vatican for them to wed. Their wedding was a formal Catholic affair and it was held at Anne’s home church, in Oakridge. Rob’s experiences with church services had been limited primarily to those the family used to attend at the Unity Methodist Church, across the river from the Dairy. The songs and bible story study times had been enjoyable and the Sunday sermons had been kept fairly short and to the point. Rob found out that he was totally unprepared for the services he was about to play a key role in.  

It is a product of human nature that when one wishes something to take but a very short time, it will inevitably drag on. This is what Rob felt about the length of the wedding service. There is probably a formal name for the reason the couple kneels for a long time at the altar, but Rob found that after quite a long time he was starting to weave and was about to fall over. The Father feared that Rob may be on the verge of fainting and he asked both of them to stand for the remaining part of the ceremony. It was amazing how quickly the next few minutes passed and Rob and Anne were pronounced husband and wife.

They were treated to a wonderful reception at the Oakridge Country Club. Family and friends were very generous with their outpouring of well-wishing for the new bride and groom. From the country club they began their honeymoon trip which would take them to Rob’s new duty station near Washington D.C.

This wasn’t your normal honeymoon trip, however. The two of them had a plan that would take them on a camping trek across lower Canada, to the World Fair in Montreal, and then to Maine, and down to Washington. I believe that love and dirt can be a healthy mix, because, they certainly had lots of both. One of the most memorable sites they camped at was Lake Louise, near Banff in Alberta. The light blue glacial water of the lake, backed by majestic, craggy mountains was fantastic. Was it mentioned that Rob and Anne were on their honeymoon and that they had pitched a cozy tent near a campfire by the lakeside? 

 

 

WASHINGTON D.C.

 

The next thing they knew he and his bride were in Maryland. Anne’s aunt and uncle lived just north of Washington D.C. in a Maryland suburb located off the Washington beltway. The couple welcomed Rob and Anne to stay in their home while they looked for an apartment nearer to Rob’s new office in Suitland. It turns out that Suitland is a suburb strip of highway, apartment complexes, and shopping centers, just a couple of miles east of Washington D.C., via the Suitland Parkway. For the next five years of stay in Suitland, Rob never did locate a city center for Suitland.

            They found an apartment only a few blocks from his new office. It turned out that Headquarters Air Force Command was responsible for the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). OSI was where Rob was going to work. The Suitland, Maryland branch was known as OSI District Office 4.

            OSI is the Air Force’s equivalence to the FBI. They had a criminal division, a personnel investigative division, a counter intelligence division, and a technical services division. The technical services division is where Rob was going to use his new communications and electronics training. The technical services team is the counter espionage arm for the Air Force. The technical services agents were also the go-to guys for the other OSI divisions. The technical services department was responsible for providing any and all kinds of technical support as may be needed to conduct other investigations.

             But wait. Before he could go to work, Rob had to go back to school. The Special Agent training was held at OSI’s headquarters. Headquarters was in Tempo E, one of the WWII temporary buildings on the Mall in downtown Washington D.C. Tempo E was only a few blocks from the Capital Building, and it was just across the Mall from the Smithsonian. Anne had found a position in the Senate Office Building, working for Illinois’ Senator Percy. She was his assistant press secretary. This meant they could link up occasionally to do some lunch-time sightseeing. 

Three months later Rob was officially an OSI Special Agent. What a place to have been stationed for a quarter of a year. To have done it properly, it would take nearly that amount of time to just study the Smithsonian museum buildings. Now, though, it was back to the suburbs. His brand new Lieutenant uniforms were all hung up, and he was sharply attired in civilian business clothes. Non-disclosure of grade or rank was an important part of being a Special Agent.

            Rob was now authorized to see what his fellow agents were doing in the back rooms of the District 4 offices. He quickly made friends with the other agents. They were dressed like him, and they were all very cordial. The chief was a Captain. Most of the technicians were senior grade sergeants, and one of them was a First Lieutenant.  They all seemed to hold back, however, when he asked questions about the special looking equipment they were tinkering with in the back shop. In the eyes of the technicians, the nature of their hardware was on a need to know basis and, after all, Rob was not yet a Technical Services Special Agent.

            The technical agent classes, also held at Tempo E, were not conducted on a continuous basis. Rob had to wait a while until the training schedule opened up. Until then, what the technicians were doing in his department was going to be off limits. For the interim Rob was assigned to Personnel Investigative (PI) division at the District 4 offices. He had never considered it, but before Rob had been selected for an assignment to OSI, his background had been thoroughly documented and reviewed by OSI PI agents from various districts across the States. The PI agent’s main daily job is to knock on doors and ask probing questions about airmen who are seeking positions involving sensitive, classified, military information. Dressed in his new suits and wingtip shoes, Rob spent many weeks knocking on doors in and around Washington D.C. There was one particular day of PI work he will never forget. The neighborhood he was canvassing was not high brow, and because the door knocking was being done during business hours, virtually all of the responses were being made by the woman of the home. At one particular door, Rob knocked several times. Eventually the door was opened. Yes, it was the woman of the home, but she had just gotten out of the shower and she was stark naked when she opened the door. Rob dismissed himself and quickly left the area. He never did find out whether that airman received his clearance.  

The technical services training class was finally set. Rob realized after a couple more months of training at OSI headquarters that he would become a counter espionage special agent. The training covered the history of the development of espionage techniques; both involving people as well as with the use of specialized hardware. Documented cases were studied to help learn best methods practices and potential sources of error. The agents learned how to physically strip search a room for certain types of bugs which were difficult or impossible to discover using electronics. And, naturally, a significant amount of time was spent learning the capabilities and limitations of their current inventory of electronic detection equipment. Although some of the equipment and the techniques he had learned were highly classified, what Rob now did was conduct security sweeps of special Air Force offices looking for bugs. Bugs is an acronym for electronic devices which could be used to record, or transmit, classified information from within an otherwise secured office area. The espionage threat posed by the Soviets during this period was felt to be very strong. The process of just how this de-bugging was done was all “hush, hush.”

            Rob spent the next five years working with OSI in Washington. After a couple of years at the Suitland district office, he was assigned to the newly finished headquarters building downtown. The new building was located to the south of where Tempo E had once been. While at Suitland, Rob had met over time most of the staff who worked in the Technical Division at the headquarters. Photographic, visual, and audio surveillance support of investigations was one of the many support roles technical agents did. Rob used to spend many hours in the OSI photo lab developing and printing official, as well as personal, B&W film. It had been encouraged for Rob to get as much exposure to proper and best photo lab practices as he could. Photographic support was the most called upon special need in OSI. Soon he became the agent-in-charge of all photographic lab work done by OSI, worldwide.

            Wow! What a time he had while stationed in Washington DC. For the years he was District 4 he was required to do considerable TDY (temporary duty) travel for his work. He traveled up and down the east coast looking for bugs. He even traveled as far north as the Arctic Circle; to Thule, Greenland. He flew as far south as the island of Trinidad/Tobago off the coast of Argentina. Every U.S. Air Force communications center as well as any base associated secure briefing rooms were required to be swept electronically and physically every year. This task kept the three teams of agents out of Suitland on the road three weeks out of five.

A TDY security team was normally made up of three agents; one agent was a junior officer, and the other two were Staff, Tech, or Master Sergeants. Personality compatibilities tended to keep the teams fixed as travel units. The two agents Rob spent most of his TDY time were Art Klosa and Harold Biffel. Both Art and Biff were Master Sergeants in grade and both always had upbeat, friendly, and positive personalities. These two gentlemen, Rob soon learned, were the success driving backbone of the District 4 technical division. As Master Sergeants, both Art and Biff had nearly reached the time for retirement. Both agents did retire in a couple of years and both transferred their OSI experiences to the U.S. Secret Services technical department. Rob’s few years with Art and Biff left him with many great experiences and the best mentoring he could possibly have ever received on how to be the best tech agent and team leader.

At the time, most of the more remote locations Rob and his team traveled to were associated with the Air Force’s missile tracking network. Where ever the team ended up they were always received by the base command with the highest respect, cooperation, and cordiality. It was interesting that outside of OSI, nobody else in the Air Force really knew who these guys were, or what consequences there might be if the fullest level of cooperation wasn’t extended in their assistance. Rob’s team was assigned one year to work at Thule AFB in Greenland. This part of the world is just a few miles south of the North Pole. The first week they were there weather conditions were such that a Phase II storm had been declared by the base commander. What this meant to Rob’s team was that they were confined to their officer’s quarters, except for emergency needs. One can only do so much card playing, and after a couple of days the team decided that it had become an emergency need to walk to the Base Exchange to secure liquid refreshment.

A Phase II storm meant that wind and temperatures had reached certain meteorological limits. The temperature in the arctic region is so cold that it never snows. The air just can’t hold any water and the outside humidity is very low. What does happen, though, is the winds erode the permanent ice layer and create what appears to be a snow storm. An analogy would be desert sand storms. Visibility dropped to near zero feet during the phase storms. Blowing ice, however, wasn’t the greatest threat to an airman wandering outside, it was the temperature. During the phase storm while Rob was at Thule, the temperature dropped to -78 degrees Fahrenheit. Every part of the body, excluding the eyes, had to be thickly covered to prevent sudden frost bite. When the team landed they were issued heavy parkas and gloves.

After the storm condition passed, Rob’s team went to work. At Thule AFB, any and all classified work was done within the base’s communications center and adjoining offices. The team completed their sweep in a little more than a day. When finished, the acting team leader for the job had the responsibility to brief the base commander on any discoveries made. Often there was nothing to report. And many times the only thing of significance to brief the commander on was procedural flaws the team may have been perked to as how the communications staff conducted business. The briefings were always presented in a manner that should have left the commander glad the team had been there.

It must have been a well received briefing by the base commander. He arranged for Rob and his team to be driven across the ice cap to the nearby native village. As one might imagine for such a desolate location, the conditions of the village buildings were pretty dismal. The existence the villagers eked out was minimal, at most. The most reflective memory Rob has of that trek was the actual SnowCat travel over the ice. At the time, it was just an ice dusty speedy trip. But he often thought back on the fact that he had actually been riding on top of the Arctic Ocean. Later that day the team rode to the top of the highest hill on the base. From that vantage point, they were told they could look out and see where the North Pole was planted. It was never night time dark this far north. The dim light from the far away sun created multicolored swirls in the frozen air over the vastness of icy nothingness that stretched out before them.

On a very contrasting trip, Rob and his team flew south to do security sweeps of the communications centers located on islands in the Caribbean: Puerto Rico, Grand Turk, and Trinidad Tobago. These islands had sites that were linked together as part of America’s down range rocket tracking system. The team took a flight out of Andrews AFB. They were the only passengers on a DC-3. This was not an uncommon airplane to use in those days. The team stayed two days at Trinidad Tobago. On the second day they were driven through a jungle to the top of a very isolated mountain. The communication center was manned by only one airman. This trip’s work went rapidly, with no unusual discoveries.

            Promotions seemed to come easy for Rob. Soon he was a new Captain. With this new promotion he also had to start flying a desk. It wasn’t long before he was told that he had become the Chief of Research & Development. The primary role was going to be the oversight of a $2M budget and coordinate with the other federal agencies having similar counter espionage responsibilities.  Rob learned that, as a rule of thumb, if one could conceive of, or actually construct a new way to intercept intelligence data, then a counter measure to that potential threat should be invented. The American intelligence agencies were still recovering from the Soviet presentation of a Great Seal to the U.S. Embassy. It had been discovered that the seal contained a very small cavity that when targeted with radio waves of a certain frequency, it would re-radiate a modulated frequency that could be tuned into outside the embassy. The modulations were actually those of conversations within the embassy. Basically, if one could think of a new way to steal classified information with a bug, then a new way to catch the bug in action had to be developed. This was his new mission.

            As head of R&D, Rob worked with many different research companies conducting classified research in the countermeasures field. Most of the firms were located in the Silicon Valley strip of California south of San Francisco. He made several flights to California to monitor progress on work his department had contracted. In the Washington office Rob also maintained a section of the OSI lab for some special things he was working on.

            One evening Rob had just gotten home when he received a phone call from the colonel who ran the OSI technical division. The colonel apparently had just finished talking to the general in OSI. Rob boss told him that he had orders prepared that had him taking the next flight out of Andrews Air Force Base to Ankara, Turkey. In Ankara he was supposed to deliver ransom money to some Turkish folks who had kidnapped a couple of U.S. airmen from a radar station. He was going to track the movement of the money from a helicopter to find out where the airmen were being held. The airmen’s actual rescue would be up to someone else. Rob had never been to Turkey and he thought to himself, “What could go wrong, here”. Besides, the colonel specifically told him that he had orders to go.

            The reason the colonel agreed with the general that Rob should be sent is because Rob had been working on a special tracking project for many months. The hardware involved used a powerful but portable transmitter that could excite a circuit which would then send a signal back to a receiver, thus enabling one to track the circuit’s movements. Based on the colonel’s knowledge of Rob’s work on this technique, he colonel must have told the general, “We can do it.” It was exciting to think that what he had been slaving on in the lab may help catch terrorists and free the hostages.

Rob wasn’t anticipating the flight from Andrews to Europe. Rarely anything flew from there but noisy transport planes, and Rob had ridden in the cold, drafty, noisey cargo holds of them enough times to know the flight would be miserable. After all of the telephone call arrangements had been made, Rob called Anne at her office to tell her of this last minute trip. He remembers Anne’s happy tone when she noted that this would be great, since you have never been to Anchorage. Rob corrected her, but he couldn’t brief her on what the reasons for the trip were.

Suitland, Maryland lies about halfway between Washington D.C. and Andrews AFB. When Rob got to the Andrews terminal building he was asked by the staff to wait in the VIP lounge. There he sat to wait with his bags of hardware. Several minutes into his wait a colonel came up to Rob and introduced himself. The colonel had come to ask Rob if he could bum a ride to Europe with him. Rob kind of quickly looked around to verify that this officer was actually addressing him with that question. Rob told him that there was absolutely no reason why not, so long as there was space available. The colonel thanked Rob, and then left.

            The OSI general must have had some clout. The only aircraft that was to fly out of Andrews AFB that night on a trip across the Atlantic to southeastern Europe was Air Force Two; the President’s backup plane. Naturally, Rob was excited to hear about this rare opportunity. When Rob inquired how it was that he had been assigned standby on this plane, he was told that Ankara, Turkey was the only place Air Force Two was going, and that he was the airplane’s only passenger. “The approval for Rob’s mission had ultimately come from the White House.

            When Rob boarded Air Force Two he was greeted by one of the stewards. Air Force Two had thirteen total crew members for the service of this single passenger. The steward briefed Rob on the many areas he could sit, and which beds he was welcome to use if he wished. It was somewhere over the eastern Atlantic when the steward approached Rob and told him that he had a phone call. Rob was led forward to a small private room with a red telephone. His colonel was calling to tell him the flight was going to be diverted to Athens, Greece. Apparently a lot of activity had been going on since Rob had first received his orders. The new game plan was for Rob to look to the local OSI team at the Athens’ base for assistance in procuring any special items he may need. Rob was to get hold of an attaché case, Exacto blades, glue and anything else he needed to use to carefully hide the tracking chip inside the case. Rob could also use the preparation time to fine tune the tracking hardware. All of this he had accomplished or was working toward. One afternoon he received another telephone call from his commander. This time he was told that the hostages had been released safely, without the need for a ransom, and that he was to catch the next military flight to the east coast.

            The next flight wasn’t going to be for a week.  The plane was listed to be a C-141 Starlifter. Rob had some thoughts that this type of aircraft was only appropriate after the royal treatment he had received on the flight over. In the mean time, the local OSI commander felt it was the right thing to do to show Rob around Athens. He was able to visit many of the old ruins, the Mediterranean, eat in quaint Greek restaurants, and drive the countryside. Rob still treasures the stone Minoan mug the Athens OSI commander gave him as a parting gift. The return trip was as he had expected it would be; uncomfortable and noisy. The C-141 carried a small amount of cargo and had a handful of airmen flying on standby status to Germany, England, or America, the plane’s final destination. The stops in Germany and England were for cargo and fuel shuffling.

              The Republican Party held its 1972 presidential election convention in Miami. The Secret Service called on OSI to provide additional manpower to assist their coverage of the candidates. Rob’s tech team was housed in the Fountain Bleu Hotel in Miami.  One of the first tasks assigned the team was to assist setting up a 15^th story command center. Rob’s task was to help mount the antenna for their communications on the hotel’s roof. Mounting the antenna was the straight forward part of the job. Rob had nightmares for several years because of his memory of the difficult part of that small assignment. The antenna lead wire needed to be run from the antenna, outside the walls, and through an open window below. The roof had a three foot high cement barrier wall around its perimeter. On the street side of the barrier wall was an eighteen inch ledge. In order to see where to swing the end of the antenna cable, Rob needed to climb onto the ledge and bend over its edge. This he successfully did. In retrospect, the antenna wire experience was a lot like his ride across the polar ice – life doesn’t always alert you to the occasional What If.

Richard Nixon was to be the Republican nominee this year. When he arrived in Miami he was going to stay at a long time friend’s home. The home was located on Key Biscayne Island.  Rob and Ron, another tech agent Rob often worked with, were asked to do a security sweep of the Key Biscayne home. Southern Florida has dozens of islands nearby. Some of them very close to Miami. Key Biscayne Island is connected to Miami with a long bridge. Rob and Ron crossed the bridge and entered a quiet, and secluded and affluent neighborhood. They had no difficulty locating Mr. Nixon’s temporary home nestled under a grove of palm trees and surrounded with lush shrubbery. The countermeasures security sweep went smoothly. Rob and Ron then set about looking for any hidden articles which may bring harm or embarrassment to Mr. Nixon. Drawers were pulled, and toilets searched. Nothing was found.

During the couple of hours Rob and Ron were at the Key Biscayne home, they left one article untouched. It was apparent that the home had been very recently seen maid service and vacuumed, but there was no reason to leave that living room floor lamp the way it was. This bothered both of the men. The lamp was obviously intended to compliment the overstuffed easy chair beneath the front window, but the lamp had been places out in front and to the side of the chair. The concern this presented to the two agents was that a guest, upon coming into the home, would lift the lamp and return it to the back side of the chair.  The lamp’s base was large enough to be hiding explosives, which when moved could be detonated. Something had to be done about the lamp. After a few minutes of discussion and contemplation, it was decided that the lamp should be unplugged and inspected. Ron reached down and pulled the plug from the wall. Rob then tipped the lamp on edge so it could be looked at. All of a sudden, both men relaxed. On the trip back to the Fountain Bleu Rob and Ron discussed how they would interview potential maid services, should either ever obtain the need.

            The years in the Air Force had gone by very quickly. Near the end of his fourth year Rob was offered a regular commission. Until that time he had been a reserve officer. Regular commissions are given to officers whose intention it is to make a career of the service. At that time, Rob had nothing more exciting to look forward to in the private sector. He accepted the commission, and with it the obligation to sign up for at least one more year. Anne had changed jobs after a couple of years with the Senator’s office. She was now the office manager for Ralph Nader. By this time Ralph had moved beyond his focus on things like his need to spread the news about how dangerous rear engine cars, like the Corvair, were. His campaigns now required a 14^th street office and a small research staff. For some period of time, Ralph was a frequent guest at product safety hearings on the Hill. Anne loved the work she was doing with Ralph, although she often commented on how eccentric Ralph Nader’s opinions really were.

In the spring of Rob’s fifth year he was informed that he was going to be reassigned as the Agent in Charge of the OSI detachment in South Vietnam. He would be shipping out that summer. Every service person is expected to serve in more than one location during their tour of duty. Someplace like Wiesbaden would have been more appealing. There was no great risk of seeing any combat with this assignment and Anne felt strongly that she would like to spend the year with me. She began making inquiries with organizations like the Red Cross to see if there was an organization she could be productively part of while there. We knew that unless she was traveling in the employ of a legitimate agency, she wouldn’t be permitted to travel. 

Springtime moved slowly to its end. One day a month before departure Rob received a notice that his orders to go to Vietnam had been rescinded. He and Anne were off the hook. It came to pass that somewhere in an Air Force reassignment office a staff person discovered that Rob’s immediate supervisor, a major, had never seen a tour of duty outside the U.S. The major was presented with the opportunity to take Rob’s place, or be reassigned as regular uniformed officer outside of OSI. The major knew where his bread was buttered, and he accepted the position with OSI in Vietnam.

Rob and Anne now had Christopher. Chris was delivered to them at the base hospital on Andrews AFB. Rob remembers being asked to provide the name of their newly arrived son for the hospital’s birth records. He told the nurse Chris’s full name and she asked Rob to please spell it out for her. Rob found himself at a complete loss as to how to compose the name Christopher. Everything went well with Chris’s birth, at least from Rob’s point of view, and after a short recovery stay and the payment of the $10 bill for the services, Rob, Anne, and Chris returned to Suitland. 

Rob had developed outside hobby interests while at Washington. He of course loved everything electronics and he found he enjoyed working with wood. Shortly before Chris’s birth, Rob worked many evenings at the wood craft shop on Bolling AFB.  Bolling is next door to Washington on the Potomac River. Bollings main attraction was that its proximity to downtown Washington made it an ideal place for officers to have martini lunches and evening social affairs.

The new baby was going to need some place to sleep. Rob designed a woven wood bassinette that would crib the baby for the first few months. He also built a stand from which the bassinette and baby could swing. The bassinette connected to the sturdy stand with four thin pieces of chain. The design was good and it would work well.

Rob and Anne had gone some time without any cabinets or open spots to display things in the apartment’s living room. This led Rob to take on another project he designed and then built at the Bolling craft center. It was an eight foot high cabinet that had open shelves on the top half, and closed cupboards below. This project took several weeks to finish. Alas, when it was complete and delivered to the outside of the second story apartment, Rob discovered that as a single piece it was too large to turn the corners to get inside the apartment. He then spent some time figuring out the best way to divide his fine piece into two halves. Once inside, however, the cabinet presented itself well in their cozy flat.

At the end of his fifth year Rob resigned from the Air Force to return to Oregon to attend medical school. Application at the Oregon Health Sciences Department didn’t go well for him. The school’s administration thought he had been away from academia too long and that he needed to go back to school so prove he still had the learning “stuff”. So, he his wife and young son bought a home in Eugene. The new digs were located on Potter Street, only a few minutes by bike south of the University of Oregon campus.

            The next year and a half he studied hard and received a degree in Biology. After thinking a plan of study through, Rob had figured what better course of study to take for a career in medicine. As part of his biology study, Rob spent a term at the Marine Biology Institute in Charleston, Oregon. He and Anne found a home to rent that was very near Charleston Harbor. The institute only enrolled about a dozen students at any one time and the focus of study was the flora and fauna of the tidal environment. Rob learned more Latin that term than he thought he could ever absorb. With his time at the university, he also filled in with some additional advanced chemistry and mathematics courses. Rob represented his strengthen credentials to the medical school. Alas, even though he had maintained a position on the Honor Roll he was denied consideration for entry. The reasons presented were that he was now 27 years old, and he had a family. Now what?

 

                                    AUSTRALIA

 

            He conferred a lot with his wife and it was decided the next best thing he could do was to become a teacher. So, during the next two terms at Oregon he took the required education courses, along with some more mathematics. By the start of summer he had received his teaching certificate and had also earned a third degree. This one was in mathematics.

            He happened by the campus employment and job counseling office one day and noticed on the bulletin board there was a posting for positions open for math and science teachers in a place called South Australia. The South Australia department of Education would even ship his family over and ship them back if he would only sign up for a two year teaching stay. Well, there wasn’t much to the pro and con discussions he and his wife had about the Australian opportunity, after all, it was a paying job offer.

            It was going to be five years before anyone at home or the Lowell community saw Rob and his family again. Rob and Anne were well received in this awkwardly accented British colony. It was a few months before either was able to fully understand conversations they held with Aussie acquaintances. Rob and Anne rented a home in Adelaide as soon as they got oriented. Their first home wasn’t the best of digs, but the price had been right.

            South Australia had just begun to experiment with open space classroom techniques in their middle and high schools. Para Hills High School was the first open space school in Adelaide. This brand new school was located at Para Hills about 10km north of Adelaide. Rob was assigned to the mathematics department, and he spent the first year of his teaching career in the year 8 classrooms. Para Hills was almost completely populated by blue color families who had recently migrated from England. The students he saw that year struggled hard in the classroom.

            A welcome reprieve came the next year. Rob was transferred to the high school block where he enjoyed working with years 10, ll, and 12. At this time, Australia was very strong into worker apprentices. What this meant in the schools was that by year 10, if a student was able to secure a working apprenticeship, then he or she could legally quit school. Students who went on to year 11 were on a track that would take them through to matriculation, or graduation. Students who matriculated were headed to university. The grand thing about this was that year 11 and 12 students were the academically motivated ones. They were eager learners and Rob enjoyed very much helping them succeed.

Besides teaching at Para Hills, he and a couple of friends, John Elliot and Ray Seco, started a fiberglass business one summer. John came from Klamath Falls, Oregon, and had moved to Adelaide with his wife, Cathy. Cathy and Rob both taught at Para Hills. John worked in city government and was currently holding a very responsible position with the suburb of Tea Tree Gully.

At the high school, Cathy became very close friends with another teacher from Oregon, Kayda Mitchell. Kayda and her husband, Ben, came from Newberg. Ben was an accountant and worked at Price Waterhouse in Adelaide. The three couples developed a close friendship. They found themselves traveling in a caravan to the outback for camping weekends, and they never missed a Thursday night poker game, usually held at Rob and Anne’s home.

Among the friends the couple had from Rob’s school, they were the only ones with any siblings. Often, Anne felt she had little in common with the other ladies. As Rob began his new work in education, Anne found employment with Channel 8 television as an Assistant Producer for the very popular Reg Grundy Productions programs. She very much enjoyed the cross cultural challenges she often met, and it came with a new circle of new friends.

Through Chris’ primary school Anne became friends with a young mother whose daughter suffered from leukemia. They befriended easily because of similar parental problems. Chris, too, was victimized by severe illnesses; his difficulty was because of allergies and the resulting asthmatic breathing problems.

Cherri and Roger Lange soon became very close friends. Cherri worked as a nurse and Roger was a banker. Roger had a tinkerer’s nature, as did Rob, and the two men bonded quickly. Weekends became rare that the two families weren’t sharing part of it together.

Ray was a Brazilian immigrant to South Australia. He and his family came to South Australia for better employment opportunities. As it had been for Rob, Ray was welcomed because he offered skills the country needed. The circumstances of how Rob and Ray linked up are not remembered. They called their business, “Australian Recreation Industries.”

By this time Rob and Anne had moved once and had eventually bought a home at 10 Satler Terrace in the northern suburb of Enfield, closer to his school. The home had a large back yard and Rob expanded an out building for their company’s fiberglass work. The fiberglass venture had started when Ray acquired the mold for a 16’ runabout. The mold was parked in Ray’s garage. There seemed to be no specific business plan for the three of them, they were just going to manufacture a few boats. Having the mold for the hull meant turning out hulls would be straight forward. However, they needed to build a mold for the deck of the boat. This process consumed many months of after work hours.

            The Australians believe in long weekends and they created lots of excuses for holidays. Rob and Anne had formed many close friendships. The most popular thing for them to do was to drive a ways into the outback and spend a few days camping. By the time one drove north for an hour and half, he found himself in very desolate country. This meant lots of uninhibited places to pitch a tent.

            South Australia is the driest state on the driest continent in the world. Summer’s afternoon temperatures were seldom below high 90s or 100 F. The outback is similar in ground cover to Oregon’s far eastern desert regions where towns like Baker are located. Low rolling hills blanketed with scrub brush and the occasionally seen Eucalyptus, or gum tree was the snapshot one got from all directions. Where there were gum trees is where the campers wanted to pitch their tents. The trees would be their only source of the often precious afternoon shade.

            Once in a while the graveled and dusty outback road would dip quickly down and up again as it found its way across a dried riverbed. Of all places in the outback, the riverbeds offered the most desirable camping spots. The parched ground was generally free of brush and there could always be sections where small groves of gums grew at the bank.

Camping on the riverbeds, however, was a very definite no-no in South Australia. The state received only a few inches of rainfall each year and that came down mostly during the winter months of June, July, and August. The low mountains to the east of the state received an occasional summer storm. From outback locations north of Adelaide, campers would be unaware those rains were happening. The hard packed dry ground was not prepared to soak up the volume that fell during the sudden outbursts. As a result, creeks swelled and fed the parched riverbeds. In just a few hours a torrent of water several feet deep would sweep the lower riverbeds of their unwitting occupants: geckos, roos, and naïve American campers.     

Between weekend camping trips to the outback and hard work in the garage, Rob, John and Ray finally turned out their first boat. They were all very proud of their craftsmanship.

            It turned out, however, that their company’s best business venture was not to be in boats at all. Rather, they landed some contracts through Ray’s associations with a large fertilizer manufacturing company in Adelaide. The contracts were to construct chemical resistant fiberglass tanks and lids. Rob was the only partner who received a long summer time off. So for him work in the fiberglass shed was full time during the summer months, or teaching by day and getting messy and stinky at night. As often happens, the partnership had begun to wane and Rob found that two of them were doing most of the construction work on the tanks.

            During their fourth year in Australia Rob and Anne had a baby; a second son, Mathew. Matt was born with an intestinal blockage that soon hospitalized him. Telltale signs of a problem soon arose as Matt’s skin became jaundiced. Diagnosis led to the attachment of a colostomy bag. Matt would wear the bag until he was nine months old and strong enough to undergo the required open stomach surgery. This new maintenance brought added stress on the family, particularly for Anne.

Their eldest son, Christopher, was already into primary school. Through his play with children at school the Aussie accent had rubbed off on Chris. When Chris attended the second grade at Kennedy Elementary in Medford he rarely opened his mouth because his new classmates would rib him about the funny way he spoke.

Rob and his wife decided they would rather raise their children in American schools. At that time the American curriculums tended to be broader based liberal arts. Students who went on to tertiary education in Australia were focused on very specific fields of interest. So, after five wonderful years, filled with a bounty of special adventures, dear new friends, and a short life-time in their new second home country, they sold their home and bid a tearful goodbye.

 

BACK IN THE STATES

 

            Back in Eugene Rob hit the road running. Naturally, his first thought was to land a teaching job. However, coming back in late May was not the best time to be scouting for a position. The start of the next school year was too far away. So he turned to his next possibility which was industry. Nope, jobs as a Chemist required specialized training. Nope, jobs in the biological fields meant specialization, too. After a short time it was looking bleak for his family. For several months Rob, Anne, Chris, and Matt were staying with Anne’s mother, Betty, in Eugene. Until a job was found for Rob, buying a home was too risky.

            One day Anne noticed a piece in the business section of the Eugene Register Guard newspaper. It told a short story about a local company that specialized in security and how they had just financed expanding their business. With his recent teaching, Rob had forgotten all about his years in Washington doing all of that security related stuff. The next day he went to the company offices and applied for a job as a technician. If a position were available, he knew that he could do it. Nope, they weren’t hiring just yet, either. Shucks!

             Two weeks later a man from Seattle called Rob and asked him to drive up and visit him about an opportunity in the security industry. It turned out that the Seattle contact was the Northwest regional franchise distributor for Sonitrol, the security company in Eugene. Rob left Anne and the boys at home and drove to Seattle. What this man, Jim Lewis, really wanted to do was to sell Rob an existing Sonitrol franchise that had opened a few years earlier in Medford. The franchise had been poorly run, and Mr. Lewis had taken it back in receivership. Jim Lewis made a very strong presentation. Sonitrol in the Northwest, and nationwide was a very strong company to be a part of. To buy the existing Medford customer base and the franchised territorial rights to six southern Oregon counties was forty thousand dollars. The potential payoff: Great, if Rob followed the proven business plan and worked hard.

Rob and Anne had saved a bit of money between the military and the teaching job in Australia. In the military they both worked and for a period it seemed like they were getting more pay between them than they knew what to do with. They returned home during one summer for a vacation. During that period, construction on the Fall Creek dam had just been completed and Fall Creek Lake was slowly filling. Both Rob and Anne felt that they could survive any future worst case economic conditions if they owned property. On the land, they could pitch a tent and grow vegetables. Fall Creek reservoir was only a couple miles east of the farm. One day they found a ten acre plot of hillside that overlooked the lake. The patch of land had an old logging road that gave access across the top end.  This spot of hillside also had some naturally cleared areas.

Rob remembers visiting with his father about their prospective land purchase. His father, being of a mindset which saw no value in property unless it could raise a crop or a herd, felt the purchase an absolutely bad idea. His father was also the gentleman who years earlier had received a solicitation to purchase some acres of land a few miles south of Bend, Oregon, off highway 97. That part of Central Oregon wasn’t even good enough to spend time deer hunting. What a scam, he had expressed. A few years later the Sunriver Resort opened for business using some of that same acreage. Rob and Anne heard what his father had said, but they didn’t listen to them. They returned to Washington peaceful in the knowledge they had something to fall back on.

The lakeside property sat there untouched over the next several years. It successfully grew a forest of blackberry bushes and weeds. The offer that Jim Lewis presented them would require they sell the hillside acreage to raise enough for the franchise purchase. They didn’t look back when they quickly sold the land for over three times what they had paid for it. They were on their way to Medford to become new business owners.

 

                                         SONITROL

 

            Boy, talk about an outback business greenhorn. That only partially describes the lack of attributes Rob had for running a business. He knew how to work hard, though, day in and day out. That was thirty years ago. It was thanks to Anne’s degree in business that they survived the first few years. She would work on the books, do payroll, and most importantly, almost single handedly raise the boys.

            In the beginning it was back to the books for Rob. He had to learn as much as he could, just as fast as he could, about this new technology.  Rob also had to become familiar with the cities which populated this unfamiliar and blisteringly hot part of Oregon. Rob would spend long evenings at the kitchen counter pouring over one kind of technical manual or another. He was proving himself to be a very self-centered workaholic. That work-to-home-to-study frame of mind lasted for several years.

            When they took over the Sonitrol business it was broke. Many, many months would go by before there was enough money in the business account at the end of the month for them to be able to take some pay home for themselves. The old business adage, “Pay yourself first”, didn’t work. Today they are both very proud that during the long, lean growth stretches he and Anne never missed a payroll for their all important employees.

            The original business had a need for five employees. With five staff, Rob could schedule them to cover the 24/7 monitoring requirements of the customer base. Naturally, on too many occasions, one of the staff would call in sick. At those times, Rob or Anne would fill in for them on their shift. The total income that first month was twenty seven hundred dollars. That amount was just enough to take care of the payroll. For the first couple of years Rob filled his week’s working hours by dressing up and selling for three to four days and then dressing down to install new systems the remaining days. Slowly their company started to grow. In the early eighties America went into a recession. The down turn in the economy hit Medford and the rest of southern Oregon very hard.

            The customer’s security systems all linked to Rob’s 24-hour monitoring office by way of dedicated, leased telephone lines. Local businesses were closing their doors. Telephone line lease costs were going up. Price objections for his specialized live audio services were coming at him from each crack in the walls of his old offices.

            A period of crisis can lead to the genesis of invention. He had an idea and, if it worked, it would vastly reduce the phone line costs for their out-of-town customers. The long distant customers were the ones who were getting hit the hardest for their special leased line. Rob had the ideas but he needed someone to fabricate the required circuit boards, and further, someone who could do write the computer program to make it all work. About the only personal computer readily available in the early 1980’s was Radio Shack’s TRS-80 tape cartridge PC. The programming language of the day was Basic DOS. A prime restriction of the program was that it had to be short enough to function in the TRS-80’s very limited RAM capability.

            Many months later the first prototype was ready to test. It worked as intended. Rob had invented one of the security industry’s first telephone line multiplexing units. He labeled it as a System 50 Telephone Line Consolidator. His office immediately put two of them to work. One was located in Ashland and the other was in Grants Pass. So now, each of up to fifty customers in those two cities would only have to pay for a short local telephone line to the nearby secured System 50. The customers using System 50 didn’t realize the complete savings of their dramatically reduced phone line costs. Rob’s office had to pay the long line fees for three telephone circuits going to each System 50. He raised the monthly fee he had been charging these customers. The additional revenue not only netted more than the newly incurred operational overhead, it prevented further attrition due to high line costs. The System 50 technology opened up new marketing opportunities for Rob. The long distance cost objection was gone and business grew.

            Rob’s parent Sonitrol company had learned a lesson from the System 50 development. If they didn’t serve their dealers, then their dealers would serve themselves. Shortly after the success of the System 50 hardware became known in the Sonitrol network, Rob received inquiries and a few orders for copies of the equipment and its operating program. Rob had not endeared himself with Sonitrol Corporation. The Sonitrol factory rapidly set to work designing technology that would also consolidate phone line circuits. By the time the corporation had product available for their dealers, the PC computer industry had matured to the point that the need for leased telephone lines went away altogether. By then, security system communications was being done via a conventional dial-up phone line. Rob’s firm kept up with Sonitrol’s new computerized security products and the Medford company grew.

 

                                          ACCIDENT

 

            Over Rob’s lifetime he always stayed focused on the value of education, both formal and private. The early years on the dairy had instilled a solid no excuses work ethic. Of course being in the right place at the right time seemed to play into his career game. Or did it? Maybe it was his destiny. There are times for all of us when it seems we are our own worst enemy.

            On September 23, 2005 Rob was in a plane crash. Ralph Springer and He had spent the morning in Rob’s hanger at the Medford airport. They were doing a biennial pilot review for Ralph. Over the past few years Rob had received his Certificated Flight Instructor Instrument, CFII, ticket and had helped mentor Ralph to his private pilot license. That morning Ralph had done quite well on the academic matters of his review. They would conduct the flying portion of his review on a soon to be scheduled afternoon in Rob’s Cessna 150. They packed away all of the training reference material that had cluttered the hanger’s picnic table during the morning’s discussions. Both were ready to enjoy a bit of lunch at the Medford Chapter Experimental Aircraft Association, EAA, fly-in luncheon. The summer barbeque was being held at the King’s property, just outside of Ruch, Oregon.

            Dave King and his wife own several acres on a south facing hillside near a state park just west of Ruch. Dave had dedicated the upper, most northern portion of this property to his favorite pastime, flying. He had built a hanger and he maintained a grass airstrip. Dave’s main fly was a Cessna 310. The 310 is a twin engine hi-wing airplane. It has one engine in front, pulling, and one engine in the rear, which is pushing.

            Some time ago Rob had flown into the King strip with his Cessna 150. He recalls flying to northerly, from the park, then over a couple of tall fir trees and the King’s house. The shortly cropped landing strip was a darker shade of green and it was well defined lying within the larger high grass field. Rob thought the strip had a bit of a resemblance to that of a coaster track. It rose, then flattened out a bit, and then rose again. It would mean that the wheels should touchdown somewhere near the middle of the first rise. This would leave plenty of distance for the airplane to slow down as it rolled out. The drop after crossing over the house on the final approach was not too severe; however, it took special focus to keep the nose high as the plane merged with the up-ward sloping strip. The Cessna shuttered as it rolled over the irregular surface. The post landing run out on the strip had been very short.

            After taxing down to the hanger parking area, and securing the plane, Rob had a wonderful visit with Dave and Mardell Day. They were busy working on the construction of Dave’s new Kitfox experimental plane. Mardell was one of Rob’s students and Mardell had logged several hours in his own beautifully built Kitfox. During the visit, Dave shared with Rob that he had received some complaints from neighbors to the east about the noise disturbance caused by aircraft departing his field in that direction. This was important information for Rob, since prior to his final landing approach he had done a field fly-over and had retreated from the north end of the strip towards the east. He was guilty of being the genesis of perhaps yet another complaining phone call.

            Leaving from the King strip is simply a reversal of the landing. Rob taxied the Cessna to the top of the strip, conducted a run-up engine test, went through his complete checklist and gently applied full throttle and began a rapid downhill acceleration. Departing and staying well over the home and tree tops was no problem.

            Once Ralph and Rob had tidied the workspace they pulled the RV6 out of the hanger. The RV6 is also an experimental plane. Rob bought the RV6 from its original owner and builder in Long Beach. This plane has been a joy to fly and it was very capable of doing light weight aerobatics. This low wing, tail dragging airplane had a balanced, constant speed propeller and was a very strong performer. They secured the hanger, snuggled into the two side-by-side seats, received clearance from ground control and taxied to the head of runway 32 for their trip to Ruch and the King barbeque.

When Rob awoke he felt very groggy and uncertain about himself. His head was in a complete state of confusion. There was no memory reference for being where he was. He quickly learned that he was in Providence Medical Center Hospital and he had gone through some stomach surgery. Rob wasn’t concerned about why he may have had the surgery. Those things were done because they apparently had to be done. In fact, he wasn’t concerned about anything at all. The mental state he was in seemed natural, and in retrospect, he hadn’t given any thought as to why he was ill.

            During his recovery he had many visitors. Among them were: Cliff Chaney, with whom Rob had mentored during his several years of flying; Steve Fusco, who has taught him much about aerobatics; and, of course, Anne and his sons. With each new visitor he received complements on how well he was doing, along with chit chat that focused on their individual spheres of daily life.

            Rob was to learn much later that he had already been in the hospital for two weeks prior to being told about the plane wreck he had been in. The airplane was a total loss and it had been bought by his insurance company. His best friend, Ralph, had been killed in the crash. Rob recalled asking Anne what an RV6 was. The airplane he owned was a Cessna. Anne did her best to explain to me that the RV6 plane was a 2-seater, was painted silver, and had low wings, compared to the Cessna’s high wings. Rob took her word for it. He also took her word that he had lost his best friend in the crash. Rob remembers trying very hard to form a picture in his mind of Ralph. At that time he couldn’t.

            The new knowledge about haven being in an airplane crash gave him much reason to reflect. Rob had no memories associated with either the RV6, Ralph, or a plane crash. He was told by his doctors that such a memory lapse is not uncommon following a deep trauma. He would start to remember people and events when his total healing was more complete. Rob accepted those thoughts and found himself to be disassociated from concerns about why he was in the hospital.

            Rob’s complete hospital tour-of-duty lasted about four months. On January 13^th of the next year it included an introduction to his first grandchild, Isabella. Bella was born at Providence during the recovery period after Rob’s final stomach surgery. He remembers both the anxiety and the treat of holding Bella as he sat in a bedside chair in his hospital room. He quickly discovered that holding Isabella close put a lot of pressure on his stomach wound, and it hurt. He asked if he might just look at her while someone else did the holding. Matt and his wife, Anne’, were both in the room with Anne and Rob. Everyone was very excited about the family’s new arrival.

            Rob’s sister, Sara, and his brother, Bill, both visited during his stay at Providence. He remembers that Sara went out of her way to buy him a book which focused on healthy living, illnesses, and some of their remedies. Today, Rob doesn’t know why she was concerned about him having such a reference book, but he still has it, and is grateful to her.

            Prolonged stays in a hospital bed begin to feel too constraining, especially when your spirit of having adequately recovered begins to grow. Rob had been released a couple of times between surgeries. He recalls how painful it was to be jostled as Anne drove the family car over even the smallest bumps on the road towards home. It was nice to be home again; to have larger, familiar places to roam. Rob found out, however, that while he was home most of his day was actually spent sitting, or lying on the living room sofa.

In fact, the only thing Rob remembers about the interim healing time at home was the one day when he began to have a very severe lower stomach pain. He soon retreated to the bedroom. Anne checked in on him and found that he was huddled in a fetal position, clenching his stomach, at the bottom end of their bed. She helped Rob to the back seat of her car, where he lay crunched up as she hurried to the Emergency Room at Providence.

            Rob next awoke with his arms lashed to the bed rails in an unfamiliar, hard surfaced room which seemed to be overly well lighted, and which had an unusually large number of windows. He was in the Intensive Care ward of Providence Hospital. The windows opened the closed recovery area to viewing by the attending staff. Fighting the restraints had apparently become one of Rob’s semi-conscious chores. He had no idea why he was being tied down this way. He didn’t recall having been arrested. Rob learned later that the nurses had affixed a discharge tube to his rear end; apparently there had been some waste management problems since his new surgery his intensive care arrival. The reason he had his arms tied down was because it had become his goal to rid himself of this new, very irritating rear end skin patch. The staff had quickly tired of his occasional successes and had remedied the source of the problem. Rob quickly resigned to the fact that things were out of his control and they weren’t going to change real soon.

            As it had been with Rob’s awakening after his first long nap, he had no idea why he was in the hospital, nor did he dwell on it. He just was. He stayed in the Intensive care room for several days. Rob didn’t recall when, or how, he was moved to the regular barrack spaces within the hospital. He found himself not in the familiar S.E. corner room on the second floor of the hospital. This room was aligned the wrong way and it was depressingly simple, too skinny, and drab.

            Rob was attached to a drip system which hung from the familiar wheeled pole next to his bed. The foot of the bed seemed to be only one or two feet away from the door. The head of the bed was crammed against the wall of the bathroom. As he lay there he realized that he had to urinate. Slowly, and with supporting aide from the IV pole, he made his way into the bathroom. Rob realized that he had become quite winded from this short trip. Finished with the work at hand, he wheezed his way back to the bed. The pace was very slow and it was all he could do to get a full breath of air. Once again in bed, he lay there gasping frantically for breath. He was experiencing suffocation. Rob wasn’t aware of any pain on his body. There was no reason for this to be happening. He pushed the emergency button and a nurse brought him oxygen. At least, that is what he thought must have taken place. Actually, he didn’t remember wearing an oxygen mask at any time. Rob did remember trying to focus on not panicking as he was struggling to get even a little bit of air. All of the in-sucking he was doing didn’t seem to bring any relief. Rob didn’t like being in that room.

            Rob remembers asking why he couldn’t have his familiar old corner room back. It was sometime into this particular sat at the hospital when he actually got relocated to his nicer, larger room with the corner windows. From these windows he could view construction progress on the new stone buildings across McAndrews Road. However, this experience could have happened on another of his re-admission episodes.

            He was very excited to see Dr. Ruth Rabinovich come into his room. Ruth is the valley’s leading infectious disease physician, and was a long time friend from Rob’s Rotary club. Her visit wasn’t social. She looked him over and asked him a few questions and then she left. As it had turned out, Rob had contracted a hospital version of pneumonia. This particular strain was especially uninterested in the medicines being used to combat it. At this time he hadn’t put two and two together regarding his recent inability to breath. In fact, that episode wasn’t even in his thought patterns. But, this virus had been the culprit and its occupation of Rob’s lungs is why he got a visit from Dr. Ruth, for which he am glad. It turns out that bugs contracted while in a hospital are particularly difficult to handle. After all, they have survived multiple mutations which have led to their ability to become immune to the normal course of treatments.

Later testing would reveal that the illness had destroyed at least 50% of Rob’s total lung capacity. He had no scars from the accident. The stomach surgeries, however, had left a roadway that is over a foot long. Also, during the last operation the doctor decided to stop cutting around Rob’s belly button; he just removed it completely. There was an offsetting benefit from modification, however; no more lint problems. Rob hides his award winning scar with his shirts. His lung damage can’t be conveniently covered up. It would live on and create significant difficulty, particularly with Rob’s physical stamina.

Surgery was necessary because Rob had received a rupture of his large intestine during the crash. As he was informed, bit by small bit, Ralph and he flew in over the trees and the King home; the landing was looking very well on their final approach for the grass strip. The RV6 was settling down nicely for a touchdown. Just prior to making contact with the strip, power was reapplied to the engine and the plane began to accelerate for a go-around. A couple of the hanger attending aviators, assembled already for the EAA luncheon, watched with wonderment as the aircraft lifted away from the field.

The crash was heard by some of those gathered, and a ground search was quickly organized. It was to be over an hour later before the once beautifully hand crafted airplane was discovered, badly battered, resting upside down in the dense fir growth bordering the northwest corner of the King property. The RV6 was delicately suspended from limbs of the trees. Fuel was dripping from one of the winged fuel tanks that had taken a direct hit by a quickly passing conifer. There were no flames. The propeller was completely broken, and the full domed Plexiglas canopy had been shattered.

A medical evacuation helicopter from Mercy Flights had been called in to ferry Rob to Providence Hospital. The reports were that he sat, still buckled in, and he was somewhat coherent as he was carefully released from an inverted position. Ralph had taken a direct hit to the head by the limb which had collided with the canopy. Rob received no stories of Ralph’s condition after the crash, other than that he did not survive it.

Theories of what may have gone wrong during the landing approach have been aired by many people. Rob still has no memory of what events took place. He doesn’t know whether the plane tripped on the tops of the trees as it was climbing out, or whether the trees had been safely cleared and a turning tip of the wing may have led to the aircraft becoming snagged. No reflective thoughts contain any logic as to why the landing had been aborted. Rob thinks back to a wilderness flying course he took one weekend in the mountainous outback of Idaho. The instructor had him successfully landing his Cessna 182 on some of the most unlikely remote forest service strips imaginable. She had told him firmly that for some airstrips, once you have made a commitment to land; there can be no turning back.   

Rob has given much thought as to why he flew the course that he did. Attempting a climb out over the heavily wooded western slope of the hillside wouldn’t be his choice if he were to do it today. Somewhere inside the head of the pilot of the doomed RV6 may have been the conversation he had had with Dave about avoiding noise above the good neighbors to the east.

The surgeon was reputed to be very good. For several years following his accident recovery Rob cowered with fright whenever he encountered a gastric twinge anywhere in his lower abdomen. It had been twice that he had gone through the quickly growing, stomach stabbing agony of pain as the loosed intestine contents found their way around his insides. Rob has no memory of what it felt like the first time it happened.

On both of these occasions Rob had been recovering at home. He doesn’t recall what his diet consisted of, but it would have been limited to something which would create little, if any, waste. Neither time did he feel the butt-joined sutures on his intestine break away. Rob wasn’t conscious of the missing several feet of intestine which had been damaged by the over 10-G impact his stomach had made with the seatbelt when the RV6 came to its sudden stop. During his healing all he felt was a constant low level of sting from the exterior stitches as his skin slowly melded itself back together.

When Rob was told what had caused his two re-entries into the hospital, it upset him. The surgeon had sniped out the suspected damaged portion of the intestine and then had stitched the two loose ends together. For some reason the butt-joint failed. It immediately occurred to Rob that the best way to secure this connection would have been to insert a portion of the tube, in the direction of normal content flow, into the receiving end of the intestine. In this fashion both ends of the graft would have had adjoining walls to which they could be secured. This was the method used on his third operation. He was pleased that the odds had increased in his favor.

Slowly Rob began to return to his office. During his absence, Debra Thomas, the office Business Manager and close personal friend had seen ably to the day-to-day operation of the Sonitrol business. Debra had already worked for Rob for several years and would continue as his loyal right hand for the next ten years. On December 31, 2005 Rob and Anne sold their business to the Sonitrol franchise owner in Eugene. He found it interesting how sometimes one’s affairs seem to run in complete circles.

Chris had played a key role in Sonitrol’s operation for a few years, as had Matt. Rob and Anne had assisted Chris and his wife, Jennifer, up as a Sonitrol franchise owner in Savannah, Georgia. Many times Rob thought jealously about how seemingly easy it had been for Chris to grow his new business. They had rapidly become well respected as leaders in Savannah’s security trades.

Matt was working at the Medford office when the assets of the business were sold. He made arrangements with the Eugene franchise to continue to sell and service customers in Rob’s old territory. To do this, Matt was able to recruit the continued employment of several of Rob’s former key service and sales staff. In time, Matt discovered that the Eugene franchise was not too keen on having a non-Sonitrol firm conducting business for them in southern Oregon. Business life was made difficult for Matt. In a couple of years, Matt and Anne’ sold to the Eugene office the assets they had acquired since Medford Sonitrol had closed.

            The longevity of Rob’s careers prior to buying the Sonitrol franchise had only lasted for five years each. The career with Sonitrol turned into nearly thirty. He often reflects on how exciting it has been to get up each day and discover what special events happened while he had slept. By all community and personal measures, Rob had become a very successful businessman. It took Rob many years, however, to learn a critically important business adage. That is, when you assign responsibility and authority to a company employee, plan to leave that hat off your own head. Until then he was the engine at the company. Without him there was no company. Now, he and Anne are looking forward to retirement. The company’s management engine is strong and it will run very well without him; for reasonably short periods, at least.

            When Rob and Anne took over the small Medford business its annual business receipts were just over thirty thousand dollars. Jim Lewis, in Seattle, had said that the payoff would be good. They had certainly put in their share of hard work and had been fairly faithful to the laid out business plan. The risk had paid off. At its peak the company employed thirty fulltime workers, and is became a multi-million dollar business.

                                               

 

                                    RETIREMENT

 

            Rob and Anne lived for many years in one of Medford’s most prestigious condominium complexes. Their condo was three stories with one floor below the entry garage level, and two floors above. They had done extensive remodeling to the kitchen on the second floor, and to the master bedroom suite on the top floor. Their home had become a show piece standard for other owner’s in the complex considering upgrades to their 1970 vintage homes.

            Anne had for years been a competitive tennis player. Two or three times a week she could be found at the Rogue Valley Tennis Club. However, she was finding it difficult to carry loads from the third floor to the basement and back up again. Laundry days seemed to bring out severe aches in her knees from the stairwell activity. One day she suggested to Rob that in their retirement years they should live in a home located in Flatland; a home that didn’t have stairwells. So they began their search.

            Their real estate agent toured them through all manner of new and ancient dwellings. None appealed to Rob or Anne. She returned one day from tennis at the Country Club and commented about the home across the street from the club that had been on the market for a year or more. It was a beautifully presented single story stone front home on half an acre of landscaped yards. They arranged to see the home, and it was perfect.

It was in 2006 that they bought the home on Hillcrest Road, and it was the middle of 2007 when they finally took occupancy. For nine months in between they contracted to have some significant interior remodeling done. During that period they remained at their condo. When they were able to move into their newly finished home, they put the condominium on the market. The condo sold for their asking price to the first family who looked at it. Except for the stairwells, it truly had been a beautiful home. 

            Fully settled in now, Rob and Anne spend their days working in their yard and garden, or Anne in her quilting room and Rob in his man cave, aka, three car garage, with lift, and partitioned wood working shop. They enjoy weekly visits from friends for dinners or table games. Matt, Anne’ and their three children are welcomed guests for weekend dinner evenings. Yes, retirement can be hard work some days, but it’s a good life.