Acknowledgments
The author’s page of acknowledgments is my chance to ramble — my
chance to ruminate on the writing of this, Volume Two in the ‘Reports To The
Clayton Historical Society’ series.
First of all, this writer wishes to extend his highest regards to the
former missileers of the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command who have assisted in
so many ways with the construction of this story. They have spent countless hours
attempting to explain the basics of rocketry, missile ballistics, and military
procedure to me — with varying degrees of success. If there is any historical value in this
story, it belongs to them. Any
errors within — technical, editorial,
judgmental, or due to my attempts to make the story more readable — are
solely mine.
Of special note are Master Sergeant Dale Uhrhammer, Airman Bob Lemley,
Airman Jack Roberts, Master Sergeant Paul Rodriques, Colonel John Voss, Airman
Russell Beaver (whose first assignment as a missileer was at the Deer Park
bunker), Sergeant Dick Mellor, Airman Jim Geoghegan, and Colonel Charles
Simpson. And there are many others
whose names have been lost beneath the blizzard of paperwork generated by this
project. Without their willingness
to stay the course through this often rough and contentious project, without
their patience with constant questions and misunderstandings, without their firm
belief that recollections of these procedures and events are worth saving, this
story would remain untold.
And there are others, such as Doctor Rachael Wang of Spokane Community
College’s Chemistry Department, and Richard and Ronald Hodges, both long ago
graduates of Deer Park High, who have assisted in various ways with
the technical issues of chemistry, engineering, computers, and rocket
science.
Secondly, this writer wishes to thank Grace Hubal, Bill Sebright, Jim
Geoghegan, and many others, including my wife, Patricia Leonora Madeline
Stewart-Parker, for their assistance with spelling, word usage, sentence and
paragraph structure, contextual structure, and general comprehensibility. Since I write and edit by ear, I
certainly need this kind of help.
In the autumn of 2004 I began searching for background material for a short article
about a 1961 rock throwing incident in Deer Park. Over the next year and a half, I
followed my curiosity far beyond that.
I wouldn’t care to guess how many after-work hours and weekends are
invested here. But then, the
satisfaction with a project like this is that after it’s done, unlike many other
hobbies or pastimes, there’s something enduring to show for the effort — in this
instance, a bit of history preserved.
You’ve doubtless noticed that this article is not an easy read. I have included a large amount of
technical material because this is, after all, very much about rocket science,
engineering, and military and political history. As such, this kind of story can only be
diluted down to a certain level before it loses its way in contrived
simplicity.
In pursuit of this project I’ve purchased several books on rocketry,
downloaded over a thousand pages of data from the internet, sent out dozens of
inquires to government and private agencies, exchanged over six hundred emails
with the missileers and others, worked through hundreds of pages of documents
pulled from data disk, and scrutinized hundreds of photographs. Then I attempted, mostly through trial
and error under the critical eyes of the missileers, to boil it all down into
these few pages. My only regret is
the rich amount of data that — as a matter of time left till deadline, space to
print in, and editorial judgment — I had to
exclude.
For anyone interested in the technical aspects of rocket science, I would
recommend ‘Design of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines’, by Dieter K. Huzel and
David H. Huang of the Rocketdyne Division, North American Rockwell. It’s an old book, but then the Atlas is
an old rocket. Just type the title
into one of the internet’s book search-engines — I would suspect one or more
sources will pop up. Most of the
book is technical beyond my understanding, but what I can comprehend is
fascinating. Those with an
understanding of mathematics beyond the four primary functions should be in
heaven with it. Those taken by
engineering, both complex and simple, will, like Scotty on the Starship
Enterprise, find this the perfect book to curl up with between watches in the
engine room.
The single most usable research document was provided by a gentleman in
Oklahoma, David Johnson. It
was a complete Dash-1 manual, a
sort of owner’s and operator’s handbook for the 567th Strategic
Missile Squadron’s Atlas missiles, and the missile’s bunkers. As a former missileer, and current
historian for both the 548th and 556th Strategic Missile
Squadrons, he undertook the awesome task of hand scanning the 924 pages of this
manual into his computer, then transferring the images onto disk. Now he’s in the process of organizing
this material into a format with indexes, cross references, and all kinds of
other tricks to allow quick access to data. When David heard of my project, he
freely sent a copy of this data to me in the hope that it might help. And it most certainly
has.
I need to also mention a incident with California’s Master Sergeant Dale
Uhrhammer. This gentleman, without
preamble, sent me a priceless, original hand drafted schematic of an Atlas D
series rocket. This 18 by 129 inch
engineering drawing produced by Convair Astronautics in the late 1950s is
doubtless one of a kind. Using
Kinko’s roll-feed scanner, I copied the schematic to disk. A number of those have been reproduced
and sent to various missileers around the country. The original was returned to Dale, and
now resides with other Atlas missile artifacts in the Vandenberg AFB
museum. This is the kind of
generosity I have found common among these men.
Except for the usual revisions
necessary for any future printings of this booklet — corrections made
necessary by the fact that after publication numerous errors are always pointed
out — this is the end of this project for me. First I need to turn my attention to a
few of the projects around the house that have been neglected for some time
now. Then I’ll need to rekindle my
research into various aspect of the local Clayton/Deer Park history. There’s at least one more long and
involved story about the old Clayton brick plant I want to write. There are more people I want to
interview, and more profiles of local families I want to record. Lets just say, there’s always more to
write about. It’s just a matter of
following my curiosity, and writing down what I find.
— Wally Lee
Parker —
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