Well, a new chief, a new environment, and equipment I never heard of before; much of it painted green with CAA stamps, Serial Numbers and Plant Accounts.  NavAids like YA-1, YR, AN/FRN12/17 - there were homers, beacons, omnis and more all for the benefit of Navy pilots in training.  These were spread out from 50 miles north of NAS Corpus Christi, outside of Rockport, to 30 plus miles south on Padre Island and west on the King ranch to the Baffin Bay homer site.  The routine was to visit each site once a week to check the equipment and make any repairs or other servicing; this we did in a panel truck equipped with various monitor receivers.  The sites were generally the same: "portable" metal buildings on stilts, with motor-generator power (or power backup) and some sort of antenna arrangement.  Once I found a fried rattlesnake in the power supply of one site - never did figure out how he got into a "sealed" building.  Padre Island (on the Gulf of Mexico) - for those who know it today as a tourist mecca, et al, was, in the fifties, a strip of sand, grass and crude, makeshift beach huts (weekend retreats, if you will) and a couple places known as Big Shell and Little Shell.  These were car catchers as folks would attempt to drive through several hundred yards of these sink areas.  Talk to the people who know!  We ran the beach in 4-wheel drive jeeps and 4x4 trucks.  From time to time there'd be "water spouts" a few hundred yards out in the gulf - reckon we outran them (since I'm still here).

There were the navaids, some 30 miles down the sand.  There were also Caffey, Duck, Eddy, Fido and G???? ... (someone will fill in this blank, right?) - target areas for air-to-ground support training.  Each area had a small tower for spotting dive attack angles and bombing results and a radio equipment shack for talking with the aircraft.  Caffey was also the Padre Island detail's barracks area.

For a year or so, I was on detached duty at Aransas County airport north of Rockport, Texas.  There, a Navy crash crew, two Air Traffic Controllers and one ET provided fire/rescue, traffic coordination and communications for Navy aircraft training.  There was an MB2 and two FFN3 fire trucks, a small water tanker, a comm trailer, a garage full of foam, and my jeep.  The planes were ADs of various vintage from area Navy air facilities.  You may have seen that photo of a fully armed AD: torpedoes, bombs, rockets (and, I believe, bee-bees).  I understood that the AD could carry its own weight in fire power; that weight required power for its support.  I'm told it had the same engine as was installed in the B-17.  That power had a down-side for an unloaded AD - a strong torque on throttle-up.  Fact or fiction I don't know - but I choose to believe.  Aviation types who do know will probably set me straight before long **.  In any case, we lost a few to torque roll.   (Anyone have that photo of the AD with the full load of bombs, rockets, and torpedo?)

**  Well, it happened.  I thank a former aviation source for providing the unvarnished truth: the AD power plant was one 3350hp engine; the B-17, four 1200hp engines totalling 4800hp.  The AD was a formidable powerhouse. My sincere thanks to retired CWO Hank Porter for helping me to stay honest.

The order came up to us to dump all our truck loads and renew.  Apparently there was a problem with the foam/water mix after a long time period and the FFN-3s were mixed loads.  We dumped them off the west end of the field.  I've never seen such lush grass as was there a few weeks later.

Rockport had 5000 foot runways - okay for props with short take-off power.  One day, three Marine jets (F-9s I think) from El Toro had low fuel and were looking for terra firma post haste.  One punched out north of us and the other two came in on the east-west runway.  I mean one came east the other came west - they passed each other midway directly in front of the tower.  Brakes, brake bottles, flaps, shoe heels, whatever - they did get stopped - one at the end on the numbers and one off the runway just short of the ditch before the highway.  After a couple days of intense inspection and testing, they flew off - in section formation yet.

I got to flying some - Buster Coward was the airport manager and ran a business in aircraft services and flight instruction.  At 6-1/2 hours in a J-3 Piper Cub I thought I was overdue to solo; at 7 hours I knew he was going to let me go.  At 7-1/2, I'd about given up.   We landed, and on some pretext about someone in the hangar he climbed out heading in that direction.  Over his shoulder he yelled "Take it around twice and come in."  Damn, he faked me out good.   Well, I took it around twice and took it in.  He met me at the hangar door and cut my tie off.  He must've had a couple hundred ties in his collection.  Buster also checked me out in the PA_12 Piper Super Cub.  I passed the written exam but never had the money to get in the 100 mile distant landing, so never got licensed ... guess it's too late now.

Back to Corpus, I went to the receiver site on opposite side of the field from the tower.  (For the time-line, the RATCC system was not quite yet operational.)   I learned a lot about audio distribution there - we had two fifty-two pair cables going around opposite ends of the field to the tower/RATCC area.  Twice on my watch Public Works cut a cable while digging and I had to shift cables.  This entailed moving 104 wires from one long terminal board to the other - a real pain.  I always wondered why there wasn't a monstrous switch for that job.  The experience gained in maintaining those audio lines over 6 - 8 months was handy later on (which is what experience is for, right?).

You'll remember Frances Gary Powers and the U-2 incident - some of you do, I'm sure. One day in Bldg 87, the ET shop, a converted aerial torpedo repair facility, we kept hearing this odd drone sound coming every so often.  Finally went outside, and there it was - a U-2.  We didn't know this at the time since Powers hadn't yet happened.   I guess there was a security flail for this surely was an unscheduled landing; the fellow circled the field over and over while they got ready.  Finally they had some Marines handle the landing assistance and put the thing in the seaplane hangar.

I was over toured at Corpus Christi a year - the story was that some E-3 tossed several boxes of PAMI cards from the plane transporting personnel files during a change in personnel management center locations.  That's scuttlebutt anyway. But, I had called the ET detail desk and asked where I was going and got a "Who are you?"  By time they figured it out, it was year four of a three year shore tour.

Somewhere in that four years my shirt collar tips started to fray - I blamed that on the new collar devices required of chiefs.

Some of the techs there were:

ET1 (Andy) Anderson, ET1 John J. (Squared Away) Flynn, ETC Griner, ETC James Hunter, ET1 Henry Dewey (Red) Lyle, ETC James Mabry, ET1 Richard Smith, and ETC Fred Stockton.  CWO2 Paul Maley was the EMO.

Jim Hunter had had a medical thing and went to hospital.  After 30 days his billet was vacated and I was detailed to fill it.  Jim wheeled and dealed and wound up coming back.

Red Lyle did a little TV repair on the side.  He and wife Terry became friends outside the gate.  Much later - like 1996, I called him in Mathews County, Virginia.  He was ill and passed a year or so later.

Across the years several of those fellows went LDO.

USN Years
USS Dahlgren DLG-12