Part II-U. S. Air Force, Chapter 12-Lackland AFB

Chapter 12
Lackland AFB
1957

I was given eight days travel time to get to San Antonio, so I left Moses Lake on the 25th of September 1957, two days after turning 22. I drove straight through to Aunt Vivian’s in Pampa, Texas. I went to sleep while driving across Wyoming but woke up when I hit the shoulder. I pulled over and slept about an hour and continued; I don’t know why I was in such a hurry or why I would do something so stupid. I stopped in Weatherford, Oklahoma to see Aunt Maurine and Uncle Jack; Aunt Maurine was going to school there to get her teaching credentials and my cousin Jim had just got out of the Air Force and was going to pharmacy school. Jim gave me an Air Force “Ike” jacket. The car wanted to run too hot, especially in the mountains, so I drove all the way to Mangum with the heater on high and the windows open; that kept it just below the boiling point. I stayed a few days with Grandma and Grandpa Sullivan and got to see Uncle Ray and Aunt Joye. While there I took the radiator off the car and had it cleaned. It was so stopped up it was a wonder it would run at all. On the third of October, I signed in at the 3700th Pre-Flight Training Group at Lackland AFB, Texas and was scheduled to be at Lackland for six weeks. Shortly after I got there Allan was born on October 17th. We were given Air Force orientation classes, aircraft familiarization, physical training, aptitude and intelligence tests without end, and physicals. It was the color blindness test that did me in. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t see the right numbers on those spotted pages. I could read some, but was always one or two short of the passing score. The doctors here were not as generous as those in Pullman. In early November, I was washed out of the course and given orders for the 43 week Officers Communication School at Scott AFB, Illinois.
In the meantime I had been going to the South San Antonio Church of Christ. I went to a Church Halloween party for the young people. There, I met this pretty young girl named Nell; she was in a hobo costume and I found out she didn’t have ride home. I offered to take her home after the party and made a date to go to the movies the next weekend. We went to see “Oklahoma”. We went out two more times before I had to leave for Scott AFB. Her mother cooked a good fried chicken dinner for us one Sunday and I was impressed with her dads shop. She agreed to write me in Illinois if I would write her.
I loaded up everything I owned in the back seat of my Oldsmobile and headed north. This was before the days of interstate highways and I remember going through the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas and I would always end up behind a farmer on a tractor pulling a load of hay. The road was too crooked to see to pass on and we would creep along. When you did get a chance to pass you wouldn’t go far until you came to another tractor or a truck creeping up a hill.