Part II-U. S. Air Force, Chapter 16-Pulman

CHAPTER 16
Pullman
1962-1964

One of the reasons I majored in Farm Mechanics instead of Agricultural Engineering the first time I went to school was the war stories I heard about the calculus courses scared me; now I was going to be forced into battle. They were hard enough, but the fear was worse than the actual courses. I also found that with a wife and two kids it is easier to concentrate on studies than it is when you are single and living in a dormitory.
Nell and I found a house to rent at 202 Columbia Street, just a couple of blocks from most of the engineering buildings. The house had belonged to a mechanical engineering professor who had passed away in 1934; his wife wanted to move to the Seattle area to be near her daughters. We rented the place from them for about a year and then they sold it to the college. We continued to rent from the college until we were transferred. We bought several pieces of furniture they left in the house including a big round oak dining table and chairs. Actually Mom and Dad bought the table through us, and I think LaDonna has it now.
We went to school full time including summer school; I don’t remember just how many Air Force students there were at WSU, but would guess somewhere in the neighborhood of 30. We didn’t have to wear uniforms so we felt like civilians again. The only difference was that we were drawing full pay, plus our tuition and books were paid for. After being there for a while we did have to wear uniforms to a special meeting one night. When Randy saw me in uniform he said, “Daddy! You’re a mailman!”
Miss Clock was an old maid math professor. She had taught me trigonometry when I majored in agriculture and now I had her again for some of the higher math classes. She was an excellent teacher and I would guess in her 60s at this time. When she was young, she was well on her way to a career as an outstanding concert pianist, but an accident crushed her fingers on one hand so she became a mathematician.
We were introduced to computers during our stay at Pullman. They were really primitive compared to what we have today. We had very little on the actual design of the machine but concentrated on programming. For any thing you wanted to do you had to write your own program. After writing the program, you had to go to the key punch room and punch it out on IBM cards that were about 3”x7”. We didn’t have access to the computers; we would turn in our cards and get the “ran” program back the next day. Of course, if you had a single error on the punch cards it wouldn’t run and you would have to make the correction and hope for better results the next day. It wasn’t too hard to put the computer in a loop where it would print out page after page of nothing; when you did this, it upset the computer operators and they might “lose” your next set of cards. The computer consisted of a big room full of equipment and was less powerful than the one I’m using to type this paper.
On October 1st, 1962 I was promoted to captain and didn’t even get to wear the uniform to show the new rank. It was a nice pay raise though.
Not all the time was filled with books and studies. On long week ends and holidays we were close enough to Othello to go see Mom and Dad. Nell’s mother and dad came up to see us several times. One time I took Randy to a football game. I bought him a bag of roasted peanuts; while I was watching the game he said to me, “Daddy I don’t think I like peanuts”. I looked down and he had a mouth full of nuts, shell and all. After he learned to shell them, he thought they were pretty good. Another time we went to Othello, Dad loaded up the old two ton beet truck and he, the kids and I went fishing at Curlew Lake. I can’t remember if Linda, Cheryl and LaDonna were all there but Chuck, Carl, Allan, and Randy were. Nell, Mom, and Ronda stayed in Othello. Dad had an old mattress stored out in the tool shed and we put it and another one in the back of the truck for beds. We stretched a canvas tarp over the sideboards for a tent. Most of the kids were riding in the back; we had stopped for something and the kids noticed a nest full of baby mice had bounced out of the mattress from the tool shed. This was something new to Randy and he was trying to get over the sideboards crying, “Is it dangewous?” Later in the middle of the night after we had all gone to bed I was woke up by a loud, “Wham, wham, wham.” We had gotten rid of the baby mice earlier but evidently the mama’s home was right under Dads head and he was beating the mattress trying to get rid of her. We had a good time fishing.
The truck we took camping was the same one Mom and Dad had to drive to church from time to time. I didn’t get to see it happen but Mom told me later that my sisters hated going to church in the truck. Actually she said they didn’t mind going in the truck; what they really didn’t like was getting out of the back of the truck in front of everyone while wearing their Sunday clothes. This was when the girls were about high school age and their little brothers were too young to put in the back. They found a solution to the problem; Dad would stop the truck a couple blocks before they got to church, let the girls climb out and walk the rest of the way.
While on leave just before coming to WSU Pawpaw had been working with a black light company in Los Angeles; he was working on exhibits to be displayed in Disney Land. He had several gadgets that looked real nice including a model of an atom. He was working on a color wheel that he wanted to change patterns while under the light but couldn’t get it to please his desires. He was trying to get it to change patterns by letting paddles rub on a bumper as they turned. He had a metal lathe and some old Norton bombsights that had all kinds of gears, bearings and mechanical actions. While he was working on his approach I started using the tools and materials at hand to make one that had gears that would move the paddles. It worked great. He made copies of mine and while we were at Pullman, they were put on display at Disney Land beside his other gadgets. We took Randy and Ronda to Disney Land while we lived in Pullman but didn’t get to see the displays because they hadn’t been put out yet. At the time Ninny and Pawpaw were in Los Angeles; he had caught a big white rabbit and we brought it back to Pullman as a pet for the kids. I built a cage with a lever mechanism that would drop a few pellets of feed when the rabbit pulled the lever. It didn’t take too long to teach him to feed himself. He was a fat rabbit.
Our house was heated by coal. The furnace had a motor driven auger that added coal to the fire when the thermostat called for it. One night it was real windy and I guess the wind sucked the damper shut. We were asleep in bed and I kept dreaming I could smell smoke. I finally woke up and the house was filled with it. I woke Nell and told her to get kids outside and open the doors. I went to the basement to see what was going on. The smoke was so thick there the light bulb was barley visible just a few feet away. The furnace was pumping out smoke but as soon as I opened the damper it quit. I almost choked before I got back upstairs. The wind was still blowing hard so it didn’t take long to clear the house with the doors open; we couldn’t open the windows because they had been painted shut. I fixed the damper where it couldn’t move again. I had started some tomato plants in the house and they died the next day because the smoke was so thick. It was scary after I thought about it later because Mom’s Uncle DeLoss, a doctor, died with his whole family in 1944 when a coal furnace suffocated them with carbon monoxide.
I had a good friend and fellow officer, Keith Fuller that told a couple of strange “animal” stories while at WSU. He said he was driving down the highway one day when a buzzard flew up from some road kill. Unfortunately, the bird didn’t fly soon enough and he came through the windshield of Keith’s Volkswagen on the passenger side. The blow didn’t kill the buzzard but it did cut him up pretty good. He was flopping around, bleeding all over everything and couldn’t find the hole to get out. Keith said that by the time he finally got the car stopped it looked like someone had been killed in it. To make matters worse, the buzzard smelled like the road kill he had been eating and it was several weeks before he could get the odor out. He also told of his experience with an octopus. Keith knew a commercial fisherman that would sometimes catch an octopus in his nets, and when he did he would sell it to Keith because his wife was Japanese and she liked to cook them. He had just picked one up and was getting out of his car with the octopus in a bucket when he heard the phone ringing inside. He set the bucket down and ran inside to answer the phone. As he was talking, he glanced outside and saw his octopus had crawled out of the bucket and was headed down the street. He told his friend, “Just a minute; my octopus is out in the street.” He said when he got back to the phone he had a lot of trouble convincing his friend that he had to chase down a runaway octopus. He said he also had some strange looks from the neighbors that saw him running after the escapee.
We went to church the same place I went when I was in school before. We had a full time preacher now named Paul Vertz. One of the pillars of the church there was A. L. Betts, who was also head of the Electrical Engineering department at WSU.
In June of 1964 I graduated with a bachelor degree in electrical engineering. I had orders to go to Defense Communications Agency (DCA) in Kunia, Hawaii. I was supposed to report to Travis AFB with the family on the 10th of July for the flight over. Due to travel backlogs it was changed to the 27th of July. I took a long leave; we went to Othello for a while and then to San Antonio to see Nell’s folks and then on to Travis for our flight to Hawaii.