Part II-U. S. Air Force, Chapter 21- Richard Gebaur AFB

CHAPTER 21
Richards-Gebaur AFB
1975-1977

When we got to Missouri we bought a house in Grandview, a suburb of Kansas City. We bought it through Bobbie Davis, a realtor we met at the Grandview Church of Christ. It was a brand new house located at 13112 Lowell Avenue, about two miles from the church and five miles from the base. I was assigned to Systems Analysis in the Operations Division of Headquarters, Air Force Communications Service. Just before we left Alaska I had been passed over for promotion to Lieutenant Colonel; if I had been promoted I might have turned it down because acceptance would have required several more years of service obligation and I really wanted to get out and move to the farm. But I found it very demoralizing when I was denied the opportunity to accept or decline. The new job was primarily administrative analysis and assembling mountains of reports which may or may not ever be read. It was hard to stay motivated, especially when I could see retirement just two years away.
In February 1976 I was sent TDY to Alaska to negotiate a commercial contract. When I got there Stan Godsoe had not been able to sell my pickup and camper so I drove it back to Missouri. I intended to sleep in the camper at night and drive during the day. It just happened that the coldest cold front of the year headed south at the same time I did. On the first night out, I found the heater in the camper didn’t seem to be working right and I was afraid of carbon monoxide so didn’t use it. I coiled the mattress from the big bed into a tube like a sleeping bag and put it in the isle to keep it rolled up. It was so cold I couldn’t sleep so about two in the morning I got up and drove some more. It was a good thing I did because the pickup almost didn’t start. If I had waited another hour I’m sure it wouldn’t have. The temperature was 50 below zero that night. The next night I rented a motel that had a place to plug in the block heater on the pickup (I think it was in Whitehorse, but I’m not sure). I stayed in motels the rest of the way home and drove on snow all the way until I got to northern Missouri. I remember seeing two or three places on the way down where you could see someone had ran off the road. Where their car run into a snow bank and had been pulled out, it left a perfect impression of their license plate in the snow. All you had to do to identify them was read the backward numbers.
I also went TDY to Hawaii and the Philippines (one trip) while stationed in Missouri. This was in support of the Performance Monitor Program (PMP) which was primarily used to determine when maintenance and levels adjustment was necessary on the wideband tropospheric scatter radio systems. These wideband systems consumed most of the time of my work section. I was assigned the task of writing an article under the name “PMP Pete” for the AFCS newspaper that was published every two weeks. I tried to write these articles to provide technical hints with humor and encouragement. Now I wish I had kept copies of the articles, but I didn’t.
I became serious about getting our new house built in Texas. I finished drawing the plans which I had started while still in Alaska. In the summer of 1976 I took six weeks leave and started work on the basement. Dad put me in touch with Buck Lipsey, the county commissioner; he was also a member of the Decatur Church of Christ. Buck came out himself and ran the bulldozer to dig my basement. He took the rock he dug out as payment. That worked out well for me and the county both, but a deal like that would be illegal now. With the help of Randy and my brother, Allan, we got most of the basement walls poured that summer. (See figure 25.)
When we got back to Grandview, a friend at work, Bob Meyers and I found a man that had some walnut trees right next to his house that he wanted removed. He gave us the wood if we would cut it down and haul it off. We did just that and took it to a sawmill there in Kansas City and had it cut up into lumber. I also bought some more walnut logs from the sawmill and had them cut. I then hauled my lumber to a kiln in St. Joseph, Missouri and had it dried. When I got it back, I bought a Belsaw planer and started making cabinets for our new house in Texas. When it came time to move to Decatur I knew all those cabinets would put me over the allowed Air Force weight limit, so I borrowed Dad’s cattle trailer, hauled them to the farm, and stored them in the dairy barn that he wasn’t using at the time.
Bob Meyers and I liked to go to the salvage sales they had about once a month on the base. I bought a lot of paint I thought I could use on the house, some chlordane (wish I had bought more), a safe, a 12 foot step ladder, a tool box, and other things I can’t remember. In addition to the salvage sale, there was a thrift store Bob and I used to like to visit. I passed up an item there that now I wish I had bought; it was an electrical foot massager. It was a neat little chair you sit in and it had metal plates you placed your bare feet on. Between your knees was a hand crank and it sent an electrical shock through your feet. If you wanted more stimulation, you just turned the crank faster. And it worked too; Bob ask me to turn the crank while he placed his hands on the plates. It almost knocked him flat. Another day we were in a Payless Cashways store and they had a wheel barrow full of cabinet hardware they were selling for something like 50 cents a package. We asked the manager what he would take for the whole lot. I think we bought it for $50 and each of us took half of it. That is where we got all the hinges and pulls that are on the cabinets in our house now, and that is why the pulls in each room are different; there were not enough of any one kind to make them uniform throughout the house.
When Roger was about two years old he was sitting on my lap one night as I read the paper. He pointed to a Sears advertisement and said, “Sears.” At that moment I realized two things: first, Roger was smarter than the average two year old and, second, Nell spent a lot of time with him in the shopping center. If he had been born today the first words he read would probably have been “Wal-Mart”.
One night Randy and Ronda had taken our car to a church function and we told them to be home by ten PM. A few minutes before ten our phone rang. When I answered, a sobbing voice said, “Dad, I can’t take it any longer and I’m leaving home”. This really set me back and I said, “Randy, what’s wrong?” He hung up. I wasn’t aware of any problems. I decided to take my pickup to church to see if there were any kids still around that might give me a clue. I told Nell to stay at the house to answer the phone in case he called again, and in the mean time call the police and have them stop our car if they saw it. I was just getting in the pickup and Nell was on the porch watching me leave when Randy and Ronda drove up. It was just a couple of minutes after ten and I guess the look on our faces scared Ronda to death. She said she thought we were mad because they were late. Randy had no idea what was going on. Either some one was playing a prank on us or worse yet, some poor kid called the wrong number to tell his dad he was running away.
Nell and I were active in the Grandview Church of Christ. We had met Buddy Wells in Alaska and he was one of the elders at Grandview. Bill Phelps was also an elder; he and Jeannette still come down and see us almost every summer. After I was installed as elder, Bill and I did a lot of personal work together.
Roy was born on the 14th of December 1976, just about a year before I was to get out of the Air Force. As with Roger, this was a big surprise. The other three kids had been born in Air Force hospitals, but Richards-Gebaur was a small base and only had a clinic. They sent us to Menorah Medical Center in southern Kansas City for the birth. In order for me to be able to go into the delivery room with Nell, I had to go to a Lamaze class with her. We had some scheduling problems but finally got it finished. After Roy was born they put Nell in a room with a smoker. When Nell complained about the smoke making her throat dry they brought in a humidifier. When we checked out of the hospital they charged us for the humidifier.
In the spring of 1977 Randy graduated from high school and that fall started school at MIT in Boston; He went on a full Navy ROTC scholarship. Just before I retired, Richards-Gebaur AFB was deactivated and AFCS was moved to Scott AFB. Rather than pay to move me (and several others in the same situation) to Scott and then a couple of months later pay to move me to Texas, they just left us on the base. There wasn’t much to do except answer telephones and forward calls to Scott. Due to the base closure, the bottom dropped out of the housing market around the base. We were able to sell our house at a discount but the government had a program to make up for at least part of the difference. I was officially retired from the Air Force on December 31st, 1977. I was a civilian for the first time in over 20 years.