As I roll down Spurlock Drive in Layton Utah, I see little has changed. Oh new people in three of the homes here, our old place still looks as it did, the little pine tree Dad and I planted oh so many years ago. The mounts on that chimney that Dad and I put up to support the Santa Clause we put up every year. The street goes though to a cardboard house subdivision yet it feels oddly enough , no different. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit here.
On the 27th day of April of the year Buddy Holly died, at 01:05 hours in the single space sleeper cab of a 1956 Peterbilt COE just outside of Jerome Idaho, I was born. I came out at the behest of Dr. V.V. Telford of Twin Falls Idaho, just as we hit the parking lot of St. Benedicts Hospital, Dr. Telford spanked my feet, I opened my mouth and haven’t shut it very long since. I guess being born in a truck has meaning after all.
In 1962, with our families domestic cash flow on a string , my Dad took on a joint mission between the USMC and the USAF at Hill Air Force Base in Utah. The commute was very long for our family, so mom with her Navy career history got a Intel job at base, so we moved to Layton in 1962. We moved into a house on Gentile Blvd, where I used to publicly display that I had the right to go pee anywhere I pleased even into the mini pool on our front lawn.
With me enrolled at a mini preschool called Candy Campus, and me already figuring out that there was a real difference between male/female , Mom & Dad rented a house in Kaysville Utah. It was an older home, but it was more on the idea of a farm house in a town that was a farm town. My the development since. Where there were once farms full of beef cattle now has cardboard homes and multi family apartments on it now. Asphalt and concrete has replaced farm ground, and those bike trails we rode as kids.
I was in 2nd grade at Layton Elementary the old one, in 1964 in was a October day, kinda nice, but windy. At 09:30 hours Mom came to school, early. I thought now what? Mom took me to Crestview Elementary School and to Mrs. Alex's class and that’s where I saw her. She sat in a reading circle on the smallest chair in the room, her name? Peggy Follett. For the next few years she was the centerpoint of my life. Everything I did, was, aspired to, was to impress her.
In 1967, I read a ad on the back of a box of Fruit Loops Cereal, that granted as a prize for a one page essay on some new technology a guest appearance on what was called the Fireman Frank Show on KCPX(KTVX) Channel 4. The Tv show was an early morning thing that featured local happenings for kids, plus ran Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Mom was on the design team of the then just in testing and design mode of the C5-A Galaxy Cargo aircraft, that was being built in part at HAFB. So I took what I knew about that, put it in my essay and for the whopping fee of $1.50 and two box tops, I won the contest.
The visit to the TV station was a visit that would be the basis for me in broadcasting. The top 40 radio station in Utah KCPX AM 1320, was in the same building as the TV station. 130 Social Hall Avenue 84111. Right before and shortly after the bit on TV, which I took command, I stopped at an open door to the main on air studio. All those machines, switches, buttons, lights and music. The DJ had went for a drink, so I stepped in, there I was sitting there just awe inspired.
Program Director Wooly Waldron came by and saw me and asked if I wanted to try doing a show reading ad and news copy. Hey I read real good, perhaps because of my Mom in my early years due to a undeveloped immune system, I’d run fevers of 108 without much warning, so Mom kept me by her side until age 6. Mom would read to me, I’d read back to her. Its been told to me although I didn’t look at it special that I could read an entire dictionary by age 4.
So there I was in radio. I loved the hell out of it. I met all kinds of people, from new performers to local celebrities, like the Osmond's. I got a crush on a very young Marie Osmond, who would go on dates, with mom dad and me to the local Davis Drive Inn after a meal at the pancake house in Clearfield Utah in the back of a 56 Merc.
I had thought media was my career, but then the love of flying entered. Dad used to go to the base to observe repairs on aircraft of the Air Force. I’d run all around that hangar , climbing in and out of everything from F4 Phantoms, to Cargo planes. I saw the X-15 long before it was on display for the public on Air Force Days that HAFB threw for the public every May. In 1968 inside that hangar the base General’s T-39 a military version of the Lear Jet>
was in the back of the hangar. Much of the time inside the hangar many of these birds were not powered up that is no electrical. This day was different. The General was set to go to Wright Patterson that Monday the bird was hot. That means fully operational. Previous times I played inside this bird with nothing to worry about. This day everything worked. With no training whatsoever except TV shows, I had never flew, today I got a near crash course on flying, out those hangar doors into wyld ayre I went. I was just shy of Idaho Falls’ Flanning field when two F4’s escorted me back to HAFB. Surprisingly enuff neither Dad nor I got into any trouble. The base commander thought I was gifted as I flew the bird without any help. With my bicycle taken away for two weeks I started basic junior CAP studies. I had thought being in aviation was my career path, with broadcasting as a secondary.
The NASA Apollo Space program had just started heating up, and my 6th grade Science fair project was a mock up of the Lunar Module. It was an early morning on May 5th that year when in class Mrs. Sturgeon, got an intercom alert that two air force airman with a mid sized truck was there to deliver some rather large boxes. Except the boxes were not empty. They contained, simulators from NASA for said Lunar Module. Needless to say I won the science fair.
In 1969 I went to Space Camp, and thought this could be fun, so I buckled down thinking I was going to space.
But my flying ambitions would be put on hold for many years into the future.
More on this later, but suffice to say, in the half century and 5 that I have walked, drove, rode, and flown this third rock from the Solar sun, I have done things, met people, been places and experienced more than any one person could, or dream of. But it was on my 17th Birthday that my life would take a drastic turn around. That in my next installment.
TTYL
Quote of the Day:
A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words.
--Phillips Brooks
Luke 19:10“For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.””
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