Cal's Air Traffic Control
Updated March 5, 2018
I was 21-years-old in 1966 and was driving an ambulance in Denver, Colorado. In the past, I had college deferments but now I was working and was worried about being drafted in the military for the Vietnam War. If it had been a real war, America’s military could have finished the war in a month or two but since it was being “managed” by a Democrat doufas named Lyndon Johnson, it was lasting forever. I didn’t want to fight in a make-believe war where our military men had to fight with one hand tied behind their backs and were being fed into a meat-grinder but, I had to do something before I got drafted. Since I always liked airplanes, I went to the Air Force Recruiting Center in Downtown Denver to see what they had to offer. They said I should start by spending several hours that afternoon taking a bunch of aptitude tests to see what jobs they would be able to offer me. As it turned out, I almost got a perfect score on all of their tests. That really didn’t come as any surprise to me because my entire sophomore class in high school was given a day-long I.Q. test and I got a score of 162 out of a maximum possible score of 200. The average person's IQ is 100 and a score of 140 or over is required to be rated as a genius. The Air Force guy said that I was qualified to do any job in the Air Force but the locations and the jobs he had available didn’t seem to be very exciting and so I decided to go home and think about it.
Several months later, some friends told me that the Buckley Air National Guard Base east of Denver had some job openings and, after some training somewhere in the United States, I would be sent right back to Denver where I could work at a normal job and just go to Buckley one weekend every month. I went out to Buckley to check it out and they just laughed at me. They said they had a one-year waiting list to get any job at Buckley. Obviously, I was very disappointed. Just before I left, one of the guys asked if I had ever taken the Air Force qualifying tests. When I said that I had taken the tests just a few months ago in Downtown Denver, he said to wait few minutes while he made a phone call. About ten minutes later when he came back into the room, he said they had just one spot open. That spot was for an Air Traffic Controller and he wanted to know if I wanted it. When I asked what that name really meant (some military jobs just sound good but are really pretty nasty), he took me over to the window and pointed to the Control Tower standing tall all by itself in the middle of a field. He said that the guys just drank coffee up there and talked to airplanes. When I said that I wanted to go home and think about it, he shouted, “THINK ABOUT IT??? THINK ABOUT IT??? If you’re not here tomorrow at 6 am, ready to enlist, I’ll give the job to someone else!!!
I went home and told my friends that this crazy guy at Buckley really tried to high-pressure me into making an on the spot decision about being an Air Traffic Controller. They said I was the crazy one and I had better be 1,000% sure that I was there way before 6 am. Wow, were they right! Looking back on that whole situation now, I should have driven out to Buckley and slept in my car overnight just to make sure that I was early.
I enlisted in the Colorado Air National Guard at Buckley Air National Guard Base located east of Denver, Colorado in January 1967 but it wasn’t until near the end of March 1967 that I was sent to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas for Basic Training. They made me the squad leader of the first squad because I was good at marching. I was the First Chair Sax in high school and I had plenty of marching practice.
In May 1967, I was sent to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi for Air Traffic Control Tech School. For the first few days, until my school started, I stayed in an older, open-bay, wooden barracks. Three days later, the bus dropped me off in front of my permanent squadron building, which was in a new area of the base called the Triangle Area. All the buildings in the Triangle Area were large, white, three-story, college-type, dormitory buildings with two people to a room. As I got off the bus, I noticed a big group of guys who were practicing fastpitch softball on a softball diamond to the left of the building. I set my bags down and stood by the fence to watch the practice. It was clear to me that they didn’t have a pitcher so when some guys came up to me and asked if I played ball and I said that I was a pitcher, the practice came to a halt. As it turned out, the First Sergeant was the coach of the team and the First Lieutenant was the shortstop. I went from being a nobody to being a somebody in a heartbeat.
My ATC tech school ran from May through September. I went to school on the “C” shift which ran from 6 pm to midnight. After school, we went to “midnight chow” for a late night breakfast and then we marched back to the dorm to sleep until 10 am. I had the rest of the day to do as I wanted because I got a perfect score on every block of instruction. If the test had been revised recently, a perfect score was graded as a 100. Once the test had been out for several weeks and before they brought out a new test, a perfect score might be downgraded to a 99, 98 or less. One time, a perfect score only graded out as an 89. The bigwigs thought that the instructors were teaching the test. They were right! Every instructor asked every student to try to remember at least one question from the test so they could better teach the next class. If you “honored” a block of instruction, you didn’t have to go to a mandatory study hall or pull “work detail” for two weeks. We “tested out” of each block of instruction every week or two so I had a whole stack of “honor slips” to show the leaders and then finally they quit even asking me if I had any more honor slips because they just assumed that I did. I only had a roommate for the first few weeks and so it was pretty quiet the rest of the time. I studied most of the day in my room or pitched fastpitch softball for the team. Around 3 pm, I started to spit-polish my shoes and iron my fatigues with lots and lots of spray starch until they were as stiff as a board. I “broke starch” by forcing a foot down each pant leg and got ready for afternoon formation at 4 pm where we were inspected and then marched to the other side of the base for school.
In the graduation picture, you can see some Army guys. They didn't take all the same blocks of instruction that the Air Force guys did but we happened to graduate at the same time. I'm the third guy from the left in the back row.
Near the end of the tech school course, the “RAPCON FAM.” block of instruction was considered to be one of the most technical of the blocks. In addition to a written test, we were put in a darkened room and had to go through all kinds of steps to adjust a radar scope in a limited period of time. This was made even more difficult by virtue of the fact that a small table under the scope covered the controls so that you could only adjust a whole bunch of knobs just by feel and trying to look under the table to see the controls was impossible because the room was so dark. Some of the guys were having a rough time finding and adjusting knobs under the scope and so I gave up all my time to them and just looked over their shoulders to see the lines on the scope being adjusted. Until the night that I tested out, I had never touched the knobs but I went through the procedures flawlessly and got a perfect score on the written test. The instruction book had a big fold-out life-sized map of the scope and the control knobs. I placed the map on my bed so that the scope was flat on the bed and the control knobs were hanging vertically on the side of the bed. I used to practice kneeling by the side of my bed and touching the spot on the paper where the control knobs were printed while repeating the instructions and only looking at the scope. Every now and then, I would look down to make sure that my fingers only touched the very middle of the control knobs. You can see a picture of the instructor’s evaluation at the top of this page. He was pretty happy that I got a perfect score on the written test because that meant that he didn’t have to make out a long report on every question that at least one of the students got wrong.
In September 1967, I flew back to Buckley ANG base and spent six months on active duty in the tower to get "facility-rated" in the Denver area. My team worked two day shifts, then two swing shifts, then two midnight shifts, and then we were off for one day. After I was rated, I worked in the tower one weekend a month and got a full-time job working in downtown Denver as a cashier for a brokerage firm, Dean Witter. I got my license to sell securities and became a stockbroker in December 1969.
In April 1971, I transferred to the Los Angeles, CA area and was assigned to the Van Nuys Air National Guard Base. They assigned me to work one weekend a month as an Air Traffic Controller in the tower at March Air Force Base in Riverside, CA. The approach control radar for the Ontario California International Airport was located at the base of the March AFB control tower and had a lot more activity so they let me spend all my time down at Ontario Approach Control. Buckley ANGB was a cross-country refueling stop and had lots of fighter traffic but March AFB mainly had B-52s and cargo transports and had much less air traffic.
Every summer we had a two-week deployment to a different airport around the United States. We visited Alpena, Michigan, San Luis Obispo, California, Marana, Arizona near Tucson, and Miramar Naval Air Station (the former home of the “TOP GUN” Fighter Weapons School) in San Diego, California several times. We always seemed to burn the candle at both ends and needed to get back home to rest up.
I fulfilled my six-year commitment in January 1973.