6555 Palmer Park Blvd., Colorado Springs, CO, July 1978 - Spring 1993.

In Bismark, ND, I turned the Camaro East, toward Fargo on I94.  In Fargo, I turned South on I29.  I was headed for White Cloud, KS, and the relatives living there for a brief visit before heading on to Colorado Springs.  This was a long drive, through most of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska.  I have no recollection of spending the night anywhere along the route though that is always possible.   

I might have taken the following photograph of Uncle Robert on the North Hill above White Cloud, looking toward the Missouri River below and Nebraska and Iowa toward the North, during my visit.  Missouri is across the river.                                                                            

I left White Cloud, KS, for Colorado Springs a few days later.  As I crossed the Kansas-Colorado border, I could see the Rockies ahead.  I initially stayed at the Visiting Officer's Quarters (VOQ) at the Air Force Academy.  I swam at the Officer's Club pool for no more than an hour.  However, I got the worst sunburn in my life.  The pain was so bad, I had to visit the Dispensary.  All they told me I could do was just to carefully use cool washcloths on my burned skin.  It took me several days to recover.

In addition, I realized that while in White Cloud, KS, I had gotten bitten by chiggers, on both legs in several places.  Each bite was terribly itchy and caused a welt to form on the skin.  I had to smear lotion all over the bites daily.  The bites took more than a week to heal. 

That early fall, I also came down with a terrible ear infection.  This was even worse than the only other ear infection that I experienced when we lived on Orchard Place in South Gate back in 1963.  When I drank my morning orange juice, it burned my inner ear.  When I ate anything and swallowed, that also burned.  The woman Flight Surgeon said she could give me antibiotics and it would take a week to go away.  Or she could prescribe nothing, and it would go away in a week.  I chose the antibiotic.  It did take a long week to clear up. 

I met with my fellow new instructors and the staff of the English Department.  I had met Colonel Shuttleworth, Department Chair, at the Officer's Club where he mistakenly introduced me to Captain Jennings at the restaurant.  Captain Mace had to correct the Colonel that his name was Captain Jennings Mace, Jennings being his first name. 

The staff took us to lunch at a Mexican restaurant not far from the entrance to the Academy.  We had several days of orientation and training before classes began in the Fall.  Ours would be the very first Academy class, the Class of 1982, that included women.  The previous class had a sprinkling of enlisted women to break the ice among the previously all-male Academy.  But our students would be the first with young women who were actually going to graduate in 1982.  The sexist Class of 1979 referred to themselves as "The Last Class with Balls".  The women of the Class of 1982 referred to themselves in response as "The First Class with Ass".    

I had met an attractive guy at Minot through a friend.  He was stationed at the Air Force Academy and offered that I could stay at his house while he was away for a couple of weeks.  It was at his house where I spent some agonizing nights trying to sleep with the sunburn and the chigger bites.  After he returned, I took up my former squadron mate's offer to stay at their house with him, his wife and their two kids.  But in order to keep from wearing out my welcome, I would spend the weekends at the VOQ.  I figured they could do without my presence every single day, and I could do the same.  The young son seemed particularly high strung and troubled.  The slightly older daughter would be incredibly bossy, as could her mom.    

I very soon had to do something regarding permanent living quarters for the remainder of what I anticipated would be a four-year assignment.  (The BOQ was converted to a VOQ since the Academy was often awash in visitors much of the year.)  I don't recall who suggested I check out a new housing development on Cimmaron Hills, close to Peterson Air Force Base, several miles from the Academy.  The builder was Gendron Homes.  At their offices near the development, their representative showed me the price listings and how they were increasing prices each month because of demand.  He mentioned a somewhat smaller three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom home with "a million-dollar view".  He was not exaggerating.  The following two merged photos show the view from one of the two spare upstairs bedrooms.  
                                                                     

Thing is, you could even see Pike's Peak from the South-facing basement window.  A similar view from the kitchen window and dining room window was also available.  The rep for the builder was definitely pressuring me to sign right away as the prices were continuously increasing.  I had hoped to consult Mom since she had Real Estate experience for so many years.  However, if I wanted this house, I had to sign immediately.  The price at the time seemed high, though today it would be considered an incredible steal.  The house was $54,700,00.  The interest rate was definitely excessive compared to recent years, 9.4%.  I had paid for a finished basement which made sense.  Counting the basement, the house had four levels, typical for many Colorado Springs homes.  The floor off of the garage featured the family room and a washer/dryer room with a sink, mirror and toilet.  The floor through the front door had the living room, dining room and kitchen.  It came with an almond-colored stove and dishwasher, but I would have to buy an almond-colored refrigerator.  The carpeted stairs led to the top floor and a full hall bathroom and the three bedrooms.  The Master bedroom was to the right beyond the hall bathroom door, and it faced North toward Palmer Park Blvd.  The two spare bedrooms faced South.  The Master Bedroom had a small bathroom with sink, mirror, toilet and shower.  (I took showers all of the time anyway, so I did not need a tub.  And the main bathroom off of the hall was always available with a tub.)  

Knowing that I was likely to have guests, I soon would buy two Queen-sized beds, one for my room and one for one of the two guest rooms.  I was able to buy curtain rods for all of the windows at the Base Exchange.  Most of the curtains were very cheap and flimsy.  But I was too poor to afford better at the time.  I soon realized that a brand-new house was incredible, but I was starting from scratch with everything.  

The only significant problem buying the Palmer Park Blvd. home was that it would take a few more weeks to be finished.  I had to stay with that family longer than I intended.  One weekend, the wife pointedly wondered aloud why I was not out and about, enjoying the area.  I explained that money was tight, and I could not afford to just waste gas driving around.  (Time enough for that in the future.)

Here are a couple of photos of the house under construction:
                                                                            

                                                                               

With nothing more going on at the Academy and the house taking more time to finish, I took some leave and headed back to visit Mom in Southern California.  She had been forced to move from the San Pedro duplex because the owner's daughter had gotten married and wanted to move into her unit.   Next, Mom had lived in a very old home a few blocks away, for several months; but she soon was living in a corner house in San Pedro when I visited during the summer of 1978.  Money was tight, but she did not seem to get it.  I would be moving into a new home, and I had no furniture of any kind except my TV shelf, stereo unit and Dahlquist speakers, and two shelves for all of my record albums--and I had yet to buy the beds and fridge at a minimum.  We were going to see Heaven Can Wait in a local theater, but we got into a silly argument about who was going to pay for the theater tickets (cheap in those days). 

Sadly, this pattern that would begin on this trip would continue through many of my visits in the coming years.  Mom began to become very possessive of my time when I visited her.  I had so many others to also visit after I arrived back in Southern California, but she did not want to share me or my time.  And, the old cliche also became true, Mom was friendly and giving for the first three days or so.  After that, she became judgmental and even critical.  On this visit, she was critical of my purchase of the house on Palmer Park Blvd.  Instead of seeing the movie, I angrily turned her car back to her rental home, called Ann to pick me up, and spent my last couple of days of leave at her apartment.  I did not need the added pressure of her disapproval.   

When I flew back to Colorado Springs, I drove over to see what progress had been made on my house.  I was surprised to see that the color was different than when I left.  The white siding was not the color the house was going to be. 
                                                                               

                                                                               

The two kids in the photo were those of the family I was staying with.  After I moved in, I spent several months killing off Black Widow spiders inside and around the exterior.  I found a few in the finished basement in the coming months.  But many took up residence under the lip of the siding and the concrete portion you can see in the photo of the back of the house.  I hate spiders and really don't want Black Widows.  The following photos are from the time after I moved in and we had had our first snow fall.
                                                                         

                                                                                 

                                                                                   

                                                                                  

                                                                                  

The builder did provide a certain square footage of lawn.  But my backyard was extensive, so I had to measure out where the lawn would go, leaving large swaths where I intended to lay rock when I could afford that.  I could not afford fencing either and had to reply upon neighbors to put up fences.  Had I the financing, I would have terraced the back yard to make it easier to mow.  I was initially able to pay for lawn care, but when the prices significantly went up, I had to buy a lawn mower.  

I used my VA benefits to buy the house.  After the closing at a Colorado Springs bank, I bought a small clock at a clock store in a strip mall behand the bank.  It did not have an alarm.  I usually kept it on the mantle in the family room.  Surprisingly, it still works all these 55 years later.
                                                                           

   
English Department picnic

The Department held a picnic on the Academy grounds at the end of that first summer.  Colonel Shuttleworth is playing the standup base.  The guitarist Captain on the right in the musical trio would play a significant part in my eventual situation that led to my resignation.  (In the top photo are Jay Gaspar and his wife.)
                                                                               

                                                                             

                                                                              

I took a few photos around the Academy that first summer.  One previous graduating class at the Academy cleverly covered the planetarium with black sheets to turn the round structure into an 8-ball.   
                                                                              

                                                                              

                                                                                

                                                                                 

Visitors

One morning as I prepared to pull out of the garage, I noticed a camper parked in my driveway.  The Schurr's peered out of the camper window to greet me.  I left the front door unlocked for them to use the facilities.  They would be the first of many visitors to 6555 Palmer Park Blvd. those many years I lived there.  Mom, Ann, Uncle Robert, Grandpa Sanchez, dad, Bruce Kuelz from Minot, the Schurrs, the Durrs, Roger Benninger and others.  I would gladly take them to favorite restaurants and the Academy, and many other local tourist attractions.    

Air Force Commendation Medal

For all of my efforts at Minot, I earned an Air Force Commendation Medal.  Here is Colonel Shuttleworth presenting it to me.
                                                                              

                                                                              

English Department photo

Here is the entire English Department photographed in the Department conference room.  Colonel Shuttleworth is sitting in the center of the front row.  The man directly behind him was my supervisor, Captain Weaver.  I am standing to the left of him.  For some reason Captain Gina Martin, who would become a friend in the Department, is not in the photo.  
                                                                           

Here are two photos I took from the instructor and staff parking lot, across a small bridge back to the Academic building.  The English Department offices were in the far right of the top floor.  Colonel Shuttleworth had the office at the very corner of the top floor.  The building to the right is the Academy Library.
                                                                             

                                                                                  

Gina Martin

In the house directly below mine on Cimmaron Hills, I would see a woman come out on her back patio with a dog on a few afternoons.  Later, at a mixer that brought together all of the new English Department instructors, Jennings Mace, Gina Martin, Bruce Daggy, a TCU grad, and me, Gina came up to me and said, "Hello, neighbor."  I was taken aback because I realized that she was the woman with the dog who lived directly below my house.  She would later explain that she had deliberately bought a house that far from the Academy to have some privacy from her coworkers.  And here she soon was disappointed to discover that a fellow Department member lived directly above her house.  So much for complete privacy.

I would eventually learn that three of the four women in the Department were not straight.  I was the only male member who was gay.  At least as far as we knew when three of us connected in the coming months.

Here are Gina and me with her two dogs, Murphy and Clover.  We are in her family room.  Her house was similarly designed as mine, just bigger.  She'd had a home in Utah, her previous assignment.  She was able to afford to put up a fence around the backyard and add other amenities inside and outside her new house with the profit she'd made.  
                                                                              

                                                                              

Gina had a troubled time at the Academy, unrelated to her sexuality.  I never got the details.  But a year after I left the Academy, she departed.  Before she left, we had a brief falling out.  I am not even sure why.  One day, I found that Murphy had gotten out.  I lured him into my house and left a voice message with her that I had him.  She surprisingly hobbled over with one foot in a cast, took Murphy home, but said nothing to me, not even a thank you.  Before she left Colorado Springs, however, we had reconciled.  She explained that she was having ongoing medical issues, and the medication she was taking lead to her losing her balance a lot and even breaking her foot.  The medication also messed with her feelings.  

Athletics

I would soon learn to become a runner.  The views all over the Academy were remarkable.  I would start out from the Cadet Field House locker rooms and take off.  I would run up the rather steep hill where the Overlooks were situated, to view the entire Academy complex.  This was the era before significant running shoes, so I would run in Converse low tops, though Colonel Shuttleworth was shocked that I was not wearing something a bit more significant than canvas tennis shoes.

I would also play a bit of touch football with some of the Department members at lunch or work out in the gym at noon or play doubles volleyball.  But I also had a few months where my body was adjusting to the altitude.  I might be sitting on the floor of the family room, start to get up, become weak and tired, and sit back down, content to just linger on the floor.  

English Department Supply Officer

When the staff learned that I had been the Squadron Supply Officer at Minot, I was quickly given a similar position for the English Department.  Primarily I was consistently replacing the "typeballs" for the Department secretaries' IBM Selectric Typewriters.  They got snapped into the typewriters in the morning and taken out and stored at the end of each workday.  They were valuable and might get lifted if not stored at night in a drawer or cabinet when not in use.  
                                                                   

                                                                                 

                                                                                  

As you can see in the middle photograph, the typeball has "teeth" at the bottom.  If the teeth got broken, the typeball did not work well and had to be replaced, another reason I was replacing them as Supply Officer.  I became the Department secretaries best friend so they could get their work done.  

I was later chosen to represent the English Department in discussions regarding the eventual replacement of the Selectric Typewriters throughout the many Departments with IBM Word Processors, then on the horizon, so much more efficient than typing everything over and over, or using carbon paper for duplicates.  

Cadet Badminton Club

Since I loved playing badminton, it was natural for me to become the Officer-in-Charge of the Cadet Badminton Club.  We participated in a tournament at the Denver Athletic Club and one at the Academy Field House.  
                                                                            

Cadet Film Club

At some point, I became the Officer-in-Charge of the Cadet Film Club.  They showed films in the large cadet auditorium.  VCR's were still not prevalent, so the Club would order films using the Club's membership dues, show those films in the auditorium the following weekend, and then return each film to the distributor.  I worked with Cadet Chris Keener who was the Cadet-in-Charge of the Club.  I don't remember many of the films we showed--most were classics--but two were memorable, Woodstock and Fritz the Cat.  We actually never got to show Fritz the Cat.

The Film Club would show a courtesy to the English Department by previewing each film for the Department in the conference room a few days before the weekend of the Club auditorium showing.  One member of the Department, while viewing the sexually explicit and violent cartoon, became so incensed--and wildly offended--that he vowed he would do whatever he could so that Fritz would not be shown to the cadets.  Sadly, for him, the film became a Cause Celebre to him alone and an unsettling crisis for me.   I tried to reason with him, but he refused to be reasoned with.  No matter that the film had received awards and accolades, he determined to have it banned. 

I spoke at length with Chris, and we agreed not to show the film to the Club.  (He and several cadet members of the Club had also previewed it in Chris's dorm room.)  I had also discussed the situation with Colonel Shuttleworth who reminded me of the fact that Fritz had received accolades.  I knew the objecting officer well.  In fact, he and I would play doubles volleyball at the gym.  We would play touch football at noon on the fields near the gym.  I would also find that my name tag outside my cubicle would be missing, repeatedly.  I would have it replaced, and that new name tag would also turn up missing.  This went on for a couple of weeks until I entered his cubicle one day and found all of them hanging, taped together, in his office.  This was his little prank.

I was also pranked (maybe by him but it could have been any number of veteran English Department members my first summer) when I got a note to urgently contact a "Colonel Munke".  I dialed the number provided, only to reach the Cheyene Mountain Zoo.  Oblivious but perplexed, I asked for Colonel Munke, instantly realizing that in saying the name aloud, I was asking for "Colonel Monkey" at a zoo.  I felt foolish.    

Feeling the Fritz controversy resolved, I still showed up at the auditorium that weekend to turn away any cadets who showed up to see the film, not having seen the flyers that indicated the showing had been cancelled.  Unfortunately, the former Cadet Film Club CIC arrived to see the movie.  When Chirs and I explained what had happened, he flew into a rage, at me in particular for bowing to pressure and also at the offending Department member who had objected.  The cadet was being highly disrespectful, but I understood his frustration at what he viewed as academic censorship.  I took the verbal abuse without responding in kind to his anger. 

Most cadets when they were allowed to join the Flim Club had to be 18 or older.  They could make their own choices regarding which films to see and which to avoid.  He ranted that the Club would lose the deposit on the film, as well, for which the officer who was responsible, or me for agreeing to not show the film, ought to reimburse the Club's coffers.  He finally left, still furious.  I was rather shaken myself when I drove home that glorious afternoon.  However, Chris was able to contact the film distributor who did not charge the Club for the returned film.  

The eventual upshot of the controversy was that by year's end, I was contacted by the English Department duo in charge of the Academy television course, Blue Tube, to be a co-instructor for the course the following year.  I was told that I had handled a very difficult situation admirably and, should any similar situation arise with Blue Tube, I would likely handle the situation as equally effectively.

One other upshot to the controversy was that the Film Club under Chris no longer offered the English Department the courtesy of previewing any films before they were shown to the Cadet Wing.

Icarus

In 1979, the Academy celebrated its 25th year of existence.  The Cadet Creative Writing publication, Icarus, honored the event with a special edition.  They culled the best poems from earlier editions of the yearly publication, as well as including poems from cadets that celebratory year.  I had written the following poem in 1977 after my interview visit.  The Major in charge of the publication decided to include it in Icarus that year.  I assisted with the publication, especially with the grunt work of making sure it was composed and printed properly, no easy task because this was before computers and desktop publishing.      
          
The Academy

I remember the trees...
Pines in their natural formation
randomly cover the hills at noon.
We visitors are about the lunch procession:
Cadets marching to a mid-day meal.
We each observe;
and I have my impressions
but hold them in suspense,
matching my integrity with these surroundings.
The steel cathedral rising to the skies
points with the evergreens close behind.
Yet neither competes now with this parade.
I must choose my words as wisely.
True to thoughts and fairly
I see this formation of youth pivot
in a movement that must come to no meaning
in time, with practice.
Men and women emerge,
contrasting even as trees grow to these hills.
All to leave this merging as one mass.
Pushed, at last, to different duties,
and a similar discipline.

I am always nudged by sadness
by such a place as this.
Resentful that I can neither confront nor conform.

I forget how it was for me when I marched.
As they will forget.
As we must remember.

I am actually still quite proud of that poem.  This was well before what would happen to me at the Academy, but it speaks of what always lay beneath the surface in those days for those of us who were different.

Class Load

We four new instructors taught four Freshman English courses in the Fall and in the Spring Semesters.  (I also would be tasked with a Summer makeup English class after the term ended.  More about that later.)  I found that I still have copies of each class roster all these years later.  
                                                                      

John Harrington and Mark Jurovich were football players on the Freshman team, Mark a QB and John a DB.  Both were from Southern California.  We were encouraged to invite Cadets over to our houses whenever possible.  The two became regulars.  Mark told me that he hated Cheesecake because an Aunt made one that he did not like.  I assured him that my recipe was wonderful and that he would like it.  I made one for them, and he reluctantly tried a piece.  After thar first bite, he would ask before each visit, "Did you make another cheesecake?"  After I left the Academy, one Christmas break they would even come by when I was visiting Mom on vacation one year in San Pedro.  

A wide receiver for the freshman team, Daniel "Danny" Malm several years later ended up back at the Academy in a coaching capacity.  A few years before, he and two friends were crossing a street in a beach city in Florida.  They were all struck by a hit-and-run driver.  One was killed, one had a severely damaged knee, but Danny had a brain stem injury so severe that he would require many months of rehab and therapy.  He would be physically challenged for the rest of his life.  He would have to use his hand to move his head.  He was able to remain in the Air Force but an assignment such as he had for the Academy was one of the few jobs he could handle.    

Don Kent McCorkindale's situation was different.  I saw him and his girlfriend after I left the Academy at a local store in a strip mall in Colorado Springs.  Both were very friendly toward me.  Later, sadly, I would learn that he was in an Air Force aircraft crash and killed.  A memorial plaque exists near the Academy chapel, on the hill above.    
                                                                           

Christmas Leave, 1978                    

One of my students (Bill Boyd) from the San Diego vicinity whose parents would be in Tucson, Arizona, for Christmas vacation asked if I was going to drive to Southern California that year.  He wanted to hitch a ride.  I hadn't intended to do that but the more I thought about it, the more interesting the drive became.  I would have a driving companion each way.  We left the first day and got to Albuquerque where we spent the night in a motel.  The next day we drove as far as Tucson where I dropped him off at the house where his parents were staying for the holidays.  I stayed at a motel in Tucson before heading on to Mom's apartment.

I would have my own car and not have to borrow Mom's while I was there.  One component of her controlling behavior would be thwarted.    

Unfortunately, on the drive back to Colorado Springs, when I arrived at the house in Tucson to pick up the cadet, I was informed that Bill Boyd had already left for Colorado Springs.  I would have to make the whole return drive by myself.  With nobody to share the long trip with me, I drove straight through, arriving at home after midnight.
     
Cadet Wing Turmoil

The rumors began slowly as they sometimes do in a small-town environment.  And the United States Air Force Academy was very much like an insular small town where gossip and rumor, once begun, eventually could and did run rampant.  Cadets began to speak of individual homosexuals being investigated at USAFA.  Rumors involved Squadron 15, now being cruelly called "Queen Fifteen".  Squadron 11 was being referred to as "Rebel 11, Homo Heaven".  There was a third Squadron also in the mix, though I do not remember which one that was and how its name was homophobically twisted.

Even in the English Department, one of the women had invited her "sister" to visit the facilities.  As soon as I saw the sister in the hallway, I immediately believed that the sister was a Lesbian.  But I would eventually learn that Arlene Robbins's sister was actually her lover.  Arlene would soon attend a Jewish prayer dinner with Cadets and Academy officers sitting side-by-side.  She would find herself next to one of the Cadets who was implicated in the homosexual scandal, Bill Ryder.  He was friends with the other two accused Cadets, Dan Stratford and George Gordy.  While none of them had had sex with one another, they had encountered one another in the Denver bathhouse, The Ball Park.  (They were too young in the beginning, 18, to legally enter gay bars in Denver; but they could visit The Ball Park.)

At the point that I would learn the details of the investigation by the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), accusations against Bill and George had been set aside.  They would admit nothing, there was no proof that either was gay, and the investigation then focused solely upon Dan Stratford.  And even that investigation was over because Dan, his civilian lawyer, and the Academy authorities had reached a plea deal.  Dan would continue in the Cadet Wing until graduation.  He would get his diploma and graduate with a degree.  However, he would never receive a commission in the Air Force but would become a civilian after graduation.  

That is what Dan told me when I knew enough to contact him in his Squadron and offer my support.  I knew I could trust the Cadet with whom I had driven to Tucson the previous Christmas break, Bill Boyd.  When Bill answered the Squadron phone, I knew he would put Dan Stratford on the phone.  I was sorely disappointed to hear that the deal had been struck and Dan would be leaving the Air Force in June.  But there was no better resolution to the investigation.

What had happened to put Dan in this predicament was that while he was on leave, two of his classmates, who always suspected Dan was gay, deliberately rummaged through his personal possessions while Dan was away, looking for anything that might prove Dan was gay.  They would lie to the OSI and the Academy authorities that what they were merely looking for was a Physics paper because their going through Dan's things without his permission was a violation of Academy rules. 

Also, claiming that you were looking for one thing when you were actually looking for evidence against a fellow cadet was a lie and a violation of the honor code.  They should have been reprimanded themselves or kicked out of the Academy.  However, what they found was a letter from a Canadian Attache to Dan.  (What one might rightly ask was how did a personal letter look anything like a Physics paper?  Why did they actually read a letter addressed to someone else, opening the envelope to get to the letter to read it?)  It was clear that the Attache who wrote the letter was gay.  The Academy had an archaic regulation that Cadets could not associate with "known homosexuals".  Dan Stratford clearly knew someone who was obviously homosexual and with whom he had corresponded.  That letter would be the subject of the investigation, the only proof, and the sole cause for his eventual expulsion from the Air Force. 

The two Cadets who had turned over the letter they had come upon experienced no repercussions for what they had done.  They had conspired to look through another Cadet's private possessions until they found something they knew was incriminating.  They conspired to lie that the sole reason they were going through that Cadet's personal possessions was to find a Physics paper that they needed.  Apparently, they were actually devout Christians who believed it was their mission to rid the Academy of a Cadet whom they believed to be homosexual.  Why did they believe Dan was gay?  Because, they told the investigators and Dan's lawyer, that when Dan was on leave, he would travel to places such as Dallas or New York or Miami.  Dan's lawyer was flabbergasted that that was their sole basis for believing Dan was gay.  Travelling to big cities when on leave indicated to them that Dan must be gay?     
They succeeded in ending Dan's military career based upon a conspiracy and a lie.  They graduated and went on to Air Force careers.  He did not.  

After we spoke on the phone, Dan would stop by my cubicle one day for a chat.  He, George and Bill would become friends for a time.  (My call had completed the circle with Arlene, Bill, Dan and me.)  At one point, George even received an anonymous note from someone who wrote, "I believe you are a gay."  They listed a gasoline station on Academy Blvd. where they wanted to meet George.  However, he got the note too late to make the connection even had he wanted to.

Regardless, the investigation was entirely over.  The OSI was no longer looking at, or following, any of them.  (At one point early in the investigation, the OSI showed up at Dick Tuttle's work, wanting to ask him questions.  Dick Tuttle was Dan's older, civilian lover with whom he would spend weekends in Denver.  Dick was furious that they would show up at his place of work and told them to leave, that he would tell them nothing.  In order to still see Dick on weekends away from the Academy once the investigation started, Dan had to devise elaborate means, including switching cars, all the while with Dan hiding in backseats, out of sight.  The friend of Dick's driving the final car would eventually pull into Dick's open garage.  The garage door would be lowered, and only then would Dan emerge to spend the weekend with Dick.  The whole thing was rather sad but necessary.  But after the investigation ended, these circuitous means of secretly meeting were no longer required.)

How had Dan and Dick met?  In his sophomore year, Dan had been invited to a party at Dick's new condo on Pennsylvania St. by a mutual friend.  Instant chemistry led Dick to invite Dan into an empty condo where they had sex.  Assuming that this was a one-time encounter, Dick thought nothing further about Dan.  However, during a particularly cold and snowy weekend, Dick answered his front door and found a freezing Dan Stratford in his Cadet uniform, standing on his doorstep.  Dan had hitchhiked all of the way to Denver from the Academy just to see Dick again.  When Dan left the Air Force, he would move in with Dick; and they would live together throughout the 1980's.  (By his senior year, like most other Cadets, Dan had purchased a new Chevy Corvette from Detroit.  All of the senior Cadets who did so would arrive in Detroit at the Corvette factory to pick up their new vehicles.  Unfortunately, after he graduated, Dan could not afford to make the Corvette payments and had to trade his in for a used vehicle.)

Department Accolades

Before this narrative gets very dark, it's significant to include a couple of notes either directly from the Department Chair, Colonel Shuttleworth, or from someone who spoke for Colonel Shuttleworth about my value to the English Department. 
                                                                               

                                                                                   

By the date of the second note, my life and career were about to take a total nosedive.  From July until my final departure on October 12, 1979, I would experience some of the toughest days and nights of my life.

Dr. Holter from Cal State Dominguez Hills had said to me in the Spring of 1979 that, to him, I was born to be a teacher.  And here I was, at a teaching assignment that I was so thrilled to have.  I had come to a place where I finally felt at home, doing a job I thoroughly enjoyed.  

George Gordy and Bill Ryder would come over for a weekend at my house before my career fell apart.  George is in the kitchen.  Bill is in the family room.  (No, we did not have sex.)
                                                                                   

                                                                               

In his senior semester, Bill Ryder failed to pass enough courses so that he was not able to graduate.  He became an Air Force enlisted man and, the last I heard, was living with his lover, near Travis AFB where he was stationed after the Academy.  George Herman Gordy, Jr. would be the sole graduate of the three friends and went on to pilot training. 
                                                                         

                                                                                 

Unfortunately, during a routine drug test later in the decade, George failed the test for marijuana and was suspended from flying.  In 1987, at a party, I learned through a friend, a doctor, that George found out he was infected with HIV; but he did not want others to know.  On April 1, 1989, George died of AIDS.  He would have been 31.  

On July 9, 1989, Dick Tuttle would also die of AIDS (he and his doctor said it was "bone cancer," but that and liver cancer were often the public diagnoses when patients did not want family to know they were gay or had AIDS).  I believe it was Dan who told me after Dick died that it was of AIDS.  

Whenever Dick's relatives visited, he and Dan tried to create the illusion that the two of them were simply roommates and that Dan's was the front bedroom, not the huge back bedroom with the King-sized bed that they normally shared.  (The back bedroom had initially been two separate and smaller bedrooms, but Dick had contractors remove the separating wall and make a much bigger master bedroom.  He also had a large fish tank installed within a wooden trunk.)  

Dick had once told me that he allowed theirs to be an open relationship because he always believed that if he kept it monogamous, Dan would grow bored with him and move on.  Typically, however, they only played around when one of them was out of town or not around.  Throughout the 1980's until Dick's death, I would be invited to parties or to a few dinners at their condo. 
                                                                       

I once even met up with Dan who often spent his Christmases in Hawaii.  Mom and I needed a place to stay because we had not reserved a hotel room before we got passes on Western Airlines from my sister to Honolulu.  Every hotel we called was fully booked.  Dan graciously allowed us to use his rented condo for three nights.  He only was there one night because he would be staying with a friend on one of the other islands each of the other two nights that Mom and I remained on Oahu.

Toward the end of the decade, Dick had his own, open fling with a tall, muscular Air Force enlisted man.  At a party I attended, Dick openly kissed and hugged his buddy on the couch while Dan appeared to be trying to ignore what was happening in front of all of us guests.  Dan himself had soon met an older man from San Francisco and was going to move there in 1988.  But when Dick got sick, Dan stayed.  I drove up to Denver one weekend, to help out with Dick when Dan was invited to a Denver Broncos football game at Mile High Stadium.  Dick had difficulty walking but used a lacrosse stick as a crutch as we methodically headed over to a corner park that Dick and his neighbors had created and donated to the city after they bought the corner lot.  The Quality Hill Park at the corner of 10th and Pennsylvania St. had previously been ripe for development.  Now the space is always there for anyone to sit and enjoy, the trees having been planted earlier are now fully grown.
                                                                         
In 1980, at the nearby Governor's Park Restaurant, I tried to talk Dick out of supporting Ronald Reagan for president.  I told him then that Reagan was no friend of the LGBTQ community.  Now, all of these years later in that community park, Dick complained that Reagan was doing, and saying, nothing about AIDS.  Dick said that he had written to the group that was raising money for the impending Reagan Library.  He told them he would make no further contributions until Reagan publicly said or did something about the AIDS crisis.  Dick had yet to get a reply and vowed that he would donate no further.  I reminded him of our conversation nine years earlier, and he admitted that another friend had likewise warned him against supporting Reagan in 1980.

I had visited Dick a couple of times at Porter Hospital after he got sick.  But the last time I arrived, I found out that he had asked to be taken home, to die there instead.  Dick had always been financially comfortable.  His condo with Dan was paid for.  He had been part owner of The Ball Park, getting me in free one night just so I would see what a gay bathhouse was like.  He'd made other astute investments throughout his life.  His job at Sterns-Rogers paid well.  When he told me that his sister had asked, when she visited him in his hospital room if he was prepared to die, he told her that he was.  He was 52.  

I visited their Courtyard Townhomes condo on Pennsylvania St. on Capitol Hill in Denver one last time in late 1989 after Dick had died (their unit was in the far left in the back of the complex).  Dan was packing up what he had not already given away, or Dick had not willed to friends and family, to sell the condo and finally move to San Francisco.  Dan had bought a nearby condo a few years earlier and had also sold that in preparation for the move to California.  In addition to the condo, Dick willed his new, blue Jaguar 4-door sedan to Dan. 

Before graduation, Cadets can order a framed, ceremonial sword to present to others.  I assume that Dan inherited the one he had given Dick back in 1979 that read, "Thanks for everything."     

Dick had always loved owls.  He had a stuffed Snowy Owl in the spare bedroom, one that had been found dead against a fence and which he had had a taxidermist beautifully restore and mount for him.  I asked Dan that night if there was something of Dick's that I could have, to remind me of a man who had been a friend when I needed one.  Dan disappeared for a few minutes and returned with a small, souvenir owl that someone had given Dick earlier in the decade.  I still have that small owl, and here it is.
                                                                       

Having served in the Air Force, Dick Tuttle is buried in the Fort Lyon Veterans Cemetary near Las Animas, Colorado.  Never having been in that part of the state, I have never visited his grave.  I believe that only family members, and Dan, were at the funeral service at the VA Cemetary.

Dan Stratford got sick in the 1990's, dying in 1995 in San Francisco, just before the meds that saved so many lives were widely enough available.  I was told his ashes were scattered somewhere in the mountains of Colorado, at a spot he dearly loved.  He would have been 37.                                   

Perspective

Likely nothing that you will read here in the next section would occur today.  Much of what happened to me then directly resulted because LGBTQ people could not openly serve in the military.  Leonard Matlovich would challenge the military policy while I was being investigated.  Yes, I knew when I joined that I would have to be careful, that as a gay man I was not wanted in that era.  But I have always felt that I had a right to serve, to defend my country like anyone else.  That the policy excluding LGBTQ people from military service was terribly wrong and needlessly hurtful.  I have always felt that the way to demand equality in our society is to show that we are equally willing to sacrifice and serve.

The major objection to LGBTQ people serving back then was that we would be subject to blackmail by foreign agents.  We were security risks.  I found that excuse laughable.  The significant reason that we might become subjected to blackmail was because the policy existed to jettison us.  We could come to the authorities, explain that someone was trying to blackmail us, and we might be thanked for coming forward; but then we could be expelled for being gay.  However, there really were no instances in the U.S. military of LGBTQ members betraying our country because of blackmail.  Only later would the military come up with the additional excuse that LGBTQ people serving would damage unit cohesion, hence the reliance on the policy of "Don't Ask; Don't Tell".  But that same justification was used to avoid integration in the military for decades, as well as limiting women to certain jobs but not others.  Some white military personnel did not want to serve with Black service members or with women.  Those two policies were struck down and white personnel were forced to serve alongside members of several minorities, and eventually with women, even in combat roles.    

I have written in real time elsewhere in this blog when the U.S. Senate finally voted to allow us to serve after they eliminated the policy of "Don't Ask; Don't Tell".  Years before in 1979, I had told Dick Tuttle that I firmly believed the policy would change in the next 5-10 years.  I was several years off, but it happened comfortably within my lifetime.  Senator Barry Goldwater, a military veteran and staunch conservative, even wrote an editorial in the early 1980's that advocated for LGBTQ people to serve openly.  Times were beginning to change.    

Sadly, what is important in retelling my experience from so long ago is that this policy of exclusion and oppression can easily return in our current environment of extremism in religion and politics that seeks to seize total control of power and take the nation backward.  Settled law no longer becomes settled to any of these extremists, especially to those bigots on the Supreme Court.

So, my story must be told once again in the hopes that no one has to experience what I unfairly endured in the late Spring and Summer of 1979.

Cadet Keith Bostic

Was Keith Bostic even his real name?  To this day I do not know for certain, not that I have tried to find out the facts after I wrote a single letter to his mother not long after I was out of the Air Force and looking for answers when it mattered.  She said in her reply that she would not become some sort of liaison between the two of us, as if I ever wanted a reconciliation.  She severely mistook my letter.  I never intended to ever get back with Bostic.  I just wanted to know why he did what he did to me, and what he tried to do to others, most of whom did not even know him.

The Captain in the picnic photo above playing electric guitar came to my cubicle one day, explaining that he was leaving the Academy.  He needed someone to take over advising a Cadet, to become his Humanities Advisor while the Cadet was at the Academy.  The kicker was that this Captain informed me that the Cadet had asked for me "personally".  Who would not be intrigued?  I did not even know who Cadet Keith Bostic was.  I realized that he had submitted a poem that we published in the 25th Anniversary Icarus.  I had never met him.  He was never my student since he was in his second year at the Academy, and I only taught Freshmen.

I don't really remember our initial conversation and meeting.  He was of medium stature, sandy blond hair and blue eyes (I am always getting eyes wrong, so don't hold me to this detail).  He was 19.  I was 29.  I say this only in context, that we were both young but not that young that we did not know what we were doing.  Dan Stratford was 21 when I met him, and Dick Tuttle was twice his age, 42.  Dan liked older men.  In fact, as a teenager, Dan would seduce his Father's business partner, significantly older than Dan.  I must admit that it's flattering when a younger man is interested.  And now I had a Cadet, ten years my junior, asking for me to be his Humanities advisor.

However, in retrospect, I wish that the good Captain from Mississippi who played the electric guitar, had gone to someone else, anyone else in the Department, instead of me.  I had enough on my plate that I did not need to agree to become an Academic Advisor as well.  Had I been teaching in the History Department, Cadet Keith Bostic and I likely would never have met.  Now, I readily agreed to become his advisor, sight unseen.  I wish I had said, "No."

When I asked Cadet Bostic why he had asked for me personally, he baldly replied, "Because I like your body."  I was taken aback.  (As with most of his actions and statements, he would later deny that he ever said or did such things.)

Cadet Bostic would come by my office, but most especially come by the projection booth whenever the Film Club was showing a film.  I remember the first time the two of us exchanged banter of a homoerotic nature.  We had been talking about nothing of significance.  As the film wound through the projector, Cadet Bostic said, "I need to go to the 'Little Boy's Room'."  I thought the phrase so archaic and amusing that I said, without thinking as he exited the booth, "Do you need help?"  I laughed.  He stopped in the doorway, turned to me, looked me directly in the eye and replied, "You can hold my hand."  He then smiled (was it mischievously or seductively?) and departed.

My mind raced.  While Top Gun was about four years in the future, with all of its military homoeroticism and sexual banter, and my friend Roger Benninger had a photo plaque from his flight training days of himself appearing to "butt fuck" his Instructor Pilot.  It was a bit of a joke, something to laugh at; but it had a definite resonance.  And with my experiences with Steve H. and John F. in Minot, I knew a come on when I heard one.  With Keith Bostic, I filed that exchange away.

It was only after a second encounter between us that I began to be concerned.  We were again in the projection booth.  I had gotten a letter, something about working more closely with your Cadet advisee.  As I explained what the letter was about, I put my hand on Bostic's shoulder, his closest shoulder.  I was not about to put my arm around him.  The booth was close to being filled with other Cadets, coming and going.  Friends of Chris Keener's; students who knew me were all around us.  Bostic then did something unexpected.  He put his arm around my waist and held me close as I explained that the letter "Was sort of a Little Brother-Big Brother situation."  None of the other Cadets seemed to notice or care that Cadet Bostic and I were in this odd sort of embrace, but I was highly uncomfortable.  I am not even certain how I extricated myself from his embrace so as to not be noticeable.

I should have let the incident of the embrace go.  

But I did not.  And I thought a great deal about what his embrace meant in the next few days.  Yes, I knew he was attracted to me.  I felt an attraction to him.  But I also felt concerned that he was becoming a bit indiscrete in showing how he felt about me.  The entire investigation regarding Dan Stratford and his two Cadet friends was entirely over.  But the homophobic environment at the Academy was still present.  One of my female students had written about how the situation among the female basketball and volleyball teams was uncomfortable now because of allegations of Lesbianism among members of those two teams.  Gina Martin had mentioned something to me since she had advisor capacity with both teams of young women.

I should have let it go, but I called up Cadet Bostic in his Squadron 16, and told him that I needed to meet with him.  He readily accepted with no questions asked.  I would pick him up in front of the Academy theater and we would drive to the Overlooks nearby to talk in private.  

I parked the car, fortunately the number of tourists viewing the Academy grounds below was not numerous.  We walked to the fence that kept anyone from going too far over the edge, and I began explaining why I had asked him there.  He did not disagree with my statement that there was an attraction between us, nor did he object that we needed to be a great deal more discrete whenever we saw one another on Academy grounds.  He seemed to understand my concerns.  At the conclusion, I asked him, "Would you like me to take you back to your dorm or would you like to go to my place?"  He did not hesitate but told me, "I would like to go to your place."  

Did I anticipate that anything would happen between us?  No, I did not.  Did I want something physical to happen between us?  I do not believe that I did because nothing did happen.  I showed him my house.  We chatted, about what I do not recall.  Eventually, I drove him back to the Academy.  But I believe it was on that drive that he began to tell me more about himself, things that ought to have warned me off immediately.  He told me that he was adopted by a couple who had lost their son.  The couple who adopted him had him assume the identity (or at least the name) of their dead son.

What exactly was he telling me?  Was he at the Academy under an identity not his own?  Certainly, the name was not his, if he were to be believed.  How had he or his parents been able to get him accepted to the Academy.  Yes, the post-Vietnam War era had reduced the numbers of young American men and women who intended to serve their country or apply to the three Service Academies.  Standards were lowered somewhat after the War ended so ignominiously.  But there was still a tough and thorough process to get accepted.      

If anything, I felt sorry for him if any of what he told me was true.  I simply took him at his word.  The Cadet Honor Code was quite clear, "We will not lie, steal or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does."  He was at the Academy.  He took that oath.  I presumed that he meant it.

He was gay, or at least he was Bi (so many admitted to being Bi in that era when they actually knew they were gay).  He told me on the drive back to the Academy that he was Bisexual.  He told me that he had had sex with young men and women.  He told me that he had been under the care of a psychiatrist.  

Perhaps I followed what I call the 'Bob Dylan amendment', "To live outside the law you must be honest."  Beyond keeping my being gay to myself and not conforming to that service requirement, I tried always to be honest.  I presumed that for Cadet Keith Bostic that was also true.  We were living outside of military law but were otherwise honest.  Especially with one another.  At least I thought so.    

Cadet Bostic would come over to my house a few times.  We would watch movies on a loveseat together.  I once noticed that he had a raging hard on, sitting next to me.  I did not mention that.  In plain fact, this was all new to me.  Our relationship wasn't about sex.  At least not at that point.  We did not have sex of any kind.  We never even kissed.  I hugged him once when we were about to leave the house, and he hugged me back.   

If Cadet Bostic were adopted, and if his adoptive parents had given him the identity of their dead son, they were giving him a second chance.  

I had seen the Katharine Hepburn televised remake of The Corn Is Green, where she helps a poor but promising young mine worker, to get out of the dark mines and experience the light of an advanced education.  She even offers to take his infant son, born out of wedlock, so that he can pursue that advanced education.  "We're friends." she tells him as her reasoning for helping him above and beyond what would be expected between mentor and student.  

I had mentioned to Cadet Bostic during one of his visits to my house that I knew the gay upper class Cadets Stratford, Gordy and Ryder, and that if he ever wanted to chat with them about being gay, they were aware of who he was and could give him council.  

Not long after that, he came to my office, needing exceptional help.  He told me that the lawyer who had handled the paperwork regarding his assuming the identity of the dead son needed further payment.  That Bostic was going to spend that summer leave away from the Academy, working for the money to pay the lawyer.  However, he had failed a course that Spring and was going to have to stay at the Academy instead, to take a makeup course.  He wanted my help in getting out of that makeup course.  

I told him that I would do all I could to get him that summer leave.  "We're friends," I said, echoing what Katharine Hepburn had said to her charge.  His head was bowed as I spoke about our being friends.  He even began to cry, full tears falling from his cheeks as I caringly spoke to him.  

I then sought out his summer school instructor.  While not providing the details of what I knew, I merely explained that for personal reasons, Cadet Bostic needed to go home on leave.  The instructor agreed to let him skip the class that summer and make it up in the Fall.  

At that point, I took a step back.  I realized that I was, in fact, going way beyond what a Humanities Advisor ought to be doing for a Cadet.  I talked to Arlene Robbins and asked that she take over advising Cadet Bostic, that I was becoming too personally involved to be objective anymore.  I called Bostic to tell him that he had his summer leave.  But then I explained that I had asked another instructor to be his advisor going forward.  "Sir," he said, "I never asked for that."  

I was scheduled to teach a makeup English class that summer.  Cadet Bostic would have just left the afternoon I returned to my office from the gym.  I found a note on my desk from him in an envelope addressed to me.  The note provided his home address, inviting me to write to him while he was away.   

During this time, I did visit for a weekend Dan Stratford and Dick Tuttle in Dick's condo in Denver.  Although we would remain friends for several years, these are the only photos I have of either one.
                                                                             

                                                                               

                                                                                 

                                                  
Over the next few weeks, I did write to Bostic.  These were intensely personal, even intimate, letters where I finally poured out my feelings about our relationship and how I felt about him.  He never once replied to any of my letters.  When the time of his leave was up and I knew he would have returned to the Academy and could have contacted me but didn't; in the early morning hours, I took the note in the envelope left on my desk to the fireplace downstairs and ritualistically burned it.  I was done with Cadet Keith Bostic.  As with Steve H. and John F. at Minot, I was moving on.  Keith Bostic was not the one I had been looking for in my life.  

That next morning, I was back at the Academy.  My summer class had concluded the Friday before, and I was providing my supervisor with the details and grades of the four students in the summer class when Colonel Shuttleworth stuck his head into the supervisor's cubicle and asked for me to accompany him.  

As I walked beside him, I suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of unease.  I could not explain the feeling more than that as we headed toward the conference room.  Colonel Shuttleworth then detailed the situation, "The OSI wants to see you."  My mind instantly raced in a panic.  What could this be about?  What did they want to see me for?  Did they know that I knew Cadets Stratford, Gordy and Ryder?  Was it something else entirely?

Adrenaline was coursing through my body as I sat down at the conference table after Colonel Shuttleworth introduced me to the two OSI agents and then left.  A briefcase lay upon the thick oak table in front of the agent seated closest to me.  He opened it as he calmly said to me, "We have the letters."

I looked into the interior of the briefcase and recognized the envelopes that I had addressed to Cadet Bostic when he was on leave.  They all appeared to be there, all six of them.  Some had been opened, but others had not.  Had Bostic been coerced into giving the letters up by his parents?  What had happened for this to have resulted?  I was in total shock.

"We know you know Cadets Stratford, Gordy and Ryder and Captain Gina Martin," he casually mentioned.  "We would like you to tell us about them because you know they are a security risk."  My head was swimming, but not enough to not hear exactly what he was saying.  However, I could not respond as my mind was tearing itself apart with questions and concerns.  Finally, realizing that they were not getting anything from me, the one agent finally said, "You do have the right to an attorney."  (They would lie in the paperwork and say that they had immediately told that I was entitled to legal counsel before they tried to pump me for information about the others.)  

I instantly responded, "Then I want to speak to an attorney.  I don't know about any of this." 

I was bewildered, but I knew exactly what was said and when it was said.  

The two of them got up, closed the briefcase, and told me that they needed to search my office.  I led them to my new cubicle, one that I was sharing with Captain Bruce Daggy.  He was in the cubicle as the two of them entered.  Wide-eyed, he looked at them and then at me.  I mouthed the phrase, "OSI," and pointed at them.  He uncomfortably got up and eased himself out of the office.  The agents proceeded to pour through all of my books on the shelves. 

The reason that I was sharing a cubicle with Bruce is that fall semester I was to attend an advanced Air Force officer's course in Alabama; Captain Daggy would attend that same course during the Spring Semester of 1980 after I returned, hence our having the shared cubicle that summer.  

They asked about an envelope I was using as a bookmark.  It was from Chuck Gover to me, and I told them so, that he was just a friend.  They wrote down his name and address in their booklet.  Soon, they were done pillaging and left for good.   I went to Colonel Shuttleworth's office as they advised me to do.  He seemed troubled but suggested that I head over to the Law Department.  The OSI had given me the name of the Air Force attorney assigned to me.  However, when I called him at Peterson Air Force Base, I was told that he was out of town for several days.  I would need other legal counsel in the next few days.  

I soon spoke with a tall, blond, 6-foot 4-inch, defensive end of an Air Force lawyer whom I had met when we were part of the Academy orientation as new instructors the previous summer.  Somehow, though, I was assigned a different lawyer in the Law Department until my other Air Force attorney returned.  This second Air Force attorney was able to get the paperwork charges against me from the OSI the following day.  He had read the thick packet and warned me that I would be in for a shock regarding Cadet Bostic.

He was not wrong.    

As I read through the extensive testimony of Cadet Keith Bostic, gathered over about two months of almost weekly interviews with the OSI, I was startled at who he presented himself to be in the black and white pages therein.  As I would summarize his statements in the weeks and months afterwards to those who asked, I would explain that one third of what he told the OSI were outright lies about me and about others.  He had essentially also turned in Dan, George, Bill, Arlene and Gina.  About one third of his testimony was distortions of the truth, what happened but not how it happened.  Only about one third of what he told the OSI during the entire time was the truth.  Initially, I was really confused.  But very soon I got very angry.   

In his several interviews, he had portrayed himself as a totally innocent, totally heterosexual cadet who was being continuously preyed upon by a singularly deceitful and manipulative Air Force officer, me.  He told them that I had kissed him, but he had roundly rejected my predatory advance.  (We never kissed, and I never tried to force myself upon him in any way at any time.)  He said that I touched his leg and arms and back.  But he acknowledged that he did not try to stop me for several minutes.  (I did not ever touch him extensively in any way except for the one hug.)  He said he only had sex with women.  He said he never told me he was Bisexual and never had sex with young men.  He said he never was under the care of a psychiatrist.  

What made no sense even to my attorney from the Law Department was, if this Cadet was in such a compromising and unwanted situation with such a predatory officer, why had he kept visiting me at my house, riding there repeatedly with me in my car?  Why had he kept the unwanted relationship, such as it was, going for so long?  And weeks before he ever went to the OSI?    

Cadet Bostic, upon his return to the Academy, had handed over the six letters to the OSI and took off for Camp Red Devil at Fort Carson for a summer military training course there.  He was initially and totally out of reach.  Perhaps he thought himself out of the picture permanently.  That he would not have to face the consequences of his lies and his actions.  Perhaps he thought I would quietly resign, and he'd get out of this predicament totally free.  He was wrong.  

Here is his two-page "Statement of Witness" to the OSI, composed from Camp Red Devil:
                                                                             

                                                                                  

Bostic Interview with my Lawyers

Later in the summer, after Bostic got back from Camp Red Devil, my two Air Force lawyers were able to get him into a small office with a tape recorder running, and they went after him and his lies, having been thoroughly prepped by me with the truth.  At one point as they were able to corner him time and again, he would complain that he was merely "...a babe in the woods."  They were not buying it.

They caught him in several lies and contradictions regarding his sworn testimony to the OSI.  With my attorneys, he was violating the Cadet Honor Code repeatedly.  He admitted that he had not actually gone to the OSI right away.  He had spoken with a Chaplain first.  (We would later learn that the Chaplain told him not to pursue turning me in.  What was happening was not worth ruining someone's career over.)  "Why did you go to a Chaplain first?" the lawyers demanded.  "Chaplains cannot do anything legally to stop what was happening."  His rationalizations and excuses made no sense.  

Throughout the interview, as I read it today, his comments are filled with hatred toward me.  He despised me for being homosexual.  He said when he realized that I was homosexual, he wanted to "burn" me.  He said he had sex with women, was attracted to women only.  His self-loathing was so evident and prevalent.  Of course, he despised me.  But likely because he expected to simply hand over the letters and be done with me and the investigation.  He ought to have known better. 

I was never going to make it easy for him.  He had created the tarpit of his own demise.  He was stuck fast to it.  He said he pitied Cadet Stratford, yet he said he knew him.  He despised and pitied me, yet he felt sorry for me because of who and what I was, but he kept coming over to my house several times before and after he went to the OSI.  He admitted that the OSI had told him that he could not lead me on, yet all that he did after he started reporting to the OSI was to lead me on and keep interacting with me.  Instead of needing money to pay off a lawyer who had made his orphan past disappear but who wanted to be paid off, he said he intended to work that summer to help a female cadet who was pregnant and needed to get an abortion.  Where had that situation even come from?

During the interview with my attorneys, he also told them that he was not an orphan, that he had not been adopted, and that he had never told me that he was an adopted orphan.  He had told me that he had seen a psychiatrist for personal reasons, but those reasons were never made clear.  He told Arlene Robbins that he had seen a psychiatrist.  Yet to my lawyers, he tried to downplay the psychiatrist, that the psychiatrist was a father of a friend and that he had seen the man informally.  None of it made much sense because he was lying or twisting the truth, much as he had during his interviews with the OSI.  He could never correctly explain why, if he was so repulsed by me and my homosexuality, he kept visiting me in my home.  

I needed to get the taped interview transcribed from cassette to hard copy.  A secretary in the Law Department began the effort but was soon stopped.  I was told that it was not their responsibility to do so.  If I wanted to pay a secretary out of my own pocket to transcribe the tape, I could do that.  Otherwise, I was out of luck.  I did pay a secretary to do the transcribing, but there are blank spots where she could not understand what was being said, and certain names were inaccurately rendered throughout.  I could not be choosy even though, I believe, the work cost me over $100.00 at the time.  (My salary was something like $17,500.00 at the time.)    
                                                                          

The significant problem for him, we eventually discovered, was that I was not the only person at USAFA to whom he had told the orphan and adoption story.  One of my students who was from Jamaica, Cadet Vivette Mirage, was in his Cadet Squadron.  He had told her, as well as her boyfriend, that same tales.  Bostic was also prayer buddies with two devoutly religious Cadets in that same Squadron.  He had told them the same things.  He told them that he had been under the care of a psychiatrist, not in some informal way.  My lawyers had caught him in those several lies.  Either Cadet Bostic had lied to them about not being an adopted orphan and under the professional care of a psychiatrist, or he had lied to me and several fellow Cadets that he was an adopted orphan.  Both could not be true; therefore, he had violated the Cadet Honor Code, grounds for expulsion from the Academy.  

Cadet Mirage and her boyfriend were more than willing to tell the truth about what they had been told.  The two religious Cadets would have to tell the truth, but they wanted legal representation first.  When Cadet Bostic was charged by my attorneys for violating the Honor Code, he needed a lawyer, too. 

As my Law Department attorney wryly commented to me on the phone one day, "Everyone's now got an attorney."  

In another irony, I was going to stop by and see my big, blond Air Force lawyer acquaintance in his office one morning.  However, his door was closed.  I got the strong impression that I had better not knock because I believed he was the lawyer who had been assigned to defend Bostic.  I was later proven right.  Bostic's lawyer and I could not discuss the case or talk about Bostic.

When the Office-In-Charge of the Cadet Honor Code was presented with the charges against Bostic by my lawyers, he immediately realized that the grave situation was too explosive to be handed over to the Cadet Honor Board for resolution.  Bostic's case would have to be adjudicated by a panel of officers, not cadets.

While it was now clear that the OSI had blindly believed Cadet Bostic after he came to them (or they came to him in the office of a Chaplain--that seemed unclear), that he was a liar and, possibly, at the Academy under false pretenses using a false identity, they still needed their star witness against me until my situation was resolved and I was on my way out.  

Soon after I received that packet of charges against me, I was told that I had to show up at the OSI, to have my fingerprints taken.  A sample of my handwriting was also required.  They wanted to verify that the letters were written by me.  As they took my fingerprints, I felt like a common criminal.  I would not immediately be able to tell the OSI how they had relied upon a seriously screwed up Cadet in their case against me.  I suspect that when they started to learn the truth about Cadet Keith Bostic, the letters were all that they had against me.  He was not a credible witness.  

On my walk across the Terrazzo level of the Academy complex to get fingerprinted (I decided to walk across from the Academic building to the Admin. building instead of drive), I was met with several of my former students from the previous year.  We started chatting and laughing.  As some Cadets were forced to leave to get to class, others replaced them.  Several minutes passed before I was able to continue on my walk to the Admin. building and the fingerprinting.  When I arrived and mentioned why it took me longer than anticipated to get there, the one who was taking my fingerprints murmured, "I hope the Dean didn't see that."  I was still a popular instructor to most of my former students, regardless of what they had heard about me through the grapevine of Academy gossip.  

This is also when I was told that while I was still required to be at the Academy while the investigation continued, I could no longer use the Cadet locker rooms or Cadet athletic facilities, even during lunch when few Cadets were present.  I could no longer use the cafeteria on the second floor of the Academic building because upper class Cadets used it.  If I wanted to work out while at the Academy, I would have to use the gym on the next ridge over that the enlisted personnel used.  I would only be able to have lunch at the Academy golf course restaurant.  I was being treated as if I were a leper who might infect cadets.  

The following day of the initial charges against me, to show support, three other (straight) instructors in the English Department took me to lunch at the golf course restaurant.  However, I noticed that, sitting a few feet away at a table near the windows, were the two OSI agents.  Henceforth, I would eat lunch alone.  

After several days of doing grunt work in the English Department, I heard that one of the other officers ("Khaki" Brown, the lone straight woman in the Department), complained to the staff that I should not even be allowed to remain in the Department because of the accusations against me.  Because of her complaint, I was exiled to the Admin. building, to do grunt work there instead.
                                                                            

To add to my indignity, I bought a milk from a vending machine one day; but when I got back to my desk and took a swig, the milk was curdled.  I almost threw up.  

I had been told by the Vice Chair of the English Department right after the charges were made against me that nobody thought any less of me and that I was still thought of highly in the Department.  However, he soon told Gina Martin, who relayed his despicable comments to me, that I should move to Denver where I might, as a homosexual, be more accepted in a big city.  I was indignant.  My home was in Colorado Springs, and I would remain there, regardless of his bigoted feelings about where a gay man might be more accepted. 

That Fall, with my position needing to be filled by a new instructor, the English Department hired an officer who was so obviously gay to replace me.  He was the kind of gay man who, when he opened his mouth, Judy Garland's purse fell out.  Chris Keener, who was now the Cadet-In-Charge of Icarus, said that when asked to choose a representation of the mythic figure, the officer picked the most effeminate and homoerotic image of Icarus available. 

I don't care if a gay man is effeminate as a picnic basket or as butch as a lumberjack; but when you are trying to expel a gay officer whom nobody suspected was gay (Arlene and her lover only believed I might be gay when they noticed that I had a Mickey Mouse phone in my kitchen), only to replace him with an officer whom almost everyone believed upon first sight was gay, you are being incredibly hypocritical.  I could not be allowed anywhere near Cadets after the accusations were made.  He had no such restrictions.  Of course, Bostic was equally allowed to continue about his daily business, even with the serious charges against him.   

As the months passed from July to my expulsion in October, I came across so many literary references that I took to heart.  Of the McCarthy era, Dalton Trumbo had summarized the dark period as follows, "It will do no good to look for heroes and villains.  There were none.  Only victims."  

From 1984, I realized the following was true of Bostic and me, "Under the spreading Chestnut Tree, I sold you and you sold me."

One afternoon, after leaving the enlisted gym, I looked up to see an Academy tow plane release a glider in the blue sky above me.  I could see the tow line drop away and the glider soar off upon the air currents after its release.  I stopped to realize that that was a metaphor for what was going to happen to me soon enough.  

From the late Mary McCaslin album Sunny California, the song "The Crossroad", "Your life reads like a novel/Like a Friday picture show/Like a man without a country/With everywhere to go."

Acute Muscle Spasms

I got used to working out, even playing basketball at noon, in the enlisted men's gym near the Base Exchange and Commissary.  One day while playing basketball for a lunch hour team, I went up for an easy layup but missed the shot.  I was puzzled as I turned back down the court as the other team had the ball.  However, my lower back started to lock up.  I began to bend over and could not straighten up.  I almost crawled over to the sideline and sat against the wall.  Eventually, I realized that I could not get back up without help. 

I soon checked into the base hospital.  They had me clamber up upon a table to x-ray my lower back.  I was in incredible pain, worse than I had ever experienced.  They found nothing broken.  I was sent home.  Someone must have driven me home.  I believe Gina Martin bought me some grapes and a few other items to eat.  I lay on the floor of the family room, trying not to move.  But as the night began to cool off in the house and I started to feel chilled, I crawled up the stairs to the kitchen, and then up the stairs to my bedroom.  I periodically screamed in pain at every few steps.  I am not sure how I got up into bed.  However, each time I needed to use the bathroom, I would have to fall to the floor and crawl to the small bathroom.   I would grab the toilet to hoist myself up.  But even that was agonizingly painful.

By the morning, I was hungry again and tried to crawl down the hall stairs, stopping to scream again every few steps.  I finally realized that I could not take care of myself.  My back was so locked up in pain.  And a house with so many stairs was difficult to negotiate when I had to crawl on my hands and knees.  I called the Academy hospital, telling them I needed to be hospitalized for the pain and because I could not care for myself.  They sent out an ambulance.  I was carried out on a gurney.  The staff checked me into the hospital.  I was soon in a comfortable bed, trying to heal. 

One of the friendly male Air Force nurses struck up a conversation with me that first evening.  I would have bet money that he was gay.  When he told me he was an orphan who had joined the Air Force, I wanted to chase him out of my room but said nothing.  After at least three days, I was able to finally head back home, much better than when I had entered.  I am certain that the stress of what I was going through contributed to my back spasms.  Within a few weeks, I was going to be without a job, and I had no idea what I was going to do.

Rejection of Permanent Grade of Captain

Besides receiving a Regular Commission, I was up for the Permanent Grade of Captain that summer of 1979.  General Orth had yet another opportunity to get a dig in at me in his rejection of that opportunity to reward me for my service.
                                                                           

This cover was part of a packet of documents.  It included a three-page "Notification of Selection to Show Cause for Retention" from Lt General Tallman, Academy Superintendent; a "Statement of Reasons", which listed several of Bostic's lies in addition to brief comments from the letters I wrote to Bostic while he was on leave; a two-page Statement from me, protesting my treatment by Air Force authorities, below. 
                                                                               

                                                                                  

I was angry at this point, having had to put up with all of the official abuse.  The packet included letters from many friends who were supporting me against the Air Force.  I was still trying to get an Honorable Discharge.

Application for Separation

I really did not want to resign without a fight.  I wanted to face Bostic in court, to find out why he did what he did.  But Captain Ash angrily responded that he was not going to be part of some sort of personal vendetta.  It would serve no real purpose.  I responded that the $10K was already mine.  But in the years ahead, I would still be plagued by why Bostic did what he did.  But I eventually gave in and submitted the application.
                                                                          

Final Officer Evaluation Report (OER)

Time required that I get a final OER in the weeks before I was forced to resign from the Air Force.  Colonel Shuttleworth had already finished mine before the ongoing investigation.  Colonel Orth, in charge of the Academy Faculty, contributed his comments to my final report.  However, they were entirely negative because of what he knew about the investigation against me.  But because it was an ongoing investigation, he was not legally allowed to include his comments in my effectiveness report.  My Law Department lawyer, who admitted that the agreed with the policy to exclude LGBTQ personnel from the Air Force, would not let Colonel Orth's comments to remain in my final report.  He had me send General Tallman a letter, telling him that Colonel Orth was out of line.  The OER was revised and Colonel Orth, rather than say anything positive about me, entirely removed his comments from the OER.  The following are the two pages of that final OER without Colonel Orth's contributions.
                                                                   

   
                                                                              

Here is the letter my Law Department lawyer had me sign regarding Colonel Orth's inappropriate comments on my initial OER:
                                                                             

This letter did give me some sense of satisfaction for all of the nonsense Colonel Orth put me through by preventing me from using any Cadet athletic facilities and not being able to even eat lunch anywhere on the Academy grounds other than at the Golf Course.  

Sgt. Leonard Matlovich

I hope that Sgt Matlovich has not been forgotten.  He was the first significant self-avowed homosexual to challenge the Air Force's policy on gays serving openly in the military.  His case had been going through the court system for a couple of years at this point.  What happened to him might impact what was happening to me.  Captain Ash was my Law Department lawyer, as opposed to Captain Breidenbach who was my Air Force lawyer from Peterson Air Force Base.  On the advice of Dick Tuttle, I would also hire Mr. Boomes from the Denver law firm of Raynard & Boomes.  He had been Dan's civilian attorney, just to keep the Air Force honest.  It would cost me $1,000.00, but that expense was deductible on my taxes because I was trying to keep my job.  

Sgt Matlovich would be told that his case was likely unwinnable in the Supreme Court--they rarely interfere in military policies, most of them never having served in any branch of the military.  Matlovich's lawyers advised that he accept the Air Force's settlement (bribe) of $160,000.00 to drop his case.  I believe that would happen months after I left the service later in September of 1980.  I was sorely disappointed, but his legal advisors were probably right.  He could end up with nothing.  He bought a pizza parlor with the money he got as a settlement.  Sadly, Leonard Matlovich was among the many casualties of AIDS in the 1980's.  He had been on the cover of Time magazine.  He was a celebrity in the gay community and supported many gay causes while he lived.  He died on June 22, 1988.  He was 44.

The Air Force's policy had been somewhat vague, allowing for some to remain in the service if the Air Force wished.  Within the attached legal document before the court, several instances during the history of the Air Force indicate the firm policy against homosexuality and homosexual acts.  If one were drunk or youthfully curious, that might be grounds for retention, but otherwise no one would be retained.    
                                                                           

                                                                                   

                                                                                   

Since Matlovich would not agree to never commit homosexual acts again in the future, he would not be retained.  

It all reads as barbaric and clinical all of these years later, especially since we can now serve openly; that is if the extremist political and religious forces do not gain control and take us backward.

Physical

In one of the letters from Lt. General Tallman, I was told that I had to report for a physical.  
                                                                               

So, I reported to Colonel Kirschner, oddly at Cadet Clinic Station 10, Fairchild Hall, the basement of the Administration Building.  When I told him why I was there, he seemed disgusted by the whole thing.  He said something to the effect of getting this required physical over with as quickly as possible, to save us both as much embarrassment as possible.

Air Force Academy Soundtrack 1978-1979

As with the Summer 1970 and the Marine OCS 1972 Soundtracks, these are the songs I associate with my time at USAFA:

1)  Lotta Love - Nicolette Larson
2)  In a Little While - Art Garfunkel
3)  Kingdom Hall - Van Morrison

4)  Mr. Blue (The Song of communication) - Laura Nyro

5)  One Step - Kiki Dee
6)  The Other Side of the Sun - Janis Ian
7)  Echos of Love - The Doobie Brothers
8)  And I Know - Art Garfunkel

9)  I Know a Heartache When I See One - Jennifer Warnes

10) My Innocence - Laura Nyro 
11) Natalia - Van Morrison
12) What A Fool Believes - The Doobie Brothers
13) Last In Love - Nicolette Larson

14) Crazy Love - Laura Nyro
15) Mama Can't Buy You Love - Elton John
16) Time Passages - Al Stewart
17) Dust Devils - Mary McCaslin
18) Miss You Nights - Art Garfunkel

19) Springblown - Laura Nyro
20) Wavelength - Van Morrison
21) San Fernando - Mary McCaslin
22) Spirits Having Flown - The Bee Gees

23) The Sweet Sky - Laura Nyro
24) Even Now - Barry Manilow

25) Light - Pop's Principle - Laura Nyro
26) Love You Inside and Out - The Bee Gees
27) Too Much Heaven - The Bee Gees

28) Shot Through the Heart - Jennifer Warnes
29) The California Zepher - Mary McCaslin
30) Walk Away - Donna Summer
31) When Someone Doesn't Want You - Art Garfunkel

32) Nobody Gets That Close to Me - Lani Hall
33) Shadows in the Moonlight - Anne Murray

34) Can't Get to Sleep at Night - Donna Summer

35) Shot In the Dark - Lani Hall

36) Never Let Her Go - David Gates

37) Double or Nothing - Lani Hall
38) Tragedy - The Bee Gees
39) The Crossroad - Mary McCaslin
40) Having Been Touched (Tender Lady) - Cris Williamson
41) Wild Things - Cris Williamson

42) Aqua Marine - Santana

The single album that seemed to reflect what I was going through was Fate for Breakfast by Art Garfunkel.  The two Cris Williamson songs Gina Martin would play for me from an album released earlier in the decade.  Wild Things was definitely about Bostic.  The other seemed more about me and my life.

When I turned 30

My 30th birthday in 1979 was on a Sunday.  Captain Ash could have contacted me on Friday when he got the information that my resignation had been accepted.  He could have called me on Saturday, the day before my birthday.  He waited until Sunday, my birthday, to call me on the phone and tell me that my resignation had finally been accepted.  I would never forget in my entire life what day I learned that I was no longer going to be in the Air Force.

A few more weeks would pass before my final day in the Air Force, Friday October 12th.  

A week before I left the Air Force, Cadet Keith Bostic resigned and departed.  He only got me by deceiving and lying to me, to the OSI, and to my two Air Force lawyers, as well as leading me on repeatedly after he first went to the OSI, what he was told not to do.  I used to believe that he had knocked me off of my career path.  But as the years went by, I came to wonder if I were meant to knock him off of his path.  He had no scruples and no honor.  He might have wrecked the lives of others in the Air Force as he could have with Gina, Arlene, George, Bill and Dan, and who knows who else at the Academy or later had he graduated?  How he ever got into the Air Force Academy is one of those great mysteries.  In hindsight, his self-loathing was apparent.  One would hope that he did not drag some poor, unsuspecting young woman into matrimony and wrecked her life, too.  The term that likely best describes him is sociopath.     

One of the faculty members in the English Department stopped by my home in my last few days so I could help him make a music cassette.  I thought it was a nice gesture to ignore the edicts and steer clear of me.  Sadly, a few years later, I was told that he had died of alcoholism not that long after the visit.  But he was one of the very few visitors I had in those days after my resignation.  I was then more alone than ever.  

That final Friday, I parked my Camaro in the parking garage directly below the Academic Building.  I had packed up my things in a couple of cardboard boxes.  I used the elevator.  On my last trip up to the office floor, the elevator stopped between floors, the door slightly open so that I could see people walking by.  I thought even then that the building itself did not want me to leave.  

I remember one of the secretaries saying goodbye to me.  She seemed sad.  I said goodbye to the few other friends whom I had made in the Department.  I finally took the elevator one last time down to the parking garage.  I drove to the Officer's Club to close out my membership there.  I would never again have a job that I had loved so very much, in a location that had previously so inspired me every time I drove to work.

Gina Martin and her mom intended to take me to dinner at Black Angus on Academy Boulevard that evening.  In the mirror of the hall bathroom in the afternoon, I watched myself remove my uniform for the very last time.  I was crushed.

The Electric Clock

My first week at Minot, I knew I needed to ensure that I would wake up in time whenever I had a trainer ride, an alert or an EWO class.  I drove over to the Base Exchange and bought an inexpensive electric clock.  I brought that same clock with me and plugged it in and set it up in my bedroom after I moved into my new house in Colorado Springs.  The clock served me well all of my years in the Air Force.

A few days after I was forced to resign from the Air Force, with nowhere I needed to be, I was awakened to the sound of the electric clock going haywire and rattling badly on my nightstand.  I was forced to unplug it to get much-needed sleep.  When I woke up for good later that morning, I tried plugging in the clock again.  It was dead.

The clock had served its purpose all during my active duty from the first week of service in Minot until the week after I left the Air Force Academy.  As with my own service, it was done.  I still have that clock as a keepsake, stored away in a rubber tub with everything else I ever kept from the Selective Service, as well as from my Marine OCS, Air Force OTS, and Air Force Academy days.  Someday, after I am gone, someone is going to see that tub of my life related to the U.S. military and toss it all out, like Charles Foster Kane's neglected sled in Citizen Kane, not knowing how valuable all of those contents were to my entire existence.  The contents are a massive clue to my entire life as I was often required to live it.  Without the draft, I might have lived an entirely different reality.  

                                                                         

Randy Shilts

Getting a bit ahead of my tale but tying together loose ends from the Academy story, after having incredible success with And the Band Played On:  Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic in 1987, Randy Shilts turned toward another significant LGBTQ topic with Conduct Unbecoming:  Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, published in 1993.  He had gotten my name, I believe, from Dan Stratford.  Randy and I spoke on the phone a couple of times before he sent an assistant to Denver to interview me personally, possibly in late 1992.  His assistant seemed awkwardly pressed for time when I drove him to the Academy overlooks, to put my experience and Dan's in context.  He appeared not to be particularly interested in any of that when we got there.  I didn't even stop or have us get out of the Camero before I felt pressed to turn around and drive the assistant back to Denver. 

I found that while Dan appeared to be a focus and would be so in the book, I was a very small sidelight.  When the book was published in '93, Dan was rightfully given a section.  I was mentioned, but not named, within his section.  Randy's biggest focus, he told me over the phone one of those times we spoke, was to give Leonard Matlovich his due.  This was as it should be.  Matlovich had been gone since '88 and might have become forgotten in the perpetual wave of deaths from AIDS.  

Sadly, Randy Shilts would become yet another casualty to AIDS in February of 1994, at least a year or more from when the meds might have saved his life.  He was only 42.  

February 1994 was the same month that the questionable policy of "Don't ask; Don't tell" was signed by President Clinton.  For the LGBTQ community, that became a very marginal improvement over the oppressive policies I suffered under in 1979.  Unfortunately, Randy would not be there to catalogue those hundreds of investigations, and hundreds of forced resignations, still plaguing the LGBTQ community in the military each and every year after his book was published.  

After the Air Force

Unemployment  

I had more than $10K in the bank from the Air Force because I had earned that Regular commission.  I had several hundreds of dollars more because I cashed in all of my U.S. Savings Bonds that I had been buying every month since I left OTS.  Because the U.S. no longer invested in me, I stopped investing in it.  I did feel betrayed by my country and, besides, I figured I would need the money.  There was no telling in those first weeks and then months if I were going to get a job, especially after the money ran out and things would get desperate.  And things would get desperate indeed.

On Monday morning, October 15th, I forced myself to wake up, get dressed, and drive to the Colorado Unemployment Office in Colorado Springs on the other side of I-25.  I strongly urged myself to open the front door and step inside.  I was discouraged at the sheer number of people already in lines there.  I wanted to bolt back out the door and drive home.  However, I compelled myself to just stand to one side of the front door and wait until I developed sufficient courage to approach the lines of job seekers, get in a specific line and actually talk to someone.

I am not certain how I got connected with a kindly man who worked upstairs.  He would help me greatly for several months, frustrated that he could not help me actually find a job.  Because I got that $10K, and possibly because I had been forced to resign, I don't remember actually getting unemployment insurance for months, if ever.  

I would interview and interview.  Looking back, I realize that I never owned a suit.  I would dress in a nice shirt and slacks, and I would wear a Pendleton shirt over the dress shirt.  But I would get rejection letter after rejection letter.  I remember interviewing with an insurance company in Denver.  They paid somewhere around $750.00 per month.  I knew I was not going to take the job there anyway, so I baldly asked, "How does anyone survive on that salary?"  

The sad thing was that I never got any benefit for being in the military.  I remember interviewing with Kaman Sciences on Gardon of the Gods Road.  The manager hired some young woman who had no better work experience than I and had never been in the military. 

In January of 1980, I drove to Canon City, to interview at the maximum-security prison there.  I did well during the interview with several personnel behind a long table, asking me questions.  During a break, I drove my Camero across the bridge over the Royal Gorge.  A light snow was falling.  Nobody else was around.  I drove back to the prison and finished the interviews.  I did get hired.  But I simply could not become a prison guard.  The pay was much less than I had been making in the Air Force.  But the back road route to Canon City was only a two-lane highway.  During winter storms, I knew I would not make it.  I was certain that with the reduced pay, I would be unable to keep my house.

I got a one-off teaching job for Chapman College at Peterson AFB, to teach American literature.  I got to read and teach Moby Dick.  With Colonel Shuttleworth's recommendation, I was able to get infrequent teaching jobs for Pike's Peak Community College at Fort Carson.  But none of these one-time classes paid enough to survive, though I enjoyed teaching G.I.'s becoming college students.  I would eventually teach English, Literature, History, Humanities and Communications classes at Fort Carson and Peterson AFB in the evenings, Monday and Wednesday or Tuesday and Thursday, sometimes Friday and all-day Saturday (for Communications seminars).  Teaching was a great way to supplement my income throughout the 1980's.  But I still needed a full-time job.  

Unfortunately, as the months of permanent unemployment drifted by, the money was starting to run out.

To add to my indignity and frustration, I reached the conclusion that I would have to sell my home.  Nothing was coming through, and I might lose my house to foreclosure.  I reluctantly put the house up for sale.  A young couple put in a bid in late May.  However, in the midst of their attempts to close on my house, I finally got hired by Kaman on Garden of the Gods Road in a different division than the one that rejected me a few months before.  The couple could not quality for the loan.  The husband of the young couple came to my door, hoping that I would lower the price of the house or give them points so they could afford to buy the house.  With a job now in the offing, I had to tell him that I was sorry but I was taking the house off the market.  Mom sent me some money to tide me over until my first paycheck arrived.  

Brief Return to the Academy

I had had a student during the regular year who flunked Freshman English.  He ended up being in my Summer makeup class where he did no better.  His father was a ranking, African-American officer in the Air Force who obviously wanted his son to attend the Academy.  The son seemed entirely indifferent to being there.  I never thought of this student any more or less than I thought about any other of my students.  He never asked for help though help would have been provided immediately.  Others in the Department would have been available if any student did not want help from me.

Several weeks after I resigned, I was asked to come back to the Academy to provide my perspective on the student because his father had found out about my discharge for homosexuality and was attempting to use that as a justification for getting his son back into the Academy.  He wanted the Academy to believe that my homosexuality might have had something to do with his son flunking out of Freshman English, twice.

The ploy was despicable on his part; however, I returned and explained what I had remembered about the young man as an indifferent student whom I suspected did not really want to pursue an Air Force career.  My sexual orientation had nothing to do with how I graded his, or any other student's, papers.  I provided my perspective and then left.  It was, of course, strange to be back in the Academy complex, even for the shortest of time; but I did what I was asked to do and then departed.      

Kaman Sciences/Instrumentation 1980-1988

I interviewed with the older man who had invented a Displacement Measurement Device for Kaman Sciences.  I knew about Kaman from my model building days because Kaman designed and built helicopters.  The Kaman plant in Colorado Springs was located on Garden of the Gods Road, to the West of I-25.  I was not overly optimistic that I would be hired after not being selected several months before by a different division, but I was actually hired to write user manuals for the Device.

The team was small.  A fellow also named Greg was in charge of the rest of the team so that the inventive older man could do what he did and not be bothered.  Rich Hostak was a product tester.  Shirley Overholser built the devices that the older fellow designed.  She was the sole manufacturer, as well.    

In the first few weeks, I realized that Rich and Shirley did not seem to like me.  They knew one another well, and I was an outsider.  We did not appear to have much in common and, because there was little for me to do in the beginning, perhaps they resented my presence in the lab where we all worked.  We listened to an FM radio station on Academy Blvd. where Rich once worked.  They held radio contests for tickets to movies or sporting events.  I found that I was really good at trivia of all kinds.  The station would ask a question, I would tell Rich or Shirley the answer, and we'd often win.  Eventually, the station held a 10-week contest where the station gave away $1,000.00 each week, broadcasting the drawing that week at each of 10 different businesses around the town.  You had to fill out a card with your name, a friend's name, and a phone number where you could be reached to have your card placed in the drawing for that week.  

During the first couple of weeks, we realized that the same person's name got called a lot.  We figured out that it was a housewife who had nothing else to do during the day but visit each local business or the radio station, fill out as many cards as she could, dump them into the collection bins, and move on.  When your name was called over the air each hour between 8 in morning and 8 at night, you had 45 minutes to call the station to get your card included for the following week's drawing.  Rich, Shirley and I got organized.  

We went to as many locations as possible and filled out cards for ourselves and one another.  We thoroughly listened to the radio station even when we were not at work.  One of us covered every single minute of every single hour, waiting for one of our names to be called.  If Shirley's name were called, and I was listening to the station, I would call her to tell her she had to call in and get registered.  If my name were called, and Rich was covering, he would call me to tell me to call the station.

Of the final six weeks of the contest, my roommate won one week, I won another week, a friend of Shirley's won, and a friend of Rich's won (he got a cut).  All of these contests helped to bond the three of us.  They helped me start to feel more like a winner instead of a loser for having had to resign from the Air Force.

The man in charge of marketing for this division did not seem to value me.  He fancied himself a writer, and he thought he could do my job instead; but he was not a good technical writer just because he could write marketing materials.  I was eventually eased out of the Displacement Measuring Division by him (where I also wrote manuals for Neutron Generators, which another Kaman division manufactured on the site).  I got transferred to the Radiation Monitoring Group.  A few months later, Terry Zeri (whom English Department wags at the Academy called "Darth Zeri") was hired to do exactly what I had been doing.  He had left the Academy a year or so after I (he was straight).  The Kaman staff had realized that the marketing guy (whom Greg nicknamed "pockets" because he always wandered around the facility with his hands in his pockets) was no tech writer.

Too much of the time, I really did not have much to do for that first division.  I tried reading the dictionary.  I learned how to solder so I could help Shirley now and then.  And, most importantly, I spent a lot of time in the Kaman library where Barbara Kinslow and her buddy Nancy worked.  The library carried several cool publications such as Time magazine, Newsweek and Air Force Times.  I read how the Pentagon was spending all of that money that Reagan was showering upon the several branches of the military.  Fort Carson got a new tank washing facility.  Other bases got new Child Care Centers or Base Exchanges or other physical facilities that had nothing to do with weapons but everything to do with morale.  And pay raises were also lavished upon military personnel.  I realized that, had I still been an officer, I would have been making really good money as the Reagan decade concluded.

In those first few years of the 80's, I eventually started to encounter stories about a strange disease that was ravaging the gay community.  The name would undergo changes, and the cause would eventually be determined, as Randy Shilts wrote his detailed book.  But there was no test until 1987.  I still remember the first time I got tested in Colorado Springs.  I always felt that I had finally been invited to the party, but the party was now over.  (I was not out at work, of course; but I was out in my personal life.)

When I was moved into the Radiation Monitoring Equipment division (created as a result of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster) to provide safety equipment to various nuclear power plants around the nation, an African-American man was also working as a technical writer in the group.  To my shock, I eventually discovered that he knew the African-American officer who had tried to use my being gay to get his son back into the Academy.  Fortunately, they never seemed to have made the connection between me and the gay officer at the Academy.  Eventually, he was let go from the company.  I don't even remember why except that it was a cost-cutting move.  I had already saved Kaman a great deal in printing expenses when I had the graphics department replace photographs of the equipment in the user's manuals with detailed drawings.  Rather than a more labor-intensive two-step printing process to create the manuals, it would now only require a single step.

With the manuals created, because of my experience as a supply officer in the Air Force, my job evolved into being materials administrator in charge of ordering parts for the Kaman radiation monitoring equipment already sold to power plants.  I was given an office on the first floor, well off of the manufacturing area and through double doors, down a short hallway, and then through a single door to my isolated office.  At this point, I was teaching two or four nights a week at Fort Carson mainly or Peterson Air Force Base occasionally.  I now had Humanities, History and Literature classes along with the English classes.  I had to do a lot of reading.  When my Kaman job hit dry spells, I would read in my office.  I had already joined the History Book Club, buying books that helped me in my various community college courses.

In 1987, Kaman hired a new manager for the newly created Instrumentation division.  He was an oversized, pompous ass with an equally large ego who immediately got rid of the brand-new office furniture the previous manager had just purchased and ordered all new office furniture for himself.  Kaman had sent out a bid for a nuclear power plant, but it was a pretense.  Under this bloated behemoth of a boss, Kaman was closing the Radiation Monitoring Equipment division and firing everyone because the group was not making enough money.  The day everyone was fired was a bad one.  People were upset, even angry.  One guy tossed things and slammed doors and was finally led out.  I was one of those fired.  We all showed up to briefings about being newly unemployed.  

Kaman realized how they could still make a profit by servicing the radiation equipment they had already supplied to nuclear power plants in Arizona and elsewhere.  Because they also needed supplies and replacement parts, I was brought back.  Kaman would also hold classes at the plants and at Kaman to train power plant employees on their new equipment.  I was part of that training, but I was not very good.  Eventually, Kaman sold the division to a man from South Carolina.  He created Amalgamated Systems Incorporated.  ASI operated out of the Kaman site for a few months before moving to a site elsewhere in Colorado Springs.  I did everything I could for them, including dumping trash cans.  Soon enough, the owner intended to move his company to his native South Carolina.  I was not going to move because I was already going back to school to get a teaching certificate in 1988-9.

Shirley Overholser & Rich Hostak, and Shirley

Shirley Overholser often mentioned her desire to open her own shop, to sell baskets that she would purchase in bulk in Mexico.  After I was transferred from the Displacement Measuring Device Group, I somewhat lost track of what she was doing.  Whether she had quit Kaman or been let go during so many layoffs, I don't know.  But in the early 1990's, when I was living in Denver, on one of my many trips back to Colorado Springs, I noticed at a shopping center along Academy Blvd. a store called Baskets & More.  Shirley had finally realized her dream.  However, after a few years of seeing that store in the same location, it was suddenly gone.  Whether she had changed locations or was forced to close her doors, I had no way of finding out.

Rich Hostak left Kaman and started his own electronics shop.  I either brought equipment to him to be repaired or bought blank video tapes from him by the case.  But when I moved from Colorado Springs and DVDs came into prominence--and I had already been buying Pioneer Laser discs of my favorite films from a store in Denver called Laserland and elsewhere--I had no need to visit Rich's Colorado Springs shop.

I no longer remember this second Shirley's last name.  When I worked for the Radiation Monitoring Group, Shirley was one of those with whom I worked.  She was sweet and kind and wonderful to work with.  She was single after a bitter divorce and was raising a son and daughter.  When she expressed to me that she needed a weight bench and weights for her son, I told that I was no longer using the one in my basement that I had bought for myself the winter after I left the Air Force.  (Gary had gotten me to join U.S. Swim & Fitness on Academy Blvd., so I always worked out there.)

Shirley drove by my place and gratefully took the weight bench and weights and a few other things I no longer needed or used.  I did not know that that would be the last time I would see her.  Cheryl Cramp, who had also worked at Kaman and left to work for Rich Hostak, would tell me that Shirley was stricken with an aggressive form of ovarian cancer and had died.  She was, like me, in her early 40's.  Cheryl said that Shirley's young daughter, barely a teenager if that, had felt betrayed that her mother had left her like that.  I was truly saddened for a long, long time.             

Hide & Seek bar

I had gone to a couple of bars in Denver during my final months in the Air Force before I was outed.  Dan, George and Bill took me to a few of them over one weekend.  I stayed at an apartment where Bill and Geoge would stay with friends when they were in Denver.  Bill had me meet him as I drove by the Capitol building on Lincoln, turning onto Colfax after he got in the Camero.  The high-rise apartment building, The Denver House, is still on Logan St.

That night, several friends of theirs gathered in the apartment before going out.  One guy was from North Dakota who told me that he left because if you were gay in ND, you were queer, and not in a good way.  Some of George and Bill's friends were going to a Village People concert in Denver that night.  George, Bill and I first stopped at a dance bar on 13th Street, between Logan and Grant.  Throughout the 1980's, David's would adopt several names as its popularity waxed and waned, The Metro and The Metro Express primarily.  (It's been a straight bar for many years now.)  We eventually ended up at a dance bar on Broadway, appropriately called The Broadway.  As the two cadets roamed through the crowd, I stayed against a wall and enjoyed the music, which traditionally ended with Last Dance by Donna Summer when it was 2 AM.  I remember an attractive man cruising me a few yards away.  I always wonder, had I engaged this interested man, and had he been interest in more than sex that night, would I have not gotten so enamored with Bostic, never written him letters, and thereby retained my career?

Dan Stratford met us at The South Town Lumber Company, next to a large Post Office on Broadway Saturday afternoon.  He explained that he would leave Dick's condo early enough on a Sunday afternoon so that he could stop at The South Town Lumber Company for a couple of hours before he had to return to the Academy in time so as not to get written up.  George, who was driving, had parked in the closed Post Office parking lot since his car did have the prominent Air Force Academy sticker on the bumper.  When we left, for some reason, George turned the wrong way onto one-way Broadway.  Unfortunately, a police car was bearing down on us as George tried to correct his mistake.

With the globe lights flashing, the approaching policeman refused to let George get his car out of the way of other oncoming traffic.  As George rolled down the window, the cop demanded to know where George had come from.  George carefully explained that he had come from the Post Office parking lot.  The cop realized that we had likely been in the bar.  George refused to lie but did not offer any fact more than he had pulled out of the Post Office parking lot.  The cop finally explained, "Since you won't tell me where you came from, I am going to have to give you a ticket."  George took the ticket and redirected his car into the flow of one-way traffic, leaving the police car and the stubborn cop behind.

That evening, again at The Broadway, George introduced me to his friend, an elderly gay judge.  When George explained what had happened with the cop earlier that day, the judge smiled and told him, "Give me the ticket.  I'll take care of it."  George never heard about the ticket again.                               

Now that all of those Denver escapades were over, and as I began to decide to find out what being gay was like, I went to the one gay bar I knew about in Colorado Springs, The Hide & Seek lounge, owned by Joe Brady.  The first time I went was on a Saturday afternoon.  Nobody was there, of course; but I did not know that nothing got started until well after darkness.  The waiter engaged me and served me a Calistoga since I did not drink.  Eventually, the crowds arrived long after nightfall.  I had already been there for hours when it was time to leave.  I brought the waiter back home with me, feeling obligated because he had been so attentive to me; but the sex was mediocre, and I realized I was not attracted.

I would soon buy a membership card, saving me money each time I entered the club.  I spent the next nine months going out most Friday and/or Saturday nights.  The twice-nightly drag shows were OK in the beginning.  Local black artist Sasha Dior was certainly classy as she lip-synced her way through a few popular songs.  She would later die of AIDS by the end of the decade.  Another drag performer was always only called "Bette Midler".  She sometimes could be seen on corners of Academy Blvd., slinging a sign for one or another local business that hired her.  Unfortunately, I wasn't meeting guys who were interested in me or I in them.  Many Saturday nights, drag queens from Denver would also perform.  But the twice-nightly drag shows got tiresome as the weeks went by because it interrupted the dancing and the dance music that I was far more interested in. 

I did meet a few guys who became friends, Lindsey "Bart" Keeling, Jon O'Neal, and Roger Hunter.  But after those first months passed, I started driving to Denver bars.  I wasn't particularly more successful in meeting someone whom I would love and would love me.  But I did meet other friends.

In the late 1980's or early 1990's, Roger Hunter, in the Air Force at Peterson AFB, drove me by the Hide & Seek, both of us curious as to what had become of the place.  The bar had closed a few years before, Joe Brady and his partner were dead, and the roof over the back area behind the stage appeared to be sagging badly, letting in moisture from snow or rain.  I thought of the slim, young, country singer from Denver who performed in the basement every few months.  He had a decent voice but nothing that garnered him attention.  He died of AIDS before the decade was over.  So had blond Mark Ceasar, whom I met and thought was quite handsome.  He was also living in Denver and became an AIDS activist before he died as the decade ended.  A short, cute guy, Ron Goodner, who had a partner and who worked as a trainer at U.S. Swim & Fitness on South Academy Blvd. would also die before I left Colorado Springs in the early 1990's.   

I did not see her there that one night, but Helen Reddy performed at the H & S once, leaving behind a signed photo for Joe Brady to hang inside the entrance to the club.        

Early 1980's Dance Soundtrack

Love Insurance - Front Page (featuring Sharon Redd)
First True Love Affair - Jimmy Ross
Do Ya Wanna Funk - Sylvester
Dancin' The Night Away - Voggue
Don't Come Crying To Me - Linda Clifford
It's Raining Men - The Weather Girls
Breakaway - Watson Beasley
Can You Handle It - Sharon Redd
Trippin On the Moon - Cerrone
Your Love - Lime
Forget Me Not - Patrice Rushin
Let It Whip - Devo
Don't Stop - The Mood
Masterpiece - Gazebo
Playing for Time - Madleen Kane
Stormy Weather - Viola Wills
They Only Come Out at Night - Peter Brown
Die Hard Lover - Loverde
Beeline - Miquel Brown
He's A Pretender - High Inergy
Just Be Good To Me - SOS Band
Babe, We're Going To Love Tonight - Lime
Lies - The Thompson Twins

By the middle of the decade, the record stores in Colorado Springs, one in the shopping center at Palmer Park Blvd. and Academy Blvd. in particular, opposite the Albertsons Super Market, would carry the latest 12-inch dance singles.  But in the beginning of the decade, I would have to ask Dan Stratford to stop by the Independent Record Store in downtown Denver when he had a chance, to pick up dance records by Sparks and others.  I'd make my cassette tapes of dance music, push them into the player in the Camero and head up to Denver to go out.  I would only very rarely get invited to some guy's home, so I would drive back to Colorado Springs by the time the bars closed.  Sometimes Bart Keeling would go with me.  More often than not, I drove both ways by myself., the dance music keeping me company and keeping me awake.  

Lindsey Barton "Bart" Keeling

I remember the first night I saw Bart at the Hide & Seek.  He was near the main bar with a few friends, talking and laughing.  He had short black hair and was tall and lanky.  He was wearing some kind of thrift-store jacket, a tad too small but certainly stylish in a Brit-New-Age sort of way.  I thought he was kind of cute, but he always used to say of his face that he wished he would be in car accident where he was tossed through the windshield and surgeons would have to rebuild his face into something more attractive.  

He went home with me either that night or one soon after I first saw him.  The sex, such as it was, was awkward and unfulfilling.  We became good friends instead.  For more than a decade, actually.  He was there when I had a couple of sad parties in which I am not sure anyone had a great time.  For the first, even Dan Stratford drove down from Denver to be there.  I served pizzas, which was probably odd. 

Here are a couple of pictures I took of a Halloween party I had.  I believe there were a total of five of us that night.  We had fun, of course.  But that was always the problem with Colorado Springs gay life in the 1980's, it was lightly attended.  (Even when someone else gave a party that I was invited to, there were fewer than 10 of us there.)
                                                                                  

                                                                         

                                                                                

                                                                                   

(The vampire, whose name I no longer recall, was an Air Force enlisted man.  We were friends for a time before we had a falling out toward the end of the decade over something silly like whether he was riding with me to Denver or not one weekend.)

Bart rented a room from a much older man and worked in the older fellow's porn magazine store on Platte Avenue.  He would regale me with stories of a few of his encounters in the store's restroom when a handsome enough patron had likely been stimulated by a particularly sexy magazine and wanted relief then and there.  Bart and I would go to an occasional movie together such as Out of Africa in the domed theater near the Colorado Springs downtown.  We also went to Making Love.  

He could occasionally be very funny, always amusing, and a reliably good friend when I needed one.  While we did drive up to Denver together a few times, Bart realized that meeting someone up there was not going to end well because of the distance.  

When we'd order a Domino's pizza for a movie night at my place, Bart would lavish salt on his slices.  (I had given up adding salt to anything many years before, so Bart's action was really odd to me.)

Later in the 1980's, Bart decided to leave Colorado and move to the desert, near Palm Springs.  He worked part-time at the airport and for a medical supply company.  On one of my visits to Southern California in the very late 1980's, likely 1987, Willene drove me to the Ontario Airport where Bart picked me up and drove me on to his shared apartment across a wash from the airport.  

We played tennis in the intense heat.  We drove around Palm Springs where I bought a Polo shirt at a downtown hotel gift shop.  One night we went to a bar called Daddy Warbucks which, after spending a couple of hours there, I realized should have been called Sugar Daddy Warbucks.  All of the young and pretty boys were after much older and not at all attractive men.  Two gorgeous hunks I saw ignored me while one excitedly introduced the other to a mousy older guy who appeared to have no personality and was wearing a nifty sweater.

One afternoon, Bart took me to the motel featured in the movie Palm Springs Weekend.  I was thrilled to see that the current owners had left it faithful to how it had looked years before.  In the tiny bar, Bart and I sat at a small table and ordered Cokes.  A very handsome, dark-haired, slightly younger man entered and sat at the bar.  I thought he was gorgeous.  But he ignored me and struck up a conversation with an older guy who was not even close to his league in looks.  Clearly, not yet, or barely, 40, I was not old enough or financially solvent enough for the guys we were seeing in Palm Springs.

In Colorado Springs, Bart had met a handsome younger man somewhere.  He introduced us at the Citadel Mall one afternoon.  Tim Veasey dumped Bart immediately, not that there was anything between them, and became instantly enamored of me.  Bart didn't care.  He was always trying to help me find that man of my dreams.  (More about Tim soon enough.)  

If Bart did meet someone at the Hide & Seek whom he thought might be attracted to me instead of him, he'd introduce us.  He did that with a young, smallish, somewhat cute, Army enlisted guy.  (Today he would be considered a "Fun Size Boy".  But I believe he ultimately thought I was too endowed for him.)  We had great sex, twice.  The young man even brought a new boyfriend to my place one evening.  I am not sure what the point was with this introduction.  Did they want a 3-way?  My mom was visiting, so nothing happened; and I never saw the young Army man again.      

Sadly, Bart and I lost touch with one another in the 1990's when my life was spinning off in a different direction.  After the first of the year of 2002, Dennis Stichman, a good friend of Bart's for longer than I, one evening told me outside of the gym in which we both worked out, as he was arriving and I was leaving, that Bart had been infected with HIV several years before.  He had been taking the meds; but in that stubborn way he had, he deliberately stopped taking them, got sick, and died.  He had always lived his life on his own terms and, I suppose, he determined to die on his own terms, as well.  I suddenly missed him very much.  

Jon O'Neal

I also met Jon at the Hide & Seek bar.  He picked me out of everyone else there that night.  He would later tell me that I presented a rather sad figure in those earliest days.  But as a few years passed, I became more attractive and appeared to have a more positive outlook.  On the Air Force's dollar, Jon was becoming a doctor.  He would owe the Air Force several years of service when he graduated from Med School.  His parents lived in Colorado Springs, hence his appearance at the H&S.  

Jon was tall, about 6'3", nicely put together, with light brown hair.  He was gay but he would frequently deny that and claim he was not.  I would hear through a gay grapevine that at a Provincetown party to which he was not actually invited, Jon would say he was not gay to all of the gay attendees.  The way he said it was taken as an insult.  He was looking to spend the night on the couch, but the host told him that if he was so emphatically denying that he was gay, he was not welcome to stay.

He had receptive sex with me on a couple of occasions.  (He was paranoid about what would become AIDS, so that circumscribed what he might do sexually with me or other men.)  He and I would drive to Denver, to the bars there a number of times.  He was interested in the attractive Army buddy of another gay friend of mine who was also in the Army.  We encountered them both in Cheesman Park in Denver.  Jon was smitten for a brief time.  But his attraction to anyone in those days never lasted long.   

When Jon was stationed in Lackland for part of his medical training, I flew down there.  We drove to Austin, to a popular gay bar there.  In our many conversations it was obvious that Jon was gay, no matter how many times he might claim to be otherwise.  He admitted that he liked gay porn, but he wanted dialogue (this was when porn was first available only in 8 mm film and not videotape).  I always thought that was a silly requirement since the "actors" were often terrible and the dialogue way too often trite.

While stationed in Texas, he met a very handsome young man who had been a minor thing in West Hollywood, CA.  He'd even been in a Mountain Dew commercial where a hot-body young man jumps off of a large rock into a lake.  That was him.  But as the decade progressed, this hot young man realized that he might have been infected with HIV.  He joined the Air Force so that, were he to need extensive medical treatment after he became sick, he would be taken care of.  When I met him, he was in an Air Force hospital in San Antonio.

He told us a story of when he started to lose weight while still living in WeHo, that when he went to the bars then, his former worshippers now avoided him because they realized that he might be infected.  He felt insulted because he had been so desired and then, suddenly, he wasn't.  Before he died, he had bought Jon an expensive set of dinnerware so that, whenever Jon brought it out to entertain, Jon would remember his hot-looking friend.

Jon got stationed in Colorado Springs and bought an incredibly beautiful, multi-level home against a hillside.  I attended a lavish party that Jon held there where one black woman attendee was supposed to be Grace Jones's sister.  I was doubtful of that claim, but everyone had a great time since Jon had organized a wonderful party.  The house had a beautiful view of portions of the city at night.

Jon and I had a bitter falling out toward the end of the decade.  A handsome young man that I was interested in, who lived in Denver, became someone Jon decided he was also interested in.  Without telling me beforehand, Jon drove up to Denver on a weekday evening and took the handsome guy out on a date.  The following evening Jon called me and asked, "Would it wreck our friendship if I fell in love with this guy?"  I was stunned.  Jon knew how much I was attracted to this guy; but even if that guy became attracted to Jon and not to me, was Jon really capable of being in love with the guy permanently?  With any guy for that matter?  Jon flitted from one handsome guy to another so easily.  And here Jon was, telling me that he had already considered tossing our friendship aside if Jon was interested in the same guy I was interested in.  How often would he do that in the coming years?  I believe I responded with the following comment, "I think you just answered your own question."  

Jon even had the audacity to show up at my house one afternoon with this guy.  I met them both at the front door but did not invite them in.  My anger would wane, but the friendship was at an end.  Months later, Jon sent me a card in the mail.  When I opened it, the picture on the front was of a petulant infant in full pout.  The text asked, "Still mad?"  Inside, the card said, "So am I."  I sarcastically laughed aloud because I wondered what Jon had to be mad about?  He made the choice to toss our friendship aside over a guy.

I would later learn from a hunky guy I met in Denver, who knew the young man at the center of our conflict, that the younger guy soon dumped Jon in favor of a 17-year-old.  Jon had wined and dined him constantly, and sometimes overly lavishly, thinking he was impressing him; but the young man's financial situation was significantly lower than Jon's.  He felt outclassed and overwhelmed.  Jon's was a lifestyle to which this young man did not fancy adopting, only to become Jon's trophy boyfriend.

A mutual friend would tell me that Jon was holed up in his huge house by himself, with no friends, wondering why I had ended our friendship over a guy.  This same mutual friend told me that he had never seen so many credit card bills on Jon's dining room table, all of them maxed out.  His lavish lifestyle was at least partly financed by credit.  We would rarely see one another in Denver, but I would steer clear of him whenever I did see him.     

Gary Kinateder

Gary was one of my students in a daytime English course I taught to his unit at Fort Carson.   He worked in an attack helicopter maintenance squadron.  He would eventually become a roommate.  As with Bart, it was important to have a friend in those early years after I left the Academy.

In the early 1980's, money was incredibly tight for me.  Whereas I had been making over $17K in the Air Force, I was making just over $13K for Kaman.  My evenings teaching for Pikes Peak Community College at Fort Carson was bringing in a few hundred every four to six weeks.  But I was paid based upon the size of each class.  Most of the time, with classes that had the minimum number of students, I made $13 per hour, working from 5 PM until around 8:30 PM, two nights a week per class.  If I had more students, it might go up to a maximum of $16 per hour.  

One night, Gary and I were returning from perhaps a movie where I might have used two of my free movie passes.  We pulled into the parking lot of Albertson's off of Academy Blvd.  Gary suddenly pointed out, "There's a bird in that shopping cart."  I did not see what he saw until I got out of the car and walked toward the shopping cart.  Sure enough, an escaped blue parakeet was likely hungry, saw a shopping cart that looked like a cage where it had been fed when it was a caged bird, and landed inside.  It was tame enough to let me grab it.  I must have had a cardboard box in the car because that is where we put the bird for the time being.  I was able to afford a box of bird seed in the store.  We took the poor, freezing thing home but had no idea what we were going to do with it.  I didn't have enough money to buy it a proper cage.  (I still did not have any credit cards at this point.)  

When I got to work the next morning, Rich Hostak asked me if I had read the paper that morning.  I acknowledged that I hadn't had the time.  He handed over his copy and told me to look at the back of the sports section.  There I found that I had come in second in the weekly pro football contest that the Gazette Telegraph ran every week during football season.  I had won $25.  With that money, I was able go to a pet store and buy a cylindrical bird cage for the parakeet.  My winnings were just enough.  In fact, never before that one time, and never again, did I ever come close to winning anything from the sports contest.  One of those cool coincidences occurred and the bird got a cage that I could not have afforded otherwise.

After we got the parakeet, Gary wondered if we ought to get a cat.  A woman at Kaman had a kitten that she was trying to find a home for since the mother had been killed by a tractor.  I ended up calling her Schnozz because of her prominent nose.  Here is the first picture of her as a kitten.  She always loved to crawl under blankets and sleep.  On chilly nights, she would touch her nose to mine, I would lift up the comforter, and she would crawl under and fall asleep.
                                                                        

Here she is in my dining room.  I loved those chairs, but the glass table was actually just a gaming table.  I hoped someday to afford a real dining table but never was able to buy one on Palmer Park Blvd.
                                                                               

I believe Gary took this picture of me and Schnozz in the living room.  My stereo from Minot is in the background.
                                                                           

Here Schnozz is on the carpeted stairs to the bedrooms upstairs.  She loved running up those stairs to chase a toy I tossed up there.
                                                                             

Here she is sleeping atop the Advent projection TV unit in the family room.  I had bought the Advent projection TV from a dealer in downtown Colorado Springs while I was still at the Academy.  I made payments and finally paid it off.  The screen was a separate 6-foot diagonal unit that the image was projected onto.  The room had to be totally dark to get the best picture.
                                                                                             

Here Schnozz is outside on the front sidewalk.
                                                                              

She always wanted to be out of doors unless it was cold, rainy or snowy.  But most of the time, she was an indoor cat.  When she was outside, she used the fences and walked along them for great distances.  She loved to torment the squirrels that lived in the neighborhood.  When I was back from Kaman for a brief meal before heading to Fort Carson, I would let her roam outside for several minutes before I would call her to return so I could head off to my second job. 

The original neighbors to the right of us had sold their house and moved on.  The new owners cut down the tall fences that the first owners had built so that I then had my view back.  They helped install rocks between our two houses, create drainage sumps, and helped make other improvements.  They also installed a small pond in their backyard.  I remember calling Schnozz one afternoon.  She came toward me, but the small pond was in the way.  Instead of walking around, she shockingly got into the water and started swimming toward me.  However, she panicked and started heading up the long direction of the pond, paddling as fast as she could.  She finally exited the pond, covered in smelly pond-scum water.  I had to wash her off before I could leave for Fort Carson.
     
We eventually could afford a fish tank for the family room.  Needless to say, she loved watching the fish.
                                                                         

                                                                                 

Here I am holding her in the living room.
                                                                                

The little tree in the front yard got destroyed eventually by neighborhood squirrels.                                                                                

                                                                                

                                                                               

                                                                                 

Gary and I also once flew to Southern California.  We were in Salt Lake City in a DC-10, but it had developed mechanical problems, so we sat in the aircraft at the gate for quite some time before we were able to leave.   Here are just a couple of pics from that vacation.  These are from Griffith Park Planetarium.
                                                                           

                                                                                

                                                                                 

Here Gary is at Disneyland with Mom and Ann.

                                                                                 

We went to Mike and Lida's house in the valley to swim in their pool.  
                                                                               

                                                                                

Here we are at Ports O' Call Village:
                                                                               

                                                                                

                                                                               

We also attended an air show at Peterson Air Force Base.  Larry Dowling, whom I lusted after in Minot, flew in for the show in an F-106 Delta Dart.  He is sitting in the cockpit.
                                                                             

Here we are with an Air Force F-15 and then a C-5A.
                                                                            

                                                                               

                                                                              

Cheyene Mountain Zoo

Gary and I spent a day at the Zoo that is layered on the side of Cheyene Moutain.  Further up is the Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun, dedicated to the famous media wit and movie personality.
                                                                             

                                                                               

                                                                                

                                                                                

                                                                                

                                                                               

                                                                                

U.S. Swim & Fitness 

Gary encouraged me to join the site in an L-shaped shopping center at the corner of Academy Blvd. and Austin Bluffs Parkway.  At some point I paid $300 for a lifetime membership in which I would only have to pay $75 per year after those first three years.  They would eventually replace the smaller location with a big, brand new, two-story building elsewhere along Academy Blvd. with a pool and running track.  Toward the end of the decade, they opened two more locations, one close to Fort Carson on Academy.  Saturday mornings, afternoons after work at Kaman, or evenings after teaching classes at Fort Carson, I would be found working out at one or the other of their locations. 

Senior cadets and other military personnel tended to work out in the facility on Academy Blvd.  At the first location, one handsome, hunky cadet stood atop the seats in front of the lockers, totally striped down, and only then stepped down and walked naked to the bathroom.  I suppose, had I an almost flawless body like his, I would have shown it off that obviously myself. 

I met Roger Hunter there, realizing that he was gay.  I met any number of straight guys who were friendly.  I may have met some who could have been gay, but I was hesitant when I was unsure.  I did meet one guy who was gay who came over for a massage and passive   sex.  Another was gay but difficult.  High maintenance was too tame.  We dated briefly.  But when we were looking at a rack of CDs at Mike Hajek's apartment in Denver, and I put my hand on his shoulder since we were crouching so close to one another, on the drive back to Colorado Springs, he scolded me at length about my touching him.  He felt I was putting excessive pressure on him by that gesture.  For putting my hand on his shoulder?  (He had also told me that he had so angered his previous lover one morning that the guy threw a frying pan toward him that stuck in the wall of their bedroom, just above the headboard.)  I stopped seeing him.   

I met the hunky blond cadet there, who came over a few times to visit on weekends as a friend until Jon O'Neal lured him away.  When I moved to Denver, my membership was valid at a companion gym on the way to Boulder and another on Colorado Blvd.               

Mike Durr visit

Mike Durr and his family would move to Colorado Springs when he got an assignment at Peterson Air Force Base.  He did visit before that, and we took him around to various tourist locations, including the Cheyene Mountain Zoo and Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun.
                                                                            

                                                                                

                                                                               

                                                                               

                                                                               

                                                                                

                                                                                

                                                                                 

                        
Drive to White Cloud, Kansas

On our first trip to White Cloud, Gary was fine.  We stayed at Grandma Breeze's house on the main street of town.  On our second trip, we spent a day and night at the Schurr's house in Topeka.  However, Gary did not seem well.  We had to take him to the hospital.  He had developed appendicitis.  I had to leave him behind as I continued on to White Cloud.  

Main Street of White Cloud (featured in the film Paper Moon).                                                                                  

View from the North hill:
                                                                             

The front porch of the Nuzum home.
                                                                                 

 
Robert's South Hill primitive campground, overlooking the Missouri River where Lewis and Clark rowed by.                                                                                

                                                                                  

Two images looking South and North from the North Hill above White Cloud.                                                                                  

                                                                               

Inside the Nuzum home that Robert eventually owned.
                                                                                

4th of July White Cloud Visit, Mom's birthday

Here is Gary on the front porch of the Schurr's house, feeling unwell.  He would not say anything until the middle of the night.  We would then take him to the hospital in Topeka and I would head off to White Cloud on my own.                                                                                

   At the (flooded) river below White Cloud.
                                                                             

                                                                               

                                                                             

                                                                               

 
Uncle Robert created a memorial to the filming of Paper Moon in White Cloud.  What had been a bank was used as the sheriff's office in the film.
                                                                                

                                                                                 

Grain elevator from Aunt Doris and Uncle Hap's backyard.                                                                                 

White Cloud main street.
                                                                                 

This home was owned by Grandma Nuzum, then Grandma Breeze, and finally Uncle Robert.                                                                                

Me and then Mom on the North Hill above White Cloud.                                                                               

                                                                                

                                                                                 

                                                                                

                                                                                 

Uncle Robert and Mom in front of the Nuzum house that Robert bought.  Mom was photographed in the lap of Great, Great Grandma Hook on that porch soon after Mom was born in 1921.                                                                                 

Uncle Hap and Aunt Doris's house, high above the Missouri River.                                                                                 

                                                                               

 
Mom with the watermelon and her birthday cake in the kitchen.
                                                                           

Mom (2002), Grandma Breeze (1989), Cousin Jim's wife Ruth (1990's), Aunt Doris and Uncle Hap (2003), Uncle Robert Breeze (2014), and Cousin Jim, the only one still alive.  (Inside the parentheses is the year each of them died.)  
                                                                                

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

The kitchen of Granda Ma Breeze's house on the main street of White Cloud.
                                                                                

                                                                                 
I had to stop by the hospital to pick up Gary on our way back to Colorado Springs.  He was still in significant pain on the drive home.
                                                                 
Academy Graduation 1982
                                                                               

Gary accompanied me when I decided to attend the graduation ceremony of the students that were freshmen in 1979.  I would encounter Captain Bruce Daggy.  He seemed a bit uncomfortable when we spoke, but he did tell me that he was going to be attending graduate school to get a PhD.  The Air Force was footing the bill--he would return to the English Department after he got his advanced degree.  (I have always thought that that selection would have been me had I not screwed up my career by my misguided involvement with Bostic.)
                                                                           

                                                                               

                                                                               

                                                                              

A major embarrassing moment occurred when we arrived.  A big section of the bleachers was entirely empty, so we sat down.  Those in the sections adjacent looked at us oddly.  That should have clued us in that we were not supposed to be sitting there.  An usher approached us to see our tickets.  They were not the right ones for where we were sitting.  This empty section was being reserved for Air Force and Academy dignitaries and their families.  We had to find another place to sit while so many kept their eyes on us during the entire walk.

Also 1982 USAFA

Mike Durr and I visited the Academy that year.  The following plaque lists Thomas Worthington Brundige IV.  Many of these memorial plaques adorn the Academy chapel exterior.
                                                                              

                                                                                  

                                                                                    

                                                                                   

                                                                              

 
Gary and I visiting Roger Benninger and Sharon in the UK

Roger invited us to visit now that he was stationed in the UK, flying F-111s.  They lived near the village of Banbury, mentioned in the early nursery rhyme.  We were able to take a bus to Oxford, trains into London to visit several sites, Warwick Castle in Woodstock, Stratford-on-Avon to see two Shakespearean plays, and Roger booked us on an Air Force chartered bus to Dover and to a Channel ferry to Boulogne, France.                                                                                 

                                                                                  

                                                                               

                                                                                

We even attended a local flea market.
                                                                                 

Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill.
                                                                              

                                                                                

                                                                              

                                                                              

                                                                                  

                                                                                 

                                                                                  

                                                                                

                                                                                 

British Museum:
                                                                             

                                                                                

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

                                                                                  

London:
                                                                              

                                                                               

                                                                                 

                                                                                

                                                                                  

                                                                                  

                                                                                

                                                                                

Tower of London:
                                                                            

                                                                               

                                                                               

Warwick Castle:                                                                            

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

                                                                               

                                                                                

                                                                                  

Oxford:                                                                                 

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

                                                                               

                                                                                

                                                                                  

                                                                               

                                                                                 

Starting across the Channel to France:
                                                                              

                                                                              

As we got out onto the rough Channel, passengers started to get seasick.  I began to be ill right away.  I fled to a men's restroom with just two stalls.  I grabbed one and stayed there for the whole journey.  I could hear men entering and leaving repeatedly, also sick.  We actually were docked in port for several minutes before Gary found me.  As we existed the restroom, I could see that the crew had been cleaning numerous spots of puke everywhere.  We hung around the town with a couple of junior airmen.  One of them acknowledged that he was doing OK until some woman tried to flee past him but ended up puking on his shoe.  Then he got sick.

Boulogne, France:
                                                                               

                                                                               

                                                                               

                                                                                

On the voyage back to England, the ferry had far fewer passenger seats.   We found a game room, saw an empty space on the floor and sat down against a wall.  A delightful couple--the husband Air Force, his wife Spanish with a wonderful accent--passed by the open door to the game room, obviously looking for a place to sit.  We waved at them and pointed to the open floor space next to where we were sitting.  They smiled broadly and joined us on the floor, chatting us up.  The wife related that they were far smarter than we when they stopped at a pharmacy after arrival in port and bought seasick meds for the return trip.  She told me that when she started to feel ill on the passage over, she started breathing heavily to keep from tossing her lunch.  "My hands started to cramp up," she explained. "It was like I was a creeple." 

She shared a seasick pill with me.  Since I did not have anything to take it with, I swallowed it without fluids.  I was damned if I was going to get sick again.  She kept coaching me to breathed deeply.  Suddenly, my hands did cramp up and I did look like a "creeple".   However, I did not get sick.

Not all of those on our tour caught the return ferry we were on.  So, we had to wait on the tour buses for the others to arrive.  The weather and the Channel beyond were even more blustery in the dark when their later ferry docked.  

Roger and Sharon were generous hosts.  I did pay for the tickets to Hamlet.  Unfortunately, when we arrived at the theater in Stratford-on-Avon, we discovered that the Hamlet tickets were for the production in London, not Startford.  I had to buy us tickets for the two shows in this theater for the four of us.  Two Gentlemen of Verona was fun with a real dog on stage who had a mind of its own.  

The earlier play as we entered the theater after it had already begun, Gary thoughtfully noted, "This is definitely Shakespeare.  We're ten minutes late and already somebody is dead on the stage."  Hands were cut off and offspring were made into a pie that the parent accidentally ate. 

We had taken a TWA 747-200 to London from Kennedy.  Since we had a long layover after our flight from Denver through St. Louis, we took a subway into New York City and road the two elevators to the top of the World Trade Center.  I know we took a few photos there but cannot now find them.  We had a lovely dinner at the restaurant in the historic TWA terminal at Kennedy, not realizing that we would get a full meal on the flight after we took off.  

We took another TWA 747-200 into Chicago on our return from London.  When Gary mentioned that he was on leave, the customs agent jumped on him, demanding to know why he did not have his leave paperwork with him.  The agent then really ransacked our suitcases.  We had only brought back one bottle of wine, so he had to let us proceed, but only after a severe warning.  
               

Early Christmases at Palmer Park Blvd.
                  
That first Christmas in 1979 when I was out of the Air Force, I could not afford to buy a tree.  The neighbor bought a huge tree and trimmed a few of the bottom branches.  I claimed them and put them up together in my family room.  I would have spent the day alone in my house but Ann and her husband sent me a pass so I could fly to Southern California and be with the family there.

In the early 1980's, Mom came to Colorado Springs for Christmas.  Here are photos of the family room with me and Gary.
                                                                           

                                                                              

                                                                                 

                                                                             

                                                                               

                                                                                

                                                                               

Gary got out of the Army and looked for a civilian job.  He actually got hired at an Arthur Murry Dance studio on Academy Blvd.  Here are a couple of photos of his leaving the Army.
                                                                         

                                                                                  

One of his temporary jobs before Arthur Murray was selling solar panels.  I bought one to heat the house.  It lasted a few years, but got destroyed by a hailstorm in the late 1980's.
                                                                           

                                                                               

                                                                                

                                                                               

He met a girlfriend, Melanie, whom he would eventually marry.  Here she is at Christmas in 1983.
                                                                           

                                                                               

                                                                               

The two of them got married in 1983.  Here are a few photos of Gary, his younger brother, and me the morning of the ceremony.
                                                                             

                                                                             

                                                                              

Gary and Melanie moved to Denver in 1983, I believe.  He would eventually attend an aircraft maintenance school and get a job with the airlines.   I kept Schnozz while Gary got a local pet store to take on the two parakeets (we acquired a beautiful white parakeet when someone tried to return it and the store would not take it back).  He would visit in the early 1990's, and we had lunch at the house.  We would lose track of one another but reconnect on Face Book in the past year.  (That new 1984 Camero in the driveway will be explained in the next section.) 
                                 

Tim Veasey

Unlike what would happen between Jon and me later in the decade, Bart introduced me to Tim at the Citadel Mall deliberately because he knew that he and Tim did not have a sexual connection.  As I said, Tim seemed enamored with me from the beginning.  He was house sitting for some friends in Colorado Springs.  He learned about my experience at the Academy four years before.  After our first extremely enjoyable date, he invited me into the house, had me sit down on the couch in the living room, and went to get something he wanted me to see.  He soon returned and handed me a familiar blue, faux-leather folder.  He then crossed the living room and sat in an overstuffed chair, awaiting my response.

I opened the folder, which was obviously one that the Air Force uses to present awards such as the Commendation Medal that I got when I first arrived at the Academy.  I read the text inside carefully.  And then I let out a loud, ironic laugh which, apparently, Tim had not expected.  Tim had been an Air Force enlisted man I realized.  At the beginning of the impending summer, this was his appointment to the Air Force Academy, class of 1987.  For the next four years, Tim Veasey was going to be a Cadet.  The irony of the situation was not lost upon me.

I could easily become Dick Tuttle to Tim's Dan Stratford five years later.

Tim seemed to really like me.  I was definitely attracted to him.  When we soon slept together, the sex was incredible.  I felt as if the top of my head was exploding whenever I climaxed.  That had never happened before.     

We drove to Tracks and the Foxhole bars in Denver.  Tracks was a hugely popular dance bar, and Foxhole was an open-air bar that was incredibly popular on Sunday afternoons.

On our first drive to Denver, when we returned to the Camero parked on the road between the two bars,  some homophobe had broken all of the headlights of all of the cars parked by the bars.  It was so late at night that I had a tough time finding an open gas station where I could buy at least one headlight to replace the two that had been smashed in.  A station was open off of I-25 but not the garage.  However, the attendant offered to go inside the garage, get a headlight, and install it for me.  It was clear that he was gay and interested.  (Who else would do that when it was not his job?)  However, I was dating Tim, so I could not pursue anything with this cute guy.)

After our second visit to Denver, the Camero began to make scary noises under the hood after we passed Castle Rock on an empty stretch of the highway, heading back to Colorado Springs.  The engine died as I pulled over to the shoulder of I-25.  Thank goodness some kind, local young folks were driving by and offered to take us back to Castle Rock.  From a payphone there, I called John Ng, the straight friend from Minot who now lived in Colorado Springs.  He was incredibly generous to drive all of the way to Castle Rock to take us home. 

The following morning, I called the Chevy dealership in Colorado Springs.  They towed the Camero to their repair shop.  But the engine was dead, and I could not afford a replacement engine.  They did offer to lease me a 1984 Camero.  That was what I could afford at the time.  They then towed the '73 Camero to the house where it would sit for several years in the garage before I could afford to replace the engine.

With Tim's time to report to the Academy drawing closer, I decided to bring him along on a visit to Southern California during the extended 4th of July weekend.  We would stay with my mom and visit as many tourist attractions as possible.  Tim rented us a Mustang convertible.  We first visited Marineland of the Pacific on Palos Verdes.
                                                                       

                                                                                 

                                                                                

                                                                                  

The next day we visited Universal Studios with Mom.
                                                                               

                                                                                 

                                                                                  

                                                                               

                                                                               

On the third day, we went to Disneyland.
                                                                          

                                                                                 

                                                                                   

On the fourth day, we drove to San Diego.  We swam at a beach near the Del Coronado Hotel.  We briefly shopped at the International Male store in San Diego.  We were going to the San Diego Zoo later in the day; but after we parked the car and headed toward the entrance, we discovered that the Zoo was closing shortly.  A really odd coincidence occurred next.  Just as we were about to turn and walk back to the car, an obviously gay, younger couple was existing the Zoo.  I was stunned.  I had seen this same gay couple first at Marineland, then Universal Studios, and also Disneyland on each of the days we were there.   It was such a bizarre coincidence.  

Since the Zoo was closing but we were in Balboa Park already, I knew they would be showing Shakespearean plays.  However, they were sold out.  Instead, we saw Antigony in a square theater where the actors descended to the square stage below the audience, passing right by the two of us on the aisle.

Tim promised after the long, tiring day, that he would be awake enough to drive us back to Mom's apartment.  He was wrong.  I had to drive us all of the way back while he repeatedly nodded off.  

The following afternoon, we drove to West Hollywood, stopping first at the Griffith Park Planetarium.  
                                                                           

                                                                                  

That evening we went to a dance bar in West Hollywood where Miquel Brown was featured singing her hit, "So Many Men, So Little Time".

Mom took this picture of us at Ports O' Call Village.
                                                                                   

Tim took a couple of pictures of Ann, Mom and me in Mom's apartment in San Pedro.
                                                                             

                                                                                

Tim and I flew back to Colorado Springs after this wonderful 4th of July vacation.  I drove him to the Academy on the morning he was to report.  Unfortunately, he called me after only four days.  He had dropped out.  He was particularly upset with a female upper classman who had been particularly nasty toward him during training.  I could not understand why he had not even completed the summer program before deciding to quit, but I picked him up where he said he would be waiting.  If he were going to move in with me, I was delighted.  

Instead, he asked me to drive him to Buckley Field near Denver the next day so he could catch a military flight back to New York where his parents lived.  I had the strangest feeling as we passed Castle Rock on the drive that I was not going to see him again.  He sensed my unease but assured me, "You think I am not coming back?  I will be back."  I was not at all reassured.  I did not believe him.  (I had noticed that when he packed up his stuff for the military hop to New York, he left nothing of any value behind.  These were not the actions of someone who was actually intending to soon return.)

I had already heard from a friend whose buddy was in Denver one of the nights that Tim was unable to stay at my place before he left for the Academy that Tim was seen in a bar in Denver.  We were not committed to one another, so if he wanted to go out without me, I was not in any position to tell him he could not.  I just wish that he had told me that he went out instead of making up a story as to why he had to drive to Denver.  

I felt bereft when I dropped Tim off at Buckley. 

Before I met Tim, I had experienced some interest from a handsome man, closer to my own age, who had once been a lover and then a FB of Dick Tuttle's.  He lived in the same condo complex in Denver.  I stopped by to see the guy that evening, feeling pretty low because I was sure that I had seen the last of Tim.  The handsome fellow invited me in.  After we chatted for a few minutes, he asked me up to his bedroom where we had safe sex.  (Dick had warned me before that this FB was known to have a wide circle of sexual partners and he was not always safe.  Later, Dick also became upset that I had had sex, even if quite tame, with his buddy.  Had I known that there was still something between Dick and his FB, I never would have met up with the guy that evening.)

Very soon, I was proven right about Tim.  He was not coming back.  On the phone he told me that he was moving to California, our trip having awakened a wanderlust in him for the West Coast.  He had already met somebody else and was going to join the older fellow in California.  I was so angry at having been proven right that I chewed him out and hung up on him.  A year later Tim would get up the courage to call me once more but, again, while he said he would try and return to visit me in Colorado Springs, he never did.  However, he did tell me that the older guy he'd met and was supposed to live with in California dumped him before Tim even arrived in California.  Tim ironically asked, "Why aren't guys more honest?"  He then acknowledged that he had known all along that he was not going to move in with me on the drive to Buckley.  He now admitted that he should have told me the truth that day.

Years later, when I was renting my house out in Colorado Springs while I was working at a job at IBM, one of my renter buddies said that they had gotten an odd phone message on my answering machine--I'd kept my phone number and answering machine active at the house since I might move back.  The person who called cryptically said, "You know who this is."  Sadly, one of the two buddies had erased the message before I got to listen to the voice.  Whoever had called never did call back.  The original message did not provide a phone number.  If I had been able to listen to the voice of the one who had called, I might have been able to confirm that it was Tim.  Or someone else entirely.    

Dennis Madura & wife, Linda, in South Gate, circa 1983

I don't recall how they met, but Dennis would marry Linda in Boise, Idaho, her hometown, before I left for the Air Force.  Mike insanely would drive the entire distance from L.A. to Boise and back.  Lida sat in the passenger's side of the oversized chartreuse Chevy Impala, and I would ride in the back, often falling asleep.  We passed through Sacramento and the desolate lower right corner of Oregon on the drive to Boise.  We would skirt through Tahoe and the Eastern side of the Sierras on the way back to L.A.  We may have stopped in Reno to eat breakfast. 

The two newly-weds settled into a nice duplex in South Gate after their honeymoon.  Eventually, they bought a small house on one of those streets between Tweedy and Abbott Road, between Otis and Atlantic.  The two loved to garden in the back yard.  They would eventually buy a brand new house in a new tract of homes inland from Oceanside where I would visit once before we ceased to communicate.  (Linda had stayed friends with Lida after she and Mike divorced.  They were both religious.  I suspect that Mike and my being gay contributed.)
                                                                                  

                                                                                    

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

                                                                               

Jim Payne, Christmas 1983 Blizzard

I met Jim Payne at the Hide & Seek bar in Colorado Springs.  I invited him to my place for dinner the night before Christmas Eve.  He had been at the Air Force Academy Prep School where they try to improve your academic skills for entrance to the Academy.  He flunked out of there.   

After he arrived, an incredible blizzard struck.  After dinner, he tried to drive home, but his car got stuck in the snow on Palmer Park Blvd.  He hiked back to my place to spend the next few days with me.  On Christmas Day, the Durrs brought over dinner since they did not have any other place except a rented apartment to have their Christmas feast.  I explained that Jim was a friend who got stuck at my place because of the blizzard.  Here are the three photos I took with all of us there.
                                                                          

                                                                                

                                                                               

Jim Payne was cute.  He was definitely gay.  However, he was dating a young woman while he was having sex with men.  They would move to Arizona and attend the University there while Mike was also enrolled at the U of A.  Jim and I had had sex a couple of times.  He would later have sex with Mike.  But after his wife (yes, they married) and Mike's wife, Lida, became friends, Jim said they could no longer have sex under those circumstances.  Jim was an indifferent student at the University.  He flunked out of the school.  He never seemed to study.  Mike helped him academically, but he seemed unconcerned about doing any studying on his own.  They soon moved away.

Years later, I heard from him over the Internet.  He was involved in some kind of scheme that I explained I had no time to represent.  He was married to a man after having divorced his wife years before.  I never heard from him again.     

While he was fun to have sex with, Mike always believed that Jim used people.  He was cute and sexually attractive, but he never applied himself when we knew him.  I am not sure what sort of occupation he ever had after flunking out of the Prep School and the U of A.  Some guys just coast through life. 

Roger Benninger visit 1980's

Often, I have just photographs of someone's visit with only a general memory of when they visited.  The giant tuning fork used to sit atop a concrete slab looking down upon the Academy Chapel below.  But on one of my final visits, the tuning fork was gone.
                                                                                 

                                                                                  

                                                                                 

Tucson visit. 1984

Mike, Lida and the two babies moved to Tucson, AZ, so that Mike could attend the University and get a degree and start a career as a pharmacist.  However, he never could pass an Organic Chemistry class.  He eventually switched to teacher's certification in elementary education. 

I was still working at Kaman and traveled to the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant to help teach classes for the Radiation Monitoring equipment that Kaman had sold to the plant.  Mom met me at Sky Harbor Airport so that we could fly together to Tucson to visit Mike and Lida.  We took a Republic 727, likely the original Pacific Airlines 727 that I had flown to Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Francisco.  (Republic Airlines was the result of the merger of Hughes Air West, North Central and Southern Airlines.)      

Months before, Mike had been taking a roll of quarters to a phone booth near his home to call me.  After so many years, he had finally accepted the fact that he was gay.  He needed someone to talk to about it but did not want his many phone calls to me to register on his home phone.  

Unfortunately, Mom as she aged began to govern her tongue less and less.  She would say things out loud that most people would keep to themselves, given the potential repercussions.  One evening, Mike and I decided to go to a bar together.  After we left, Mom said something that crushed Mike's marriage and made his and Lida's life miserable for the next few years.  She stupidly remarked, "I hope Greg doesn't get Mike to take him to some gay bar."  Perhaps Lida had had her suspicions, but Mom's comment confirmed her fears.

When Mike and I got back, Lida pointedly told Mike to go to their bedroom.  She firmly closed the door.  I turned to Mom because I knew that something dire must have come up.  Mom then repeated the remark she had made to Lida about a gay bar.  I was shocked that she could be so reckless.  I told her, "You had no business saying anything like that."  She professed total innocence, not seeing that what she had said could have had any consequences for their marriage.    
                                                                               

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

                                                                                  

                                                                              

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

They continued to live together for a while.  Eventually, they sold their house, Lida took the girls back to Southern California, they got divorced, and Mike moved into apartment.  He would soon meet Walt McLain and would move into Walt's trailer in a park not far from the college.  After Mike got his teacher's certification, I helped the two of them move to an apartment in South Gate.  They would eventually move to Long Beach, buying a condo after living in an apartment for a couple of years.  Walt would soon learn that he had HIV.  He would die of AIDS just before the meds became available that would have saved his life in 1995.

Antonio "Dino" Gagliasso

When he was a good friend, Dino was great.  On a couple of occasions, he really helped my life's direction.  When he turned on me, he was one of the worst human beings I have ever met, as bad as Bostic in many ways.

We met at Tracks, the hugely popular dance bar near the railroad tracks in Denver, across the road from The Foxhole.  An Army enlisted man, he would soon move into one of my spare bedrooms, put up giant James Dean posters on the wall, and live with me as a roommate for a couple of years.  He should not have been in the Army or in Tracks.  He would only later admit that he was just 17 when we met, using a fake ID to get into bars.

Here we are with a couple of friends in the Tracks parking lot.  Mauro Molfetta, a straight Army buddy, and Arnie from Salida are standing with me in the middle photo. 
                                                                         

                                                                                 

                                                                               

I would encounter Arnie at a fitness center in Denver almost a decade later.  He'd been an avid kayaker but had nearly died one time when his kayak was wedged between rocks after turning upside down and trapping him in some strong mountain rapids.  He barely got out alive.  He also told me that he had joined the Army and became a helicopter pilot.  He and Dino had had a brief affair when Dino lived with me.  Arnie climbed in bed with me one night when Dino was away.  I never saw someone before who came so much.  Dino later told me that Arnie never masturbated.

Arnie was a good guy, and I never understood why Dino did not permanently connect with him.  They seemed a good match.        

Dino and I visited Southern California and went to Disneyland with Ann and Mom and then drove to the beach.  I would also learn that his mom committed suicide when they both lived in a trailer while his Merchant Marine father was away at sea.  He told me that he heard the pistol shot and found her body.   
                                                                          

                                                                                 

                                                                               

                                                                                 

                                                                                

                                                                                

                                                                                 

Here are Dino, me and Schnozz:
                                                                               

                                                                                 

                                                                               

That same year, likely 1985, we road the Cog Railway up to the top of Pike's Peak.   One of the biggest disappointments of this decade occurred on this trip.  I saw a handsome, hunky young man who clearly seemed interested in me on the trip up and in the gift shop.  On the trip down, Dino and I found our seats.  I spied the young man with a young woman (his sister, I would soon learn) and an older man (his father).  As they entered the car in front of ours, I noticed that he located where we were sitting and walked back to our car.  He and his father would sit in the seats opposite ours, with his sister sitting next to me, though he quickly switched seats with his siter so that he was sitting next to me.    

As the train moved away from the station, he asked his sister a question that I knew the answer to.  "What does SCUBA stand for?"  Having been a huge Sea Hunt fan growing up, I knew it stood for "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus" which I stated aloud when his sister did not know.  He and I then began to chat.  He totally ignored his father and sister, and I ignored Dino, as we became more smitten with one another.  Somehow, I was not surprised to learn that he was a sophomore cadet at the Air Force Academy.     

As we neared the station in Manitou, I could not figure out a way to give him my phone number.  Kaman had given us business cards, but I had given away my last one in my wallet the night before at a bar in the Springs.  As the train came to a stop and we all got up to leave, he made an odd comment, "Girls?"  He then made a thumbs down gesture with his hand.  I was more than ever convinced that he was gay and that he was very interested in me.  My brain was in a lock.  A couple of years later, my friend Roger Hunter advised, "You could have given him your name and told him you were in the phone book."  Of course.   

As we got into our car and they got into their car and drove off, I was so crestfallen.  I never saw him again.  His name was Paul.  Yes, I gave his name to the love interest of Greg in the Rainbow Arc of Fire series of novels, as well as using this meeting on the Cog Railway in the book, too.  
                                                                              

                                                                                  

                                                                                 

                                                                                   

                                                                                  

                                                                                 

                                                                                  

                                                                                

                                                                                

                                                                                

                                                                               

                                                                                    

Dino, Mauro, & the Shrine of the Sun

No matter the roommate or the family member or the friend from out of town, I would take them to the Cheyene Moutain Zoo, the Will Roger's Shrine of the Sun, Garden of the Gods, and/or the Air Force Academy.  Dino was no different. 
                                                                                

                                                                                 

                                                                              

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

                                                                               

                                                                                

                                                                                 

                                                                                   

Dino, Tom & Hawaii

Dino met Tom Carrasco in Denver.  They began dating.  During a bad storm, Tom wanted Dino and me to pick him up in Denver, assuring us that the roads and weather were fine in Denver.  They were not.  I kept driving in that '84 Camero which, with rear wheel drive, road like a waxed ski.  The entire drive was scary and dangerous.  We finally reached the neighborhood where Tom lived and picked him up.  I was furious that he had lied to us about road and weather conditions in Denver.  

After that fiasco, I told Dino that he might as well have Tom move into the house, just so their long-distance affair did not force me to drive to Denver so they could meet up.  Tom got a job at the May D&F in the Citadel Mall.  I got discounts for some cool sweaters, but that was about it.  What neither Dino nor I knew was that, when Dino was off on Army duty, Tom would take my '73 Camero and visit rest stops for sex with truckers.  (A couple of Dino's Army buddies assured us that they could replace the destroyed engine in the Camero, and it would be great again.  They installed what ended up being a bad rebuilt engine but, having been paid, did not want to take it out, return it to the seller, and get a good rebuilt engine.  The car was drivable but not well.  This was another of the small crap situations Dino got me into.  It would get much, much worse.)

The Army eventually stationed Dino in Hawaii and Tom went with him.  Western Airlines was selling cheap passes to employee family and friends.  Mom and I twice over Christmas flew to Hawaii.  Here are a few of the photos that featured Dino and/or Tom and us. 
                                                                             

                                                                               

                                                                                 

                                                                             

                                                                                

Dino and Tom would eventually break up.  Dino would get out of the Army and move to Denver after a short stay living with Jon O'Neal in Colorado Springs.  At some point he would live in one of the many old houses in Denver that had been cut up into condos or rental units.  Here he was living in one unit in one with a Don Nolan renting another unit.  One day in 1990, when Don was leaving a downtown building and Dino was entering that same building, they met up again and chatted.  Don told him that he was then a tech writer for a project in the Denver Tech Center.  They needed more writers.  Dino mentioned me and, after I was interviewed, I got the job.  This was a significant key for me later even though the Capitol Federal Savings project only lasted a few months.

Dino met Larry Boroff, and they soon moved in together.
                                                                          

                                                                                

The three of us visited Central City:
                                                                             

                                                                                

                                                                                

                                                                                  

                                                                                 

                                                                                  

Dino and I in Virginia

Although I did not know it at the time, my years as a part time instructor for Pikes Peak Community College at Fort Carson and Peterson AFB were coming to an end.  I had actually had a chance to get hired full time by PPCC in 1989, but--again--came in second to a woman who never served in the military.  The hiring process was rigged.  I get it.  The woman whom the all-female English Department quickly hired taught part time at the main campus.  They knew her personally.  While the History Department sent someone to see me teach once, the English Department never sent anyone to observe my teaching, and I had been doing it for them since 1980.  I was told that they claimed she had taught a few more English classes than I had, and that was the sole criteria they used for choosing her over me.  However, had they bothered to learn that I had taught 9 freshman English courses at the Academy?   Did they know that I taught a literature course for Chapman College?  Did they even care that I taught many Communications classes for PPCC, in addition to History and Humanities and Literature classes?  They likely wanted to hire a woman whom they knew rather than a man they never bothered to drive the 10 minutes to Fort Carson to meet and observe.  I was never even interviewed during whatever "hiring process" they used.     

In another twist, PPCC would in the next few years, open a Northern Campus, on the opposed side of I-25 from the Air Force Academy.  I never heard.  I had taught for those three departments, yet I never learned that they were hiring, circa 1993, possibly earlier.  I suspect I could have gotten a full-time teaching job at the Northern Campus in either the English, History or Humanities Departments.  Of course, I cannot entirely blame PPCC.  I would be working full-time for IBM and living in Denver, out of the loop. 

Regardless, in 1990, I was still interested in exploring historical sites that helped when I taught U.S. History.  So, Dino and I flew to Norfolk, VA, via Cleveland on Continental Airlines.  We were both shocked to find that when we changed planes in Ohio that people could still smoke like crazy in public places.  We landed in Norfolk, rented a car at the airport, arrived at our motel and checked in.  We did go to a gay dance bar for a couple of hours and had a fun time.  In the morning after breakfast, we headed across the bridge to the peninsula and Yorktown.  We then continued on to Jamestown and Colonial Williamsburg.

Jamestown
                                                                    

Colonial Williamsburg:                                                                                

                                                                               

                                                                                 

                                                                                  

                                                                              

                                                                                   

                                                           
We bypassed Richmond on our way to Monticello:
                                                                                

                                                                                     

                                                                                   

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

                                                                                    

                                                                                     

                                                                                                                                                                        We checked into a motel in Charlottesville and went out to the Silver Fox gay bar after dinner.  We met a handsome man who was a registered nurse, living in Staunton, VA, in the Valley.  He stopped by our motel room later, but we did not have sex.  We merely chatted until he left.   The next morning, we visited the University and then took off for Appomattox Court House.
                                                                                

                                                                                   

                                                                                    

                                                                                        

                                                                                    

                                                                                     

   Appomattox Court House:
                                                                                     

Wilmer McClean surrender house (he had moved his family to Appomattox after first living at Bull Run/Manassas where the war began in Northern Virginia in 1861):
                                                                               

Historical reenactor in the top hat.  We were told not to ask him questions that did not involve the Civil War time frame.  Any directions he provided would reflect the 1860's and not the 1990's Appomattox region.
                                                                                     

                                                                                 

                                                                                    

Front porch of the Wilmer McClean surrender house:
                                                                              

 Surrender room:
                                                                                  

We had to barrel back to the Norfolk airport to catch our flights back to Colorado.  I could not even stop to get gas.  Avis soaked us to fill up the tank after we turned our rental in at the airport.  
                                    
                                                      
When I was living in Denver in the 1990's, Dino met another Dino (Attardo) in a bar in Denver in 1997.  He had a condo for sale.  Dino knew I needed to stop renting and invest in a place to live.  That is how I got a condo that we will explore later in this journey.  But, eventually, Dino and I would have an incredibly bad falling out.  I, of course, would be totally unaware of what was going on, and it would cost me dearly, financially and personally.  (In a way, this was much like my being entirely unaware of Bostic's betrayal at the Academy.)

Dino had met Joey after he and Larry Boroff broke up and sold their duplex.  Joey had HIV and smoked a lot of pot to give him an appetite.  He and Dino essentially dropped out for months, consumed with smoking pot daily.  Dino had foolishly bought a sandwich shop in Denver, but he paid little attention to running it while he was often stoned.  I stupidly cosigned on a loan for a big old house that Dino was supposed to fix up and sell.  He eventually made a tiny profit, and I got out of the loan business.  However, Key Bank, in the midst of many, expensive financial blunders, had left the line of credit attached to that sold house open. 

When I got a notice about it, I turned it over to Dino to resolve.  What I did not know was that all of the pot smoking with Joey had turned Dino paranoid...and irrationally greedy.  He began to see me as some sort of enemy to be destroyed for taking advantage of him when he was 17.  That was all over a decade earlier, and I had been a friend not an enemy.  I had helped him at every turn.  I even found a letter from his stepmom, thanking me for giving Dino some cold-weather gear when he was temporarily deployed to Europe on an Army exercise in winter.

Instead of ensuring that the open line of credit through Key Bank got closed, Dino went to the bank and asked for the maximum amount of money on the line of credit.  The Bank, instead of being suspicious or contacting me, willingly gave Dino over $53K.  With the check in hand, he told me that this was the profit he had made from selling the sandwich shop.  (He had not, in fact, sold the shop.  That bank repossessed the shop when he stopped making payments.)  Dino also had had access to two of my credit cards when he was supposed to be refurbishing that big old house we jointly owned.  Now that he had over $53K, he got even more greedy.  (At one point I called him to clarify something financial regarding the cards.  The explosive voice he used toward me with that call can only be described as monstrous.  He spewed out a stream of hate and vindictiveness.  I was panicky and did not know what to do.)

Dino then, with the two credit cards, went to ATM after ATM and took out as much as he was allowed to, even over the maximum of each card.  He over maxed out each card which I did not even think was possible.      

He wasn't done with his pot-and-hate-fueled spree against me.

While I was at work, he entered my condo in Denver (he'd always had a key).  He first formatted the hard drive of my computer, to wreck the manuscripts to those Rainbow Arc of Fire manuscripts I had already written.  He took four, framed, professional photos of me that I was preserving that were used on each of the first editions of each existing RAoF volume and put them on the dining room table, facing one another.  He took a bottle of Snapple from the fridge and left it outside for the bum who was living under my back deck.  I had three, large boxes of personal stuff in the storage room in the back of the building.  He took two of them.  To this day, I have no idea of all that I lost; but all of my diplomas went missing, from South Gate Junior High and High School, from East L.A. College, from Cal State Dominguez Hills from my BA and MA degrees.  A teacher's certification from the state of California to teach Communications, History, English, Literature and Humanities also disappeared.  

He still was not done.

He then called me at work, using one of those sinister, voice-disguising devices to threaten me that if I went to the police regarding what he had done, he would expose me for Social Security fraud.  Mom had $10K she intended to give to Ann and me after she died.  But since she was worried about maintaining the money in her own account, after two open-heart surgeries, she was totally dependent upon Social Security and Medicare/MediCal to survive.  She had given the money to me to keep in an account for her until she died.  Only then was I to divide it between Ann and me. 

Dino then took off.  He would later claim that he took the boxes of my stuff to a beach in Southern California and burned everything.    

I was left with a $53K debt with Key Bank, as well as two over-maxed-out credit cards, as well as my own credit card.  I could not pay all of that debt back.  I certainly could not make monthly payments to cover those several bills.  Since Key Bank could not find Dino, they came after me even though it was their blunder that gave him the money in the first place, as well as giving him a reason to max out my two credit cards that he had access to.

You might wonder, as I did at the time, what Dino did with all of that money.  He would later claim that he flew to Copenhagen and deposited most of it in a Danish bank there.  I really did not believe him at the time.  Once in a while, Dino was capable of telling whoppers.  He could be dishonest.  I think he simply squandered the money.  He had once taken an old armoire I inherited with the condo, promising to use it himself.  I think he sold it and kept the money because I never saw the armoire again.  He took several Franklin Mint Corvette diecast cars from me, promising to sell them for me since I had no place to display them in the small condo.  I never saw the diecast cars or any money from the sale of them.

I tried to work with the bank and with the credit card companies.  I tried to work with one of those debt relief companies.  They told me that I had too much debt.  Bankruptcy was the only answer.   

Fortunately, this was a time when a consumer could absolve credit card debt through bankruptcy.   
 
Key Bank would contact me over the years, asking if I knew where Dino was.  He had tried to reconcile with me a year or two after what he had done.  I told him then, knowing it would never happen, "You pay me back the $22K you acknowledge owing me, then we can be friends again.  If not, we are not friends."  I would never see a cent from him.

I would get an email from him now and then, no matter where I lived.  He and Joey were in Oregon.  He and Joey moved to Chile.  Dino was teaching English to Chilean military cadets.  He and Joey were raising ducks on a small farm in Chile.  Dino met a woman and, fulfilling a prophecy his late father had told him that if he ever met the right woman, he would no longer be gay, he married that woman and fathered a child.    (Joey, now on the outside, moved back to the U.S., Dino told me, and soon died of AIDS.)  Dino kept wanting to renew our friendship.  I kept him at arm's length and dreaded each time I got an email from him.

I did not care what was happening in his life.  Our friendship had ended years before after what he had cruelly done to me.  I only worried that his extreme behavior might be played out upon me once again.  I tried to be civil at all times, but I wanted no friendship.  Ever.  

The last email I got from him many months ago, he expressed his frustration with me that what had happened was years ago.  I should forgive and forget.

Sorry, I cannot.  Besides, we have both moved on in very different directions.  He ought to have accepted that years ago.  

Rob McDonald and Denver buddies

Having tired of the Hide & Seek bar in Colorado Springs after about 6 months or so, I started driving to Denver.  Those several bars would come and go in popularity over the years.  Sadly, I no longer remember the names of some of them.  Charlie's was the country bar that used to be much farther toward the old Stapleton Airport on Colfax before they moved much closer to the downtown area.  The Triangle was the leather bar with a notorious basement.  I was told that if you showed up at the door wearing a Polo shirt, you would not be admitted.  I never went there until the early 2000's.      

Tracks and The Foxhole were two of the longer lived.  The Foxhole was especially popular on Sunday afternoons and evenings.  Tracks was huge on Friday and Saturday evenings for dancing.  They played some of the best, new dance music from the 1980's.     

It was at The Foxhole that I began to notice an actual small circle of friends who would link arms and chat.  They seemed a tight-knit group that enjoyed one another's company.  I was envious of their apparent camaraderie.  Somehow, some way, at some point, I began to be part of the group that primarily consisted of Mark Martinez, Ramsey Hammond, and Rob McDonald.  There were others who were a part of the circle who came and went over the years.  All of them tended to be several years younger than I, but they welcomed me nonetheless.

Later in the decade and into the 1990's, Mark would hold a pre-Thanksgiving potluck feast every weekend before Thanksgiving.  They would find a venue, set up folding tables and chairs, and invited dozens of friends and acquaintances.  Everyone would bring something while Mark and a couple of buddies would provide the turkeys.  I distinctly remember attending at least three of these feasts.  One was in the foyer and meeting room of an apartment building on 10th Street and Pennsylvania, not far from Dan and Dick's condo (though they were both gone at that point).  I owned a Sony video camera and taped much of the gathering.  I looked at it a few months ago.  The images brought back so many memories of long-forgotten friends, acquaintances and guys I lusted after over the years.  

Another Thanksgiving gathering featured an incredibly handsome man who sat opposite to me.  We chatted for a long time over dinner.  He told me that he had recently travelled to Europe but had not enjoyed himself because he really did not know much about what he was looking at.  I believe I told him that I could have been invaluable since I knew so much history and art after the courses I taught at Pikes Peak College.  At the dinner the following year, I learned that his parents had gotten him to do some kind of purging ritual because he was HIV positive.  He soon got very sick and died. 

While I was still living in Colorado Springs, Mark was driving back to Denver with a buddy.  It might have been close to the holidays, and a snowstorm had closed Monument Hill, north of Colorado Springs.  He and his boyfriend at the time, Evan Templeton, could not get back to Denver.  He called me and I told them to drive over and stay with me.  I let them have my bed while I slept somewhere else in the house.   

Rob McDonald visited the house a couple of times.  I warned him once not to pet Schnozz for too long a time as she tended to bite when petted too vigorously.  He soon yelled out in pain, "She BIT ME!"

Another time he brought a hunky friend and a boyfriend.  I took them to a few of the regular tourist spots.  Here are the photos.

The Academy Chapel (the boyfriend is in yellow, the friend is wearing the gray T-shirt):
                                                                             

Garden of the Gods:
                                                                               

                                                                                  

                                                                                

                                                                                  

                                                                                      

                                                                               

Canyon
                                                                              

                                                                                   

                                                                                 

                                                                                  

                                                                                      

Yes, I had a thing for Rob's friend, Rick Steen.  I thought he was cute and hunky and a thoroughly nice guy.  But he lived in Texas, still does according to Rob the last time we spoke.  Rob also added, "He's totally bald!"  

Rob McDonald moved to San Diego in the late 1980's.  He loved it there.  We kept in loose touch over the years.  He had briefly date Wilfred "Willie" Benitez, eventually a pilot for United Airlines. 
                                                                           

On a train ride with Mom to San Diego in the 1990's, I called Rob from a restaurant, but he was going out on a date and could not meet up with us.  On another Southern California visit, I wanted to borrow Mom's car and drive down to San Diego and see Rob.  But she was in another of her controlling phases and would not let me use it.  I did get to see Rob one last time when I was at Comic Con in the early 2000's.  Willie and his partner, Steve Miller, drove down from Long Beach where they had a lovely home.  They took Rob and me to dinner.  It was wonderful catching up.

When I was at another Comic Con in 2019, Rob called me in my hotel room in Oceanside.  I had to take the train back and forth to the convention and had no time to meet up with Rob for dinner.  We had been friends on Face Book.  He had travelled a lot in the 2000's.  But some of his posts indicated that he was dealing with physical issues.  Eventually it was clear that he was battling cancer.  I thought he was dealing well with it.  His posts were upbeat.  But then a sister indicated in a final post that he had crossed over.

He would be the second person I knew well who was born and raised in Oklahoma and who died of cancer.

Fortunately, I was able to send Rob those pictures we took in Colorado Springs so many years before.  We emailed one another just often enough not to lose touch.  He told me over the phone in that motel room that he was single, not cut out to be married (though he had a roommate), and he had grown "old and fat".  He laughed at that remark.  After I moved to Indio, CA, Rob mentioned that he and friends would head out to Palm Springs each year.  He would try to visit when he got the chance.  He was never able to.     

I would later chat with an extremely handsome and hunky man in his 30's who knew Rob and would often head out to Palm Springs with Rob and his entourage.  That was nice to share memories with someone who knew Rob from his San Diego days.

Willie had some life crisis or other after he had a medical retirement from United.  He eventually broke up with Steve, his partner of many years (Rob told me Steve did not want people to know).  They sold the house in Long Beach.  Willie also cut Rob off from his life.  I called Willie one afternoon from outside a dress shop on El Paseo as Ann and Aunt Jean were shopping.  We chatted very briefly before the cellphone connection broke off.  I tried calling Willie back, but he did not answer. Rob later told me that, without informing me, Willie had cut me out of his life, too.  So, the cellphone connection had not dropped, but Willie had likely hung up when he realized it was me calling.              

Ann's visit 1985

Living on Cimarron Hills in Colorado Springs gave me a spectacular view.  I could see the Spanish Peaks on the Colorado-New Mexico border.  Also, if I had to pick up someone from the Colorado Springs Airport, I could see their aircraft on its landing approach from my house.  I would wait until I saw their airliner nearing touchdown, and only then pull out of the garage to pick them up after they got their luggage from baggage claim.  Ann only spent a couple of days, and I only have the following three photographs.
                                                                         

                                                                                  

                                                                                 

First Boston Visit 1985

Tim McConnell invited me to stay with him and visit a few of the sites in Boston and at the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, MA.  We went to the Kennedy Library.  (This trip was another of those that I was able to make because of those inexpensive passes from Western Airlines who served Colorado Springs from Salt Lake City, their major hub.  To visit any cities back East, I would have to fly west to SLC from Colorado Springs and then east to NYC.  I would then take New York Air to Boston.  Problem was that New York Air flew out of LaGuardia and Western Airlines flew into JFK.  I had to rely on a cab or bus to get back and forth between the two airports.  I remember having to spend an uncomfortable night sleeping in JFK for a morning flight back to SLC.)  Tim lived in Rhode Island, working for Anderson Windows.  He was using a lobster trap as a coffee table.  He laughed when I said that I did not know lobsters could be found that far inland. 
                                                                            

                                                                               

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

                                                                                  

                                                                                 

                                                                                

Basketball Hall of Fame
                                                                                    

                                                                                  

Second Boston Visit 1985

Chris Keener and I remained friends long after he graduated from the Academy in 1980.  He was stationed outside of Boston and invited me to visit.  He was dating his future wife, Elaine, while he lived in the BOQ.  When I visited, he put the mattress on the floor to sleep and I got the box springs, much as I had years before when I visited David Zito at George AFB.

We visited Revolutionary War sites in Lexington and Concord, as well as Walden Pond.  Elaine and I have remained friends on FB.  I believe that the reason Chris is no longer friendly is that he supported Trump in 2016.  I was adamantly opposed to that monster.  As with many of that man's supporters, if you attack him, they take it as a personal attack upon them.  Regardless, a few months ago, Elaine asked for the copy of that photo of Chris and Elaine hugging near Walden Pond.  I was glad to send her all of the photos of them that I took on that visit. 

Elaine insists that the visit was earlier than 1985, possibly 1982.  That may be possible.  If true, then the visit with Tim McConnell would have also been in 1982.  I have no way to confirm either year at this point.  

Lexington
                                                                             

                                                                               

                                                                                 

 
Concord Bridge                                                                                

Walden Pond
                                                                                

                                                                                  

                                                                                  

                                                                           

                                                                              

USS Constitution
                                                                                   

                                                                                

 
U.S. destroyer                                                                              

Mom and Washington DC, circa 1985

Again, using Western passes, Mom and I visited DC and Northern Virginia.
                                                                           

                                                                                   

                                                                                   

                                                                                   

                                                                               

                                                                                           

                                                                                   

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

                                                                               

                                                                                

                                                                               

Me in Southern California, circa 1985

Ann and her husband Jim, both working for Western Airlines and then Delta after the merger, bought a house with a pool in Manhattan Beach when they both worked at LAX.  I was never much for either of Ann's husbands, Jim even less so than Mark.  Jim drank and smoked, was loud and boisterous, and we never quite got along.  During one of my visits to that house, Jim's parents were also staying with them.  They were the worst kinds of smokers in that they would sit right next to you and puff away profusely, totally oblivious to the fact that you were choking on the fumes.  They both may have been hard of hearing, and so they talked--incessantly and loudly--again totally unaware of their negative effect upon me.  When Mike Mebs finally picked me up for a drive to Tucson that we were going to take, I could not get out of that house quickly enough.  I remember muttering under my breath when he wanted to linger and chat with everyone, "Get me out of here!"         
                                                                               

                                                                              

                                                                             

                                                                                    

                                                                                     

                                                                                     

                                                                             

                                                                                     

                                                                                    

Somehow or other, Jim and Ann decided to relocate to Maryland, not far from where his parents lived.  Mom now felt abandoned by both of her offspring.  She always felt that Jim was responsible for Ann drinking too much and being exposed to cigarette smoke after Mom herself had quit in the 1970's.  But Mom was never going to leave her apartment #1010, the one with a spectacular view from Harbor Towers, in San Pedro if she could help it.
   
But after two open heart surgeries, Mom began to mentally fail in 2002.  Ann and Aunt Jean moved her to an assisted living apartment a couple of miles from Harbor Towers.  But it was too late.  When I visited her there, I found her by the elevator.  When I asked what she was doing sitting there, she feebly explained, "I forgot my room number.  I don't know where I am." 

Ann and Aunt Jean had been clearing out her apartment for a couple of days.  I had to help, and little things that she had brought with her from the house in South Gate to San Pedro got tossed.  Ann had sold Mom's Chevy and piano and had given away her TV.  I was forced to go through her many loose photographs.  In previous years, I had tried to organize her collection that went way, way back in time to White Cloud when she was an infant in the 1920's.  Several thick photo albums got hauled to the apartment in the assisted living mid-rise building.  After Mom died, Ann inherited the several photo albums.   

Mom always took photos of everything.  Pigeon nests on her balcony.  Friends at the DAR or Republican Women's Group or on a golf course.  And she always got duplicate and triplicate prints made, to give away to those in the photographs or to mail to one of us kids if she thought we might be interested in the subjects.  Here I was again, sorting through piles and piles of loose photos.  I had to make a quick decision, or I would be there all night.  If I did not recognize anyone in the picture, I tossed it and any duplicates.  If the shot was unimportant or unrecognizable, I would toss it and any copies.

During so many previous visits to apartment #1010, I used to look around at all of her possessions that reflected a long life, and I shuddered at how tough it would be to clear out the apartment after she died.  She had so much that nobody else would really covet.  I did get the only painting she ever did of Newport Harbor and Grandpa Sanchez's sailboat.  Ann got the pastel of the Magnolia, created by a woman artist whom mom told me died of cancer.  (When Ann moved back to Southern California in 2007, she tossed the Magnolia pastel that Mom so cherished.  And Ann now has that sailboat painting on her wall.)   

Her apartment building in San Pedro, Harbor Towers, was strictly for seniors for almost all of the time she lived there.  To see or hear ambulances come and go over the years was nothing new.  She was friends with a Charlie Sanchez across the hall for a few years until he died.  Mom used to complain about the cranky woman many of them called "the cat lady" because she fed strays in the parking lot.  Pictures on the peg board on the first floor, opposite the elevator, of past staff members were not always of the living.  Fortunately, Mom did not die in her apartment.  But Ann finally flew her back to a rest home in Maryland when Ann had to return to work for Delta Airlines after a too-long leave of absence in California.  Mom breathed her last in a hospital in Maryland with Ann in the room.  The congestive heart failure had finally taken her.

Rheumatic fever as a teenager initially damaged her heart, requiring those two open heart surgeries later in life.  She had been advised not to have any children, let alone two.  Each of her three siblings had had but a single son.  She produced the only son and daughter.       

I think her proudest moment after producing us two kids was the time she had the hole-in-one at Rio Hondo golf course when she was 77 years old.  She was just several days shy of her 81st birthday on July 4th when she died in 2002.    

Hawaii with Mom 1985, 1986

Those Western Airlines passes came in handy those two Christmas breaks.  Kaman always closed down the plant site on Garden of the Gods Road from Christmas Day through New Year's Day.  Sometimes, each employee might have to take one vacation day during that break, but it was worth not having to even think about working for over a week.  Even on Christmas Eve, if it were a normal workday, a team might go out to lunch together and not be required to return.  I remember at least one occasion where I turned the '73 Camero left out of the Kaman parking lot, feeling quite joyous at not having to return until after New Year's Day.

So, for those two years, I flew to Southern California for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and Mom and I took off from LAX in a Western Airlines DC-10 Spaceship for Honolulu.  In 1985, we were able to engage a motel room and a rental car.  In 1986, we got the rental car but had to rely on Dan Stratford's kindness to have a place to stay.  No hotel or motel had a room available.

In 1985, we had breakfast at a McDonald's and took off East and circled that half of Oahu, ending up at Waimea before turning South toward Honolulu.                                                 

In the Western employee lounge before the flight                                                                                       

                                                                                 

   In our hotel room                                                                                       

                                                                                     

Hanauma Bay                                                                             

                                                                                   

                                                                               

                                                                                  

                                                                                       

                                                                                 

We stopped at a Matsumoto's Shaved Ice in Waimea.  Mom also bought me a T-shirt.  When I opened the rental car door, a $5 dollar bill was staring up at me.  We also parked at the beach.  It was early, but surfers were already on the water.  A car pulled up next to the rental.  An incredibly gorgeous young man in his late 20's got out and proceeded to get entirely naked.  Mom did not see anything because she was already on the beach and watching the crashing waves.  If I had a telephoto lens, I might have taken a picture of him before he donned his wetsuit.  He had one of those muscular and tanned bodies that was perfect without going overboard.  (You can barely see him paddling out in the first photo.)
                                                                     

                                                                               

                                                                              

Overlook second day (Mom had a way to embarrass us by dragging in some total stranger to take our picture)
                                                                               

Arizona Memorial
                                                                                

                                                                                   

                                                                           

VA Cemtery
                                                                         

Lobby of the Royal Hawaiian
                                                                               

 Christmas week 1986
                                                                             

On one of these visits, we ate at Hamburger Mary's in Honolulu.  That might have been the trip where Mom further embarrassed me as we hunted for some place to have lunch.  She approached total strangers who were obviously not locals and asked, "Do you know where a restaurant is?  My son is starving."  They shrugged their shoulders, knowing no more than we did about where we all were as I tried to hide.                               

David Zito and girlfriend in Denver  

David was living in Denver temporarily while undergoing training of some sort.  I was on my way to Tracks but stopped by for a brief visit.  (He might have been training to become a physical therapist.)  
                                                                                              

                                                                                    

                                                                                      

L.A. County Fair and 13222 Foxley Drive in Whittier, 1987
             
During the same visit to So Cal where we saw Grandpa Sanchez for the last time, we also accompanied Lorri to the L.A. Country Fair and visited the house on Foxley Drive, the first time in many years.  We were in luck because nobody was living there, but someone was apparently fixing it up to sell.    
                                                                          

                                                                               

  13222 Foxley
                                                                           

                                                                                  

                                                                                  

                                                                                 

                                                                                

The patio cover was gone.  The sandbox was gone.  The paver steps were gone.  The tree in the backyard was gone.  But that back fence seemed to be the same one from the 1950's.

The Hofeldt's house next door (that was the front porch where we kids were standing when the running "ghost" approached us but then veered off)
                                                                              

At this point I had already completed my autobiography Separate Ways and sent it off to publishers, one after another, only to get rejections, one after another.  In 1987, I would start and finish Salvage Diaries, detailed accounts of my almost-daily life, my friendships and my continuing search for a lover/partner/friend.  The following was a passage in which Dad, Ann and I were headed to see Grandpa Sanchez at the rest home in Yucaipa for the last time.  I had given Ann a copy of Separate Ways to read.  When I asked for her opinion, she was brutal.
                                                                               

                                                                              

I thought that my paragraph regarding the old folks in the rest home was rather clever as I look back at what I wrote so long ago.
                                                                             

I found the passages where Jon O'Neal interjected himself and started dating a guy I wanted to date.  What I discovered was that he had done much the same with another guy I had met.  And, I had become friends with a handsome, hunky, straight, blond cadet who would visit me periodically.  Eventually, Jon swooped in and co-opted the cadet's attention and free time.  I found that I had had plenty of reasons to terminate my friendship with him.  He could not be trusted to put a friend's interests above his own.

Reading large sections of Salvage Diaries (1987) today is saddening and dreary.  While the writing is crisp and methodical, the subjects are discouraging.  Grandpa Sanchez would die.  Dick Tuttle would die.  George Gordy was marching toward death.  I provided the first names of men to whom I was incredibly attracted yet who, for one reason or another, were not attracted in return.  Many were men I no longer remember, not just their last names but reading their first names brings no faces to mind.  I discuss bars that the Denver gay crowds flocked to for months, even years, that are long gone and forgotten.  Had I not catalogued them, I would not have remembered the Southtown Lumber Company, Club Tower, The Uptown, The Metro, BJ's Carousel, The Grove, The Compound, and more.  Though I have not forgotten Tracks, The Foxhole, The Triangle, Charlie's or Garbo's, they are also long gone.

Events, people and places that were so important to me then had faded from memory until reading about them again revived at least some of that time and those memories.

I wrote about Category Six Books on 10th Street, when a volunteer named John who worked there (who would later die of AIDS) handed me the first four volumes of Tales of the City, explaining that I would be doing myself a favor to buy and read them, even if I were initially doubtful.

"Choose the least important day of your life and it will be important enough," advises the deceased mother in Our Town to her recently deceased daughter-in-law after the younger woman has been laid to rest in the town cemetery.  However, as I read the details of these many days of my past life in 1987-8, I really have little desire to relive most of those days of discouraging searching and not finding.  But I do wish for a few more hours with those whom I have lost over the years.   Those diary entries have allowed some of them to live again, even if just out of reach.     

Mike Hajek, 1986-8

I remember the drive to Denver the night I met Mike.  The new-age station I was listening to played One Wish by Hiroshima.  I told myself that my one wish was to meet someone who was interested.  Mike was.  He drove his car behind mine on the return to Colorado Springs.  At a gas station in Denver, he accidentally locked his keys in his car.   I did have a metal coat hanger in my trunk, so we were able to unlock the door and continue on our way.  (He was so embarrassed.)

We quickly became more friends than lovers because we found much that we had in common and seemed to enjoy one another's company.  As the many months passed, I realized that Mike was too much of a "the glass is almost entirely empty" kind of guy.  His negativity became too much.  I would lose my job at Kaman, yet he was the one who was incredibly negative about his own employment situation that was still going well.  He could do something incredibly bizarre at inopportune moments.  One time, we were invited to one of Mark Martinez's Thanksgiving feasts.  We got to the door and were about to enter when Mike suddenly stopped, refused to go inside, and actually bolted.  It was a chilly night, and I had the dessert in hand that we were asked to bring.  I was not going to leave.  I entered the room, had a great evening, and when it was over, only then looked for him.  I told him, tossing open the car door, "Get in."  I drove him home and dropped him off.

Before we finally broke up after two years, though, he would drive to Colorado Springs most weekends, we would go out to a different restaurant almost every Friday and Saturday night and enjoy one another's company.  After that trip to San Antonio to see Jon O'Neal and having fajitas at a Mexican restaurant, Mike and I would make our own fajitas at least one of those two nights.  Besides, one of our last nights out at a restaurant near the mountains, we had to don badly fitting jackets to conform to the dress code.  The unseemly menu featured rabbit and dolphin.  The restaurant we went to and consistent supported was The Mission Bell in Manitou.  The accommodating and friendly owner knew us on sight and always gave us great service and food.  Until it finally closed, we would also have breakfast at Marie Calendars on Academy Blvd. 

Here are photos from our drive up Pike's Peak.  We could not reach the top because the final stretch of road before reaching the summit was closed due to snow.
                                                                               

                                                                             

                                                                                      

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

                                                                                    

                                                                                 

Air Force Academy
                                                                         

                                                                             

                                                                               

                                                                             

                                                                                        

                                                                                   

Mountain Drives
                                                                                   

                                                                                 

                                                                                   

                                                                                  

                                                                                

                                                                                

                                                                                 

                                                                                   

                                                                                   

                                                                                 

Central City and Ramsey's railroad
                                                                           

                                                                                

                                                                       

                                                                             

                                                                                       

                                                                             

                                                                           

Ramsey lost his precious railroad to an unscrupulous investor.  Gambling passed and took over several historic mountain towns like Central City.  I wrote about CC in Autumn Saga.

New York City
          
A business conference took Mike to NYC.  I met him at LaGuardia though his flight was late.  I had arrived earlier in the day on another Western flight from SLC.  We stayed at the Roosevelt, that had certainly seen better days.  I was able to get us tickets to The Fantasticks before it closed.  I was cruised by the mute during the play.  As we were walking along the hallway to leave, the actor Steve Buscemi was waiting there for a member of the cast.  We recognized him from the recent movie Parting Glances.  In Greenwich Village, we saw Garrison Keillor, both of us having read Lake Wobegon.  
                                                                                   

                                                                                 

                                                                                    

Mike and I remained friends after the breakup.  He even drove to the Springs one Christmas holiday when I was sick with a cold or flu.  But after a couple of days, he grew restless and bored.  I sent him back to Denver because all I could do was try and rest and recover.  I was not much company during that Christmas break.   

1988 Honda Civics

My Camero lease was up.  Mike wanted a new car.  We ended up buying Honda Civics.
                                                                               

                                                                             

                                                                           

                                                                            

                                                                          

                                                                    
1988 

The top of Harbor Towers
                                                                           

Grandma Breeze's 85th birthday and family reunion 1988, White Cloud, KS

Cousin Doug, Uncle Lloyd, Aunt Jean and, separately, Mom flew in from CA.  I flew in from CO.  Ann and Jim Brown flew in from MD.  Second cousin Phil and his daughter flew in from Ohio.  Cousin Jim, his wife Ruth, battling cancer, and their daughter Tammy drove up from Topeka.  Uncle Robert, Uncle Hap and Aunt Doris, and Grandma Breeze still lived in White Cloud.  The celebration would be in the Legion Hall on Main Street. 

We stayed in either Doris and Hap's house high above the river or in Grandma Breeze's house on Main Street.  Nobody wanted to stay in Uncle Robert's ramshackle Nuzum house up from Main Street.  We discussed having another reunion in five years when Grandma Breeze turned 90, but she firmly declined the idea.  It was too much work and too much trouble.  What none of us could know was that she would die in 1989, less than a year later.  She got up from her bed to use the bathroom late at night and immediately collapsed of a heart attack. 

Robert was watching TV in the living room but could not save her.  (He would die in 2014 in one of the former "Indian homes" up the hill, to the West of town.  The speculation was that he had gotten up in the middle of night and immediately collapsed of a heart attack.  His body was found beside his bed a day or two after he had died, having lived alone so that no one knew right away that he was dead.  The Nuzum home had deteriorated so badly. it was unlivable.  He also later bought Grandma Breeze's house on Main Street after she died--Great Grandma Nuzum had owned it before she died; but it, too, became unlivable after a while, hence Robert renting one of the houses that were originally built for the local Native American population still living in the area.)   

Except for Grandma Breeze, we would all be back in White Cloud in 1995 for the 50th wedding anniversaries of Doris & Hap and Lloyd & Jean in the same Legion Hall.  The War was just over, and they'd gotten married in 1945, as had so many other WWII Veterans.  

                                                                                   

Cousin Jim, his daughter Tammy, Me, Grandma Breeze, Ann, Cousin Doug

Uncle Robert found a mother dog and her pups in an abandoned barn.  He brought them to his house to care for them, realizing that they would not make it if left alone.  The second photo is of Cousin Doug with the loveable pups.  Only later would Uncle Robert tell me over the phone that someone would poison several of the pups, some of whom he had hoped someone might adopt at the next flea market.  I had given him money for dog food for the pups.                                                                                 

                                                                             

In rereading the extensive passages in Salvage Diaries regarding this reunion, I learned that Robert's favorite dog Pardner had been shot, hence his being buried on Robert's hill above White Cloud several years before.  Brownie, also buried on the same hill, had been poisoned.  A lot of cruelty existed in such a small, sleepy town as White Cloud.   

The view of the town from Robert's hill to the south
                                                                                     

Uncle Robert and Aunt Jean on the dirt road to Robert's hill
                                                                            

Here are pictures above the town on the north hill.
                                                                      

                                                                                        

Mom and Uncle Robert in front of their old school.  Robert explained how cold it was when you had to leave the warm building in winter to use the boys out house to pee.  (There was one for the girls, too.) 
                                                                         

We visited the Doniphan County Seat of Troy while we were there.  You would be hard pressed to find any car brand other than a Ford, Crysler or Chevy around the old courthouse in 1988.  We stopped in a drug store for something to drink and to take a few pictures.
                                                                             

                                                                                   

Aunt Jean, Uncle Lloyd, Mom, Cousin Doug, Me, Uncle Robert.
                                                                         

We were told by Robert that Abe Lincoln had given a speech in Troy.  While there, he had stayed in this house near the town square.  I have not confirmed if this was true.
                                                                       

About to depart Troy.
                                                                          

Outside the Legion Hall
                                                                       

Aunt Jean Green is photographing Grandma Breeze, Uncle Robert Breeze, Aunt Doris Rowe, Mom, Cousin Doug Green.  I look at a photo of six relatives and realize that none of them is now alive.
                                                                          

Inside the Legion Hall
                                                                                 

In Grandma Breeze's living room with Uncle Hap
                                                                           

                        
In and around town
                                                                           

Aunt Doris, Cousin Doug, Aunt Jean, Uncle Lloyd, Mom, Me, Uncle Robert

                                                                         

The woman on the far right is a school chum from the 1920's and 1930's.

In Grandma Breeze's kitchen the final morning                                                                     

Ann, husband Jim, Me
                        
Ready to depart for the KC airport
                                                                               

                           
We survivors came together in White Cloud for Mom's funeral in 2002.  Doug died in March of 2003, but he would be buried in a VA cemetery in California.  Minus Doug and Mom, we would return in May of 2003, after the death by heart attack of Aunt Doris.  Uncle Hap, her husband, having had his plug pulled by Aunt Doris who then went to a friend's house near the hospital only to be stricken, would die two days after we mourners arrived.  The memorial, funeral and burial services would be for the two of them, together.  Uncle Lloyd would die a few years later, to be buried in the same VA cemetery as his son, Doug.  Aunt Jean, Cousin Jim, his daughter Tammy & her husband, and Ann and I would be in White Cloud to bury Uncle Robert in 2014.  In 2017, Cousin Jim, Ann and I, along with Doug's Army son Michael, who looks so much like his father, would bury Aunt Jean in the VA cemetery where Lloyd and Doug are.  Ann's former husband Jim died and is buried in Maryland.  Only Ann, Cousin Jim and I remain of the Nuzum, Rowe, Breeze, Sanchez clan who are tied to memories of White Cloud.  (Jim intends to be buried in Topeka, beside his first wife, Ruth.)  Ann and I have not made plans.

I wrote the final book in the RAoF series, partly about the funeral of Doris and Hap and that return to White Cloud in 2002.  What has happened to the Olive Branch cemetery since the death of Uncle Robert who mowed the lawns and cared for the graves is unknown.  Some of the town's folk have had issues with drugs, as had so much of small-town America.  When Robert's son Ray showed up at his funeral in 2014, it seemed to most of us that he was there merely to claim all of the properties and items of valuable that Robert had accumulated over the years and willed to his son.  Ray, named for Grandpa Ray Breeze, was entirely uninterested in meeting his Cousins Jim, Ann and me.  We soon felt the same about him.  He was in a wheelchair even then and did not look particularly healthy, so I doubt if he is still on this Earth.  (Ann confirmed for me that he had died a few years ago.)                          

Aunt Jean and Uncle Lloyd visiting Mom in San Pedro, 1988
                                                                           

Mom's Chevy:                                                                                  

                                                                                   

                                                                              

                                                                            

Student Teaching 1988-9

My job at Kaman ended on March 4, 1988.  I was brought back on April 12, but the Radiation Monitoring Equipment division had been sold to a man from South Carolina who created a new company, ASI.  He operated ASI out of the Kaman facility for a brief time until they moved into a temporary building a few miles away.  I was hired, but the owner did intend the following year to move his new company to his native South Carlonia.  I was not going to move there.

I realized that a full-time job was hard to come by in Colorado Springs in the late 1980's.  My horoscope one morning said I ought to back to school to get my teaching certificate after I visited the UCCS campus to pick up enrollment application paperwork the day before.  I had phoned the private Colorado College about their teacher program, but they charged way too much to attend even for one year ($10K per year).  I then contacted UCCS.  The head of the program, Dr. Jack Sherman, told me that they had already accepted their group of candidates for the 1988-9 school year.  However, he looked at my background and qualifications and allowed me to enroll after the last minute.  

Grandpa had given Dad and his brother a cash inheritance when he died, beyond what he had given to the Catholic Church.  Dad loaned me $5,000.00 (it was a loan and I had to pay back every single dollar), sending me $300 per month.  I continued to teach evenings for Pike's Peak College at Fort Carson.  When possible, I also worked part time for ASI until they prepared to move to South Carolina in 1989. I was also given some money from my GI Bill ($376.00 per month).  If I tightened my belt, I might be able to graduate and get a secondary teaching job at the end of the one-year program in 1989.

The summer of 1988, the certification program got to commandeer Pioneer Elementary School and another elementary school.  We were grouped based on our teaching area.  I was in English.   Here are my group members and the students we taught.
                                                                       

                                                                                

                                                                                   

                                                                                     

                                                                                   

                                                                                   

                                                                                

                                                                             

Here I am, surrounded by many kids in my class:
                                                                                       

                                                                           

                                                                              

                                                                              

                                                                               

                                                                            

I was fortunate, financially, that one of the student teacher candidates needed a place to live during the program.  He rented from me, and we set up his waterbed in the basement.  He knew I was gay but did not have a problem with that.  Several weeks into the program, he met a woman, and they started seriously dating.  He eventually spent many nights at her apartment instead of in my basement, but he honorably continued to pay rent.  I was grateful for that.  He ended up keeping his stuff at my place well through 1989.

I soon was faced with one minor crisis.  We were asked to sign a paper that testified we had not been involved in something untoward with a student or students, words to that effect.  I thought about Bostic and the Academy.  I did not know what to do.  Do I sign or not?  Fortunately, I had been going to a gay bar just opened in Colorado Springs called The Pelican Club.  It was located in the old train station downtown.  This was a huge step up from the Hide & Seek that had become even more dreary than earlier in the decade.             

One night I was in the club when I noticed a familiar woman emerge from the back room.  She did not see me, but I knew immediately that she was the professor who was second in command of the teacher certification program at UCCS.  When faced with the dilemma of this form to sign, I knew I could ask her what to do.  She told me that it was good that I had not talked to the head of the program because he was decidedly homophobic.  She told me that I could sign because the situation at the Academy was not what the form had in mind.  The cadet and I were adults.

My second problem with the program involved the woman who was in charge of the English student teachers.  "Mitch" Bates was older than most of the other professors in the program.  She was not a PhD but only had a Master's Degree.  All of the other prospective student teachers of English were women.  None of them had taught before, especially not at the college level as I had for nine years at that point.  None of the other six had a Master's Degree as I did.

Whether it was that I had years of experience teaching, or I was an older man, or I was allowed into the program after the cut off, or my confidence came across as arrogance to her, or that she surmised that I felt myself better than the program, I have no idea.  She didn't like me.  And, until the head of the program told me that Mitch Bates had serious reservations about my being in the program, I had no idea she had any problems with me.  I thought everything was fine between us.  However, she was undermining me often without my knowledge.  

(In reading passages of Salvage Diaries, I realize that she had had a student the previous year who did not believe he could be taught anything new by this program.  Before she even met me, she already believed that I would likewise be a troublesome student.  Any mistake I made, or misunderstanding I experienced, was seen by her as a sign of my contempt for the program, though I had none whatsoever)  

When I started the actual teacher observations, I had finished Salvage Diaries and begun Serial Letters.  Mitch wanted us to write to her about whatever we were experiencing in the program.  I also wrote to friends, family and myself when I needed to let off steam during the year of student teaching.  Attending college full time while working two part-time jobs was exhausting.  In my letters to Mitch, I would often use my daily horoscope as an introduction.  I did come across the following letter to her, and this must have been after I had learned that she was continuously criticizing me to the head of the program.  (I am surprised that my remarks to her were so boldly expressed.)
                                                                                                     

                                                                                 

Mitch and I finally worked through our issues in a rather odd way.  After the Fall semester when I had to choose three teachers in three different schools to work with for three weeks each, Mitch had to move all of her books from her office on Campus.  All seven of us volunteered to load up her Cadallic's massive trunk on a cold, slightly snowy afternoon.  Mitch was incredibly grateful that we would do that for her, especially me, I suspect.  I had always liked her, and now she returned those feelings.  After the first of the year, when I had to choose one instructor to student teach with in the Spring, Mitch was on my side.  She wisely told me to work with Kay Esmiol at Eagleview Middle School.  The head of the TEP (Teacher Education Program) at UCCS personally told me that whatever I had done to turn Mitch into an advocate rather than a foe had worked wonders.  She was now an advocate.

What had happened with Rich and Shirley at Kaman had been duplicated with Mitch.  Initially, they had not liked me much.  But, eventually, they came around--we three became good friends.  Without my being aware, I guess I must have come across badly when we first met.  And that poor first impression took some time and effort to undo.  The same happened with Mitch Bates.  

I had enjoyed my respective three weeks at Widefield Middle School and Doherty High School.  Though I admired the two teachers I worked with at each school, Kay Esmiol was far better for me for the entire Spring. 

Student Teaching, Eagleview Middle School, Spring 1988  

I have been reading Serial Letters, my written chronical, sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, of the year of student teaching from our classes at UCCS, but most especially of my time observing the three teachers at Widefield High, Doherty High, and Eagleview Middle School, as well as full student teaching at Eagleview in the Spring.  Mitch wanted us to keep her informed of what we were going through daily in the Fall and weekly in the Spring.  I also wrote letters to friends and family members during that experience, as well as an occasional letter to myself.  Here are a couple of letters, to give you a taste of what it was like.  (These are from my Student Teaching in the Spring at Eagleview.)     
                                                                           

                                                                               

                                                                                

I wish in some ways that I could say that the entire Teacher Education Program was greatly beneficial for me in the long run.  That I got a great middle school or high school job when the program ended.  I did not.  I interviewed with three schools.  The most promising was Air Academy High School.  I would have been teaching some of the same students that I student taught at Eagleview, the Middle School that fed Air Academy High.  Unfortunately, while the head of the English Department was a man, all of the other teachers were women.  He seemed to have his own fiefdom there.  I also believe that he had never been in the military.  I firmly believe that he saw me as unwanted professional competition.  I was not hired.  I did not get the other two jobs either.  All of the time and expense, the many hours of effort in and out of classrooms did not result in a job.  I was able to use some of what I learned in my classes at Fort Carson, but only for a couple more years.  That was about it. 

I was able to refinance my house to lower my expenses.  

Besides, Dino was walking into that building in downtown Denver when Don Nolan was walking out.  I interviewed for the technical writing contract assignment in the Denver Tech Center for Capitol Federal Savings and got it.  I had a lengthy drive each day along I-25 in the Spring of 1990.  But I was making more each hour than I ever had at Kaman.  I believe the rate was $21.00.       

Problem was, this was only the start of a direction that would eventually, and permanently, take me away from Colorado Springs and my home there.  But I did not know that when I started the job at the Tech Center in March of 1990.

Epilogue to Salvage Diaries, End of Sumer 1988

I had been writing that manuscript since 1987, at least a year, maybe longer.  Significant changes in my life, losses of jobs and friendships, potential boyfriends and breakups, more deaths among family and friends, reunions, both mundane and magnificent, occurred.  The book would of course be too long and ultimately be rejected by publishers.  Like life itself, it meandered.  I wrote almost daily, not knowing what was going to happen or how it would end.  We were getting sick and dying of AIDS.  Testing was only just beginning.  Relatives were dying of old age.    

Mistakenly, I did not use the last names of many of those mentioned in the manuscript because a couple of them had objected; but now, after so many years have passed, I no longer remember those last names:  Rob M. was Rob McDonald, Mark M. was Mark Martinez, Mike M. was Mike Mebs. Mike H. was Mike Hajek, Glenn Hajek was his brother, Evan was Evan Templeton, Mike N. was Mike Nelson, Dick Tuttle and Dan Stratford are known, Ramsey Hammond as well, Ken W. was Ken Ward, Randy B. was Randy Billman, Jon was Jon O'Neal.  I only know that Mark Martinez is still alive.  The rest I have no idea, or you have read elsewhere that Rob, Dick and Dan, Grandpa Sanchez, Uncle Robert and Grandma Breeze are dead.  Many of those in the manuscript, both gay and straight, I don't even remember their faces, what they looked like.  Those many who turned my head at least once, often many times as I saw them from afar or up close, are lost to me now.

The following is the Epilogue, to give you a notion of what that year was like and how I lived it and, often, what I wrote about and how I wrote back then.
                                                                     

                                                                                   

                                                                              

                                                                                 

                                                                                  

                                                                                   

     
Ports O' Call Village Maritime Museum 1989

                     

The year 1989 was not a good one, as I remember it and as I read about it in Serial Letters.  While I graduated from TEP, I did not get a high school or middle school teaching job.  That year Grandma Breeze died on April 30th.  Dick Tuttle died on July 9th.  George Gordy died on April 1st.  I really do not know how I survived financially after the GI Bill checks stopped and school was over.  (I had had to take two additional classes at UCCS that summer to finally get my certification from UCCS.)  ASI had moved to South Carolina.  They had not even asked me to come in, to help them pack up and load the trucks for the move, to earn a few dollars that Spring.  They had hired a woman to take my job instead.  (She must have been willing to move to South Carolina.)

At some point, I did visit Mom in So Cal.  The ship models of the Titanic and Lusitania are long gone the last time I visited the museum several years ago.  The current staff had no idea they had even been there.
                                                                 

                                                                                

                                                                              

                                                                             

White Cloud Flea Market 1989

Several years before, the town hosted a Flea Market and. being so popular, that became an annual event.  The photograph of the four siblings was the last I remember seeing.  They are at the White Cloud Olive Branch cemetery, featured in the final volume in the Rainbow Arc of Fire series.
                                                                        

The four Breeze siblings.  From left to right, Aunt Jean, Aunt Doris, Uncle Robert, Mom.

On the back of the following professional photograph, perhaps Aunt Jean had written:  "Dec 25, 1944 All four in Calif."  I would be surprised if a studio would be open on Christmas day to take this picture.  Stamped on the back is the following:  "SOUTHLAND STUDIOS 15 East Colorado Street Pasadena 1. California Sycamore 2.9386".  The last is the phone number.
                                                                         

Mom (the oldest, born in 1921), Aunt Jean (1923), Aunt Doris (1925), Uncle Robert (1927).

This was, of course, before Robert went into the Army, and all of them got married after the war and each had a boy and Mom also had Ann.  Mom lived in Pasadena at the time the photo was taken.  They might have all gathered at her place to celebrate the holiday, one last time together.  Aunt Jean, an Army nurse, would be stationed at an Army hospital in Palm Springs where she would meet Uncle Lloyd, rehabbing from a wound received in the Pacific while he was with an Army Airborne unit.  

Mom by the Missouri River                                                                            

 
Main Street toward the river                                                                         

 
Grandma Breeze's old restaurant.  She lived above.  I wrote a bit about it in Olive Branch.
                                                                                

Mom's visit to Colorado Springs, 1989

While I was still seeing Mike Hajek in 1988, and my lease of the 1984 Camero was up, we went to the Honda dealership in Colorado Springs and bought Civics.  He got blue.  I got maroon.                                                                                

                                                                                      

                                                                                 

Salvage Diaries 1987-1988 & Serial Letters 1988-1989 

I spent several weeks this summer of 2023 reading these two manuscripts from over 30 years ago.  The extensive details of my life then that I committed to paper were sometimes astounding.  I did return to school to get a teaching certificate a few months after I was laid off from Kaman.  That program cost me a tidy sum, but I never did get a secondary teaching job.  And it did not even help me to get a full-time community college teaching job.

While reading, I was also fascinated to compare my being laid off from IBM this summer on June 30, 2023, to being laid off by Kaman in March of 1988, while also remembering what it was like when I was forced to resign from the Air Force in 1979 and being likewise unemployed then for an extended period.

As before, I had applied for many different jobs, at UCCS, at Kaman, at ASI, at Pike's Peak Community College, at Cypress Community College in California.  Nothing came through.  I had to take a computer class to actually get my teaching certificate that summer of 1989.  I also had to take a History of the English Language course, at the same time that summer.

My most pressing problem was money.  The part time ASI job had ended months before.  The VA was paying me far less that summer because I was no longer a full-time student.  I was still teaching any community college courses I could get at Fort Carson.  But the main campus changed the way they were paying part-time instructors, so I had to wait longer to get reimbursed than before.  I wrote about clipping coupons and buying bargains at the grocery.  I was getting by on financial fumes that summer and early fall.

I kept expecting that I would end Serial Letters on October 12, 1989, ten years to the day when I left the Air Force Academy and my military career ended.  But the last letter was to Mike Mebs on September 8th.  The letter was no more or less important than any previously written.  The manuscript just...stopped.

What I still do not know was how I survived financially for the remainder of that year, 1989, and through the beginning months of 1990 until I got the job working as a technical writer for Capitol Federal Savings in the Denver Tech Center.  But that job only lasted for 3-4 months until a new job started in the Spring of 1991.  I don't know how I managed to survive just teaching for Pike's Peak Community College part time.  By that time in early 1990, I had submitted, and got rejected for, the manuscripts of Separate Ways, my autobiography, Salvage Diaries, Serial Letters, and Seeker in an Era of AIDS.  What I only slowly discovered was that you had to be somebody to get published.  You had to be known in some way for a publisher to take a chance on you.               

But I was also able to confirm within the pages of those two manuscripts that George Gordy died on April 1st of 1988 and was buried in Arlington Cemetery.  My Grandma Breeze died on April 30th that same year.  Of course, she was buried next to her husband in the Olive Branch cemetery, next to her husband.  Dick Tuttle died on July 9th.  I could not afford to attend Grandma Breeze's funeral in White Cloud.  I no longer kept in touch with George to attend his funeral, nor could I have afforded to fly to Washington DC had I been invited.  I did not learn of Dick's death until July 24th when Dan Stratford called me.  (Dan said he had called before, but I was not home; and he did not leave a message on my machine.)  I would have gone had I known.

If my sister thought that Separate Ways, the autobiography, was a downer that nobody was going to read, these two manuscripts were no different, perhaps even worse.  Diaries and Letters were also too long at well over 500 pages each.  All of them were autobiographical.  AIDS was prevalent and people were getting sick and dying.  I finally got tested in 1989.  But being negative did not solve other difficulties in my life.  I looked back as I read those many pages and wondered how I survived...and thrived in some ways.       

Mike and Walt at Mom's apartment, 1990

After Mike and Lida split up, Mike met Walt.  He moved into Walt's trailer in a rural park near Phoenix.  I would help the two of them move to Southern California after Mike graduated from his teacher education program and the University of Arizona just before the Christmas week of 1988.

They first moved into an apartment in South Gate.  We had to take apart the heavy convertible sofa to get it up the stairs to their second-floor rental.  They would soon move to an apartment off of Ocean Blvd. in Long Beach.  This was where Walt would be diagnosed with HIV.  Eventually, they would buy a condo less than a block from Anaheim Blvd.  He would die of AIDS in 1995 before the meds might have saved his life.
                                                                             

                                                                                     

                                                                               

Sadly, Mike would remind me recently that Walt was dyslexic, though undiagnosed for years.  So nobody knew why he was an underachiever for most of his life.  His parents would ride him and criticize him and feel that he would never amount to much.  They would have to financially bail him out constantly.  His self-esteem was almost non-existent.  But when the parents finally learned of the diagnosis so late in Walt's life, they were devastated as to how terribly they had treated him for so long.  Mike sent me this, that he got after Walt had died, regarding Walt's service in the Navy.
                                                                         

Walt's mom would die of cancer only a few years after her son.  His father would live much longer but be afflicted with dementia.  He died a few years ago.

The following is a photo of Mike and me with Walt's two daughters.
                                                                             

Tim from Norfolk, Spring 1990

I was visiting Mike and Walt in Long Beach.  I went out to the Silver Fox bar on Redondo Avenue.  The Brit and the Mine Shaft were two other Long Beach gay bars over the years that I would stop in if I were visiting Mike and Walt.  Sometimes they would accompany me; other times I would go by myself.

Over Christmas week in 1989, at the Silver Fox, I met Tim, a guy who worked as a contractor at the Norfolk Navy Shipyard.  After I got the temporary technical writer job at Capitol Federal Savings in the Tech Center in Denver, Tim and I would chat on the phone in the mornings before my job would start.  (I no longer remember his last name.)   

Tim visited me in Colorado Springs once.  I would visit him in Norfolk, to see Yorktown, Jamestown, and Colonial Williamsburg. (Eastern Airlines had started up service between Atlanta and Denver, with inexpensive fares that Spring of 1990.)  The two of us would decide to visit Disney World.  He did have a friend who lived in Orlando with his mom.  I insisted that we ought to stay in a motel because I was there to see the Disney resorts, not visit friends of his whom I did not know.  We could have dinner with them one night while were there.  Tim insisted that his friends would be insulted if we did not stay with them.  I relented but knew this could become a serious problem.  It would be.

Tim's visit to Colorado Springs, Garden of the Gods
                                                                   

                                                                                 

                                                                            

                                                                              

                                                                            

                                                                                

Broadmoor Hotel
                                                                           

                                                                                

                                                                                    

Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun
                                                                              

                                                                                

                                                                                    

                                                                                

                                                                                 

                                                                                 

Royal Gorge
                                                                               

                                                                                   

                                                                                 

                                                                                  

I did not bring my camera to Norfolk.  The following are photos from the trip to Disney World, actually only Epcot.
                                                                                   

                                                                                             

                                                                                   

                                                                                  

The trip slowly unraveled.  Since Tim used to work at one of the parks a couple of years before, when we were going to enter the movie park, he used his old employee badge to enter the park with actual employees on their way in to work.  When Tim joined his friend and me inside the park, he said he stopped at lost and found to see if a Sure Shot camera got turned in so he could claim it.  He did not own such a camera.  When we were driving around Orlando on toll roads, Tim would pretend to toss coins into the receptors but keep driving without actually paying.  I seriously began to question his honesty.

Every day, we would leave a park earlier than I wanted, to spend time with his friend and his friend's mom, talking about other people I did not know.  The mom would serve big meals late in the evening that screwed up my digestion.  The three of them would chat late into the night while I tried to sleep.  Each morning we started late for the parks because of his coming to bed so late.  One night when he woke me up after he came to bed very late, Tim was clearly drunk and tried to force me to have sex.      

The final day, Tim and his friend wanted to leave the park significantly early.  I finally protested.  Tim callously suggested that I drive back to the park in the rental car by myself after I dropped him and his buddy off at the buddy's house.  Hell, I could have visited Disney World by myself had I known I would be there by myself on our last day.  Everything I had feared was taking place.  He'd rather spend time talking with them than be with me in the parks which was the whole reason I agreed to the trip in the first place. 

When we got to their house, after a couple of hours passed, his friend's mom was going to serve a big Italian dinner.  In the guest room, I told Tim that I could not eat food like that so late in the evening.  I should have told the friend's mom myself, but it was Tim's fault that everything I had told him I did not want to do, we were doing.  I did not spend money on the airfare to get there, and to pay to enter each park each day, only to leave early every single day to spend significant time with people I did not know. 

In the morning, we drove to the airport without speaking.  No surprise there.  After dropping off the rental car, I gave Tim the cash to cover my half of that expense.  When he got on the bus to take us to each of our respective airlines--I was on American, and he was on Delta--Tim sat down and deliberately took up the entire seat so that I could not sit with him.  I had to look elsewhere to sit during the bus ride.  I realized that this was definitely over.  He got off the bus first but did not say goodbye or even look in my direction.  I was fine with that.  I never heard from that Tim again.                  
  

Tim Hatzenbuhler, Summer 1990

I met this Tim at The Foxhole in Denver on a Sunday afternoon.  He was visiting from Rapid City, South Dakota.  We had an early breakfast at an IHOP on Colfax after talking extensively at the bar.  Tim would soon visit me in Colorado Springs, and I would then visit him in South Dakota.  It probably did not work out between us because of the distance and, sexually, we were both tops at the time.  Unlike the Tim in Norfolk, this Tim was a nice guy.  He would eventually move to Phoenix, meet his partner, and move back to Rapid City after a few years.  We became buddies on FB in the last couple of years.  It appears he finally has moved to Oregon.

Cog Railway                                                                              

                                                                                   

                                                                                    

                                                                                  

                                                                                  

                                                                                   

                                                                             

                                                                                

                                                                                

                                                                               

                                                                               

                                                                               

                                                                              

                                                                             

                                                                                  

                                                                               

                                                                               

The Broadmoor Hotel
                                                                              

                                                                               

Cheyene Mountain Zoo
                                                                                   

                                                                                  

                                                                            

                                                                                  

Will Roger's Shrine of the Sun         
                                                                                  

                                                                                      

USAFA                                                                             

                                                                                   

                                                                                   

                                                                                

Garden of the Gods
                                                                           

                                                                                

My South Dakota visit, Summer 1990

Deadwood                                                                         

                                                                                      

Mount Rushmore
                                                                                    

                                                                                           

                                                                                 

                                                                              

                                                                                    

Devil's Tower
                                                                                        

                                                                               

                                                                               

                                                                               

                                                                                    

                                                                                                 

                                                                                          

                                                                                                                                 

South Dakota stream
                                                                                

                                                                                

                                                                                    

                                                                                   

                                                                                 

Tim's second visit to Colorado Springs

We revisited the Academy on a blustery day.
                                                                         

                                                                                      

                                                                             

                                                                           

                                                                          

                                                                             

Thanksgiving Weekend in Maryland, 1990 

Aunt Jean, Mom and I spent that weekend with Ann and her husband Jim in Maryland.  Except for teaching for Pike's Peak Community College at Fort Carson, I really don't recall how I survived financially between the end of the job with Capitol Federal Savings and Loan in late June of 1990 and when I started a new job in the Spring of 1991 in Boulder, CO.    

Aunt Jean, Mom and I visited a lot of sites in DC and Northern Virginia.  I was plagued by Ann's husband Jim's parents once again.  They were loud because they were probably likely beginning to be slightly deaf; and, again, oblivious, they would sit down on either side of me on the living room couch and smoke like chimneys, choking me out.  I would have to get up and sit somewhere else.

As usual, I had to sleep at night on the living room couch.  Jim would come out late at night and turn on the TV because he could not sleep, like his parents oblivious to my presence.  Of course, he would also light up a cigarette.  When I pleaded with him that I needed some sleep, he would become upset.  When I said something to Ann, she sided with her husband and came up with the most ridiculous claim I had heard regarding guest vs host etiquette.  Since I was a guest in their house, I needed to conform to how they lived their lives, she told me.  If Jim wanted to watch TV and smoke late at night when I was trying to sleep on the living room couch, I had to tough it out and not complain.  I believe she had that wrong.            
Their Crownsville neighborhood
                                                                            

                                                                           

Me and Jim's dad
                                                                         

Mount Vernon
                                                                               

                                                                                   

                                                                             

                                                                               

                                                                                

Washington DC Mall
                                                                              

                                                                                

                                                                                  

                                                                              

                                                                                  

                                                                                   

                                                                            

                                                                                 

Baltimore Aquarium
                                                                                

                                                                              

                                                                              

                                                                              

                                                                              

                                                                               

                                                                                 

                                                                                

Baltimore Harbor
                                                                           

                                                                               

                                                                                

                                                                                

                                                                               

                                                                                 

                                                                                       

                                                                                  

                                                                                     

                                                                             

                                                                                 

Friend Ramsey and me in So Cal, 1993

We flew to Southern California to take in the sites.  The Spruce Goose was still under the dome in Long Beach, beside the Queen Mary.

                     .                                                               

                                                                             

                                                                               

                                                                               

                                                                                

Inside the Spruce Goose dome
                                                                               

Travel Town
                                                                  

                                                                                  

At Mom's apartment
                                                                                

Disneyland
                                                                      

                                                                                  

                                                                                   

                                                                             

                                                                                

Ramsey and I at Disney World, 1994

After the disappointing trip with that Tim from Norfolk, I wanted to undo those bad memories with a trip to Florida with a friend.  Our Delta flight was rather bumpy into Orlando, and we both got airsick.  After we checked into our hotel room at Port Orleans, we were too tired to visit a park.  While we tried to sleep, it rained outside in a massive downpour.

Port Orleans Hotel vicinity                                                                            

                                                                                

                                                                              

                                                                               

                                                                               

                                                                                 

                                                                                    

                                                                              

Epcot
                                                 

                                                                                   

                                                                                     

                                                                                   

                                                                                 

                                                                                     

                                                                                 

                                                                                    

                                                                                     

                                                                                     

                                                                               

Disney-MGM Studios
                                                                                 

                                                                                   

                                                                            

                                                                                  

Disney World monorail
                                                                                   

                                                                           

                                                                               

                                                                              

                                                                                

                                                                               

                                                                                

Me at the Palos Verdes Mall
                                                                                

Cabrillo Beach, 1991    
                                                                            

                                                                            

IBM contractor jobs, March 1991 - June 30, 2023

When the Capitol Federal Savings contracting job ended in June of 1991, I really had few other prospects.  I remember a group interview with a contractor firm in the Tech Center for an assignment on some island in the Pacific in the fall of 1990.  (This might have been for Ciber, Inc. for whom I would work several times over the years at IBM.)  I didn't get it.  Except for continuing to teach part-time for Pike's Peak Community College whenever I could get a class in the evening or during the day, I don't recall how I managed--again--to survive financially from June of 1991 until I first got hired to work at IBM at the Boulder Campus in March of 1991. 

IBM at Boulder embarked upon a Joint Application Development project (JAD), to document and improve all of their various product groups on site and elsewhere.  One technical writer would write down in words what each group did as each member was interviewed in a session.  The other writer would watch a diagram being created on a printable white board that showed the steps and the people involved and what they might do to improve the workflow for their team.  An IBMer would run the session.  We two contract tech writers had to remain silent and not contribute.  (I made the mistake of mentioning a solution to one of the groups during a JAD session and was chided for having spoken by my IBM supervisor after the session ended that day.)  In the afternoon after lunch, we writers would return to our offices on the top floor in Building One of the Boulder Campus and organize and type into our computers the JAD documentation that was created during the session.  A special application allowed us to create the flow chart using boxes and connecting lines.

There were three of us JAD teams.   

Immediately after I began the IBM job, I heard about the terrible United Airlines 737 crash south of the Colorado Springs airport on March 3, 1991.  The plane rolled over on approach and 20 passengers and 5 crewmembers were killed in Widefield Park.  I had flown into and out of that airport so many times over the years, usually in 737 aircraft like the one that crashed.  My friend Willie knew the female co-pilot who was killed.

The JAD job was easy enough, and I believe we were paid around $23 per hour, more than I had ever been paid per hour at any previous job.  My JAD partner, I would eventually realize, was padding his hours, working overtime each and every day.  I would always be finished during an 8-hour day and never resorted to overtime.  Being single and without friends in the area, he would work well into the evening and eat dinner at the IBM cafeteria.  At lunch he would fill up two soup bowls over the brim, requiring the placing of napkins under each bowl to catch the overflow--he was going to get every drop of soup he could for his money.  We got on well enough, and I liked him, except when he would declare in the afternoon that he would edit my work after I left for the day.  That was insulting, and I knew he was only doing that to milk every overtime hour out of IBM that he could through our contract company, Ciber, Inc.

My partner was a big man, one whose doctor warned he needed to lose significant weight, or he would die of an early heart attack.  I had gotten the job with the help of Nancy D., with whom I had worked at Cap Fed the previous year.  She got a check for $1K from Ciber for getting me hired at IBM since I stayed on the job for well over the three-month requirement.  I always thought that she was padding her hours at Cap Fed since she stayed late every day after all of the rest of us had already left.  The woman who had been our supervisor at Cap Fed was later hired by Ciber at IBM, and Nancy got another check for getting her a job.

A JAD team that only included me as the sole tech writer was sent to the IBM site in San Jose.  Ciber, Inc. had to buy a first-class ticket for me on United Airlines since the trip was set up at the last minute and an economy ticket was actually more expensive.  I was razzed over that ticket by the IBMers on the trip.  To add insult to injury, when a local Chinese restaurant was recommended for us during one lunch off site, I was the only one who ordered the lemon chicken and came down with food poisoning later that day. 

My first evening in San Jose, my Cousin Doug drove down with a woman co-worker to have dinner with me at our hotel.  The team also drove up to San Francisco on an off day.

The entire JAD project at Boulder lasted just under one year.  Nancy and I would move over to the Federal Systems (FSC) division for a few more months of tech writing work there.  I would later learn that all of the JAD work that we had faithfully done for months got boxed up and stored away.  Whether any of the divisions or groups ever took advantage of what the project documented, I am not at all sure.  In fact, the implication was that almost nobody did apply the results.  I guess old IBM dogs could not be taught new tricks.       

In those early days, we had to wear white shirts and ties and a suit or sport coat.   The IBM cafeteria was a sea of white shirts and ties during the lunch hour.  As with Cap Fed, we took our pay and moved on, realizing that our work might never be used.   None of these contract jobs ever provided medical or dental or even a 401K in the early 1990'a.  That would slowly change as the decade of the '90's progressed.  Not knowing how long the job might last, I spent a few months at the beginning staying with Dino and his boyfriend, Larry, and paying them rent for a door-less bedroom in their house in Thornton.  The house was in need of a serious renovation.  The bathroom was unfinished.  Their ancient dryer sometimes damaged my clothes.  Eventually, while Dino enjoyed the rent money that I was paying them, Larry wanted the house back to themselves and their four cats:  Alexander, Miranda, Zoe, and Locutus.     

That summer I found a small, one-bedroom apartment in the Park Humbolt Apartment complex, on Humboldt Street, one block over from Cheesman Park.  We moved the single bed that I had bought and pieces of my furniture from the Palmer Park Blvd. house into the second-floor unit by the elevator. (Most of the rest I turned over to a furniture consignment store in Denver.)   I also kidnapped Schnozz from her comfortable home and brought her to Denver.  She was most unhappy during the long drive on I-25.  I soon realized that I would have to put my own pillows up in the closet when I was gone during the day, more about that shortly.  My apartment was on the second floor over the entry, to the left.  Schnozz could sit in the bedroom window and watch the neighborhood squirrels in the trees and the passersby on the sidewalk below.  
                                                                             

While I was still living in Thornton, a gay couple who were friends of Roger Hunter were renting my house but soon bought a dog, though they promised to take care of Schnooz for me at the same time.  Schnozz displayed her displeasure with the dog invading her house by peeing on the couple's pillows when they were not in the bedroom.  I had warned them that she night retaliate since she had always had the whole house to herself for years.  That was why I finally brought her to Denver, to keep the peace with my reliable renters and their new dog.    

Eventually, after repainting the house in lieu of paying rent one month, the gay couple moved out, to buy a place of their own.  Dennis Stichman, Bart's friend, had a female coworker whom he recommended to me who was looking for a house for herself, newly divorced, and her three teenaged sons.  I gave them a really good monthly rental rate, not much above $500 per; but she turned out to be a nightmare to deal with.  She was always violating terms of the lease that she had signed.  She also accused me of disliking women.  I thought she hated men since she'd had a bad husband who left her with three boys to raise.  Regardless, she broke the lease and moved out a month early.  I was definitely pleased to see her go.  After they moved out, I discovered that she or her three sons had punched holes in all three of the bedroom doors, the kind of doors you have to entirely replace rather than repair with that kind of permanent damage.  Needless to say, she did not get her security deposit back.    

For the next renter, I hired a management company.  They were pathetic.  If a light bulb burned out, they charged me $5 dollars for a replacement and deducted it from their check to me.  I never understood that.  When that renter and his family moved out, I had had enough of being an absentee landlord and decided to put my beloved house up for sale in 1993.   

After the JAD and FSC jobs at IBM ended in 1992, I was again looking for a job.  I interviewed at Hewlett-Packard in Colorado Springs.  Had I gotten hired, I would have moved back into my house on Palmer Park Blvd.  I would have driven to HP every day which was only across an open field from the Kaman plant on Garden of the Gods Road.  I would have gone back to teaching in the evenings at Fort Carson.  But the hiring supervisor hired a young woman with less experience than I.  She was not a military veteran.  (Again, I was not given credit for that in a predominantly military town.)  She was a pretty blond woman.      

What I would only later learn from Roger Hunter was that the population of the greater Colorado Springs area had quadrupled in my absence.  Pike's Peak Community College would build a northern campus, requiring the hiring of more full-time instructors in every area of study.  I had no idea.  Nobody told me until it was too late, and others were hired instead.  I had actually applied to Denver Community College for an English job opening after the JAD and FSC jobs ended.  As I looked around the classroom where us 10-15 semifinalists were to meet the department chair, I noticed that most were younger, pretty, blond women.  They cannot have had nearly the experience I was bringing, I thought to myself as we waited.  

The chair eventually entered wearing tennis togs, having just come from the courts to greet us.  He appeared to be no older than I, was handsome...and straight.  He explained that the Department would review our resumes and qualifications and choose only five as the ones who had a final chance to be hired with a classroom demonstration.  I was shocked to eventually learn that I was not to be one of the final five.  I had taught at PPCC for 11 years, at the Academy before that.  I had recently graduated from a Teacher's Education Program.  I had been a technical writer for Kaman, Capitol Federal and IBM for over twelve years.  I was a military veteran.  None of that apparently mattered when they made their final selections.  Was I too qualified and--again--seen as a threat to the head of the Department?          

After I was first laid off by IBM, when I entered the unemployment office in Denver, I did notice an ad on a pegboard for the English Department at the Air Force Academy.  I had read that the branches of the military were being mandated to hire at least one civilian instructor in each department at the three service Academies.  The main requirement was a Master's Degree.  I figured that I would have as good a chance as anyone else.  However, I did not get hired.  I would later learn that there were 100 applicants for the single opening in the English Department.  Not good odds.  And, of course, Colonel Shuttleworth was still the head of the Department.  He probably did not want to bring me back, given what had happened 12 years earlier. 

At some point I read in the Gazette Telegraph that the head of the English Department was involved in a scandal, possibly a sexual scandal while he was in the middle of a divorce proceeding.  He did not lose his job, but that incident did not help his career going forward.   

Roger in front of his first home in Colorado Springs, 1991

I met Roger at the U.S. Swim & Fitness on Academy Blvd.  Over the years he would host dinner parties, and when he got back from an assignment at the Pentagon, we would have Thanksgiving together in that house.  He would eventually sell that house and buy a lovely home next to a golf course.  He would give wonderful Christmas parties in the new house, and we would have Thanksgiving dinner together a few times while he lived there.

Roger had a straight roommate named Chris, an Air Force enlisted man, when Roger first lived in the house below.  They would keep in touch over the years after he moved out.  Chris would later have a girlfriend toward whom he became obsessed.  He went to her house with a gun one evening during a particularly turbulent stage of their relationship.  She had called the police before he got there.  As he peered out of an upstairs window after the police arrived, a policeman shot Chris in the head.  He was killed.  Chris had attended one of the Thanksgiving dinners at Roger's golf course house just a couple of years before.  We had also encountered Chris at a Colorado Springs video store before one of the Christmas dinners at the golf course house.  His violent death saddened us both.  He'd always seemed like a nice, handsome guy with few problems.           
                                                                          

Catalina Trip with Mom, Mike, Walt and Me, 1992

I got seasick on the way to Avalon.
                                                                        

                                                                           

                                                                                  

Frank Massey, & Mom's second open heart surgery, 1992

Mom's health began to deteriorate in the early 1990's.  She needed the original pig valves in her heart replaced.

I had met Frank Massey at Garbo's, the Friday after work piano bar on 7th Street, closed by the early 2000's.  He seemed only moderately interested in me.  However, Frank would soon call me because he needed to move out of the apartment unit where he was staying off of Grant Street.  I would eventually unravel the mystery of Frank but not right away.  He arrived in Colorado a few months earlier with a boyfriend whom he had met back East.  I gathered that their relationship had turned abusive, and Frank was briefly arrested.  I did not know about this right away; otherwise, I would have been far more wary of inviting him to move in.

Frank was handsome with a nice body.  But our relationship was never sexual.  We slept together briefly before he started sleeping on the single bed in the living room that we were using as a day bed.  Schnozz never seemed to trust him.  The abusiveness started with Frank calling me "goofy".  He graduated to making small putdowns as the days passed. 

Frank bought me the following for Easter (with my money), one of the very few thoughtful gestures he ever made:
                                                                             

When Mom visited during the Mother's Day weekend of 1992, she would quietly say when we got back from taking her to lunch, "He's not very friendly."  No, he was not.        
                                                                      

                                                                              

                                                                                   

                                                                                    

Here are Mom and I in City Park:
                                                                           

                                                                             

                                                                                  

                                                                                 

                                                                                   

                                                                                           

Here is the back of Frank's head when we drove to Colorado Springs.
                                                                          

Frank could be incredibly manipulative.  The only good thing he ever really did was bring home Sneezer from the Denver Dumb Friend's League.  Schnozz was not happy.  Frank pressured me to move out of the small, one-bedroom unit into a large one-bedroom unit on the same floor and in the corner of that middle building.  To keep the peace, I moved us.  Frank painted one of the walls in the living room rather creatively, but then I got pressured into buy a dining table and chairs to fill the space in this larger unit. 
         
On the eve of Mom's operation in California, Frank brought a woman home to our new apartment.  They had been at a party, he told me, and she needed a place to sleep for the night because she had had too much alcohol to drive.  He gave her his single bed in the living room, but that required his sleeping with me in the bedroom.  I realized that he was also drunk as he began to go after Schnozz.  She was hiding under the bed, and I pleaded with him to leave her alone.  She had grown afraid of him in recent weeks.  He suddenly cried out "She bit me!"  He grabbed an expensive bike helmet of mine to strike her with.  He kept whacking away until he broke the helmet trying to get at her under the bed.

I was standing between the bed and the side wall at that point.  I was so upset that I began crying.  Frank was now a drunken monster, totally out of control.  I believe that he saw my crying as a weakness and used his open hand to bounce my head against the wall.  (He would later excuse what he did by saying that he only hit my head with the open palm of his hand rather than using a fist to hit me.)

Schnozz fled to the living room.  Frank chased after her, grabbed her and threw her against a wall.  I knew I had to get us both out of there.  I got the front door open and the two of us fled.  (I would only later learn that Schnozz had a broken bone in her back when Frank threw her against the wall.  In addition, I would hear from gay neighbors who lived below us that they seriously considered calling the police because the conflict sounded really bad.  I realized then that he had been at fault when he was arrested after he and his former boyfriend had a domestic abuse conflict.)

I picked up Schnozz and headed to the next building over in the complex where my friend Ramsey lived.  He took us in for the night.  In the morning, I had to go back to the apartment to get my things for the flight to LAX for Mom's surgery later in the day.  Fortunately, Frank was not there.

Ann picked me up at the airport, explaining that Mom had almost died during the surgery.  She had reacted badly to the anesthesia.  Fortunately, the anesthesiologist recognized her dangerous reaction and did what he could quickly to undo the damage.  She was soon out of danger and the surgery continued without further incident.

We all stayed at an old hotel next door to the hospital that families of patients could use.  Uncle Lloyd and Aunt Jean, Uncle Hap and Aunt Doris, Uncle Robert, and Ann and I had separate rooms.  I was lying in the bed in the morning when the bed began to sway.  It was an earthquake. 

Fortunately, the old hotel stayed together.  This was the 7.3 Landers earthquake that struck at 4:57 AM on June 28th.  At 8:05 PM, when we were all back in our rooms, the 6.5 Big Bear Lake earthquake/aftershock occurred.                       

Here is Mom later in her hospital stay:
                                                                             

I returned to Denver after that first weekend away and moved out.  A small, one-bedroom apartment was open in the left building of the Park Humboldt complex, on the second floor and in the back of that building.  I started moving much of the furniture and my clothes into the new apartment.  The only contact with Frank after that was to leave him cat food for Sneezer.  It was clear that he could not maintain a place of his own.  His only job was to clean vacated apartments in the complex after someone moved out.  I am not sure how the decision was made, but Frank would leave Colorado and stay with a Lesbian friend of his in Virginia.  I bought him a one-way ticket from Denver to Richmond, VA, on United.  On the way to the airport, he would say, "I miss Sneezer." 

Thankfully, I never heard from Frank Massey again.

In 1993, after I had been hired by the IBM Sales Manual team in 1992, to reorganize and standardize their product documentation after I had worked on the project for a year, and it appeared that this job could continue for several years to come, I sold the house on Palmer Park Blvd. for $109K.  I had purchased a Sony video camera in 1993 from an electronics store on Colorado Blvd. and used it to videotape the interior of the Palmer Park Blvd. house.  This was the first house I had ever owned, and I wanted a video record of where I had lived those many years, during and after the Air Force.

Over the years, I would return to Colorado Springs only to attend Thanksgiving gatherings and Christmas parties at either of Roger's two houses.  We drove into the small cul-de-sac once to see the old house.  The new owners had painted it a hideous dark blue color.  I felt sad for the place.  Had I a choice, I never would have moved to Denver, never would have sold the place.  I would have been content to stay there, write my rejected manuscripts, perhaps gotten hired full-time at the Northern Campus for PPCC, and retired when I got too old to teach. 

Life, clearly, had other plans for me.