One very early morning in either late July or early August, I awoke, got dressed, put a few of my things in the Camaro, hugged mom goodbye, and took off for Air Force Officer's Training School at Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas.
It was a beautiful, sunny morning. I drove all the way to Riverside, stopping at the Sub Station, the submarine shop near the University of California Riverside campus. I wanted to take a sandwich with me on the rest of the trip to my first stop, a Holiday Inn near the airport in Phoenix, AZ. However, it was too early to stop by the campus and wake up Darryl Butler, and it was also much too early for the sandwich shop to be open I realized.
I got back into my car and kept driving, eventually passing through the California desert. I had already installed an 8-Track tape player in the glove compartment to keep me entertained on the long trip. At the motel, I accidentally left my keys in the trunk but found them still there when I realized I did not have them with me in my room over an hour later.
I soon spent time by the pool, watching a cute, younger guy diving into the pool off the board. We finally began talking and I learned that he worked on a road crew, which was why he was staying at the motel. He also was a member of the Marine Corps Reserves, so we had military service in common. We ate dinner together in the motel restaurant. On our way back to our rooms, I hoped he would ask me to his room; but he needed to get sleep, as did I, so we parted. I left early enough the next morning so that we did not meet up again even though I hoped he'd join me again in the restaurant for breakfast.
I drove on to my next stop, El Paso, TX. There were three other guys who were driving to OTS in their cars. We had already agreed that we would meet up in El Paso in the same motel. I was resting in my room when I heard a knock. The others were there and we had dinner together before continuing across Texas the next morning. In San Antonio, we stayed at a motel near Lackland, swimming in the pool in the afternoon.
The next day we showed up and were assigned to separate squadrons. My squadron's colors were blue.
A couple weeks later, my flight got to go to Hondo Field, a former base where pilots trained for WWII. For just a few bucks, each of us was taken up individually in a Cessna by an upper classman, to get a feel for what the Flight Screening Program was going to be like in a couple more weeks.
In the photograph above, I am leaning against a B-25, which was an advanced training bomber that was used in dad's bombardier training in August 1943. Here I was 40 years later, undergoing Air Force training. If you look carefully, you can see that I am wearing shower thongs over my black socks rather than shoes. I had gotten an infected blister on my big toe from the new hard shooes. So I could not wear them until the infection healed.
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