Anita and Greg at entrance to BOQ, Minot, August 1974

I'm wearing one of those color dress shirts that I had bought back in South Gate in 1970 or so.

I believe one of the guys in the BOQ let mom stay in his room during her visit while he was away.  She played pool at the Officer's Club where we usually had lunch and dinner.  Fine dining was non-existent in Minot.  The restaurant at the "O" Club was pretty good.  If you were an officer, you were strongly encouraged to become a member of the Officer's Club, which I gladly did.

For the first few months, most of us ate there all of the time.  But, as the time passed, we got tired of that and began to buy our own food and eat in our BOQ rooms with what we'd prepared in our kitchenettes.

I had bought an RCA TV set with a loan that I got from the Minot Credit Union where I had set up my checking account.  It used to be very cheap to have our rooms cleaned by the same cleaning service from the VOQ.  However, the rates began to go up so sharply that all of us cancelled what was the equivalent of daily room service.  I bought a portable vacuum cleaner--my room was a combination living room/bedroom anyway, not very large as you will eventually see.  The small bathroom had a tub/shower and a sink with a medicine chest/mirror but no vanity.  The kitchenette was also small with a small stove and fridge and sink.  So, there really wasn't that much to keep clean.

One year, unfortunately, the building quickly became overrun with silverfish.  North Dakota silverfish were like North Dakota mosquito's:  huge.  You would see them scurry into hiding in the kitchen.  In the middle of the night, you could see them gliding along the ceiling and walls.  It was scary they were so big. 

The Air Force scheduled a fumigation and that seemed to clear up the problem for good.

Shopping in Minot was also pretty limited.  The local K-Mart was a good as it got, and that was a 45 minute or more drive, on the south side of the town, whereas the base was a thirty minute drive north of Minot.  So, most of us shopped for groceries at the Commissary and any other goods at the Base Exchange where prices were lower than almost anywhere else.  And nothing was close to the Air Base anyway.

Launch Control Center

Keep us reaching away
from documents ordering us to war.
Run it farther off.
With those who so often know invasion,
will we suffer from distant relations
a final knowledge of conflict?

Amid heat and its quick corrosion,
if we arc retaliation
with our reach through the sky--
outflanking any naturally shielding snow--
will be meet them as we lie,
frozen in the instant
that revenge flashes and clouds;
layering the ill-natured
between recovering cold
and impotent green?

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