I had been Chuck's sponsor in Minot when he finished missile training at Vandenberg AFB. He decided to live downtown rather than in the BOQ after arriving. We used to see movies in the theater in Minot. One day we saw a film and spent the late afternoon at the local Pizza Hut. Chuck ordered beer, and the young waitress carded us. I was probably 27 at the time and thought that was a compliment.
Like Tim McConnell and others, Chuck took advantage of the early-out program and returned to Morgantown where he had graduated from college. He found a job with the U.S. Geological Survey there and worked at that job into the early 2000's. That's the last I heard from him. We played phone tag a few times and then stopped trying to reach one another.
In the 1980's, I would visit him and his wife, and the three of us toured Antietam and Gettysburg when I was going through my Civil War phase. I had always wanted to see Falling Water, not too far from Morgantown into Pennsylvania, but I never did put that trip together.
Chuck was big on classic cars and ocean liners, especially the Titanic. I would send him a Titanic T-shirt from the Maritime Museum in San Pedro.
The toughest part of being stationed anywhere in the Air Force for any length of time was to say goodbye to people who had become such good friends. Dave Morris, Chuck Gover, Tim McConnell, Mike Durr. If our being in our 20's was the highlight of our lives, we lived a significant part of those years together in Minot. It may have been just a Cold War instead of WWI or WWII or Korea or Vietnam, but they were significant times and our jobs seemed important.
Marine OCS, Quantico, Virginia
I still feel that I am running there.
Not like this thinking war at Minot,
easy to neglect.
Stranger still
locations return me
to admiring us again.
A uniform never losing our youth
when resigning admits we are adults.
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