1972 April-June: Transition to Connecticut

SEAD to Ann Arbor to Kansas City to East Hartford. Continue reading

It could have been worse.

It could have been worse.

Although my last official day of active duty1 in the army was Monday, April 10, 1972, I had most of the last week off for out-processing—visits to the dentist and doctor, filling out forms, etc. The only thing that I remember vividly about April 10 was that there was still snow on the ground at Seneca Army Depot (SEAD), which made it ninety-two snow-covered days in a row since the day that I arrived.

My plan was to stop in Ann Arbor on my way back home. I missed U-M much more than I missed KC. By this time I had lost touch with all my high school friends, but I had exchanged letters with Bill Davey, who was finishing his first year at Law School. Some of the guys from Allen Rumsey House, notably Frank Bell, were probably still there, too. My plans were not very specific. I would stay in Ann Arbor until I ran out of money or stopped enjoying it.

I still wear this occasionally.

I still wear this occasionally.

I remember nothing about the trip to Ann Arbor. I probably took the reverse of the route that I had taken in January to get to the Rochester Airport. Then I flew to Detroit Metro, and I must have caught a bus to Ann Arbor. I would not have paid for a taxi, and Bill did not have a car. I think that I must have been wearing my uniform, but I don’t remember whether it was fatigues or “class A’s”. All my meager possessions were in my duffel bag. I am pretty sure that I did not bring a suitcase to SEAD. They let me keep all my Army clothes, including my field jacket, which I still have.

I must have walked from the bus stop to Bill Davey’s apartment. I slept on a couch or the floor there for the time that I was in town.

What did I do during the day? Well, mostly I walked around the campus and the surrounding area. I visited Allen Rumsey House, where I talked to Frank Bell and a few other guys. I walked down to the I-M building to see that AR’s record score for 1969-70 posted on the wall. I might have dropped by the Frieze Building to say hello to Dr. Colburn. I also have a vague recollection of attending some sort of hockey game with guys from AR. It wasn’t a varsity game. Maybe it was an intramural contest.

It is still at least two miles from the U-M campus to a McDonald's.

It is still at least two miles from the U-M campus to a McDonald’s.

McDonald’s was the only place that I could fill my belly for $1, but there were none near the campus. I remember walking to the one on the west side of town at least twice. The no-nonsense hamburgers were twenty-five cents; I ate four of them on each visit.

The old B-School building has been replaced by a much more modern complex.

I spent one afternoon at the placement office of U-M’s Business School. Someone there provided me with a list of actuarial contacts at quite a few large insurance companies.

After a few days in Ann Arbor I began to feel like an outsider. I decided to fly home and figure out my future in the comfortable environs there.

At home in Prairie Village I composed and typed letters to thirteen insurance companies. I explained my situation—just out of the Army with two actuarial exams. All thirteen responded. Ten companies said that they were not interested. Three in Hartford—Hartford Life, Aetna, and Travelers—wanted me to come in for an interview. They agreed to split the cost of my airfare and hotel expense. They put me up at the Hilton, which was within easy walking distance of all three.

This is the old Hilton on Asylum Avenue. In 2021 there is a parking lot on the site.

This is the old Hilton on Asylum Avenue. In 2021 there is a parking lot on the site.

I flew out by myself and took a taxi from Bradley to the Hilton. I do not remember too much about the interviews. I definitely talked with Jan Pollnow (a guy) at the Hartford. I remember that the atmosphere at the Hartford seemed much more open and relaxed. It reminded me of BMA. Even the buildings were similar towers.

At both the Aetna and Travelers there seemed to be rows and rows of clerks with mechanical calculators, real numbers factories. The Hartford had plenty of clerks also, but they seemed better placed, and there was more open area.

I think it was the Aetna that made me take the Actuarial Aptitude Test, which had two parts, verbal and math. I got all the questions right. The guy who escorted me around told me that I was the first person who ever did that. He said that plenty of applicants scored 100 percent on the math part, but no one else had ever gotten all the verbal questions right.

I received identical offers from all three companies at a starting salary of $13,000 per year, which seemed to me like a truly enormous amount of money. I had never made as much as $300 per month in the Army, and I did manage to save part of that. Another way to look at it was that my first year’s salary was much larger than the total amount of out-of-state tuition for four years at a top-rate university. Things were different in those days.

I accepted the offer from the Hartford and started making plans for my move to the Hartford area. The first order of business was to buy a car. My Army friend Al Williams had purchased a small Toyota in Albuquerque. I rode in it several times, and it seemed like a cheap, practical, and reliable car. My dad, who served in the Pacific in World War II, had a very low opinion of anything Japanese. He advised me to buy an American car, but there were none as cheap as Toyotas and Datsuns. Furthermore, most people who had not been strafed by the Japanese thirty years earlier thought that the Japanese cars were at least as good as what came out of Detroit in the seventies.

However, more and more GreenieI looked at Datsuns and Toyotas, and I decided on a Datsun 1200 hatchback. I would be able to fold down the back seats and cart an enormous amount of my stuff from KC to Hartford. I picked a bright green one, which I called Greenie. I never had a problem finding that car in a parking lot.

I tried to negotiated by myself by playing one dealer against another, but I am pretty sure that they had an agreement. They certainly were not desperate for the sale. At any rate, I did get to witness the Fargo scene in which the salesman pleaded my case with the sales manager. I think that he threw in an AM-FM radio and floor mats rather than reduce the price, which was around $2,000. My dad co-signed the loan.

No “girlie stuff” on either greenie.

The car was totally devoid of “girlie stuff”2: power steering, brakes, or windows, automatic transmission, etc. It did not have a manual choke, but I learned how to set the one on the motor. It was a nice car on the inside, but it was awful on snow and ice, had too little power too carry a big load over the hills of Pennsylvania, and, in its twilight years was very difficult to start in the winter. Still, I loved it. It was mine.

I did not leave for Hartford immediately. I bummed about for a little bit, and then my sister got mononucleosis, and I had to help my mother out. Jan Pollnow called to ask when I would be coming to work. I set a date in June. It may have even been July.

I loaded pretty much everything that I owned into Greenie, said goodbye to my family, and set off on a route similar to that of the big family vacation of my youth. Thank goodness for the Interstate Highway System that made my drive a lot easier than my dad’s. I left very early in the morning, but I did not try to make it all the way to Hartford. I never exceeded the speed limit.

Leawood_HazletonMy recollection is that I stayed overnight in Hazleton, PA, but I don’t see how I could have driven that far by myself in one day. I can easily see myself leaving at the crack of dawn, but I would lose one hour by traveling east, and I definitely remember that I did not speed. To tell the truth, Greenie was uncomfortable at any speed over 60. Furthermore, I would not trust myself to drive very far after dark. Maybe I stopped at motels for two nights, once in some less memorable place in Indiana and once in Hazleton.

I had no credit card. I paid cash for everything. That, of course, was not unusual in the seventies.

The Shoreham was torn down and replaced by an office building decades ago.

The Shoreham was torn down and replaced by an office building decades ago.

I made a reservation for a couple of nights at the Shoreham Hotel, which at the time was located between the Hartford and the Aetna. I spent the evenings looking for an apartment. I used the want ads to locate two furnished apartments. I went to see both of them. One was very close to the Hartford. I was not crazy about the neighborhood. Instead I put down a deposit on one in East Hartford that actually had two addresses, 45 Olmstead and 23 Spring St. It looked like a motel that had been converted into apartments. It had a swimming pool in the back.
ApartmentThis is a satellite view in 2021 of the area that in 1972 was occupied by the apartment complex, which I think was called “The California Apartments” or something similar. The apartment building and the pool are completely gone, but the parking lot on the right is the one that was formerly used by residents of the apartment. I resided there until August or September of 1973.

The KFC is still on Burnside Avenue, but it has been spruced up.

I unloaded all my stuff from Greenie. I had to walk upstairs, but in those days that was nothing to me. I had not brought anything that I could not carry by myself. I opened a bank account at Connecticut Bank and Trust (CBT—the bank that listens—and deposited the money that was in my KC account. Then I went shopping at the JM Fields department store on Silver Lane. I bought everything that I could think of that I would need—pots, pans, linen, pillows, towels, dishes, silverware, a cookbook, and all kinds of soaps and cleaning materials.

On the way back to the apartment I stopped by Kentucky Fried Chicken (not yet KFC) for supper. I am pretty sure that I ordered the eight-piece dinner (extra crispy), which in those days was two meals for me, and a large Coke.3 It was not as good as my mom’s chicken, but it was still tasty.

I knew almost no one at all in New England, but I had been in the same situation in 1966 at U-M. It felt good to be on my own, and I was primed for a new adventure.


1. Draftees were required to spend two years on active duty, two in the active reserve, and two in inactive reserve. When the active duty period for draftees was reduced in 1972, the active reserve period was concomitantly increased. So, I was in the active reserve until October 5, 1974. Since the Army had made it clear that it did not want the draftees, there was not much danger of being called up to active duty during that period. However, for three summers rather than two I was subject to being called to go to “summer camp” for two weeks of training.

2. I purloined this phrase from Rosemary Boxer on the British television show Rosemary and Thyme. She was disparaging the later Range Rover models for the inclusion of such frills.

3. Diet Coke was not introduced until 1982. The only low-calorie cola drink that the Colonel offered in the seventies was Tab, which had that horrible after-taste.

1972 SEAD January-April Part 2: Activities

Winter life at SEAD. Continue reading

This will probably be the most boring blog entry of all. Life at SEAD in the winter, especially as contrasted with SBNM, was not very interesting. In the three months that I was there, snow covered the ground every day. Much time needed to be killed, and few good weapons were available

I do not recall watching any television. There might have been a television somewhere in the barracks, but I don’t remember it. I did not have a radio or stereo. I remember seeing no movies. I don’t think that the base had a theater, and I had no transportation.

I did not locate even one person who knew how to play bridge.

I worked days, but nearly everyone else worked shifts. I had nights and weekends off, but I never was too certain who else would be off. So, there was no one with whom I regularly hung around. I spent no evenings in my room unless my roommate was working the swing shift. I stayed out of his way, even on weekends.

I don’t think that our table had gutters on the sides. Thus, bank shots were possible.

On the base; The center of activity at SEAD was the USO club. I played some ping pong there and more than a little eight-ball at the pool table. My favorite game was table shuffleboard, which I had never even seen before. The playing area was a flat piece of wood about two feet wide and maybe fifteen feet long. The smooth surface was varnished. Playerswas sprinkled particles silicone that everyone called “wax” to eliminate sticky spots on the wood. The table was supposed to be flat, but SEAD’s had a slight warp at one end.

Four weighted pucks were provided for each of two players. One set was red, one blue. Two two-person teams also worked. Pucks were slid from one end to the other, with each side alternating. As in deck shuffleboard, the idea was to knock opponents’ pucks off and leave yours in the scoring area.

It was a mindless game, but I enjoyed it. I got to be pretty good at it after a while.

Just like this, except we were all guys in our twenties, they only let us have one card each, we used plastic markers, and the prizes all sucked.

The other big attraction at the USO was the bingo games. They were held in the evening once or twice per week. There was no charge, but you could only play one card. The winner of each game took home a small item from the PX. A typical prize was a pair of socks or a tube of toothpaste. I played as often as I could, which was probably every time.

The competition was fierce. I never won anything, until the last evening game in April before my ETS. We played at least five or six games that evening, and, to my surprise and delight, I won every game, a feat no one had even come close to accomplishing.

I retired undefeated. In the ensuing forty-nine and a half years I have never even considered playing bingo again.

White_Deer

SEAD had one unique attraction, a herd of white deer1 that lived within the security fences. They were visible throughout the base, even in the busiest areas. Some would boldly walk right up to people. Since they tended to breed, there were no natural predators, and no other animals competed for their food supply, their population sometimes was deemed excessive.

I had heard that the military had tried to address this issue by rounding up a few dozen of them—don’t ask me how. The soldiers loaded the deer onto trucks for release outside of the base. Reportedly nearly all the captured deer somehow made their way back into the base. Either they leapt over the fences or they snuck through the gate or a hole in the fence. The Reds had never been able to penetrate the base’s security, but the whites evidently had little difficulty.

Elmer

At some point the brass decided that the best approach was to allow soldiers who had volunteered to participate to hunt the deer for one day of the year. For obvious reasons, I hesitate to call this the “Final Solution”. The massacre for 1971 occurred while I was there. I did not participate, but I saw a few guys dressed like Elmer Fudd and armed with M16s that were accurate to 300 meters. They were allowed to shoot only a limited number; it might have been as few as one per soldier.

I did not participate. Most of these deer were as friendly as the animals at a petting zoo. I don’t understand how anyone could enjoy slaughtering them.


The official chaplain for all of SEAD was a Catholic monk based in Seneca Falls. This was a very peculiar arrangement. Most chaplains were career Army officers. This one had fairly long curly black hair and a beard. I visualize him in sandals. However, there was always snow on the ground, and so that must be wrong. He definitely wore a brown monk’s robe. I am not sure which order he belonged to. I also don’t remember his name, but it was Italian and ended in “o”. He claimed that the Italian names that ended in “i” were from northern Italy’s wealthy families.

He was not a bit like the other Army chaplains. He often circulated around tables at lunch or supper and talked with guys. He enlisted me to conduct weekly religion classes for the local eighth graders. They did not like me very much. Their previous teacher had taken them bowling, and they wanted me to do the same. I put the kibosh on that ideas. I only had four or five weeks with them and a syllabus. Besides, I did not have the wherewithal to take them anywhere.


Off of the base: The chaplain invited me up to his house once. We listened to a few of his albums, including Bernstein’s Mass. Then he drove me back to the base. Don’t read too much into this. It was an innocent evening.

This is a Yelp map of the ten best bars near Romulus. The closest, #3, is the Golden Buck Restaurant in Ovid, which has a small bar area.

I left the base one other time. A bunch of us went to a bar in Romulus. It might have been the bar in Romulus. It featured a coin-operated pool table. People—some locals, some soldiers—were playing nine-ball on it. I watched, but I had no intention of spending money to lose at nine-ball. I could do that for free at SEAD.

I sipped a beer and sat around talking to some of the MPs. It killed an evening, which was the objective of any activity on SEAD in the winter. It was not enjoyable enough to merit a return trip.

On a Friday or Saturday evening my roommate, the weightlifting champion from Texas, and a couple of buddies from his platoon made a road trip to Geneva. They attended a mixer at one of the colleges there. I did not join them. When my roommate returned to the room a little after midnight, he was extremely irate. I asked him what the problem was. He explained that he had gotten into a scuffle with a group of five college guys. He was upset that his friends walked away from the encounter. As a result, he ended up fighting all five guys by himself.

I sympathized and said, “Wow, fighting five guys! Those are not good odds.”

“Oh, I handled them all right. I’m just mad at those MPs. What a pair of pussies!”


1. This is the largest herd of white deer in the world. They are not albinos. In 2020 the white deer are still thriving on the abandoned depot.

1967-1969 Part 4: Summer Jobs

My introduction to the insurance workplace. Continue reading

The BMA Tower in KC.

During my undergraduate years I worked all three summers at life insurance companies. I wore a suit every day. My dad had given me some ties that he no longer wore. Thus attired, I never acquired the valuable and character-building experience of flipping burgers or waiting tables.

My dad worked at Business Men’s Assurance (BMA) in Kansas City throughout his entire career. The company had a policy of offering summer jobs to the offspring of its executives who were attending college. My dad certainly did not start at BMA as an executive, but by the time that I was in college, he had risen to the level of vice-president. So, for a couple of years I took advantage of that situation.

1967: I think that I rode to BMA with my dad and his car pool.

I was assigned to work as a clerk in the company’s Policyholder Service Department. The area that I worked in dealt with policies that for one reason or another had been terminated. In some cases the amount of premiums paid in exceeded the benefit paid to the customer. Our group calculated this difference and initiated the refund or whatever other steps were indicated.

Our group consisted of about twenty women sitting in rows of desk and one female supervisor who had an office. I seem to remember that her name was Dorothy, but I could be wrong. My recollection is that she was BMA’s first female officer. She talked with me the first day, but we had few dealings thereafter.

The above is a programmer’s coding sheet. Our data sheets were similar.

The other twenty or so ladies in the section each had two items on their desks—a gigantic Friden (the first syllable is pronounced like “free”) mechanical calculator and a pad of eighty-column computer coding sheets. The work came to them in the shape of a policy folder with a small piece of paper clipped1 to indicate the current status. The ladies then calculated the amount of the monetary element using actuarial formulae and filled out a coding sheet. Someone else checked the work and then forwarded it to the keypunch area, where another group of ladies converted the sheets into IBM cards that represented transactions for the mainframe to process.

There were no available desks in our section. Therefore, I had the dubious distinction of sitting in a row of desks just outside of the offices. The other three people in this row were the officers’ secretaries. At night my desk was used by a young man who telephoned customers whose policy had either lapsed or was about to lapse. I never met this fellow, but we exchanged notes left on our common desk. He told me about the person who previously sat in our desk. I had seen her name plate. It was a Greek name that ended in “itis”. The night shift guy called her “Mrs. Disease”. I told him what my name was and added the appellation “Now a name…soon a legend”2. My communication with him was probably the most enjoyable aspect of the entire summer.

Friden

My role in the process described above involved calculating square roots, which I had learned how to do in Ms. Jancey’s math class at QHRS, as described here. Using the Friden this was a multi-step process. At least one of these steps required division, which was something to see and hear. The machine calculated each digit one at a time as its top section, which displayed the answer, chugged back and forth.

U

I had my own coding sheets. When I had filled one out I gave it to one of the ladies to check. She disliked the way that I made my U’s. To her they looked too much like V’s. She asked me to add a line to the right side of each U. I eventually made a habit, which I have perpetuated, of doing so. Subsequently, unfortunately, people have through the years often mistaken my U’s for Y’s.

Spoiler alert: E always won.

There was not much work for me. I seldom did as much as twenty hours of actual work per week. I was told in the first week that this would probably be the case. When I did not have any real work to do, I was enjoined to “look busy”. This was, it was emphasized, especially important because the big bosses often came down to see the department head, whose office was not far from my desk. I was not allowed to bring outside reading material. For a while I tried to pretend to read the insufferably boring manuals that were on or in my desk. When that became unbearable, I amused myself by marking twenty-six columns on a piece of paper and counting the distribution of the letters in an article or pamphlet. For each letter I placed a tick mark in the appropriate column and totaled each column at the end of the article. Computing the final results killed time, but seldom did it yield any surprises.

I must have eaten lunch in the company cafeteria. I did not know anyone. I am pretty sure that I did not eat with my coworkers. Maybe I ate alone. It would not have bothered me.

To make extra money I also stayed late one or two evenings per week. The summer students were put to work looking on desktops, countertops, and filing cabinets for missing policy folders. We worked in pairs. One of us would “read” policy numbers on the folders; the other would “check” against the list of the missing in numerical order. If we found one, the checker recorded on the list where the folder was.

Bouquet

A startling event occurred one evening. A girl who was working in my vicinity received a delivery of a bouquet of flowers from her boyfriend. She just broke down and cried. This startled me because she never struck me as the emotional type. She had once laughed at my pronunciation of “secreted”, meaning “hidden”. I accented the second syllable. I didn’t say anything at the time, but I looked it up and discovered that I was right. Check it out here.

Peter

1968: In my second year at BMA I think that I rode in to BMA with Peter Closius, who was a year older than I was.3 I had never met him before, but his parents were good friends of my parents, and I knew his younger brother Phil from Boy Scouts. Peter treated the drive to work, most of which was on the three lanes of Ward Parkway, as a race. He made liberal use of all the lanes. We had many close calls but no collisions; I was often terrified.

Because I had passed part 1 of the actuarial exams, I was assigned to work for Reuben Johnson, who was the #2 man in the Actuarial Department. He kept me pretty well occupied with projects, most of which were mostly pedestrian. The one that I enjoyed the most was when he asked me to write a summary of the recent sales history of one of the company’s products. I discovered that one of the salesmen had discovered a loophole and had been taking advantage of intricacies of the system. The result was that the product had become unprofitable for the company. I don’t remember the details, but Reuben liked my writing style.

Oscar Klein died in 2020. His obituary is here.

I ate lunch with some of the actuaries. We wolfed down our food so that we could play a few hands of bridge afterwards. Sid Peacock and Oscar Klein, VP and Actuary, also played. The fourth player rotated. They liked playing with me because I played as fast as they did.

Sid and Oscar also played golf in the morning before work. They teed off at the crack of dawn, shouldered their own clubs, and jogged between shots.

Sandy Finsilver, whom I had met in Detroit on the trip with my dad in 1966 (related here), also worked at BMA during that summer. I had seen him once or twice in Ann Arbor, where he was attending the University of Michigan.

Fish

Sandy invited me to come with him to a party at his apartment complex. I brought some of my albums, including I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die by Country Joe and the Fish. Quite a few of the guys there who were in the Army Reserve or National Guard did not appreciate the vocal stylings of Joe McDonald, an avowed communist.

In 1967 the A’s were still playing at Municipal Stadium in Kansas City. In 1969 the Kansas City Royals, an expansion team, were scheduled to play there. In the summer of 1968 the Kansas City Spurs of the North American Soccer League took advantage of the absence of sports entertainment in KC. They not only played their regular-season games in Municipal Stadium; they also scheduled three friendlies against international opponents. On July 4, 1968, the great Brazilian club team, Santos, came to KC and played against the Spurs. My dad and I were among the 19,296 people in attendance. I can therefore brag that I got to watch Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pelé, at the height of his career.

Pelé was named the Interational Player of the Century in 1999.
Pelé was named the Interational Player of the Century in 1999.

I do not remember much about the game, which Santos won 4-1. I don’t think that Pelé scored a goal. However, at one point he took a shot from near midfield. It took off like a bullet, went over the goalie’s outstretched arms, hit the crossbar so hard that it shook visibly, and rebounded back into the field of play. I could not believe that anyone could kick a ball that hard.

That was the only professional soccer game that I ever witnessed. Over the years I have watched portions of a few games on television, but I never sat all the way through one. I did attend several games played by my four nieces and my nephew. Soccer is a fun game to play, but football and basketball have so much more action. It is not surprising to me that it has never achieved the degree of popularity in North America that it has everywhere else.

Too few sold in 1970.
Too few sold in 1970.

The Spurs had moved to KC from Chicago. They played for three seasons, 1968-70. They won the league title in 1969, but they did not qualify for the playoffs in 1970. The attendance in 1970 was less that 2,400 per game, which meant that there were over 33,000 empty seats. The team folded after that season.

1969: I don’t remember exactly why, but I was not allowed to work at BMA for a third summer. I wrote to Kansas City Life to see if they had summer positions in the actuarial department, and they offered me one. I recall that my letter included a facetious remark about my secretary being on vacation, and the actuary with whom I communicated thought that I might be serious.

KC_Life

My work at KC Life also was mostly mundane, but a few interesting things happened. The actuarial department had purchased from Burroughs what I would call a semi-programmable calculator.4 It was enormous for a calculator—perhaps three feet on a side and at least six inches high. It had a keyboard similar to that of a calculator—digits plus arithmetic symbols and, I think, a few others. Its output section was similar to that of an adding machine—a roll of paper a few inches wide. It had a third section for input and output of a strip of magnetic tape about an inch wide and six inches long. The tape was for storing the program. There was no limit to how complicated the program could be, as long as you could fit it into 64 bytes. Not 64 gig or 64 meg or 64K; 64 bytes.

I don’t remember what the actuaries actually used this machine for. Some actuarial calculations might have been time-consuming on a Friden. If five or six steps could be combined using this beast, it might have been valuable.

Morley Safer quizzes George Finn On 60 Minutes.
Morley Safer quizzes George Finn On 60 Minutes.

I wrote a program that took as input a date in the form MMDDYY. It spat out something that indicated what day of the week it was. I don’t remember whether it took into account the ten dates that didn’t exist when countries adopted the standards specified by Pope Gregory XIII. Probably not.

I know; George Finn, Rain Man, and other savants can do this in their head, but I can’t.

I worked with and lunched with two actuarial students named Todd and Tom. Once while involved in some work project I lost track of time and almost missed an appointment for lunch with the two T’s. At the last minute I rushed to join them because I had read Chaucer and knew full well that “Tom and Todd wait for no man.” I hope that you laughed or at least groaned. I have related this incident many times over the years, and no one has appreciated it.

4F

Tom had played quarterback at Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, KS. He had injured his knee, but in no way did it limit his subsequent athletic activities. He informed us that his doctor had provided documentation of the injury and coached him on how to take the draft physical. He flunked it and was classified 4F, just like Trump.

Armstrong

On Monday morning, July 21, everyone in the actuarial department gathered around a portable television set and watched Neil Armstrong climb out of the capsule and take the first steps on the moon.

My time at the two life insurance companies did not excite me about the prospect of my putative actuarial career. The work was not awful, but there were other things that I would rather do.


Nevada_Smith

1. Post-it notes were invented in 1968.

2. The Steve McQueen movie Nevada Smith was heavily advertised with this catch-phrase. I have never actually seen this film, but I remember the ads.

3. It is quite possible that I rode with Peter in 1967, not in 1968. Peter later owned and operated several companies in Fairfield County, CT. He died in 2003. His obituary is here.

4. I searched carefully on the Internet, but I could not find an image of this device.

1972 SEAD January-April Part 1: The Stupidity Intelligence Office

Working at SEAD. Continue reading

I worked in the Intelligence Office at SEAD for a little less than three months. I worked with the same five people for almost that entire time. I find it puzzling and a little irksome that in 2020 I can remember none of my co-workers’ names, and I also can recall very little that I personally did there.

I attribute this failure to three things.

  1. Almost nothing even slightly memorable—especially compared to SBNM—happened in those three months. There were no incidents whatever.
  2. My work was totally routine. I remember nothing but typing and routine filing.
  3. I had a bad attitude. My thoughts kept gravitating toward my ETS day.

Here are the four people who were already working in the Intelligence Office when I arrived:

Maybe DIA?
Maybe DIA?
  1. The Chief Intelligence Officer (CIO) was a civilian. I had almost no dealings with him. I have only a vague idea of what he did. I had no idea whether he worked for the CIA, the DIA, or some other acronym. He had a private office and lived off-base.
  2. The Assistant Intelligence Officer (AIO) was an Army lieutenant. He was not a lifer. I worked with him a little and even socialized with him once. Nevertheless, I would not hazard a guess as to his job description. He also had an office and lived off-base.
  3. The chief clerk as a middle-aged woman who had worked with the CIO for several years. I thought of her as my boss. She with us at her desk in a rather large area with three desks surrounded by shelves and filing cabinets, but no walls or dividers. She lived off-base.
  4. A PFC had been working in the same area as a clerk-typist for a few months when I arrived. I am not sure whether he was classified as an MP or a clerk-typist, but he lived in the barracks. He and I got along very well, and we socialized together a little. I was a SP4, and so I outranked him, but even at the end of my time at SEAD he knew the job better than I did. So, if he said something needed to be done, I did not question it.
Paperwork

When I arrived at the Intelligence Office there was a backlog of paperwork. The quantity of reports, letters, and what-not was a little more than the two people in the big work area could easily handle. On the other hand, there was not enough work for three people. After I was there for a couple of weeks, the backlog had disappeared, and my PFC friend and I had plenty of spare time.

Towards the end of January the three of us in the big work area were joined by another soldier, a sergeant who was TDY1, which meant that his was a temporary assignment. He did not know how to type, and so we had very little work for him. We also did not have a desk for him. So, he just sat on a chair in our workspace and twiddled his thumbs. I would have found his situation very stressful. My brain needs to be occupied. When I try to relax my thinking, I generally fall asleep. In my first summer job I had little to do, but I was required to look busy. It was a difficult situation for me. The link for the blog describing that summer will be linked here.

I think that the sergeant on TDY was still there when I ETSed in April. I never did find out what his next assignment was.

Class_A

The soldiers in the office wore the winter version of the “Class A” uniform. This consisted of:

  • A dark green suit coat that had space for all of the badges, insignias, and medals.
  • A light tan long-sleeve dress shirt.
  • A plain black tie.
  • Trousers that were, I think, the same color as the coat.
  • Black dress socks.
  • Plain black shoes, which were not ideal for walking through the snow that was on the ground from the day that I arrived until the day that I left.Garrison_Cap
  • An olive drab “garrison” or “envelope” cap. This was the most practical headgear. In 1972 soldiers ALWAYS wore headgear outdoors and NEVER wore headgear inside. The garrison cap could be folded once and kept on the belt when indoors.
  • We also had a government-issue overcoat and raincoat. I never used the latter.

 

I am pretty sure that we hung up the coats somewhere as soon as we got to the office. I only had one suit coat, and I worked Monday-Friday. I don’t remember how we managed to have clean uniforms every day, but I cannot remember any problems. There must have been really good laundry service.

The attention of the officers seemed to be primarily directed toward convoys. Every so often the people in charge of handling the materials stored at the depot would load up some trucks with the goods that were needed at another post in the eastern U.S. The Intelligence office would presumably designate the route and the timing of the delivery. MPs served as armed guards, which was considered by most as a much more interesting assignment than driving around in the snow at SEAD.

Nobody from the MP Company—or anywhere else—ever asked me what we did at the Intelligence Office. If anyone had asked, I would have replied that I had no idea what the officers did. My job was simply to type and file forms.

What they did ask me about was a civilian employed in the Personnel Office, which occupied the other half of the building in which we worked. She was considered—by far—the hottest female on the base and, I venture to say, the hottest in this area of the country. Several guys manufactured various excuses to walk down to our building to ogle her. The MP’s all worked shifts, which meant that everyone in the company had off-duty time available during business hours every day to devote to visits to the Personnel Office. Quite a few made a habit of it, but no one made any headway.

My co-workers and I had some mundane dealings with the Personnel Office. For example, we sometimes borrowed or lent some supplies. Our involvement with this lady, who was always personable, convinced us that she had no interest in the MPs.

This is a rough schematic of the Intelligence Office. The Personnel Office and the lobby would be below the drawing.
This is a rough schematic of the Intelligence Office. The Personnel Office and the lobby would be below the drawing.

The first day that I arrived at my new workspace I noticed one peculiar thing, but I did not mention it until I was fully trained, and we had eliminated the backlog of paperwork. Appended to one of the walls near the doors to the two offices was a sign that read “Intelligence Office”. I proposed to the PFC that we erect by the door that everyone always used to get to our work area a similar sign that indicated that our area was the “Stupidity Office”. We designed, created, and posted a rather realistic sign. The CIO and AIO got a chuckle out of this, but, needless to say, they made us take it down.

The 201 files for all of the military personnel on the base were stored in our office. I don’t know why; we never consulted them. They contained everyone’s test scores, deployment history, and lots of other things. I was often bored, and I occasionally looked through them. I was more curious about the scores on the Language Aptitude Test, which I had taken at Fort Polk in October, as described here. I scored 73 points on that test. In all of the folders that we had I did not find any other score above 10.

I was also interested in the GT scores. I had heard that the minimum score for assignment to the MP MOS was 90. Only one person in the 295th MP Company had a score that low, and it was the the highest-ranking NCO on the base, Top, our First Sergeant. I was surprised to find that no one had a higher score than mine. At least one guy in E-10-4, our AIT company, scored higher.

The most interesting 201 file of all belonged to Capt. D’Aprix. It had page after page referring to an incident that happened a few years earlier at some other post. Evidently it was all worked out in the end; his assignment at SEAD had entailed a lot of responsibility at a top-secret installation. The exact disposition of the investigation was not detailed in the folder. I never mentioned a word about this to anyone.

Reel_Tape

The lieutenant in the Intelligence Office invited me to his (and his wife’s) house for supper once. I don’t know what the occasion was. He was an enthusiastic audiophile. He played some music on his reel-to-reel tape player. I asked if the sound quality was a good as on vinyl records. He said that it was “probably better”. It probably was better after the record had been played a large number of times. I never have been able to understand how analog recording works under any circumstance.

I don’t remember what kind of music he preferred.


PDQ

I hung around some with my co-worker, the PC. He was the first classical music aficionado that I had encountered in the Army. He played some of his Peter Schickele records for me. I became a pretty big fan. I subsequently purchased a couple of PDQ Bach albums. While I was isolating during the pandemic in 2020, I listened to the opera The Abduction of Figaro on YouTube (available here) while walking on my treadmill on rainy days.


1. TDY stands for Temporary Duty. No one knows what the “Y’ designates.

1972 January: Transition to Seneca Army Depot

Getting to and learning about SEAD. Continue reading

My recollections of the period between my departure from SBNM and my arrival at SEAD are very sketchy. Someone on the base in Albuquerque must have helped with the travel arrangements. I am pretty certain that I did not bring my golf clubs, my stereo and speakers, my album collection, and other bulky items to SEAD. So, they must have been shipped to my parents in Leawood, KS. I assume that before I left I was also debriefed, which is the Army’s way of saying that I was warned me not to tell any communists about any of the mission-critical classified information and activities that I saw at SBNM.1

I flew from the Sunport to KC, spent a few days with my family, and then on January 10 I flew to Rochester, NY, which is as close as you can get to SEAD using commercial aircraft. I don’t remember any of that.

201The one thing that I clearly remember is that I was handed my own personnel file (called a 201) and told to hand it over when I arrived at my new post. This amazed me. If they let me do this, it seemed likely that each person who was relocated must have been entrusted with his own 201 file. I immediately looked through mine to find the letter of commendation from the base commander prainsing the heroic acts performed by me and my clipboard during the harrowing Siege of Sandia Base that is described here. I found it. What if there had been a letter of reprimand? I could conceivably have received one for my run-in with Capt. Creedon or my attire at the base EM committee meetings (both described here). Could I have just removed derogatory items at will? I don’t see why not. Computerized records were not yet ubiquitous. Paper still ruled.

Roch_SEADThe instructions on my orders indicated that after my plane landed I should board a bus for Canandaigua, NY. When I arrived at the bus station there, I was still thirty miles or so away from SEAD, which is located near Romulus, a bump in the road between Seneca Lake and Cayuga Lake. I have no clear recollection as to how I made the last leg of the journey. I remember that there was no snow on the ground as we approached the base, but it had started to snow before I exited from the bus, van, car, or truck that brought me. Soon it was coming down hard. Incidentally there was snow on the ground all the way to the day that I left, April 10.

You can just drive in now, but the barriers were always down when SEAD was still operational. At least two MPs with rifles manned the main gate.

I remember that the main gate seemed to have a much more serious security detail than at SBNM. The MPs were armed with M16s, and they stopped every vehicle. There were three sets of fences; one was topped by rows of barbed wire and one electrified. At SBNM we ordinarily just waved everyone in.

Someone showed me to my room. The barracks were not nearly as opulent as the ones at SBNM. Every room had two occupants. My roommate was from Texas. I don’t remember his name—in fact, I only remember the name of one person whom I encountered in my three months at SEAD. This failing astounds me. I usually remember names.

He was a little shorter (in height, not less time remaining) than I was, but he was powerfully built. I later learned that he was the high school state champion weightlifter in his weight class. He had a temper, too. I gave him a wide berth.

I asked him if they had regular room inspections. He said that there were inspections, but they were not very common. So, I just piled all my stuff in my locker and locked it. I didn’t make my bed every morning either. My lack of standards for orderliness became a sore point with him. He might have resented the fact that I was so short (in the Army sense), too.

The next morning I was interviewed by a female2 civilian in the MP office. This was something of a surprise to me. SEAD had a lot of civilian employees. SBNM did too, but there they almost all worked for Sandia Labs doing God knows what. Civilians at SEAD were hired for jobs that I would have expected military personnel to do at SBNM.

I handed my personnel folder to the lady who was interviewing me. She was shocked and disgusted when she discovered that I only had eighty-eight days before I ETSed. “April 10! What are we supposed to do with you for less than three months?” I had no answer. They decided to assign me to help with paperwork at the Intelligence Office, which required a walk of a block or two from the barracks. I never worked even one day as an MP at SEAD, but I still stayed in the MP barracks.

The commanding officer of the 295th MP company was Capt. D’Aprix. He gave a security briefing to a handful of newbies. Some might have been civilians. Some might have come from SBNM.

The first sergeant of the company (always called “Top”) may also have been there. If he said anything, it did not impress me enough to stay in my memory.

What could graduates of this institution be working on at SEAD?

Capt. D’Aprix emphasized that security was everyone’s responsibility at SEAD. A “depot” in military terminology is a place to store something. He said that “special” weapons were stored there. The actual nature of the weapons was—and still is!—highly classified, and we were not allowed to disclose what kind they were. He did not mention it, but the units of the soldiers who worked on SEAD were not classified. All the MPs and all the technicians who maintained the weapons wore patches with mushroom clouds on their sleeves identifying them as belonging to the Defense Nuclear Agency. The technicians all came from SBNM, an open base. The building in which they were trained displayed the words “DEFENSE NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCHOOL” in letters that were more than a foot high. Anyone who could not figure out what kind of weapons were in the depot was too stupid to be dangerous.

We were also told to be on the lookout for card-carrying communists and other shady characters who were interested in what went on at SEAD. It was not feasible for all areas to be guarded all the time. Therefore, the MPs patrolled the entire base (or at least the part within the fences), and the ever-changing routes that they employed were TOP SECRET. So, if we were in a bar or other establishment in one of the neighboring towns, we needed to keep our guard up and our mouths shut.

I was there in the winter. Unless a relative has died, absolutely no one goes to this part of the Finger Lakes in the winter. I guarantee that if any unfamiliar people appeared in Romulus (population about 4,000), they would be noticed by everyone immediately. I suspected as much even on that first day, but I later became certain.

I found the following interesting write-up at https://www.senecawhitedeer.org/index.cfm?Page=Military%20History.

This is a recent satellite image of the entire SEAD complex, which has pretty much gone to SEED since the Army abandoned it in 2000.

In the mid 1950s the north end of the Depot property was transformed into a special weapons area. These special weapons areas (19 in total in the United States) were designated as “Qs”. Becoming a Q area represented the highest security levels known at that time because their mission was to house atomic weapons which indeed were very special weapons.

The Q was built over two years and consisted of about one square mile of area, eventually resulting in 64 igloos, some of them atomic bomb blast resistant. The Q had its own security force, specially trained Military Police who patrolled the Q 24 hours a day. The Q area had a triple wall fence surrounding it, with the middle fence being electrified at 4800 volts. No one was allowed inside the Q without a heavily armed MP escort.

Although the Army still does not acknowledge that storage of atomic weapons occurred within the Seneca Depot, other documents found by SWD suggest that the Seneca Army Depot was the US Army’s largest arsenal of atomic weapons and the second largest atomic stockpile in the entire United States. Besides atomic bombs, the Depot also housed atomic artillery shells for Atomic Annie, a long range artillery gun only fired once in Nevada.

Today, the Q is peaceful once again, this time being leased by Finger Lakes Technologies Group, as it recycles some of the igloos for secure document storage.

I never heard anyone talk about the Q area. I had no idea that there was anything else on the base besides the part that we patrolled.

After the base closed in 2000, a group of locals developed really ambitious plans to make it profitable, but very little came of it. The place is now a veritable wasteland.


Not in this man’s army.

1. In point of fact, the only thing that I did or saw that required a clearance was the night that I stood watch on Manzano Base. The irony is that at that time my clearance had not yet arrived. I described this incident here.

2. There were no female MPs in the Army in my day. This was the only part of the first half of the movie Stripes that I found outrageously discordant with my experience. Women were, in fact, allowed to become MPs in 1975, and the movie was made in 1981. So, I guess that inclusion of the MP babes was vaguely plausible. That they were attracted to two middle-aged (Bill Murray was 31 at the time, and Harold Ramis was 37) layabouts is questionable.

However, the entire second half of the film featuring the “Urban Assault Vehicle” was, of course, preposterous.