Com-Central.net

Producing fire and ice at the same time

I had that very setup as model when I was eight! (we won't discuss the year )

www.ninfinger.org/~sve...h1822.html

Wow, what memories!

At the Los Angeles area, at Fort MacArthur Upper Reservation/White Point site, each time they did an excercise with the missiles, there was a loud alarm bell.

In our Sixth Grade classroom, overlooking the site, we would hear the loud ringing, and run out of the room, disobeying the teacher's commands, and run to the fence to see the Nikes rising silently out of their underground pits.

Later that year, in Seventh grade, my friend Jack Canaday and I used to shoot arrows through his backyard redwood fence, and hop the fence to retrieve them, just to be aboard the Nike site. The fence delineated the Upper Reservation's boundary, and we were nearly always met by a snarling, furious German shepherd dog and his Army handler, Mike.

The first encounter was a heart-stopper, with the dog breathing hard and showing its teeth, right at the strained limit of Mike's leash, inches from our terrified faces. He told us to get back over the fence right now, but we countered that Jack's dad would kill us if we lost his hunting arrows, and Mike let us look for them in the tall mustard. It happened again and again.

Gradually Mike got used to us, and did not bother us. The dog got to ignore us, even.

Fifty-plus years later, at an Old Fort MacArthur Artillery Days (run what you brung, cannon-wise, as long as they're blank, Fourth of July weekend each year) I was talking to the old CO of the former Coast Artillery outfit, who was in charge of the Nike site in those days, and mentioned Mike and the dog, and our shenanigans....

The old codger nearly dropped from a heart attack to learn that two kids were allowed to wander through the area looking for lost arrows.

Ahh, memories,
Russ

It's just like old times with Russ *@$#_*^&Buchan back a'gin. (wasn't that your semi-official login, not that anybody needed one, until the spambots projectile-vomited a couple-hunnerd times 'a day onto the boards and forced us onto more secure ground?).

When I was a lad (not quite as far back as Sr. Buchan's youth), we watched all of the pre-Mercury and Mercury shots from Cape Canaveral (that's Cape Kennedy, for pre-assassination youngsters...and then it got re-prenamed back to Canaveral oh-yea-'bouts '73) from elementary school some miles south. Before Alan Shepards launch, experimental launch vehicle shots of one type or another were near daily events (it seemed). Some of these followed, umm...erratic trajectories. Or blowed up real good altogether (sometimes with encouragement from the ground...or not). There were so many, it was actually possible for nine year olds to get jaded about long white vapor trails ("Ho-hum...another one...") These were not Saturn V's, mind.

When they stuck one of the Mercury Seven aboard, though, that was different, and it would be broadcast over the school PA system on days that we were in school and we'd watch in real time from the classroom windows facing north for the rocket. Shepards "Freedom Seven" was one of those. Rockets were such a big deal then. All the boys had models of real-and-imagined spacecraft. Jupiter C and Atlas were wicked cool when they came out later

Good to see you back Russ, We will have to try and get you to ruin your keepboard again (remember the anti-beaver round on the old board?)

Piney