The End of Flight Training and the Start of College
As the weeks droned on after my brother’s untimely death, Kaz and I settled down in our new home. After taking some time off on bereavement leave, I went back to work at the ATC Center and resumed logging hours for my Commercial Pilot license by flying out of Hooks airport in northwest Houston two to three times a week.
In spite of my chaotic working and flying schedule Kaz and I found ample time to begin enjoying our life together now that the pressure of ATC training was well behind us. Since money was no longer a problem for us, we went on frequent furniture and household accessory shopping trips and on one of our excursions even bought a small upright piano. While growing up on Okinawa Kaz had learned to play so she was anxious to refresh her musical skills.
One of the requirements needed to earn a commercial pilot rating was to fly a certain number of “round-robin” flights. These were nothing more than one-day round trips to airports to which I had not yet flown into; a few of them were to be completed with a flight instructor on board. It was after one of these flights, accomplished on a cold and rainy day in November of 1971, which finally forced me to make a decision that would bring my quest for a commercial rating to a screeching halt.
The flight plan for that trip called for me and my instructor to depart David Wayne Hooks (DWH) airport in northwest Houston early in the morning and fly to Oklahoma City (OKC) via a refueling stop in Dallas (DAL). The return flight called for me to navigate to and land in Lufkin, Texas (LFK), then proceed directly to, and land at DWH. On different legs of the flight I would be required to change altitude several times, use dead-reckoning techniques and VOR tracking alternately and practice simulated engine out procedures.
The weather on that day was marginal for VFR flight, with occasional fog and scattered rain showers, and the median temperature hovered just slightly above a chilly forty degrees. The prevailing winds were steady out of the north blowing at a brisk eight to ten knots, and the inflight forecast for DAL, OKC and LFK showed similar conditions with no chance for improvement as the day went on.
During my exterior preflight inspection my gloves and jacket got more than a little wet as a low layer of gray and gritty clouds opened up temporarily and dumped a fair amount of rain on me and the already soaked tarmac. Because the cramped cockpit offered very little room for extra movement, I was forced to remove my outer wear outside the plane just before climbing onto the wing and clambering over the passenger seat finally dropping into the pilot’s seat. During my preflight outside the aircraft my head, shoulders, and upper back had gotten uncomfortably damp—and, as I settled into my seat my cold shirt stuck to my back sending a tooth chattering chill down my spine.
As I energized the engine and watched the flight instruments spool up and come to life a feeling of dread came over me, and a dark thought flashed across my mind: I really don’t feel like doing this today.
Steeling my will against the feeling of dread that had suddenly taken control of my emotions, I distracted myself by intensely concentrating on performing all the procedures necessary to get the aircraft off the ground and into the air.
I applied power, pushed the right rudder to turn the nose wheel in the direction of the taxiway, and released the brakes. The taxi-out, run-up and takeoff roll were uneventful, and the “fun” didn’t start until I’d climbed through a thousand feet.
Because the actual rain producing ceiling was well above eight-thousand feet and the visibility was in excess of five miles, the flying conditions were still rated as VFR. But around twelve hundred to fifteen hundred feet above the ground there lay a thin “scud” layer of thin and wispy gray clouds that were producing atmospheric instability above it causing wind shear and light turbulence. Since our planned cruising altitude was set at sixty-five hundred feet, we found ourselves in moderate turbulence (commonly referred to as “chop) for the entirety of the flight.
And it never got any better.
Although I considered myself a good pilot, for some reason all my flying skills seemed to abandon me that day. For the life of me I couldn’t hold a steady altitude—often finding myself three to four hundred feet above or below my filed flight level. My navigation was spotty, causing me to miss waypoints sometimes by two or three miles, and once I almost let the plane’s engine completely quit by failing to recognize the symptoms of severe carburetor icing before applying carburetor heat to clear the issue.
My landings at the various airports were nothing short of incompetent—either flaring the airplane too high and floating halfway down the runway before finally landing long and bumping down on the main gear, or flaring too late causing a hard neck-snapping smack nearly driving the gear all the way through each wing. They say a successful landing is one you can walk away from, but that day I wasn’t too sure that any of mine qualified.
After a mercifully smooth landing back at DWH late that evening, and after receiving a less than glowing flight review from my instructor, I finished tying down my aircraft and dragged my sore and stiff body to the parking lot. Sitting in my idling car trying to warm up I again forcefully swallowed the bitter bile taste that had been pushing up from the back of my throat for the entire day.
Cruising out onto the smooth black asphalt highway, I was overwhelmed by the softness of the ride and the ease with which I was able to maneuver my more than four thousand-pound sedan. For the past twelve hours I had been struggling to maintain control of a machine weighing less than two thousand pounds as winds and turbulence had all but tried to take that control away from me and send us spiraling back down to earth.
As I drove home that dark and wet evening, I played the day over and over in my mind, and by the time I pulled into my garage I had decided on what needed to be done.
***
As I opened the door from the garage, Kaz was right there to meet me.
“Hi honey! How was your flight? I was starting to worry because you so late. Everything go OK?”
“Oh, it was OK, I guess. Actually, it could’ve gone better. But I’m home now.”
She reached up and gave me a tight hug and a kiss. “I really miss you today. It was so bad weather I thought maybe you cancel flying and come home.” She turned and hurried into the kitchen. “Look, I made chicken soup today because it so cold,” she said, looking over her shoulder. “You want to change clothes and come eat? I bet you hungry.”
“Yeah, I’m a little hungry…” I swallowed back a sudden rise of bitter bile. “Actually, let me go take a quick shower first, then I’ll eat.”
“OK, good. While you shower, I get table ready for you. Isoide kudasai!” (Hurry, please).
After my shower I did feel just a little better, but I was still shaky. I brushed my teeth extra hard and tried to get the bitterness out of my mouth with some vile-tasting Listerine. All the while I was trying to figure out how to break the news to Kaz about the decision that I’d reached.
It felt good to get out of my wrinkled clothes which I’d been wearing for almost fourteen hours, and the hot water helped relax the nerve-stiffened muscles in my neck and back. Soon enough I was back in the kitchen wearing a comfy pair of sweatpants and an oversized sweatshirt.
“You want crackers too?” Kaz asked cheerfully.
“Sure!” I was starting to feel more human and the hot rich broth and tasty chunks of chopped chicken breast made the dark bitter taste in my mouth all but disappear.
“So,” Kaz said between heaping spoonfuls of soup, “tell me how you did today. I think maybe a little bumpy with the wind, no?”
“That’s an understatement! It was awful. It was as if I had never set foot in a cockpit. My flying was worse than when I first soloed.”
“Oh no! That too bad. You didn’t crash though. I worry about that sometimes, you know.”
“Well, I think my flight training may have to end after today.”
Kaz’s spoon stopped halfway to her mouth and she set it back in the bowl while turning to look at me with questioning eyes. “Uh, what you say? No more training to fly?”
“Well, I don’t know if I have what it takes to continue on the path that I’ve been on. See, don’t get me wrong—I love to fly. But I love to fly when I want to fly and where I want to fly. Today I would’ve chosen to stay grounded.”
“Wha…I don’t understand. What you mean?”
“OK, so like today. From the get-go I didn’t want to go up. The weather sucked and I sure as hell wasn’t in the mood. We’ve been really busy at work and I just felt that I didn’t have that edge that I need when I’m the cockpit. So, coupled with my lack of enthusiasm and the shitty weather—plus the pressure of the long round-robin flights to large airports that I’m not familiar with—I was just not mentally or emotionally prepared to fly.
“The whole day I was way behind the airplane. Instead of having a plan on what I needed to do I found myself reacting instead of being proactive with the airplane. A couple of times I almost lost control on final and on my landings, and once I almost lost the engine due to carburetor icing. I’ve never done that before. I’ve always been able to listen to what the airplane was telling me and act before something happened. Not today!”
“Oh…that bad. But you made it all the way, didn’t you? And you came home. So, that something.”
“Yeah, well my instructor didn’t even bother debriefing me after we landed back at Hooks. He just told me to go home and get some rest and we would talk about it tomorrow. I know I’ll probably have to do the whole round-robin all over again. He was just so quiet the whole trip—like he was just waiting to have to take over before I killed us both.”
“Oh…”
“So, I guess…I don’t know. I thought about this all the way home and I think since I’m happy being a controller I should just drop the formal flight training.”
“So…what about the GI Bill. They still paying you for your training, right? What happen then if you quit?”
“Well, my benefits are still there. If I drop out of flight training, I guess I could use what’s left to finance going back to college.”
“You can do that?”
“I think so. It would work a little different though. Instead of the VA paying the flight school directly for my flying hours they would pay me instead for the college hours. Then I pay the school. Anyway, I think that’s how it works but I’ll check to make sure.
“You know Frank, I want you to be happy. And I thought you were happy flying. But if you want to stop flying and go to college you should do. I mean as long as you happy.”
“It’s not that I suddenly don’t like flying. But let’s say I go all the way and get the training and flying hours necessary to become a commercial pilot. Then do I quit the FAA? I don’t know that I want to do that. I love being a controller—just like I love flying. But I don’t want to someday regret that I gave up a career that I love to work in another career that makes me do things I may not want to do. You know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“So again, I want to fly when and where I want to fly. And if I don’t feel like it, then I don’t want to be told to do it.”
“OK, that make sense to me. So, after you quit the program you gonna fly again?”
“Sure. But it won’t be as often since we’ll have to pay for the flying hours on our own. But I hope you understand how I feel.”
“Of course! I rather have you home on your days off anyway. You always gone and I miss not seeing you. You work too hard, you know.”
So, it was decided. The next day I called the flight school and told that I was planning on withdrawing from the program and that within the next few days I would drop in to sign the necessary paperwork. Of course, they tried to talk me out of it, but I stood my ground as I knew that this was the right decision for me.
Within a month I had made the proper inquiries and was enrolled at Sam Houston University in Huntsville…about thirty miles north of Houston.
Guam! A Plum Job, For Sure
A couple of months later, as I was walking up to the sign-in desk just outside the control room doors to start a 2 pm to 10 pm shift, I decided to spend a couple of minutes looking through the large black binder containing ATC job vacancies all around the country. The binder was one of those three-ring jobs about two inches thick and it was attached by a light metal chain just to the right of each area’s sign-in log.
I had looked through this binder before, curious to see what controller positions were open at the various facilities within the FAA, but since I was still a young and inexperienced controller and happy to be working in my hometown, I wasn’t looking to transfer anywhere. I mainly read it because I was just fascinated by the number of open FPL positions that were being advertised.
Just as I was closing the binder my eye caught sight of a word on one of the vacancy announcements that I would never have associated with any air traffic position: Guam! I checked my watch and saw that I still had about five minutes before I was required to check in with my floor supervisor, so I quickly thumbed the sheets until I came to that particular announcement.
Reading hurriedly, I saw that the vacancy was for a facility on Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, M.I. (Marianas Islands), called Guam CERAP. It explained that Guam CERAP was a combined ARTCC/RAPCON (Radar Approach Control) FAA facility located on an Air Force base, and the FAA was soliciting applicants to fill a vacancy for a GS-12, ATCS (Air Traffic Control Specialist) position. Since I was already a GS-13, and I had no idea how a Center and a RAPCON could possibly be combined, I almost quit reading. Then some italicized print caught my eye:
“Selectees will be authorized free transportation for their immediate family, authorized free household goods transfer; authorized free shipment of one (1) automobile; receive free on-site housing for the term of the assignment; authorized per-diem at the rate of 2.5 times their salary from date of selection until established in on-site housing, and be granted a tax-free 25% post differential which will be added to their monthly salary. The selectee must sign a contract agreeing to serve two years at this facility and will be guaranteed full return rights to his/her home region and facility with no loss of service time at the end of that period. If the selectee, at the end of this contract agrees to sign a new two year contract, he/she, and family, will be provided with fully funded travel vouchers for common air carriers, and will be granted six weeks of leave to return to their home of record (home leave). Per-diem, at the rate of 2.5 times their normal salary, will be paid, in addition to salary, during the six-week home leave period. The new two-year contract will be signed prior to departing on Home Leave and will commence upon their arrival back to the Guam CERAP.”
Well—I thought—that 25% post differential pretty much maxes out what I presently make as a GS-13. Looking at my watch again I saw that I was running a little short on time, so I closed the binder and hurried to my area to check in. When my first break came up I returned to the binder, removed the Guam position announcement and headed for the nearest office copier.
Pulling into my driveway a few minutes before 10PM, I was hoping Kaz would still be up so I could show her what I’d found. I entered the semi-darkened house and found her in the living room, wrapped snugly in her robe and curled up on the couch reading a book.
“Hey, I’m glad you’re awake. I want to show you what I found at work.” I pulled out the copy of the announcement from my jacket.
“What that?” she asked curiously, putting the book down and sitting up, suddenly interested.
“Well, it’s called a “vacancy announcement”, and it shows where ATC jobs are open. This one says there’s a vacancy on Guam.”
“Guam?! They have Center on Guam? No, I don’t believe it. Guam too small.”
“No, it’s not a center. It’s what’s called a CERAP. That’s a center and a radar approach control combined. I’m not sure how that’s possible, but this announcement says there’s on there.”
“Why they have a center there anyway? It’s small Island…smaller than Okinawa, and it’s in the middle of the ocean. No, I don’t believe it.”
“Here, read it yourself,” I said, handing the copies of the announcement to her.
“Hmmm…” she said softly while reading it inquisitively. “Hey, it say here it only GS-12! That no good. You already GS-13, right?”
“Well that’s true. But if you look a little further down it says that they will pay an extra twenty-five percent. Plus, free housing and transportation. That alone will make it more than what I make now.”
“Hmmm…” she said again. “You know, if we go to Guam it much closer to Okinawa and I can go visit my family sometime. Living here in Houston I think we never have enough for airplane ticket to Okinawa. Right?”
“I think so. I’m not sure how many miles it is from Guam to Okinawa, but it has to be closer—that’s for sure.”
“So, you going to try to go?”
“At this point I have no idea what the first thing is that I need to do. I guess I could talk to the front office tomorrow and find out what the procedure is. They may not even want a rookie like me—maybe they’re looking for some older controllers. But for now, I just want us to talk about this to see if we really want to try to go somewhere like that.”
“Frank, it’s up to you. This is your career and I don’t want you to lose what you have. For me? Sure, I like the idea of being closer to my home, but we don’t know anything about Guam. Maybe you better find out more.”
“OK, I’ll do some checking tomorrow.”
***
The following day, and on my very first break, I walked up to the administrative wing to seek out some guidance. Houston ARTCC is a large two-story building, with a deep basement floor, and the actual center control room in the rear wing and on the first floor. Controllers, radar and radio technicians all parked in the rear parking lot where access to the control room and lower levels—where the techs worked—was fast and easy. The second floor was used for training—classrooms, a mock control room, and instructor offices took up the majority of the space, with a few rooms set aside for storage.
The front wing, first floor only, was unmistakably the gem of the whole building. A glass and chrome front entrance fronted onto Airport Boulevard—the main thoroughfare that terminated at the departure/arrival gates of the Houston Intercontinental Airport (now G.W. Bush International), two miles north. Entering through the massive front glass doors, one would be presented with a mirror-like black marble-floor hallway extending right and left. To the left was a beautifully designed, and glass encased, cafeteria; while to the right was situated the massive administrative area.
If one were to look straight ahead once inside the doors, you would be presented with a lush view of a massively overgrown, and stunningly lush solarium. Complete with tropical plants, a water feature, and anchored by three medium-sized pin oak trees, the solarium was bordered by the four glass-encased hallways and completely open at the top. It was breathtakingly beautiful at first glance.
Since I hardly ever had a chance to enjoy this view—always entering and exiting the building through the rear wing doors—I paused momentarily to take in the beauty of the large solarium. Small but numerous flights of jet-black starlings were launching themselves upwards from the pin oaks this sunny morning on their quest to feed before returning just before sunset to roost and chatter loudly among themselves in the trees’ low-hanging branches.
Returning to the task at hand, I pulled myself away and continued my search for the facility chief’s administrative assistant. Her name was Helen.
Helen was the head of all the administrative assistants, and the chief’s right hand “man”; she had been at Houston Center since its inception in 1965. She had transferred over, like of lot of the controllers and supervisors, from the old San Antonio Center where she’d been in the same position. Of all the glassed-in administrative offices, Helen’s was the largest, except maybe for the chief’s—his was larger but completely walled in and windowless. Helen’s office walls were gaily decorated with scaled-down replicas of the U.S. and Texas state flags, and on the top of the oversized oak bookcases below them were at least two dozen framed pictures of family, friends and probably a few favored retired controllers and supervisors. The common theme for each picture was that Helen was prominently featured—usually in the center of the group.
As a now accepted member of the Houston Center controller workforce I quickly learned that although the facility chief was the leader of the center, it was Helen who wielded the real power. Stories still circulated in the control room how several unfortunate controllers had been unduly terminated, even after the chief had assured them otherwise, after Helen had interceded and provided additional negative administrative evidence. She was one not to be trifled with, I was told.
She was probably in her mid-fifties, slim and petite in stature, with a pair of extraordinary and piercingly perceptive clear blue eyes. Her hair, bright blond, parted on the left, and always styled in a helmet-like bouffant accentuated with a flip just above her shoulders, framed her doll-like face perfectly. Her makeup was always impeccable, carefully painted on, and spoke of many hours spent in front of an illuminated cosmetic mirror.
Her voice resonated in a low alto register, hinting of at least a pack-a-day habit of her favored minty Kool cigarettes, and it was heavily accented in a west Texas drawl. Her favorite word was, “honey”—and depending on her mood, she used it as either a gracious compliment or a cutting insult.
Finding her at her desk busily shuffling through a stack of papers, I quietly walked into her office.
“Hi…uh, excuse me. I’d like to ask a question…” I stammered as I entered.
“Oh!” she said, and I wondered how one word could be phonetically twisted to sound so…Texan. “Hi honey. Come right on in! I was just looking at something or other here. What can I do for you?”
“Thanks. Well…” I raised the vacancy announcement sheet to show her what I had. “I…I was just wondering if I could ask you for some advice and maybe a little help.”
“Sure ‘nuff, honey. What’cha got there?”
“Well, I found this position vacancy announcement in the jobs binder and was wondering what the procedure was to put my name in for the job.”
“Let’s see. Give it here, honey.” She squinted her eyes and scanned the sheet. “Oh, this is a vacancy for Guam.” She put the put the vacancy announcement down on her lap and looked up at me with a little smile on her lips. “So, what you’re looking at here is what is referred to in the agency as a “plum” job. You know that don’t you?”
“Uh…no ma’am. I don’t know what that is. All I’d like to know is how I would go about in applying for this position. If you could help me with that.”
“Honey…it’s called ‘bidding’. When you put in paperwork for a job vacancy it’s called ‘bidding’, not applying.”
“OK. So, what would I need to bid on that vacancy?” She looked at me intently, cocked her head slightly, and smiled at me sweetly. “Honey, how long you been here? A couple of years, right?”
“Yes ma’am.” I wondered what that had to do with anything.
“So, like I said before…this here job is a plum position. It’s meant for controllers who’ve put in their time and paid their dues—so to speak. You could throw all the paper you want at this vacancy and as soon as the Western-Pacific Regional office saw your lack of time in the agency all that paper would go in the trash.”
“Uh….”
“So, this is what I’m suggesting, honey. Forget about this job in Guam and just concentrate on doing the best job you can here at Houston Center like we all do. Besides, I don’t think you want to go through all the effort of filling out all the necessary forms you would need for them to consider you just to have them chunk it in some can somewhere. Besides, I’m way too busy to have to do all I would have to do knowing that it would go nowhere. Now, is there anything else I can do for you honey?”
I stood there for a few seconds not knowing what to say. Then, a little flash of anger shot through my brain and I decided to throw all caution to the wind. “You know what, ma’am? If you won’t mind—and I understand what you’ve just said—I’d still like to submit my bid on this job. I may not get it, but at least they’ll know that I’m interested in the job. And let me apologize in advance for any extra work I may be causing you, but like you said, we’re all here to do the best job we can.”
Her soft blue eyes suddenly turned steely. “Well, honey! If that’s what you want to do, then so be it. I’m here not only to push papers but also to give advice, but if you’re not willing to take it then I guess we’ll both just have to waste our time.”
“Thank you, ma’am, I appreciate it.” And with that, she pushed her chair back and stood up. Smoothing her tightly fitting dark gray skirt with one hand while primping her helmet-like bouffant with the other, she turned and walked to a large black filing cabinet. After retrieving several forms from the cabinet, she walked back and handed the pile to me.
“Fill in all these forms with the information requested and refer to the vacancy number on the bid form where that information is requested. Return all to me as soon as you can so I can file them as necessary. Any questions?” She cupped her chin in the palm of her right hand while supporting her elbow with her left and stared at me intently.
“No ma’am. Thank you for your help.” I said humbly.
“Fine honey. Now get along, I have work to do.” And she turned away from me and returned to her desk.
It took me two days to fill out and sign all the forms. Not wanting to face Helen again, I stuffed them into a manila envelope and deposited them in the Center’s internal mail chute the following day when I went to work. I thought I’d hear something in a few weeks and kept checking my mail slot at work, but after a couple of months I came to the realization that Helen had probably been right all along, so I just put all thoughts of Guam out of my mind.
One Year Later…
I was literally minutes into my 3PM to 11PM evening shift and was busy working an extremely complex Galveston Low Altitude radar sector when I felt a tap on my right shoulder. Thinking that my supervisor, Bob Wold, had finally seen that I was close to sinking, and that he’d thoughtfully sent a “tracker” to assist me on keeping a lid on the exploding sector, I dutifully slid my chair over a few inches to let him plug in to the radio to start helping me sort through the beehive of airplanes I was working.
When nothing happened for a few seconds I looked over my shoulder and was surprised to see Bob standing there with his hands resting on his hips. “You got a second, DeLeon?”
“No, not really. I’m going down the crapper. You got a tracker coming?”
“No. I’m getting you relieved off the sector.”
“What?! Did I have a deal?”
“No! You’re doing fine. I just need to get you off the sector ‘cause the chief wants to see you.”
“The chief?! What the hell does he want?”
“I don’t know but right now, you need to look back at your radar—you’re just about to run those two fuckers together there just east of Hitchcock.”
I looked back and saw two of my many radar targets flashing a collision alert. They were on converging courses, both descending to seven thousand feet, and both heading to the Houston southeast arrival fix named Hitchcock. I had been planning to vector one of them behind the other just before Bob broke my concentration. I keyed my radio: “N7235L, turn left fifteen degrees, radar vectors behind converging traffic—a Super King Air, ten o’clock seven miles, crossing left to right, also at five thousand.
“Bonanza 35L, roger—turning left fifteen, looking for the traffic and requesting direct Hitchcock as soon as possible.”
“Roger, Houston altimeter 2997, expect direct Hitchcock as soon as practical reference that converging traffic.”
“Roger that.”
“OK,” Bob said. “I feel much better now.”
“Yeah, me too. Where’s my relief?”
“Right behind you getting the picture. Give him the briefing.”
Once my relief briefing was complete, I unplugged my headset and stowed it in my assigned headset cubby hole. I asked Bob again what the chief wanted.
“How the fuck do I know?” he said playfully. “Maybe he wants to personally give you a big bear hug for saving those two little bastards over Hitchcock a few minutes ago.” He smiled; his Lucky Strike cigarette glued to his lower lip spitting blackish-gray ash onto his coffee stained tie as he talked. “Seriously, I have no idea. But get your ass in gear and go see him now.”
“OK.”
“Oh, and if he offers you some jellybeans from the big fishbowl, he keeps on his desk, you can bet your ass is in big trouble. He only does that when he’s getting ready to severely chew somebody out.”
“OK, I’ll keep that in mind.”
***
After checking in with Helen, who seemed to be in an unusually surly mood, she directed me to have a seat while she went into the chief’s office to announce my arrival. Oddly, she hadn’t called me “honey” when I walked in—in fact she only made a grunting sound as she pointed to an empty chair and gestured for me to wait.
A minute or so later she emerged and curtly said, “He’ll see you now.” I got up, walked past her and entered the chief’s office. With no windows the large office was cloaked in semi-darkness with only a floor lamp and an oblong desk lamp to help pierce the grayness hanging over the room. Walking in from the overly bright administrative area made the office even darker, and the lingering stench of cigar and pipe smoke added to the dankness of the stagnant air.
L.E. Andersen was a large, portly man, who somehow seemed small sitting behind his massive dark oak executive desk and was almost swallowed up by an equally massive high-backed brown leather executive chair. Pushing himself forward off the chair he reached over the desk with his right hand extended while carefully keeping his smoking Half-bent Dublin pipe carefully shielded with his left.
“Hey Frank!” he said cheerfully, “Welcome to the bridge…”
“Thank you, sir,” I responded cautiously, trying not to notice the large goldfish bowl full of hard candy sitting prominently on the desk between us. I took his warm smooth hand and returned the firm grip and shake.
“Hell, son have a sit down there on either one of them seats. Paid a lot of money for them things and they hardly get any wear.” He gestured to two large black leather wingback chairs flanking and facing each corner of his desk.
“Thank you, sir.” I took a step to my left and eased down into the plush cool leather.
He sat back into his chair and methodically tapped the ashes from his pipe’s bowl into an etched crystal ashtray. “Well now…” he said, while concentrating on his pipe and watching the burnt black tobacco ashes tumble out of the pipe’s bowl. “How you doing out there? I hear you’re one of our best young controllers. Least that’s what your supervisor and area manager tell me. Also, you’re from right here in Houston, right?”
“Yes sir, I am. Born and raised.”
“How ‘bout that. Good man!”
“Thank you.”
“Oh,” he said suddenly. “Where are my manners? How about getting yourself a handful of these jellybeans here?” He reached out and pushed the large bowl across the desk’s shiny glass top towards me. I felt my innards tighten up a bit.
“Uh, no thank you sir. But I appreciate it.” I managed to say through the rapidly rising lump in my throat.
“Ah, well. Suit yourself. Guess I’ll have some myself.”
He daintily picked out a small handful of the colorful candy and popped a few into his mouth.
“Well, I guess you’re wondering why you’re here, hmm?”
“Yes sir, I am.”
“Sure, you are.” He sucked loudly at the candy and smacked his lips. “Well, first off I wanted to ask you if you know a guy named Bill Hoy.”
“Bill…Hoy?” I asked slowly while trying to remember if I’d ever run across someone by that name. “No sir, I don’t think I know anyone by that name.”
“OK. Well Bill and I were in the Navy together a long time ago. Great guy! Hell of a drinker and quite the ladies’ man. Of course, he’s married now, and the wife clipped his wings but good.” He chuckled and checked his pipe to make sure it was all the way out. “Anyway, even though we haven’t laid eyes on one another in a damn coon’s age we still stay in touch you know. Oh, ‘bout once every six months or so we call one another to shoot the shit and see what’s what in the agency.”
While he droned on about his friend, I couldn’t help but sink a little deeper into my growing discomfort and confusion. Why the hell was I here? Surely, I’d done something wrong—and serious enough to have him call me in and announce my punishment personally. After all he had offered me the dreaded candy, so I was sure this was going to cost me a GS grade or two. His voice fading further away I pushed my memory to see if I could come up with the incident that had brought me to this point in my career. I wondered how we were going to pay off the furniture and Kaz’s new piano if I was dropped back to a GS-12, or even a GS-11. God, what if he was getting ready to fire me?
“Well anyway…hell, I’m way off the subject!” He said loud enough to bring me back. “What I wanted to say was, well me and Bill were on the phone late last night talking about our facilities and your name came up.”
“My name?” I asked. “I don’t understand…”
“Yup. See, Bill is the chief way out there on Guam…and, of course because of the horrendous time difference we always end up talking late at night. Anyhow, he mentioned that one of my boys had put in some paperwork some time back to transfer over to his facility. Of course, that surprised the hell out of me so I asked him who that might be. And guess what? It was you!”
The word Guam, thrown out so randomly, took me completely by surprise—and I’d almost forgot that I bid on a job there.
“You bid on a controller job there…let’s see…I think he said…” he pushed some papers around on his desk. “Oh yeah, about a year ago. Is that right?”
Finally coming to my senses, I confessed. “Yes sir, that’s right. But Helen told me…” I wanted to tell him about her saying that that job was a plum one.
“Well ain’t that something!” he said loudly, rocking back on his massive chair and popping a few more jellybeans. “I told him he had to be mistaken, that nobody here’d want to go to Guam, but I checked this morning and found you that you in fact had thrown some paper at that job!”
“Ah, yes I did. But that was over a year ago. And I thought….”
“Well, that now begs the obvious question, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You obviously wanted to go last year, right? So, the question is, do you still want to go?”
“I, uh…”
“Well, do you?”
My mind was spinning, and my heart was thumping. What if I said yes, and I came across as not liking my job here? How would that affect my future? But then, what if I said no? Maybe he’s testing my loyalty. Maybe…maybe.
“Yes! Yes, I still want to go!” The words came spilling out as if I had no control of my own tongue.
“Well, there you go. What about your wife? Do you think you may want to ask her first?”
“No. Even without asking her, I know she’ll want to go.”
He sat there studying me for a few seconds. Finally, he said, “OK, look I don’t know if there’s anything I can do. After all, Bill is my friend all right but he’s the chief at Guam. If you want, I can make a call and see what he thinks, but I doubt that I’ll have any influence on any decision he’ll want to make.”
“OK, that’s fair.” I said.
“Fine! All right well look, I’ve kept you away from your sector for long enough. I just wanted to get your take on this, so the next time I talk to Bill I’ll let you know one way or the other—but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. In fact, don’t even tell your wife we talked. Nothing will probably come of it.”
Three Weeks Later….
I had been attending morning classes at Sam Houston University in Huntsville on Tuesday and Thursday, and since Mondays were my first day off, and Thursdays I started my shift at 2 pm, the school schedule was working out just fine. After the first week of classes, I found out that one of my friends at the center, Jim Tharp, was also taking classes on the same days so we got together to split the fifty-mile one-way drive between us. He had just dropped me off around noon on a Thursday when Kaz met me at the door.
“I have very two very weird phone calls today!” she announced nervously as I walked in.
“What weird calls?”
“Well, one is some ship company. They want to know when we will have our car in California!”
“What?! What ship company?”
“They say something about ‘bear’. I don’t know. But the other is some furniture moving company—Atlas, I think—and they want to know when they can come to pack our furniture! Is this have to do with Guam?”
“Wait!” I said, putting my books down on the kitchen table. “That can’t be right. I don’t even know if I’ve been selected to go to Guam. Besides, if I had been selected, I would’ve been told by the administration by now and given orders. So, I don’t know what this is all about. Are you sure you got the right information about what they wanted?”
“Yes! They want to know dates!”
“Well, we don’t have any dates. But I’ll talk to Helen when I get to work today. I think maybe it was just some kind of wrong number. I just talked to the chief a couple of weeks ago and if he’d heard something they would’ve told me.”
“No Frank!! They say your name and they say my name. Maybe your name is common American name but mine is not.” I had to agree that she had a point.
After arriving at work later and checking in on my shift, I peeked into my work mailbox to see if there was anything that resembled travel orders, and I found nothing. Just before I plugged into my assigned sector, I asked my supervisor if he could make sure I got a break before the administrative section in the front office went home. They usually cleared out by 4PM, so I wanted to make sure someone was still in the office so I could ask about the calls Kaz had received. He said he’d do his best to get me off.
On my break I hurried down to the administrative wing to pay a visit to Helen. I found her rearranging a stack of booklets as I came through her open door.
“Hi Helen. I hope I’m not bothering you, but I have a question.”
“And what is that, honey?”
“Well, my wife told me she got a couple of calls earlier today while I was in school—one from a shipping company in California and another from a moving and storage company. They both asked for dates on when we planned to have our car in California and the other on when they could expect to arrive at our house to pack up our furniture.”
“OK, so what’s your question?”
“Uh…well…am I going somewhere? Because if I am, I don’t have any orders. At least I didn’t find any in my mail slot.”
“Wasn’t that you who wanted that job in Guam?”
“Yes. But I’ve received no notification that I’ve been accepted.”
“Didn’t you just tell me your wife got a couple of calls yesterday?”
“Sure. But if I’ve been selected for the job in Guam shouldn’t I have orders—or at least something that tells me when I’m supposed to be going? How do we know what to tell the moving companies?”
“Tell them whatever you want.” I was flabbergasted with her response, so I decided to try a more forceful tack.
“Do I have orders to go to Guam or not!” Helen, who had turned away from me to continue her paper shuffling, looked up at me angrily.
“Listen! I don’t have time to deal with you right now. As soon as we do get something, you’ll find it in your mail slot. Now if you don’t mind, I’m busy with more important things, honey!” And with that she motioned to me with a dismissive wave of her hand, stood up and walked out of her office. I was left there alone wondering what I should do next.
As I began to turn away to follow her out, I felt a hand touch my shoulder. A little shocked, I turned to find one of the other lower-ranked administrative assistants named Linda looking at me sympathetically. “Listen,” she said. “Why don’t you step into my office for just a little bit so we can speak privately?”
“OK.” I followed her into a small office further inside the administrative area and saw that it even though it was smaller, it wasn’t walled with transparent glass walls.
“Listen, I couldn’t help but overhear what you and Helen were talking about…and promise me that you didn’t hear this from me,” she began. “Orders for your reassignment actually came in about a week ago, and I think Helen shelved them somewhere. I asked her yesterday if she’d notified you and she blew me off. Told me to mind my own business.”
“What? Why would she do that?” I asked.
Linda looked at me curiously and said, “I think you know the answer to that. She never wanted you to get that job—and I’m surprised she even filed your paperwork with the Western Pacific Region. But I guess she thought you’d never even be considered. But look, here’s what I suggest you do. Go back to the control room and talk to your area manager. You work for Marshall Moyle, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“OK perfect, tell him you talked to Helen about your orders, but she denies knowing anything about them. I guarantee you Marshall will get to the bottom of this pretty fast.”
“OK, thanks. Look, I don’t want to get Helen into any trouble, but I don’t understand why she would do that.”
“She does what she thinks she can get away with, and she’s really hated by all the other secretaries. But you know, she has a lot of power with the chief, so we all keep quiet. It’s opportunities like this that we all wait for just to try to make her look bad. See, I was in the office when your orders came in and saw how Helen reacted. We all know she’s angry because you forced her to submit your request last year after she tried to talk you out of it, and really pissed because L.E. arbitrated on your behalf with the chief on Guam. She thinks you don’t have the seniority to get this kind of a job. But please don’t say anything about this to anyone. You got what you wanted, so let Marshall deal with it from now on. Just let it play out. She can’t go against an area manager…especially Marshall.”
“I really appreciate it.”
“OK, now off with you. Go out through the side door so Helen doesn’t see that you were in my office. I think she’s in the coffee shop, but just to make sure. OK?”
On my way back to my sector I asked my floor supervisor if I could speak to Marshall.
“What about?” he asked, a little suspiciously.
“Well, I just want to ask him a question. It’s nothing about the operation here.”
“Is it personal?”
“Yes.”
“OK, as long as it’s nothing about ATC. If it is, I need to know what it’s about. But you’re gonna have to wait for a little while ‘cause I gotta tell him you need to talk to him. So, for now go and relieve the Daisetta sector. I’ll get you off when he’s ready to see you.”
I didn’t get to talk to Marshall until about an hour before my shift was over when I was told to go to his office just outside of the control room.
Marshall was one of the more senior area managers. He was just under six feet tall, thin and wiry and sported a perpetual tan—probably because when he was not working, he could always be found on his boat fishing on Lake Conroe. His facial features were sharp and angular and reminded me of a dark-toned Humphrey Bogart. He preferred to dress in dark brown or gray leisure suits, and like most men during that era, always had a lit cigarette dangling from his fingers.
I knocked quietly at the half-opened office door and he waved me in.
“Hi Frank. What can I do for you?”
I began to explain about my submitting a bid for a job last year when he raised his hand and stopped me.
“Is this about Helen giving you a hard time today about some travel orders?” I wondered how he’d found out.
“Well yeah, kind of.”
“I know all about it. You’re working a day shift tomorrow, aren’t you?” he asked, taking a long drag off his cigarette.
“Yes. I come in at seven.”
“OK, check in with the area manager when you arrive…I won’t be in until three…but the problem should be resolved by then. Just tell him I asked you to stop by. Anything else?”
“No. I don’t think so.
“Fine. Have a good evening. Close the door when you leave.” I had been told that Marshall was a man of
few words, and that he had immense sway within the facility, but his brevity on
this issue left me totally puzzled. How
could this issue be resolved overnight?
When I got back to the sector, my supervisor asked me how the meeting had gone. I told him it was short, and he responded that I had visited with Marshall longer than he’d anticipated. “Must’ve been a real complex problem,” he added.
The next morning before checking into my area for my sector assignment, I walked up and checked in with the area manager on duty. Before I could say another word, he told me to go back out and check my mail slot. I did, and in it I found a thick package containing my reassignment letter, travel orders, a welcome letter from the Western Pacific Region, and various documents that required my approval and signature.
***
Two weeks later, Kaz and I had booked air travel from Los Angeles to Guam via Hawaii, contracted our house for sale by a government agency, had our household belongings packed and shipped off by Atlas Moving and Packing, and arranged to have our car at a pier in San Pedro, California, for subsequent shipment to Guam aboard a Golden Bear Shipping Lines cargo ship.
I was granted three weeks travel from the US, and six weeks per diem after we arrived on Guam. With all that time, and since our 1972 Mercury Grand Marquis was still relatively new, we decided that it would be nice to drive leisurely to the West Coast and have it shipped from there, rather than having it shipped from Houston. That decision would prove to be troublesome and cause us a not-so-small inconvenience.
But, as they say, that’s a story for another time.
NEXT: Guam – Part One