Chuck Woods:  

Hi there- I moved to Manhattan Beach when I was about 4 years old. I went to both Robinson and Pacific schools before attending MCHS. My older sister and brother were both teachers/coaches while I was at Mira Costa. They were in some of the first graduating classes from the newly opened MCHS wayback in the mid 1950's, went on to USC and then returned to Costa as faculty members. My sister, Beverly Rohrer, eventually became the Dean of Students at MCHS and then moved on to become the Superentendant of the Manhattan Beach as well as the Redondo Beach School Districts. She was the first women ever to serve in the later position. MCHS was just a great high school to attend and I remember most of my school friends and football teammates. I was lucky to have played sports with some really good athletes as well as go to school with a lot of very smart and fun people. Surfing with all my friends at 3rd/4th/5th streets was so much fun and just hanging out at the beach was certainly one the many highlights of growing up in Manhattan. After graduation, I went on the play football at El Camino JC where I was the starting running back for two years. It was great fun playing football at El Camino. Our team had some really good football players from all over the South Bay. Many players went on to play college football and even a couple made it to the NFL. I was contacted by several colleges to play football at the next level while playing there. I was extremely excited to have the opportunity to play at the major college level but prior to completing the college enrollment process I was drafted by the US Army. I went off to army basic training in Feurary 23, 1967. When I arrived at Fort Benning, GA, I decided to extend my two year draft commitment in order to go to Officer Candidate School and I was selected to attend the army artillery academy at Fort Sill, OK. I was comissioned in December 1968 as a 2nd Lieutenant, US Army Artillery Corps. I stayed at Fort Sill after graduation to attend several specialized artillery officer training courses. The advanced training lasted about 6 months and when completed, I was assigned to Fort Irwin, CA as the executive officer of a field artillery battery. Fort Irwin is located about 45 miles outside Barstow, CA right in the middle of nowhere. The unit that I was assigned to had the Army's biggest self propelled artillery guns that could fire a 200 pound shell well over 15 miles. After about 10 months in the Mojave Desert I volunteered to go to airborne jump school. I was accepted and said goodbye to the Mojave Desert, Fort Irwin, all my military friends as well as those very, very big guns. I went back to Fort Benning, GA to attend airborne jump school. What fun it was to jump out of airplanes. My second jump was from a C-141 four engine jet...needless to say my knees were more than a bit wobbly! My "career" as an officer in the army lasted four years, two of which I was assigned to the101st Airborne Division. I jumped out of a bunch of airplanes and helicopters which was an absolute blast and I served a combat tour with the 101st in Vietnam which was not. In combat terrible things can happen and while on patrol in the A-Shau Valley, close to the Laotian border, my long range recon team and I found ourselves in the very wrong place at the very wrong time. I was medevaced first to a field hospital in Da Nang, then to Japan where I spent a couple weeks in the hospital and then on to Letterman's General in San Francisco to fully recover. It was great to be able to walk out of the hospital. I went home and spent a couple weeks in Manhattan Beach before returning to Fort Sill, OK to serve as the commanding officer of a field artillery training unit. Ironically, it was the exact unit that I was in before attending Officer Candidate School just few years earlier. It was very eerie to be the commanding officer of the same advanced training unit that I had once served in as extremely naive officer training cadet. It seemed like a lot had happened in my life by the time I reached the age of 24, a combat veteran now with my own staff of officers and NCOs as well as the responsiblity for the training of 120+ soon to be new Army 2nd lieutenants. One bright moment in Vietman was that I was able to spend a day with Mike Milligan right before Christmas in1968. I had a couple of days to burn up after arriving in Vietnam. Being an officer helped a lot. I commandeered a jeep, a driver and we drove around for awhile until we found Mike's unit. Mike was great friend of mine who graduated from MCHS in 1963. It was surreal to have couple of beers 7,500 miles from home with a friend who lived just around the block from my home in Manhattan Beach. When I left the Army, I basically did nothing but surf the coast of California, play baseball with my friends and enjoy the Manhattan Beach life style. I bought a home in Manhattan and I tried as best as I could to assimilate back into a normal life style but it was difficult. I had changed, most of my friends had moved on and our country was in the middle of a political struggle about the merits of the Vietnam war itself. I put my combat medals in a small box along with pictures of friends who made it back from Vietnam as well as some who didn't. I put the box in my attic and I haven't opened the box in over 40 years. I decided to return to college and completed my Bachelors of Business Administration degree at Loyola University and continued on, receiving my Masters of Business Administration from Pepperdine's School of Business. After graduation, I worked at different management consulting firms and healthcare companies before moving into the international business arena. I must confess that among a lot of other after work activities that having a few cocktails at Critters, Ercoles, Grunions and The Tiki Bit with my friends was great fun. The Tiki Bit was just around the corner from my house on Larsson Street in Manhattan. That spot is now a Taco Bell fast food restaurant! In 1979, I was hired by an healthcare company that built and managed very large hospital delivery systems for governments throughout the world. As the International Director of Information Technology, I was responsible for the installation of the computers and all the software required to operate and manage the hospitals that our company built. Most of my travel and project responsibilities were in the Middle East, although trips around the world were not uncommon. I would normally spend 3 weeks traveling abroad, followed by about 6 weeks at our corporate offices located in Santa Monica, CA before heading out again to the next project site. The international business arena was a lot of fun at first but over time travel to the Middle East became very dangerous. I was also spending about 5 months out of the year at our various project sites throughout the world. A long time to be away from my home in Manhattan Beach. I decided to leave the company in the mid 1980's to work closer to home. I have to admit that even with the international travel demands that scuba diving in the Red Sea off the Saudi Arabian coast was something to behold and was one of the many highlights I experienced. It was very rewarding to work with the people in the many countries that our company operated in as well as to get to know their cultures. I was so fortunate to have worked in some of the most spectacular places in the world only to be humbled by the people who lived there. The most terrifying event I experienced was being at a business meeting in downtown Baghdad, Iraq during the Iraq/Iranian war. The Iranian air force jets began bombing the oil fields outside downtown Baghdad. Needless...Expand for more