Gerald Carr:  

After an inauspicious beginning graduation night i.e. woke up in front of Joe Kesslings’s house with no recollection of how I got there, I started work as a welder apprentice in June 1967 at ARADMAC (CCAD now) and graduated as a certified aircraft welder in July 1970. During that time I finished Del Mar. Basically I was either at school or working for those 3 years. I moved on to the University of Houston (UH) and graduated in 1973 with the same work full time/school full time schedule I had a Del Mar. There I hung with some other Tigers/Corpus Christi expatriates (“Los Corpitos” i.e. Joe Kessling, Terry Mason and Hal Bingham) in the somewhat undesirable part of SE Houston off Griggs Road. Actually Terry was at Rice and lived in the dorm until he moved to our apartments, the Sunrise. I worked at Texas Instruments and Hughes Tool Company in its heyday. I foolishly thought I still wanted to be a lawyer and wound up at UT law school where my greatest achievement was being a photographer for the Law School year book The Peregrinus. Look up that word and you can see the mythical creature that pretty much exemplifies the chaos that surrounded the endeavor. I just didn’t sign up for the next year and went back to Houston and Hughes Tool Company. I realized that my interest was in engineering with applications in material science, inspection, and evaluation. I took some mechanical engineering studies at UH but never got a degree in that field. After another year at Hughes, I was hired by Hunt Tool Company/Geosource on McBride Lane in Corpus Christi as the second shift superintendent. Yes, the return of the Corpito. By then I had married a W B Ray graduate and had #1 child on the way. Through the good offices of my former SMSG geometry teacher at Carroll, Pat Juelg, I was able to talk to her husband Gene who was the lab director at CCAD. I found out there was an opening in the lab and I applied and wound up there. Career wise I was home: metallurgy, metals finishing, and most important, nondestructive testing (NDT). Eventually I became the depot’s NDT Program Manager. I got to go all over the USA and some foreign locations supporting Army aviation and troop training. I am now a life member of the American Society for Non Destructive Testing (ASNT) and a Level 3 in 5 methods. I retired two weeks after my 55th birthday (yup 55th) with 31 years. BEST OF ALL I was able to continue my health insurance!! Eat your heart out. Did I mention I had two more children? Brian and Matthew both maroon blood (Corps of Cadets) Aggies. The eldest, Cathe...Expand for more