Thomas Salinas:
CLASS OF 1958
Robstown High SchoolClass of 1958
Robstown, TX
Thomas's Story
9/15/21 Well folks, Dr. Sian Proctor is in space right now, even as I write! I've included a photo of my friend Brian Riehle and Dr. Proctor when she went to visit him.
7/25/21
Just found out that a friend I worked with in Guam on the Apollo Space Program and then with Univac installing computers at major US airports around the country had a daughter born on Guam (like my 2 children), named Sian Proctor and she has been selected to pilot the next Spacecraft X into space on 9/15/21! She's an astronaut! Her parents would have been so proud of her accomplishment but they have both passed away. Dr. Sian Proctor who lives by Cape Canaveral, contacted a mutual acquaintance or ours in Florida and will visit him at his home since currently he's bedridden and can't travel. I thought that was very
thoughtful and classy of her. I'll have to settle for viewing pictures of the visit.
7/20/21
On this date 52 years ago Apollo 11 landed on the moon and when the two American astronauts set foot on the moon they became the first humans to set foot on a celestial body outside our own planet Earth. I am proud and consider myself fortunate to have participated in such an historic endeavor as a computer technician working at the NASA Tracking Station on the island of Guam. It was one of the major accomplishments of my life and I will continue to celebrate this event as long as I live. See, Cotton Pickers do get around, eh? Check out the photo in my album below.
10/30/20
Just saw Willie Jones' name in the "do you remember section" and of course I remembered him but I don't think he knew me. Anyway, it reminded me about a friend of mine asking I of I had told him previously about being from Robstown, Texas and when I said yes, he asked me if I knew Willie Jones and of course I said yes that he was a star running back on our football team. He proceeded to showed me a me a page in the book he was reading titled "Three Yards and a Cloud of Dust", a book about Ohio State football and written by their famous coach Woody Hayes. The page he showed me had a paragraph about "some freshman football player from Robstown, Texas, playing for Perdue(?) that had run roughshod over his Buckeyes for close to 250 yards(?) and upset the Big 10 powerhouse. My friend was, and still is, a diehard Buckeye fan. Just thought I'd let you know, if anybody reads this.
50 years ago today (4/11/70) I was in Corpus Christi supporting the ill-fated Apollo 13 Moon Mission at the NASA Tracking Stat...Expand for more
ion. Also supported the historic Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 missions in Guam and several Gemini Man-in-Space missions on board the *USN Coastal Sentry and at NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston.
While on the Gemini program I actually circumnavigated the earth via sea, air and land travel which took about a year. I then hired on with Univac installing computers for the Automatic Radar Traffic System (ARTS 3) for the FAA at major airports including Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico and later on worked on the ARTS 2 program for medium sized airports that included Corpus Christi, though I didn't personally participate in that installation. Then in 1972 I went to work for the FAA in Atlantic City, NJ on the same ARTS systems and retired in 2007. In my travels I ran into people from Robstown in Guam, North Texas, Oklahoma, Michigan, California, West Va.. and Chicago. Everybody seems to like our High School team's name... The Cotton Pickers! What's there not to like?.
July 2020
I noticed that Chicago, Seattle, South Dakota and Minneapolis in the news lately and it brought back memories. I spent 2 years in Chicago attending DeVry Tech after graduation from RHS but it wasn't as "wide open" then as it is now, it was actually a pretty nice city. I spent 3 months in Seattle in 1962 attending training on the Minuteman ICBM at Boeing and attended the World's Fair and dined (twice) at the Space Needle restaurant that rotates but didn't see much because of the fog. I was then sent to Rapid City, So. Dakota in January '63 and got caught in a snowstorm going over the Rockies. My '62 "Vette didn't have snow tires but I made it OK. Boeing had set up a Bachelor Quarters Complex near the World Famous Wall Drug. While there I got to see Mount Rushmore, herds of buffaloes, hundreds of rattlesnakes and humongous mosquitoes! I also visited the Black Hills and the Bad Lands. They were also filming the movie "How the West Was Won" but we weren't allowed on location...bummer. After I was laid off I also lived in Minneapolis while working for the Univac Computer Co. before I was sent to the field and was in New Orleans for 3 months and attended Mardi Gras festivities that started several weeks before they stopped on the day after "Fat Tuesday". That was fun. I also went to St. Louis and went to the top of the Gateway Arch in little cabs, similar to ones on a ferris wheel. You had to lean forward to look out the little windows and I felt like the structure was starting to fall over!
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