Michael Feany:  

My Story ? You want to hear my story....... How I ended up moving to Santa Barbara, California in October of 1988. I had been attending the University of Iowa, studying philosophy in 1983 and 1984. My funds were running low so I looked around for ways to finance my lifestyle as a professional student. I decided that joining the Iowa Army National Guard would help out. So I joined the Guard Unit in Iowa City, Iowa. It was a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH like the TV show). They sent me off to basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina in May of 1985. In July of 1985 after completing basic training, I was shipped off to Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas. There I got my advanced individual training as a Combat Army Medic. That was a ten week course which I completed by mid September of 1985. I then returned to Iowa City, Iowa. It was at this point that I realized that I didn't want to do six years in the National Guard. I found out that if I went on two years of active duty with the Regular Army I would complete my military obligation. So that is what I decided to do. In early September of 1986 I went off to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C.. I went there for a ten week course of training as a Power Generation Repair Specialist. I got a serious case of walking pneumonia round about Halloween. I remember getting sick very clearly. A group of us trainees had gotten hotel rooms in Georgetown in DC to celebrate a wild Halloween weekend. But I ended up being sick as a dog and could only sleep the whole time. I managed to make it through the training course and even come out as the top student in my group of thirty students or so. Then it was off to my permanent duty station. My assignment was two years at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. I didn't know it at the time, but it is the proud home of the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division. So that is where I spent the next two years, living in the soldier's barracks on Fort Campbell, Kentucky. It is right on the border with Tennessee, just an hour or so from Nashville. I worked in the HHC DISCOM (Headquarters Company Division Support Command) motor pool, maintaining the unit's generators. It was a rather long two years. During my time there at Fort Campbell, I saved some money, got my first personal computer ( a Commodore 64 executive model) and I still have it, in a closet somewhere. I learned to type on it, using some typing tutor software and learned to play chess on it as well. I spent a good deal of my free time at the post library reading and thinking about what I was going to do and where I was going to go, when I got out. I made a list of the kinds of attributes I wanted in the next place that I would live. It had to have a nice climate, not too cold or too hot. It had to be on the coast, probably west coast. I wanted it to be near some mountains as well. The city couldn't be too big or too small. And it had to have a good university so I could use my newly acquired college fund to go back to the life of a professional student. While looking through college catalogues in the Post library, I ran across one from the University of California at Santa Barbara. It had the most beautiful aerial photograph taken from about 10,000 feet above Santa Barbara. It showed the community and the mountains and the ocean in a very beautiful way. I was hooked from the moment I saw that picture. I did some additional research on Santa Barbara and found it met all my requirements quite well. So as the end of my two years approached, I made a deal trading off my 1977, $25 Chrysler Cordoba and my 1972 V-8 Vega wagon for a 1984 Mazda B-2000, 5 speed pickup truck with a camper shell on it. Finally, after a long two year wait, on September 6th, 1988 I headed o...Expand for more