Wayne Fowler:  

After graduating from Hillsborough High in 1964, I took the summer off to just relax. I had already committed to join the Air Force during the summer of 63. During high school, I was a member of the ROTC unit, played in the military band, and served as executive officer and company commander my senior year. Once I joined the Air Force in the fall of 1964, I traveled to Texas for basic and tech school. They taught me to operate electrical power plants. Then I was sent back to Florida for my first assignment at Cross City AFS. In 1966, I got orders to Okinawa, spent about 18 month there and in Japan. During that time, I graduated from the NCO Leadership School at Yomato AS, Japan. Also spent one summer on Ie Shima island where the famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed in the last battle of WWII. Then I was reassigned to RAF Croughton in England where I worked on one of the first Autodin telephone switching stations. I also went back to school at Capitol Radio Engineering Institute earning a BSAE degree. England was a great place to be in those years. I was able to travel extensively throughout Europe. In 1971, the Air Force reassigned me to the arctic circle to a radar site at Kotzebue, Alaska. That was short lived though because they moved me again to one of the most distant islands of the Aleutian island chain, Shemya. What a windy place! Finally, after five and a half years out of country, I returned to Caswell AFS in Maine. I was barely in the US though as I could see the pedestals used to mark the Canadian border from my office window. Because I was getting a little tired of all the remote assignments, I decided to cross train into Air Traffic Control radar maintenance. They sent me to school for a year at Biloxi, Mississippi. What a sleepy little place it was in those years. Plenty of time to study. For my first assignment in my new field of work, they sent me to the high desert of California at George AFB. There I maintained the equipment that guided the latest prototype and experimental airplanes the Air Force was working on. My new work didn't last for long though as they sent me back to remote Alaska in 1975. There, I spent one of my coldest winters (minus 60 degrees) in the outback along the Iditarod trail. In 1976, I was able to return to Texas, to the oil country out west. The assignment to Webb AFB turned out to be short lived too as they announced the closing of the base the day I arrived. I stayed on to shut everything down and then moved to Wichita Falls about a year later. Also, in that short time, I was able to attend and graduate from the NCO Academy and married Dana West. What a year! In Wichita Falls, I was able to help in the aftermath recovery of one of the worst tornados to hit that area. My training in portable power generation was a big help. Later that year, I was returned to my other career field working on the RAPCON equipment that controlled aircraft coming into the joint military/civilian airport. At night and on weekends, because Air Force pay was not the greatest, I worked at the FBO servicing all the aircraft coming and going. In 1979, I went back overseas to Levkas Greece to manage a tropospheric scatter radio relay site. That was a choice assignment. In my spare time, I sailed around most of the islands in the Adriatic sea. Returning to the states in 1982, I was assigned to MAC HQ near St Louis, MO. I was able to complete my second degree of college work, a BSOE from Southern Illinois U. During that assignment I was part of a combat engineering team that responded to emergency situations that required civil engineering support. A tornado hit Altus AB, OK and nearly destroyed it. Tore up two C-5 jumbo cargo planes as well. We were the first team on the ground and they set our first priority of rebuilding the main dining hall so the airmen could eat a regular meal. It took us three days to clear the debris and put the dining facility back together. The place was a complete wreck. Shards of glass were driven into the walls over an inch deep. We had to design and construct a new roof as the original one was long gone. After almost three years there, I was reassigned to Charleston, SC. I took over as electrical superintendent of the civil engineering squadron. During that time I attended and graduated from the senior NCO Academy, ...Expand for more