Mike Jordan:
CLASS OF 1970
East High SchoolClass of 1970
Anchorage, AK
Walla Walla High SchoolClass of 1970
Walla walla, WA
Mike's Story
What I have been up to for the last 50 years…
I was in the Air Force from the end of 1971 till mid 1981
During my time in the Air Force I was stationed inside of Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs, CO. By inside, I was 9500 feet up and a half mile inside of the mountain.
I did a tour in Turkey on a mountain top outside of Ankara from 1973-1974. Turkey at that time still liked Americans and was a very interesting place.
I next went to Vandenburg AFB in California. A lot of military spy satellites were launched as well as some of the largest unmanned rockets were launched (Titan III-C series) and the test and training site for minuteman missiles. I was fortunate to have actual speaking parts during a number of rocket launches… even if it was only a few words to check off a number of the launch check list, it was still exciting for a guy that grew up during the 60’s and the moon landings.
After Vandenburg I went to Germany for 3 years (1976-1979) stationed at Rhein-Main AFB outside of Frankfurt. While there I was only a few hundred feet from the Officer Club when it was blown up by a terrorist bomb. I have pictures but I was too close for the telephoto lens I had on my camera and didn’t get pictures of the whole building burning. Terrorist also blew up the Army Frankfurt Officer Club and several vehicles in the Weisbaden Air Station motor pool. It was interesting times being in Europe during that period.
From Germany I went to Sunnyvale AFS in Sunnyvale, California (just north of San Jose) where I was once again involved with satellites, this time communicating and pulling data from them and passing it on up the chain. I was here until I got out of the Air Force in 1981.
Before I joined the Air Force, Karen Adams (class of ’71, sister of Keith Adams, Class of ‘70) and I met, fell in love, got engaged and broke up (pressure from her family) two weeks before leaving for the Air Force. Although I kept in touch with her closest friend Karen did not contact me again until 9 months later just before I was about to get out of technical school at Kessler AFB, Mississippi. She was living in Chattanooga, Tenn (the reason I went to that school in Miss was because I knew she would (possibly) eventually move back to Chattanooga and it was the closest I could get… just in case I could change her mind). A few weeks before I graduated and went to my first assignment at Cheyenne Mountain, CO, she contacted me. We talked, met that weekend and got married the next. One of the few plans of mine that actually worked out. Ha!
3 years later, in 1975, we decided to have a child and had a beautiful girl. She was big at 9lb 7oz and for those that knew Karen, she was a very petite girl, so it was a rough pregnancy for her. We named her Misty and I was in the delivery room and got to see her drop into the doctor’s hands. A funny side story… Karen went from very light labor to full labor in about 30 minutes. Karen was screaming her head off and annoying all the staff (they didn’t know at the time that she went into full labor so fast and just thought she was overreacting) but when the nurse decided to take a look she was surprised when she found Misty’s head was almost out. I had been perfectly calm during all the screaming and rushing about because none of the nurses seemed to be worried or excited, but when the nurse started yeaing “Get me a doctor! Any doctor”, my stress level immediately took a big jump. Her doctor had not been scheduled to come by for another hour or so. The funny part was Karen managed to stop screaming long enough to ask the nurse if it was a boy or girl. The nurse answered, “I don’t know, I can’t tell from the ears”. With all of the stress and confusion going on, for some reason I always thought that was funny. I’m kind of strange that way. They did get a doctor up in time for both of us to get scrubbed up and him to get Karen positioned for the delivery. He still had a few moments before Misty dropped into his hands. I was so relieved that it all turned out just fine. And so excited to see my daughter born.
After we got out of the Air Force, I went to work for Satellite Business Systems just outside the beltway in Washington DC. It was a start up company by IBM to compete with AT&T and it was very exciting times. Also, very busy.
Unfortunately, Karen divorced me in 1987 after 16 years of marriage. This was probably the lowest point of my life and though she remarried very quickly, I didn’t. It was 3 years before I remarried.
During my single time, the company I worked for, SBS was taken over by MCI. I stayed on for a while but MCI was not a very people oriented company at that time (if they ever was). I took a GS position with Voice of America working on their newly updated communications systems using satellites. Having satellites on your resume during the 80’s made you very much in demand. The problem was, that everything you have ever heard about working for the government is greatly under exaggerated. There really are a lot of people there that do not do their jobs because they knew it was next to impossible to fire them. As a supervisor I had to deal with this all the time and didn’t care for it. So after a couple of years of this I moved to another satellite job in Charlotte, NC.
While in Charlotte, a woman that I knew casually from the online service, QLink (QLink turned into AOL in 1991) started getting serious. The challenge was that she lived just outside Portland, OR and I was in Charlotte. We managed to make it work though and after meeting a couple of times we got engaged. While engaged, because long distance online romances were not something you heard about much then, we were interviewed twice by USA Today, with our pictures and story and once by the Oregonian during one of my visits back to Portland for a job interview. 5 minutes before 1991 was rung in, we were married and have been married for over 30 years now.
I moved...Expand for more
to the Portland area (Hillsboro) and took a job. Before I left the Air Force I started getting into computers because they seemed to be the wave of the future (little did anyone know just how much). In 1979 I bought my first Apple II+, followed by another one in 1981, followed by Commodore computers and then my first PC in 1988. After I got the PC I ran a bulletin board system with it. Our daughter took to the computers like she was born to them and by the time she was about 7 or 8 she was hitting almost 100 words a minute typing with almost perfect accuracy. It was amazing to watch her go. She was the computer go-to girl all the way through 6th grade at her school since none of the teachers knew much about all of the Atari computers that were donated to them.
After I moved to the Portland area, my new wife, who was almost as computer literate as I was, got into computers in a big way. At one point we had over 14 computers in our house and I was running one of the bigger bulletin board systems in the area with 9 phone lines. I also started making the transition work wise to the IT field, becoming a system administrator in 1996 for the computer system of the company I took a job at. From that point on, I was in the IT field and retired as an IT Director in 2020.
During the last 30 years living in the Portland area, my wife and I have been involved with a dog breed called Bouvier des Flandres, a Belgian cattle herding dog and all-around farm and work dog. Highly intelligent, fearless, very devoted to those they consider in their family and very talented. We have used them for herding, carting (they love pulling wheeled carts), agility (one of our pups went to a home where she became one of the most titled agility dogs in the country), protection and much more. My wife has used them as service dogs for many years and they do very well at this. Her first service dog has flown all over the country with her, flying so much on the same airline and was so well behaved that Northwest Airlines gave Sam (her dog’s name) a pair of honorary wings. These dogs look like small black bears and the reaction from people sometimes when he came off the plane was priceless.
I also got back into photography, something I was very much into ever since I was a kid and that I did as a side job professionally while in the Air Force. I didn’t do much photography while in Alaska as I didn’t have a good camera at the time and though I tried to get on the Legend and Echo groups, they were already full when I joined East halfway through my sophomore year. While going to jr high and the first half of high school in Walla Walla, WA I had been the main student photographer for our year books and school activities. It was something I really enjoyed and was disappointed I couldn’t continue with it at East.
From about 1996 onward, I did a lot of dog photography, moving into digital cameras early 2000s. Just about any dog show that our breed showed in, I was there taking pictures of the dogs and events. I’ve been published a number of times and have 10’s of thousands of photos over the years. I continued this until we stopped going to dog shows around 2010. A few years later I got into glass fusing (melting glass into shapes and molds vs glass blowing that most are familiar with), which was a lot of fun, although very expensive. I found out that though I am a very technical person, I’m not much of an artist. So, while I could create things that were technically good, they weren’t all that artistic, so I got out of glass fusing. It was just to expensive of a hobby to create a bunch of dust collectors for me (my wife isn’t into nik naks and dust collectors Ha!). I did do some neat things in glass though and did enjoy it.
Over the years, I’ve tried to find old classmates (who are much older now than they were then) but even with my computer ability, I found that most people of our age group just didn’t show up on the internet… at least not like the later classes. I had trouble tracking anyone down, so I stopped looking for a long time. I recently started looking again because I was trying to find friends and people that knew Karen Adams. She died in August 2020 from cancer and I wanted to let as many people that knew her know. I had been friends with most of them through Karen while we were married but lost touch afterwards. As I was going through old letters, I ran across those of people that I knew, which got me searching for people I knew as well. So far, I’ve not had a lot of luck, although I did find the girl I had a crush on in high school and have now talked to her. Now I find out that if I had asked her for a date like I wanted to she would have said yes. Ah, if I had only known. I didn’t have a car in high school nor was I as outgoing as many, so I’m sure I missed out on at least a few opportunities to date some of the girls I would have liked to. I only blame myself for that but I sure wish I had known about this one.
Well, this is the longish short version of the last 50 years. There are a lot of details between the lines, but after all these years, who cares and who can remember? LOL! I’ll have to dig up some of my photos, but I have very few of me, since I was almost always behind the camera and not in front of it. I use to have red hair, now it’s white (what’s left of it). I grew a beard in 1988 and it’s all white now too. I have a few hints of my red hair left, but not much. I’ve considered going to a few of the class reunions, but most of the names I’ve seen, I didn’t know or not very well, so I’ve not made any. The last time I was there was 1996 for a couple of days. If we ever get back to a better normal, maybe my wife and I can make it back up there. She has never been to Alaska and would like to see it, but who knows. At our age we don’t travel as much as we use to and don’t have the big desire to either, so I doubt if we’ll ever make it back up there. But who knows?
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