John Hicks:  

f TN I worked for a carpet cleaning company cleaning a middle school each afternoon. That was nice because we would play basketball in the gym each night after we finished. I got married in 1976 and started working at Berkline making sofas and recliners. I did this for one year and while in the process of divorce I joined the Coast Guard. I was in the Coast Guard for 20 years. I did many things there. My specialty was Personnel, called Human Resources today. In New Orleans I was on a firefighting crew when a Peruvian oil tanker had a collision with a butane barge. Fire burned all day and the barge all night following. When stationed at the Marine Safety Office in Cincinnati we got the best seats for the Reds games. We got the owner's seats next to the dugout. We did that many times. Besides Personnel there I renewed boat documents and registrations for the pleasure boaters on the Ohio River. At Dam Neck, VA I worked as the Coast Guard Representative 1982-85 on a Navy Training Base for Coast Guard students who attended there. I worked for a Navy Commander there. At the Coast Guard Support Center I supervised a Personnel Office. While at the Support Center I went Temporary Duty for 45 days to Valdez, AK to work for Admiral Robbins who was in charge of the Alaskan Oil Spil cleanup. I went from there in 1990 to the USCGC CHEROKEE (WMEC 165) where I was the Personnel/Admin Yeoman and an Assistant Boarding Officer for drug boardings. The following year the CHEROKEE was decommissioned and I went to the USCGC HARRIET LANE (WMEC 904). Here I traveled lots of the Caribean where we made drug bust for pot and cocane, picked up stranded boaters, immigrating Dominicans, demasted boats in storms, towed in the USCGC Chase after it hit a whale, and others. We spent most of one year picking up Haitians trying to leave Haiti. We picked them up by the hundreds on their sailboats and btought them to Guantanamo Bay Cuba to be processed. We later returned many back to Haiti and repeated this process numerous times. We fed them and bedded them down on the flight deck and stood watch over them. Pulling back into Guantanamo Bay was always a welcome day or so relief. In 1993 I left the ship for Marine Safety Office in Louisville, KY. The biggest events while there was the great flood on the Mississippi in 1993-94 and the great flood in Kentucky and on the Ohio River in 1997. Other than that we had the standard pollution investigations and accident reports to investigate. In 1997 I retired after a little more than 20 years. I then worked part time for the Harrison Water Assn. in Cynthiana, KY and a meter reader in 1998 & 1999. Early in 2000 I began work with Specialized Technical Services out of Richmond, KY where I read electric meters for Harrison Rural Electric. It later became part of Bluegrass Electric and I became Project Manager in the Harrison District. In 2004 I became a District Manager and at present spend most of my time in Northern KY with Owen Electric trying to get the readers there in order. It is there that I presently am.