OLD PHOTOS

Here are some old photos from mom's collection. 

She joined the Faribault Sky Club around 1940 or so.  Here is a few pictures from that time.

This is mom right after her first flight! The aircraft is a J3 Piper Cub.   I believe the pilot was Frank Matejcek.

This is mom's sister, Mary Wall, in front of the J3 Cub owned by the Sky Club.  Mary was also a pilot and Joined the WASPs with mom, but couldn't handle the aerobatics and did not graduate.

A couple of mom's freinds in front of the J3 Piper Cub.  Note the CAP Insignia - the Faribault airport had a CAP squadron located there, which kept the airport open during WWII.  This is a photo taken about 1942.

This is the Faribault SkyClub about 1940.  They treated mom really well, like she was their little sister!

Faribault Airport around 1940-1942

GOODBYE TO MOM

In the late evening of March 6, 2016 Mom passed away.  One of the tasks I have is to inventory all of her belongings and make sure that they go to various museums.  Now I’ve just started going through her papers, photos, memorabilia,  awards, and uniforms these past weeks.  While it is not as difficult as I thought it would be, it does bring back wonderful memories and quite a few surprises.  I’m finding it a pleasant pastime, a time to be treasured like the last five years of her life I spent helping her.

I could never have dreamed that I would spend the last  years of mom’s life helping her in so many ways.  I brought her to airshows and symposiums, took her to her presentations and assisted her during the presentations.  I also took her to see all of her doctors, helped her with shopping for personal items, and even recall a day I spent taking her around to a variety of stores so she could find a bra that would fit.  While she never did find the bra she wanted, mom and I had a wonderful time together that day.  I hate shopping for bras, by the way, but I truly enjoyed spending the day with her.  Any excuse worked as far as I was concerned.

I realized the day after she passed that I wasn’t mourning her.  I guessed that I had already been mourning her the last five years of her life, watching her as her body gradually wore out, hollering at her during presentations because she forgot what to say and refused to wear her hearing aids.  Whispering just didn’t cut it when she didn’t have her hearing aids in, and she hated wearing them.  And at times I did this in front of more than 600 people!  I felt terrible when she would forget a story, change to a different story midstream, or simply cringe when, after being asked a question, would give an answer to a totally different question.  I realized that at the age she was, in her nineties, most folks enjoyed everything she did and loved her just the same.  Her stories, even when she mixed them up, were totally amazing, funny and wonderful to listen to.  It was a time when my mom was a friend, a peer, a wise advisor, and a child.

Saying goodby to a friend

Thinking back about her I realize I have never met anyone even remotely like mom.  Everybody is born and eventually dies.  What happens between those two events is what makes everyone special, and some folks even more so.  While some folks fill those years with misery, drinking, drugs, and other debaucheries, mom squeezed as much life, living, fun, excitement, love, learning, friendships, and adrenalin causing events out of that time that she could. She was a hugger, a kisser, a fighter, a bona fide adrenalin junkie and a lover, and at the end she had completely used up her life in the most incredible way ever.

Just prior to passing she told me she had done nothing in her life to be ashamed of.  There might have been a couple of things she was embarrassed about (one of those being her cooking) but she was proud of the life she lived and enjoyed it to all the limits God gave her.  In the end she was tired, had completely used up her life and body, and was ready to reunite with her parents and family that had already passed.  She was tired and ready to go.

Great Granddaughter Cherokee, Mom and a friend saying goodbye

And like she had done so many times at air shows, banquets, and so many other events, she found a place in her apartment to hold court to greet the many friends and family that came to bid her farewell.   It was not a time to say goodbye and mourn but a time of celebration and recognition of someone that truly knew how to live and enjoy life and really do it well.

So some folks are born, they just go through life and then die.  Mom was born, lived ninety six years, and put more life into those years than anyone else I know.  When she passed, she had shown how life should be done, and done right.  She is not to be mourned.  She should be celebrated.

Meeting a Pilot

Over the years my mom gave thousands of talks about her time as a Women’s Air Force Service Pilot during World War II, in more than thirty states.  Mom always loved telling her story, especially to schools.  I remember many times her eyes would be lit up like searchlights when she would get a package of letters from school children thanking her for a presentation.  Part of the message she gave the students was that their job in life was to follow their dreams, “as long as it isn’t immoral or illegal!”

One of those talks occurred in the mid 1990’s in Little Falls Wisconsin at the High School there.  A young lady that had been to many airshows as a youngster with her father got very excited after hearing mom talk, and decided she can learn to fly and have some kind of a career as a pilot.

In 1997 her father came to Faribault, Minnesota where my mom lived, and knocked on her door.  When mom opened the door, he told her that his daughter was going to the Air Force Academy. Mom dragged  him inside her home and proceeded to tell him her story about learning to fly, and eventually joining the WASP organization, flying heavy bombers and pursuits in the training command.  When she finished, she autographed one of her books for his daughter and gave it to him. 

I retired in 2012, and immediately started to assist mom with her traveling and presentations that she gave.  Earlier she had  received a book that was the history of Nellis Air Force Base, which was originally known as Las Vegas Army Airfield, where she served as a WASP during WWII.  She read the book, and was very disappointed that there was not one word about the ten WASPs that served there during WWII.

While she was trying to figure out how to contact the author, the author called her.  The author apologized, saying that the base had no records about the WASP during WWII, probably because that for years after the war, the WASP records were sealed.  The author then invited mom to Nellis to tell her story about her job at Las Vegas Army Airfield during the war.

Mom meeting Major (now Lt. Colonel) Carolyn Jenson

I brought mom to Las Vegas in September, shortly after I retired.  When we arrived at the Nellis Air Force Base, we parked and were met at the gate by two video teams, photographers, and an entire team of archaeologists. We thought the last group was funny because the last time mom was at this base was 1944!  We all were loaded into a bus, and proceeded onto the base.

We were brought to the hanger where the Thunderbirds Air Demonstration Squadron park their aircraft.  Outside the hanger, a single officer was waiting in front of the hanger for us. She introduced herself to mom, saying she was Major Carolyn Jenson, Thunderbird number three, and a top Air Force Combat pilot.  She had heard mom talk in high school at Little Falls Wisconsin.  She told mom, “I’m here because of you.”

hanger.

Being Burns and Allen

The day after mom passed away I was pretty depressed and just thinking about my 4 years helping her tell her story and traveling.  I realized that I had been mourning her for most of that time.  I recall helping her with her presentations right after she first started, when she was about 72, and how strong and vital her memory was.  The last five years of her life she was forgetting stories, getting lost in her memories while telling them,  and many, many times I had to remind her what she should be saying.

We had a PowerPoint presentation she used, and my response was to not sit off the stage and change slides, but to get up on stage near her so I could more effectively give her voice prompts as to what she forgot. 

One of the problems she had was her hearing – the aircraft she flew, and particularly the bombers she flew, both the B17 and the B26, were quite unforgiving with the volume of the huge engines, and all of the pilots from that era now need hearing aids, and mom was no different.  The problem I had however, is she did not like wearing the hearing aids, so I ended up hollering at her for her voice prompts.  I always felt so badly for her, thinking the audience was bothered by her missteps in her memory, as I made it quite obvious with my very loud reminders.

The last presentation she gave was for the Veteran’s Day Breakfast at the Bloomington City Hall building.  During the presentation, she completely forgot an entire story – one of her best, and one that was really funny.  She looked at the slide, looked at me, and I could see she did not remember anything.  I told her (loudly, again) if she remembered the time when she had to sign a piece of paper that said she would not fly below five hundred feet, but she thought it was fifty?  She looked at me and said, “No, tell me!”  The audience was howling with laughter, I told the story but was close to tears.  I felt it wasn’t my story, but hers.  The audience, however, loved the story (they always did). 

When I was thinking about this the day after she passed, I realized all those times she forgot and I had to help her remember, it was actually okay. All that time we were doing Burns and Allen, and that made it okay.  The audiences loved it.

Electronics Education

I was an electronic technician for my working career, and I enjoyed it a lot.   Part of my career was teaching electronics, which I also enjoyed.  One of the problems as an instructor was getting the students enough electronics information so they could succeed at being a competent technician, because the college I taught at was concerned with putting more liberal arts into the program.

This got me thinking.  When I was still teaching, I was pondering how someone like Montgomery Scott ('Scotty' in the TV/motion picture series Star Trek) what his education looked like.  As I watched our electronics program get dumbed down with less basic electronics and more liberal arts classes, how much more would that happen in Scotty's time, when there is so much more high level physics that would have to be taught?  So they would be looking at deciding between introductory electronics/physics, liberal arts, and high level physics/electronics courses.  System level stuff would be incredibly important as well.  How much electronics does one need to replace a failed box instead of repairing it at component level, and what are the drawbacks to having no one that can repair things at the component level?

There are a number of products that I've seen that are really BADLY designed today.  A friend had a rain/temperature sensor designed in a black case that was insanely hot and nonfunctional - I have a poorly designed one wire weather station where the wind speed/direction/temperature device can run 10-20 degrees hotter than the surrounding ambient temperature because of the power supply and electronics inside the case.  The result, I think, of poorly trained engineers.  Is this because of the amount of information these engineers need to get, but cannot, because of poorly designed engineering programs?  If so, my question about Scotty's education is not a problem in the twenty third century, but is relevant today.

Another thought that I had happened while working at Physical Electronics.  Phi (abbreviation for the company's name) designed, built, sold and maintained scanning electron microscopes that did surface analysis.  They sold both older, refurbished machines (that still could cost almost a million dollars) to new machines, which they sold less than 100 a year of.  EVERYTHING they made is going to be repaired - because even after 40 years of production, there are still only a few thousand of, say, the main imaging supply, a 30KV 1000watt power supply that allows the devices to do the imaging.  So I was repairing everything from boxes that had through hole and point to point circuits to working on surface mount boxes just designed, and writing technical reports for new boxes just being first produced that didn't work, so the engineers could figure out the problems in production. Compare that to most modern electronics - cell phones, $20 dvd players, $50 blu ray players, and lots more.  When repairs are $50-100 an hour, none of this stuff is going to be fixed, just tossed.  So we have expensive electronics that will be repaired, and a type of electronic device we can consider a commodity that will be replaced and tossed.

So move to the twenty third century and the starship Enterprise.  EVERYTHING on board is going to have to be repaired - so Scotty's education needs to cover everything from component level repair to system wide maintenance.   Things not able to be repaired will have to be manufactured, somehow.  We are doing such a lousy job these days of training technicians to engineers that, if we had an Enterprise starship today, the folks maintaining it couldn't.

Art