Birth of the Blue Missile

OK Scamp
I know the last post may have been minor in scope, but there are people I know here in Austin that are watching the build through this site. If nothing else that was for them.These are not car people, just interested.
In the mean time, as Captain Kirk would say you have identified yourself as one of my monkeys.
As a benevolent master I can not hold back your feed any longer.
This installment brings us back to the military academy just before I got the Duster.




During the year of 1970 I was going to school in a small suburb of New York on Long Island.
The Vietnam War was raging and Huey Newton and the ‘Black Panthers’ actually came to my High school on a bus to rally people there. We all thought that it was pretty weird seeing as it was a mostly a white middle class suburb. The teachers never let them off the bus.
Rock and Roll had already infiltrated the school as well as the soft drug culture. Towards the end of that year there was a locker search and there were a couple of my friends that were popped for possession.
That fact along with some other factors led my mother to decide to send me away from the influence of my bad friends. She gave me a choice of a couple of military academies for the next school year.
One was in upstate New York; the other was in Georgia with a winter campus in Hollywood Florida.
This was a no-brainer, more snow or the beaches of south Florida.
So it was the summer of 70 my father and I drove to the school so I could get there for the summer session. My grades were not quite up to their standard for the first two years of school. If I wanted to enter as a Junior I had to attend the summer session and the next summer as well. So I could graduate in 72.
When we pulled up to the campus there was a large collection of multistory red brick buildings, which were quite intimidating. The front steps were say twenty feet wide and six feet tall. You entered into a large hall with a receptionist sitting at a desk. We checked in and were given a map and instructed to check in at one of the dorms. The dorm was a three quarter U shaped three-story building. I was on the second story about half way down the long leg. This was a typical military room arrangement with a bunk bed and a shared bathroom between two rooms. We each had a foot locker and a shared closet, and desk.
There was a resident advisor at each end of the building on each floor. On my floor it was a major K. who taught English at one end, and one who’s name escapes me at the other. Major K was a character, it appeared he had a sleep disorder that caused him to fall asleep at the strangest times. One day I stuck my head in his room and found him asleep reaching for a book on his library shelves while standing on a small step stool. Needless to say some English classes were rather lacking in content, but we quickly learned if we were quiet enough when he fell asleep, he would sleep until the bell rang for the next class.
As a student I was a quiet type and that never changed. At the academy this was not exactly a plus. This was a collection of kids, some with a rough past that were sent here to be straightened out. One of those was my roommate. It took a couple of weeks before the friction between us built up enough for there to be a physical confrontation. I really don’t remember what it was all about, but he started to wail on me and I just exploded. I was not big or heavy but I threw him down to the ground and was going at it when he tried to get up and grabbed the edge of his footlocker and sliced his hand to the point there was blood all over the room. There were enough witnesses to exonerate me as far as cause and we stopped fighting and got him to the infirmary. He was then whisked off to the hospital, for quite a few stitches. When he returned, it seems we were great friends. It was at this time I also met my partner in crime, Ernest, he lived down the hall, and was from the town the school was in.
The summer had a rather relaxed attitude about all the military things. We did have to dress up in the uniforms and there were weekly inspections of the rooms but that was all. Even the inspections were rather low key. This left us a lot of time after class to goof off. The area around the school was heavily wooded and we took advantage of this fact all the time, we were also within a short hike of lake Lanier. One of the stops in the woods was a manmade cave you could get three or four people in. The entrance was about two feet across and was about six feet long. It was dug into a hillside and the room at the end of the tunnel was about four feet high and about eight feet in diameter. It had a clay pipe in the ceiling to vent the cave for fresh air. You would crawl into the area and sit down in a circle. And we would go there and smoke a joint before going over to the lake. Now I’m not claustrophobic but the crawl into that dark tunnel was really a difficult one, especially the first time.
Now please remember the main reason I was sent there. Until I went to the academy, I had never smoked dope. We would get ripped in the cave and then go to the lake at the “Via-Duct” . This was a pipeline over an arm of Lake Lanier, and we would go swimming at the base of the two towers. These towers supported a main water line about 30” in diameter. The top of the pipe was about forty feet above the water. And was supported by towers with horizontal beams about ten feet apart. There was a fair amount of area between the bases but they did stick out quite a ways from the steel structure. One of the things we would do was climb up the structure and jump off into the water. This was not too difficult, but in order to jump off of the pipe, you had to walk out from the top of the hill all the way to the center of the span. A good seventy percent of the walk was over land and if you fell it was going to hurt. I myself never made that trip, I did go to the top rung just below the pipe and jump but I did not possess the fortitude to make the trip. I also remember that in the water there were fish that would constantly nibble on your feet and legs.




I was there for two years so there are more stories to tell, more later
Andrew