Igloos in the Jungle: Memoirs of a Tactical Airlifter in Vietnam and Beyond

By Brian Watson

Go along with the Colonel on this nostalgic trip back to the 1950's and life growing up in the Midwest. Follow him on his solo trek across Europe and the year that made him a man in the Aviation Cadet Program. Next it's many a day in Vietnam over the course of the war and the hardships faced by the aviators and their families on a daily basis. Life in the "fast lane" or five years in the Pentagon gives the reader a close look at the many challenges faced by the Staff Officer in the "building". Finally, the harrowing experience of life in a high school classroom for 19 years caps off the interesting adventure.

Lt. Col. Watson amassed almost 5,000 hours flight time with 1,300 of it being combat time in Vietnam. He was "in country" for over 500 days covering parts of 1965,1966,1968,1969,1970,1971,1972, and 1973.He was decorated 39 times including the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, 12 Air Medals, 2 Commendations Medals, and the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry just to mention a few. His travels took him north of the Arctic Circle to the southernmost tip of South America, all over Europe and the Far East with stops in 68 countries on 6 continents. Sit back, relax, and enjoy this most interesting story of an Air Force Officer and his travels in support of our national interests.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469159379

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Copyright © 2012 by Brian Watson, LT COL USAF, Ret.

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Contents

DEDICATION

A SPECIAL THANKS

PROLOGUE

CITATION TO ACCOMPANY THE AWARD OF THE DISTINGUISHED FLYING CROSS

SECTION ONE

SECTION TWO

SECTION THREE

SECTION FOUR

SECTION FIVE

SECTION SIX

EPILOGUE

BIOGRAPHICAL DATA

GLOSSARY

It was an honor to wear the air force uniform for forty-two years and a privilege to do so in combat in Southeast Asia. I hope you enjoy my story and come to appreciate, just a little, this amazing aircraft and the men who flew her over the skies of Vietnam.

Also, the sacrifice and support needed by wives and families, who had to maintain a life as normal as possible, while their aviators were flying into harm’s way.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to Jeanette. Being the wife of a C-130 tactical airlifter in the 1960s and 1970s was not an easy job.

Deployments ranged from thirty to 120 days flying combat in Southeast Asia, supporting NATO operations in Europe, or fulfilling U.S. obligations in Latin and South America.

We had no instant worldwide communications, cell phones, or webcams. Our only means of remaining in touch was via snail mail, with letters often taking eight to twelve days to reach one another. We would go for months without hearing the sound of each other’s voice.

To our family she was a mother, substitute father, homemaker, repair person, shopper… you name it. She handled any task that needed to be done. Just knowing the home front was in good hands made my flying job that much easier.

As I write this book detailing my life, and that of many a C-130 crew member, I hope I am able to illustrate the huge role played by the wives of us nomadic gypsies.

A SPECIAL THANKS

To my daughter, Leslie, who spent many hours helping with the editing and formatting of Igloos in the Jungle . . . She did all the heavy lifting on the computer side of the project, everything from spacing, cutting, pasting, spelling, grammar, etc. This old dinosaur could not have begun to tackle the technical aspects of this endeavor. So again, thank you, Leslie.

PROLOGUE

This book will be considered an autobiography; however, its true intent is to tell a story about tactical airlift in Vietnam that has never been told. In particular, it is the story of the remarkable missions and accomplishments of the C-130 Hercules and the crews who flew and maintained her.

At first look, the C-130 is an ugly duckling—square and squatty with a bulging nose, four propellers, and a brown/green paint scheme. Compared to the sleek jets and other streamlined airlifters, she looks forlorn; but looks can be, and often are, deceiving. Once you get to know her and fly her for a while, she becomes a thing of beauty.

The first Roman Nose Hercs were the early A models, built in 1953 and 1954. Currently we are building and flying the J model. What is most remarkable is that the basic aircraft of today hasn’t changed much from the initial model, produced by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation fifty-nine years ago. It is still ninety-seven feet long with a wingspan of 132 feet and is thirty-seven feet tall at the tail. The cargo compartment is roughly the same, and it has a gross operating weight not all that different. Today’s cockpit though has the latest and best avionics, a new crew complement, and more fuel efficient and powerful engines.

The thing that sets the C-130 apart from modern high-speed jet transports is its ability to operate anywhere around the world and be completely self-sustainable.

What makes this possible is a built-in device called the gas turbine compressor (GTC). When turned on, it provides the hot bleed air and power to turn the first engine without any outside equipment. It is very loud. Crews often jokingly referred to it as the gas turbine converter, whose other purpose was to convert JP-4 into noise.

The aircraft can back up, unlike other commercial airline planes that require a tug to push them away from the terminal or military transports that must be parked where they can taxi straight ahead. We simply open the rear cargo ramp and door, and the loadmaster directs us to where we can proceed ahead normally.

The versatility of the C-130 is unmatched by any aircraft in the USAF’s history, and its longevity (fifty-nine years and counting) is amazing. This aircraft has served many roles as a strategic and tactical airlifter, gunship, medevac, airborne command post, refueler, ski plane to the poles, forward air controller, and a firefighter, to name a few.

The term tactical airlift is defined as the movement of men and equipment directly into the battlefield. The C-130 does this by short-field assault landings and airdrops. These two definitions can lead to many different delivery systems or ways to deliver the supplies.

Depending on the gross weight, short-field operations can be into as little as two-thousand-five-hundred-foot runways, while airdrops can be thirty thousand pounds of heavy equipment, container delivery systems (CDS), two-thousand-pound bundles, low altitude parachute extraction systems (LAPES) vehicles/equipment delivered six feet off the ground to an unprepared runway, high altitude low opening (HALO) troop drops at twenty thousand feet plus in clandestine operations. I have been qualified in all of these types of missions and have seen some very interesting and classified events unfold.

In the Vietnam War she did everything asked of her, and more. As a combat-ready crew member on the C-130 for fifteen years, I have traveled to sixty-eight countries providing humanitarian aid to third world countries and supporting our national objectives wherever called upon to go. A C-130 crew is unique, often operating independently and halfway around the world, with little command and control other than to complete the mission you were sent out to do, be it a one-day or one-week trip.

To this day, I treasure many of those memories, and I often wonder where some of my crewmates wound up and what they are doing today. Occasionally, a reunion can be found, and they are always a great place to stretch the truth and swap war stories. So be patient. After filling you in on how I came to fly and fall in love with this beauty of a beast, I will tell a story that I hope will give her the credit that has been long overdue, as the greatest airlift aircraft ever produced.

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CITATION TO ACCOMPANY THE AWARD OF THE DISTINGUISHED FLYING CROSS

Captain Brian D. Watson distinguished himself by extraordinary achievement while participating in aerial flight as a navigator on a C-130 aircraft in Southeast Asia on 18 August 1969. On that date, Captain Watson’s mission was the Emergency Resupply of a twenty-seven-thousand-pound Armored Personnel Carrier to the Special Forces Camp at Bu Dop, Republic of South Vietnam. Captain Watson accomplished this very vital mission despite adverse weather conditions, hostile ground fire, and the inherent hazards involved in flying into a marginal strip. As a result of his courage, perseverance, and the energetic application of his knowledge and skill, his actions on this day contributed significantly to the airlift mission in Southeast Asia. The professional competence, aerial skill, and devotion to duty displayed by Captain Watson reflect great credit upon himself and the United States Air Force.

NARRATIVE

On 11 August I deployed to Vietnam for a seventeen-day shuttle as part of an all-Stan/Eval crew. We would spend most of the time flying separately giving in country evaluations and making sure our crews were performing up to snuff. We would get to fly together as a crew to maintain our skills as well as do our part for the airlift mission. When the schedulers saw they had a Stan Board crew, it was easy to assign them to the most demanding missions, since we were considered the best. On 19 August we got a mission that resulted in the awarding of the Distinguished Flying Cross.

It was my ninth day of a seventeen-day rotation into South Vietnam. I had my Timex windup alarm clock set for 0400. Summertime in Vietnam is considered the dry season, but it can rain every afternoon and often all day. At 0400 it was obviously very dark, as our crew began making its way from our contract quarters in a downtown Saigon hotel, to board an air force blue goose, a school bus painted dark blue, which ran a shuttle from downtown to the airport (Tan Son Nhut AB), every half hour. We caught the 0430 shuttle for the fifteen-minute ride to the base. To this day, I still find it strange riding a bus in a major city to the airport to go fly in combat. Arriving at the airlift control element (ALCE), we were ready for the 0500 briefing that would give us our day’s combat flying schedule.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about our mission in Southeast Asia (SEA) was we never knew from day to day exactly what we would be doing. This made things a lot more interesting. Missions would vary from passenger movement, to resupply, to medevac, to brigade operations. Most entailed just long, hard days. Occasionally you would get a mission that would place you right in the middle of a hot spot, where the action was. This would be one of those missions.

The C-130 Hercules was the backbone of the Vietnam War when it came to airlift. At 155,000 pounds gross weight, it is an imposing sight. Four turboprop engines provide the power and thrust to get in and out of very short, unprepared runways. I was a combat-ready navigator on this remarkable aircraft for fifteen years, and it never ceased to amaze me how versatile this aircraft was and still is. The USAF is still buying them today.

Upon arriving at the ALCE, the crew begins to go about their duties. The flight engineer and loadmaster get the aircraft parking spot and head to the flight line to begin the preflight and loading for the first leg of the day’s activities. The two pilots and navigator are briefed on the exact mission to include maintenance status of the aircraft, intelligence and threat briefing for areas flying into today, and a weather briefing. After this, we usually proceed to the aircraft to prepare for takeoff. On this day, however, we made two extra stops, first at the life-support section, to pick up flak jackets, and second at the armory to check out M-16 rifles and ammunition. We knew this was not going to be just another day at the office.

At that hour of the morning, a C-130 Breakfast of Champions was more than likely a chilidog and a Coke at the base operations snack bar, not on Rachael Ray’s list of things to have to start your day, I suspect. Standard procedure calls for the aircraft to be loaded and the crew ready to start engines twenty-five minutes before scheduled departure time. Today it would be 0700. Taxi and takeoff out of Tan Son Nhut was always an experience unto itself. Here we are preparing to depart on a hairy combat mission and could be number twenty in line for takeoff behind an Air France 707, a flight of four F-5 fighters loaded with ordanance, five other C-130s, a United Air Lines 707, South Vietnam AF World War II vintage A-1s, and a couple of C-5s heading back to the world. When we finally switch from ground control to Saigon Tower as number one for takeoff, the sequence of events would typically be like this:

Saigon Tower Igloo 605 # 1 for departure

Roger 605, cleared for takeoff, contact Paris on 126.8 (VHF radio)

Paris, Igloo 605-airborne

Roger 605, radar contact be advised I have artillery fire (usually friendly) on the 030… to 090 radial surface to ten thousand feet

605 copies, we are heading northwest to Loc Ninh

Paris Control was one of several ground control intercept (GCI) sites in South Vietnam, whose mission was to provide flight advisories, ground fire, both good and bad guys, and any pertinent threat data they might have in their area. This was not air traffic control as we know it today. All our in country tactical flying was conducted under visual flight rules (VFR), and the aircrews were on their own to fly and navigate as they saw fit.

Our initial destination was Loc Ninh, a small U.S. Army post just seven miles from the Cambodian border, sixty miles north of Saigon. This area was known as the fishhook because of the contour of the border between Cambodia and South Vietnam. It was the southernmost dumping-off point of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, bringing men and supplies from the north to fight in the south. Seven months later this would be the region where President Nixon authorized the invasion of Cambodia. At Loc Ninh we would make shuttle flights into the very short and dangerous landing strip at Bu Dop, a Special Forces A-Team Fire Base just two and one-half miles from the Cambodian border. The Fire Base had been under rocket-and-mortar attack from across the border for the past few nights; supplies and ammunition were running low. The army needed resupply to go on the attack.

We flew four flights from Loc Ninh to Bu Dop that day. Taking in armored personnel carriers, reinforcement troops, ammunition, food, and medical assistance was the order of the day. On the first two sorties, the weather conditions were fair, partly cloudy skies with OK visibility, and only moderate ground fire. As the day wore on, the weather began to deteriorate, and hostile fire became intense. Finding a hole in the clouds, then dropping down through it, locating the 2,800-foot dirt landing strip, avoiding heavy fire, landing, offloading, and getting back out tested the entire crew to the maximum. On our last trip in and out, we took fifteen hits from small-arms fire. We completed four successful sorties and delivered enough equipment and men to ensure continued operations at Bu Dop.

While flying the mission you are so locked in on the job, and professional training takes over. Only when the mission is over, and you have time to reflect, does the magnitude of the event sink in and hit you. For this mission, I was awarded The Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC).

SECTION ONE

The Civilian Years

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All of life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Detroit and the Lake in Brighton

3 January 1941: Brian Watson entered the world at 5:30 a.m. at the Wayne County Hospital in the Motor City. He was a large baby for the time, weighing in at ten pounds and measuring twenty-four inches in length. For Verne and Helen Watson, he was their second child. Their daughter, Lois, was already two and a half years old. The family lived in an upstairs flat on Elmira Avenue on the near northwest side of the city, in a typical middle-class neighborhood. On October 1943, they moved into a single-family home on Rosemont Avenue, near Grand River and 7-Mile Road. This would become their home for the next three years.

Actual memories of my early years are almost zero, only old photos and stories told by the family make up almost all of these early years with one exception. August 1945, VJ Day, bringing victory over Japan and the end of World War II. I remember all the family (aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews) driving to downtown Detroit and seeing nothing but row after row of Greyhound buses with people singing, dancing, and celebrating on the bus tops. It was a great day in our country’s history, but hardly a monumental moment for a four-year-old.

Life for the Watson family changed forever in the summer of 1946. Our family moved from the immediate Detroit area to the remote small town of Brighton (forty-five miles northwest of the Motor City). In 1946 that was as country as you could get. Today, Brighton is considered a suburb and bedroom community of Detroit. It would turn out to be a great place to grow up and be a teenager. The small town had approximately 1,500 people in the city limits and another few hundred living in close proximity. We were the latter; our little home was about three miles outside of town in an area surrounded by water. My growing-up years would be ones spent on, in, or around the water.

My best friend in those days was my dog, Sandy, a sixty-pound collie; and we were inseparable. Everywhere I went, Sandy was right beside me. When Dad whistled at the end of the day, we both came running. At night, he slept at the foot of my bed. Sandy lived to be twenty years old. While I was away in the air force, Dad had to have him put down. He later said, It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. I missed that old dog for quite a while.

Outside our front door about one hundred yards and across a dirt road was Big Crooked Lake, one mile long and one-half mile wide. About three hundred yards behind the house was Round Lake, one-half mile by one-half mile. Behind that was Little Crooked Lake, three-fourths of a mile by one-fourth of a mile. We were almost surrounded by water, and as a result, our recreation was always water related.

The lake area served two purposes: a summer residence and second home for the wealthier Detroit people, and a year-round permanent residence for a small number of families. Around the lakes there were somewhere near 150 to 200 homes, mostly summer cottages. We were one of about fifteen hearty families who called this place home year-round.

From Memorial Day to Labor Day, the place was a flurry of activity. Once school was out all the cottages opened up, and the population increased tenfold. Some of us pre-baby boomers may remember when school let out the Friday before Memorial Day and always resumed the day after Labor Day. At any rate, for these three months we lost our private little community, but still managed to get along with the newly arrived city folk. Many of the kids became good friends, and you would look forward to seeing them after nine months and catch up on their lives.

I had one particularly good summer friend, Jerry Cahill. He would spend the summer with his aunt and uncle, who had a summer cottage a couple of blocks away. His parents sent him to a private boarding school in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. To us country bumpkins, that could have been halfway around the world for all we knew. We didn’t really grasp that it was just across the river from Detroit. Jerry was not much of an athlete, but he was a huge sports fan. He followed my high school sports accomplishments in the Detroit newspapers and always was a positive person. Unfortunately, I lost track of him as the years went on.

When the summer people arrived, the lakes would be teeming with boats of all kinds. We had two. One was a fairly nice motorboat with a ten-horsepower Johnson outboard engine. It would hold six people or pull one water skier. The other was a plain old-fashioned rowboat. Every fall we would pull them out of the water and scrape, paint, and store them for the winter. Those all-wooden boats would contract in the cold Michigan winter, so when we first floated them in the spring, they would sink like a rock. After a few days, the wood would expand and seal, we then would bail out the water and be ready for the new season.

By the middle of June, the water had warmed up enough to begin our summer of fun on the lakes. Almost every family had a dock for their boats and a raft for swimming. The rafts were wooden platforms mounted on fifty-five-gallon drums and were towed out a couple of hundred yards offshore to water depths of fifteen to twenty feet. We would spend hours swimming between rafts and diving to the bottom. In order to prove that you had reached the bottom, you had to bring up with you some seaweed or mud. No proof, no credit for the dive. To see who the best swimmer was, we would go underwater and hold our breath as long as possible. It’s a miracle we didn’t all drown.

After a day of swimming and dinner, I would often get out my trusty fishing pole and see what I could catch. The lakes were full of bluegill, sunfish, perch, bass, and a few pike. I learned to fish from a gentleman named Mr. Rutter. He was a summer resident in his late seventies, very quiet, and loved to fish. He would watch me and only offer suggestions when I messed up (which was quite often). When he spoke, I listened. It was usually dead silent, so as not to scare the fish. We would stand side by side for an hour and not say a word, Just fishing, as he would say.

I was a good fisherman and usually came home with a sizeable catch. The rule was If you caught ’em, you cleaned ’em. Chop off the head, scale and gut the fish, and the job was done. Our freezer usually was full of my bounty. I provided a good portion of the family’s vittles. In later years my mother never ate a lot of fish. She said that she had eaten so many at the lake that she couldn’t stand the thought of eating another of those little swimmers.

Brian, the summer businessman, had a little gig going. Fishing was great in the lakes, but there also was an unwanted sea creature in our waters, called the garpike. It was a scavenger-type fish that was inedible. In town, there was a branch of the Michigan Fish and Game Commission, and they paid twenty-five cents per gar. July and August were prime fishing times to catch the creatures. The weather was hot and humid, and they would gather in shallow waters (three-fourths feet deep) to relax in the sun. My modus operandi was to row out quietly in our small boat armed with my bow and arrow. I attached ten to fifteen feet of fishing line to the arrows and would lie in wait for the exact moment to attack. On a good day, I could nail eight or ten of them, wrap them in a newspaper, and take my bounty into town to claim my riches. Two to two and a half dollars a week was big money in 1952.

Summer at the lake was a great time and place to grow up. We played all day. There were no TVs to watch or video games; we were always outside having a blast with our friends. As sunset neared, my dad would give a loud whistle, and we knew we had better get a move on inside. Usually we didn’t have to take a bath, as we had washed in the lake sometime during the day. So it was off to bed and then get up, and do it again tomorrow.

As the days got shorter, and the calendar deeper into August, another summer at the lakes was drawing to a close. Soon the city folk would be closing up their cottages for another year, and we year-rounders would have our lakes back.

I once violated one of Mr. Rutter’s golden rules of fishing, and I paid the price. This is a true fish story. Two of the rarest fish in the lakes were the northern pike and the large mouth black bass. I was ready to fish off the dock with my Shakespeare rod and reel, a can of juicy night crawlers, and my pail to hold the day’s catch. The dock was about twenty feet out into the lake, so I headed out with all my gear.

Rule violation #1: Never take your pail out on the dock. Leave it on shore at least ten feet from the water.

About twenty minutes into the adventure, I had caught two or three bluegills and sunfish. Casting my line out into the water loaded with a plump night crawler, I was ready. Soon, the bobber disappeared under the surface, and I knew I had something big on the hook. A short battle ensued, and I reeled in a fourteen-inch black bass. I took the hook out of its mouth and deposited the fish into my pail, which was next to me on the dock (major mistake). Before I could reload and recast, the monster jumped out of the pail and back into the lake and was gone forever.

I had no witnesses to back up my sad story, but to this day some sixty years later, I swear it happened. I never had the courage to tell Mr. Rutter. He would have only shaken his head and said something to the effect of, Boy, don’t you ever learn?

Labor Day was always summer’s finale, and in a way, it was a sad weekend. Sure we got our lakes back, but it meant the end of another season and back to school. By the end of September, all the boats and rafts were out of the water packed away until next spring. We waited for mid-November, the freezing over of the lakes and the beginning of winter activities.

When the lakes began to freeze over, we waited anxiously for the ice to be thick enough to go out on. When my dad chopped a hole in the ice, measured the thickness, and declared it safe, out came the ice skates and hockey sticks.

By Thanksgiving, the lakes were frozen over and covered with snow. In a typical winter, we would not see the ground again until mid-March. The summer rafts were replaced with ice shanties, and shoveled hockey rinks would appear. Night would fall by 5:00 p.m. in the winter months, so most of our outdoor activities took place on the weekends. I was not into ice fishing but spent long hours on the blades in a hockey game or just skating.

Thanksgiving brought about a small family tradition. From 1949 to 1953, every Thanksgiving was spent at my Aunt Clara’s in Detroit. My dad and I would always be at Briggs Stadium to see the Lions do battle with the Green Bay Packers. In those days the Lions were good and usually thumped Green Bay. I can remember sitting there during blizzards rooting on the home team.

In the late forties and early fifties, we had no television, so we listened to the radio. The Detroit Red Wings were our team with stars like Gordie Howe, Ted Lindsey, and Terry Sawchuck. No one wore a helmet, and goalies didn’t wear masks. An NHL player’s moxie was graded by how many stitches he had. I recall our goalie, Sawchuck, was rumored to have had over four hundred stitches in his face alone.

On a shoveled rink on the lake, we would conduct our own hockey battles. After a few minutes, we would have to halt the game to clean the ice and snow off the puck. This was the usual procedure, and we thought nothing of it. When listening to the Red Wings on the radio, they would stop play for icing the puck. The rule was, if the puck crosses both blue lines with no one touching it, it’s icing time. Hearing this as a kid, I thought they were stopping play to clean the puck, just like we did.

My father drove the family car forty-five miles one way into downtown Detroit every day and usually got home at dark. Once in a while, my sister and I would plan an attack on the unsuspecting traveler. We would build a snow fort and arm it with dozens of rounds of ammunition, snowballs. Dad would usually spot our ambush from a quarter-mile away and be armed to the teeth when he pulled up the driveway. The fact that the trees were barren and he had a direct line of sight never occurred to us; we weren’t the brightest of soldiers. After a short battle, in which we usually lost, it was time to go inside to warm up and have dinner.

Another winter activity that today would most likely result in lawsuits and claims of child abuse and endangerment—we would tie our sleds with about ten feet of rope to the rear bumper of the car and Dad would tow us around up and down the roads, reaching speeds of 20 to 30 mph. Judge Judy would throw the book at us today.

One of my favorite pastimes was sledding. Several hills were in close proximity to the Watson household, and flying down them and plowing through a snowbank was a great adventure. One day I spotted the snowbank to top all snowbanks and aimed my trusty sled right at that baby. I got a running start, to generate as much speed as possible and hurtled down the slope on an Evel Knievel type run. Unfortunately, the monster snowbank turned out to be a woodpile covered with snow, and I hit it head-on. A few scrapes and bruises took second place to my crushed ego, and I headed home to try and explain why I looked like I’d been run over by a truck.

Brian, the winter businessman, had an enterprise of trapping and selling muskrats. The furry little creatures were abundant around the lakes, and all I had to do was catch them. I had six traps that I put out and checked twice a week. It took about two hours to make the rounds and harvest my bounty. By the time I got them they were more than likely frozen stiff, but a store in town would give me fifty cents each for the haul. I think I may have broken even after the cost of the traps and the bait and maybe even came out a few bucks ahead. At any rate, it was the thrill of the catch.

Our little house at the lake was just that, my guess would be that it was only 1300 square feet with three bedrooms. A well and septic system was the order of the day. We had no running water in the kitchen and had to prime the pump in order to get the H2O flowing. It took about a gallon to get rolling, but that was the case for all fifteen of us pioneer families. My best recollection is that by 1949, we finally had running water.

My formal education began in the fall of 1946 at the Beurman School, a one-room schoolhouse much like those seen in the old western movies. It served grades one through eight with a single teacher for all of us. How we learned anything I’ll never know, but it seems we learned the basics and could move up the education ladder. Ms. Shearer did a hell of a job teaching twenty of us in eight different grades. She was a taskmaster and disciplinarian.

The school was one and one-fourth miles away, and we all met at a certain point every morning and walked to and from school. Rain or shine, sleet or snow, we trudged our way, never complaining. I must admit some days we were all a little late arriving, due to detours and side adventures along the way.

There was not much Ms. Shearer could do since the entire school was late. Calls to our parents only worked for a little while. We had no hidden agenda; we were just kids being kids. I mentioned a call home. We were on a party line. One phone line served five houses, so we were expected to limit our calls to five minutes. If the code was violated, someone would just cut in and tell you to hang up. We didn’t dial any numbers. We got the operator, and she placed the call, always reminding you that you had five minutes.

Friday nights were special ones for the Watson family. Every other Friday was payday, and we would go into town for the evening. The destination was Kluck’s Bar and Restaurant, a family friendly (they all were in those days) place, whose owners were good friends of my parents. After dinner the adults would socialize (play shuffleboard and drink beer), while my sister and I would make the three-block walk to the Grand Theater, for a night at the movies. My dad would give us each twenty-five cents; fourteen to get into the theater, five for a large Coke, five for a large popcorn, and one for two sticks of licorice.

A typical night would go as follows: A ten-minute newsreel (I remember the Korean War as a regular topic from ’50 to ’53), adventure serials with Flash Gordon doing battle with Ming the Moon Ruler, and Tim Tyler’s adventures in the African jungles. Next came one or two cartoons; Tom & Jerry and Heckle & Jeckle were two of the regulars. The main feature was usually a western with the day’s top heroes. How many of you recall these names: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Tom Mix, Hop-Along Cassidy, the Durango Kid, Lash LaRue, or Bob Steele? The good guys always wore a white hat and the bad guys a black hat. During a typical ten-minute knockdown fight, no one ever lost their hat. While chasing the bad guys on horseback, our hero could fire his six-shooter from a couple of hundred yards and pick off the villain. Never once did a horse get shot. In the end our hero always got the girl and rode off into the sunset to fight another day. Those were great times for us young folks. I would write to Hollywood and collect autographed pictures of my heroes, and I felt like a million dollars when another photo would arrive.

When we returned to reality and headed back to Kluck’s, the adults were all still shuffle boarding, and on the television would be the Gillette Friday Night Fights (boxing). By 11:00 p.m., we climbed into the family auto and headed back to the lake, having had a great Friday night. We all looked forward to the next payday in two weeks, when we could do it again.

As I remember, it was late 1948 when my dad came home one day with a brand-new fourteen-inch Admiral TV set. Programming usually began around four in the afternoon. Until then all that was on was a test pattern. It was such a novelty that we would sit and stare at that stupid pattern for a long time. Either we had no life or we were in awe of this box with a picture on it. Shows came on at four o’clock, and broadcasting ended around midnight. Three networks were all there was (ABC, CBS, and NBC); and they signed off every night with a playing of the national anthem. Here is a sampling of what programming was like in 1948:

Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts

Candid Camera

Ed Sullivan’s The Toast of the Town

Kukla, Fran, and Ollie

Howdy Doody. Remember Princess Summer-Fall-Winter-Spring?

Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater

A brief background and history of both sides of the Watson family—my father and mother were both third-generation U.S. citizens. My dad’s side of the family was German/English, and my mom’s side was Irish/English. The arrivals through Ellis Island go back as far as the potato famine of the 1870s. My father’s mother was German/American, and his father was English/American, while on my mom’s side it was Irish/American for her mother and English/American for her father.

A story that only pre-boomers will understand—my aunt Clara on my dad’s side lived on the northeast side of Detroit in a culturally diverse neighborhood, mostly European. It was 1949. The war was over, and life was back to normal. We would visit her, a couple of times a month, and my sister and I always looked forward to the arrival of the ice truck. Aunt Clara had an ice box (not a refrigerator) in her kitchen, and every five days the iceman paid a visit. He replaced what ice was left with a brand-new block of crystal clear ice one foot by one foot by one foot, and I guess it weighed twenty to thirty pounds. When he was done we would follow him out to his truck, where he would take his ice pick and whack us off a nice chunk of fresh ice. It didn’t get any better than that for an eight-year-old in 1949.

At age eight I got my first bicycle, a two-wheeler with aluminum spokes and a high-rise seat. Motorcycles were beginning to become popular, and our way of imitating them was to take a deck of used playing cards and some clothespins and attach them to the spokes. We would start out slow, and as our speed increased the sound of those cards got louder and eventually sounded just like a motorbike. Another one for the pre-boomers, as today’s kids wouldn’t get the thrill of making that noise.

Michigan was the place where most of the family settled with the majority living in the greater Detroit area. I recall growing up in the forties and fifties that almost everyone lived within thirty or forty miles of one another on the northwest side of the city. Redford was one area, and most people who know Detroit will recognize this as the Grand River/6-Mile Road Area.

On the Watson side there were five children; my dad was the eldest, and on the Mayer side, there were five offspring with my mother being the eldest. All ten were rooted in the Detroit area and settled down to raise families in the traditional manner, with two exceptions.

On my dad’s side there was his younger brother, Uncle Warren. He was an army ROTC cadet at Michigan State University, who graduated and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in June of 1941. We know what happened in December of that year. He was off to participate in the Great War and travel across the world. Many years later Uncle Warren would play a key role in shaping the life of a young and floundering civilian, named Brian Watson. The second was my mother’s brother, Chuck. He was a Michigan State graduate and an engineer. Uncle Chuck was only twelve or thirteen years older than me, so he was more like an elder brother than an uncle. He was the family playboy and a care-free spirit.

As a result of the economy, mainly the declining auto industry, by 1958 around 90 percent of the families had left the Detroit area. New York, Arizona, Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Indiana were final destinations for many of them. We moved to Peru, Indiana, due to Dad’s job.

Once the summer folk left the lake, there were few playmates around. I was very sports minded and found ways to keep busy. In the spring, it was baseball. Somewhere, I scrounged up an all-leather front car seat with real strong springs. I mounted it on a milk carton, and the seat was very close to the size of the strike zone. I had three baseballs and went back forty-five feet (little league distance) and began to throw at the seat. If I hit it that was a strike, and the ball would bounce all the way back to me. If I missed it was a ball, and I would have to walk up and retrieve my three balls. It was a pretty good reason to throw strikes. I would pretend I was pitching to Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, or anyone else who was an all-star. Little did I know that I was building up my arm strength and learning how to throw strikes. I started on the high school baseball team as a pitcher, my freshman year.

When the fall arrived, it was time for football. Next to our house was a vacant lot about seventy yards long and thirty yards wide. This was my football field. I would punt for hours from one end to the other, pretending to be the Detroit Lions’ punter. My dad nailed a two by four across two trees to simulate a goalpost, and I kicked field goals after growing tired of punting. Often, I was the Lions’ kicker trying to hit the game winner to beat the Bears or Packers for the NFL title. A few years later, I would be the punter and place kicker on the high school football team.

We had a one-car detached garage next to the house. When I was about eleven years old, my dad mounted a basket above the garage door, and I began shooting hoops. In the winter I would have to shovel snow just to have enough space to shoot. Often it was with my gloves on and a parka over my head. In those days we had cold, harsh winters in Michigan. Eventually my dad mounted a spotlight above the basket, so I could shoot in the dark. January in Brighton was always really dark by 5:00 p.m. Again, I was trying to hit the shot or make the free throw that would win the state championship. Hours would pass by, and Mom would practically have to drag me in the house to eat and avoid frostbite. My sophomore year in high school I would be the starting center on the team. In my third game I scored 37 points and broke the single-game scoring record.

My sister, Lois, was always thinking up daring and crazy things for us to do. Down a desolate dark dirt road about one-fourth mile away was an old abandoned streetcar. Overgrown with weeds and rusted out, it had the reputation of being haunted. On warm nights in the summer, we would try to summon up the courage to explore this wicked and spooky place. Once during dinner, we were bragging about how six or seven of us were going to break the curse and expose the mysteries of this haunted old streetcar.

My dad said nothing, just sat there and listened. How could we suspect that he and two other fathers had planned to take up residence in the old car and be ready for the brave adventurers? Darkness arrived, and the daring investigators set out on our mission. No one wanted to be the first in, but no one wanted to be called a chicken either, so we approached the target together. We were about ten feet inside and feeling pretty bold, when we heard a blood-curdling scream and all kinds of racket began.

We must have broken the world’s record for the fifty-yard dash getting out of there. We didn’t return for quite a while, and my father never said anything about it for months. We were not about to volunteer any information on our aborted attempt to solve the haunted streetcar mystery. A few months later he confessed, but it didn’t help our shattered egos very much.

Dumb things young kids do department—as I said, my sister was always the one to plan our daring deeds. With two of our cousins, she decided we should see who could climb the highest in a weeping willow tree across the road from our house. The tree was about forty feet tall and hung partly over the lake and partly over land. The higher up you got the better. There was only one problem, the higher you went, the smaller the branches became. I set the record reaching six feet from the top.

As I was basking in the glory, the tiny branches snapped and down I came. I managed to grab onto some of the tree limbs to slow down the fall. I hit the ground kind of soft and only came away with minor scrapes and bruises. Mom and Dad weren’t too happy, and that was our last attempt to set tree-climbing records.

I fondly blame it all on my sister; she was the brains behind most of our wild endeavors and, along with my two cousins (Larry and Lynn Hien), always had us in no-win situations. Naturally, I always took the lead, since I was the bravest in the tribe, which meant I was the one who took the brunt of the hits that led to the most bumps and bruises. I may have been the ultimate warrior, but obviously wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.

In early summer, when I was ten years old, I decided to build a super secret fort in one of the wooded areas not too far from home. I got the family hatchet and saw and went to work. In two days I constructed a beauty, well hidden and solid. The next day I broke out in a complete body rash and couldn’t stop scratching. I had created my masterpiece right in the middle of a poison sumac patch. I wasn’t the most popular member of the family for quite a while.

June, July, and August at the lakes were always teeming with activity. Boats were everywhere, and water activities dominated. The highlight of the summer was the Fourth of July fireworks display. At the far west end of Little Crooked Lake was a golf course and private cottage area owned by the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. Every year they put on the fireworks shows, and it was always a big event. The family would load up the boat with food and drink and make the two-mile ride to stake out a good spot for the show. Early July in Michigan wouldn’t see total darkness until a little after 9:00 p.m., so we had time to swim off the boat and enjoy our water picnic before the fireworks. I’ll always remember this as one the great times of the summer.

Life changed dramatically for all of us at the lakes in the spring of 1951. Our little school closed its doors, and we would continue our education in the metropolis of Brighton. I went from a one-room schoolhouse with twenty kids in eight grades to a classroom with twenty other sixth graders. For some reason, upon enrolling in Brighton Elementary School it was decided that I would skip the fifth grade. I was big for my age, but not at all smarter than any of the other kids. I guess my parents made the call. It was all right at the time, but I think it came back to haunt me in the years to come, as my maturity had not caught up with my size.

The biggest change was being in a much more structured environment both academically and socially. No more walking to school at our own pace; it was catch the school bus or there would be hell to pay. Nevertheless, we survived and were happy to be in such a big school. I don’t recall much about the studies at Brighton Elementary, but I’m sure they