We flew home from France, I vaguely remember being on the airplane and being driven around the vast canyons of NY City. I do remember going to the area where we picked up the car that Dad had shipped back from France. I vividly recall going to a drive-in and getting “Foot Long” which Mom had assured me they had all over America, foot-long hot dogs and root beer, I was going to like this place. From there we picked up Dad’s Buick Roadmaster and started the long trip from NY to his new duty station in Ft Huachuca, AZ. I remember getting an Etch-A-Sketch, I assumed we bought it in Ohio as it said Ohio Art on the back. We stopped by Custer’s Last Stand and once there were pictures of Helen and I in Indian Bonnets.
I’m sure we must have driven to the Grandma’s homes around Santa Rosa either before of just after reporting in to Ft Huachuca but the trips to Grannies and Grandmas sort of blur into the next few years.
When I went to start school they told me I would have to be in 2nd grade again because they taught “new math” and I had not learned it in my old school, which I’d already completed the 2nd grade in and was quite looking forward to being a third grader.
We lived just off post in a little place called Huachuca City and the trailer park had a Coke Machine and I had a set of Roy Rogers pistols I wore low and mean. After a short time there we moved on Post and I was just a few blocks from General Whiteside Elementary.
Grannie Fikes came down to visit with us for a while while we were living on Post, I know she was there when I came home from school and was upset because the cartoons I usually watched while I ate lunch were not on. I started to change the channel and grannie told me to go back…then everyone stopped and came into watch the TV as the newsman said that the President had just been shot. I watched as Grannie broke down in tears, Mom got worried and Dad got ready, he was a soldier and knew he would be put on alert at any moment. Mom told me to go back to school, which was fine with me as Grannies crying was starting to get to me. When I got back to school most of the teachers and some of the girls were crying too. It would be years before I started to understand what had happened that day.
My older Sister Helen and I would go to the Post Riding stables and rent horses, the horses had set trails they would follow through the Huachuca Mountains and the one I always got was blind in one eye and would only make right turns, so if I wanted to go left I’d have to go all the way around the other way.
Some Hollywood people came and stayed on Post for a while, they filmed a movie, Capt. Newman, MD with Gregory Peck. I thought he looked a lot like Dad.
I joined the Cub Scouts, my best friend’s Mother was the Den Mother. When we got in a fight one night over me not believing in God she kicked me out of the Pack.
I pretty much considered myself a Lone Wolf Cub after that. Bobby and I went back to being best friends, I just didn’t get to go play Cub Scouts any more. Bobby’s older sister Kathy was Helen’s best friend. Helen and Kathy decided we needed to be a Beatles Band and we were assigned roles and outfitted with cardboard guitars and Beatle wigs. I was John.
Dad was doing some very serious stuff for the Army, I knew he worked on computers…and that was about it. when he was home he was usually taking extension courses learning more about computers and what ever it was he was doing he could never talk about it. It would be another 12 years before I really started to know what he had been doing.
The US Army gave him a medal for the work he was doing, only it was a secret too and I was to find out later that it was read into the congressional record in a closed session of Congress. It seems he wrote a computer program that reduced “war game” simulation from days to simulate one hour of real time down to a few hours for one real time hour. A very major advance in the reduction of time needed on the worlds most sophisticated computers when there were not that many around. His advancements led directly to our ability to have first person, real time computer simulations.
He also did the programming for the Vela satellites, a spy satellite system that he would not talk about until many years later, several years after getting out of the Army, he heard a news report while we were driving on the 405 freeway in Los Angeles about one of the satellites detecting an explosion. It seems they had a detector on them called a Bhangmeter, and yes, it was named for the Bhang, AKA marijuana. I wonder if he ever knew that. He also was given a new toy to work with, an IBM 1316 removable disk pack, several 
stacked magnetic disks about the size of dinner plates. He used them for data storage and they provided faster access to parts of programs then the older tape drives. He wrote an access routine that mapped the drives and called it a File Allocation Table, several years later a young man in California would sell the FAT file routine he had come across and claimed as his own to a young Bill Gates who would incorporate it into a program he was working on called Windows.
We moved off Post and out into the desert south of Sierra Vista to a place called the Barcus Ranch. We had a huge rock house that had been built out of the rocks that came from a huge open well out behind the house. 
It was a stage stop on the Nogales to Tucson run in the late 1800’s. The rancher had Brahma Bulls in the surrounding range and when they would come in to feed behind the ranch Helen and I would drop onto their backs and let them ride us out into the desert. Free range Brahma Bulls are not very steerable.
One night Dad was working late on the computers, which was nothing unusual for him, when the dogs started acting strange. Dogs that would growl to get out when Cougars got on the roof were now trying to crawl under the TV and couch and the rock solid stone house started vibrating. Mom went to use the phone to call dad and the line was dead so Mom told Helen to go get the rifle out of the bedroom down the hall and as she was coming back she yelled and Mom and I ran to look. Out the window in the door at the end of the hall we could see a green fireball sitting in the night sky far out in the desert. As we watched it slowly dropped closer to the ground and stopped and a green beam went from the ball to the ground. The beam shot back into the light and the fireball streaked off to the east faster than a rocket. as soon as it was gone the house stopped vibrating, the dogs went back to normal and the phone worked again, everything was normal except our nerves.
We would explore the deserts often, trips to Old Tucson, a famous movie set, Tombstone, a more famous silver mining Town once ruled by the Earp’s and Bisbee, a huge open pit copper mine. Rucker Lake and Chiricahua stronghold where the Apache warrior Geronimo and the Chiricahua held out against the US Calvary.
I learned to shoot in the gullies and learned to ride in the canyons and learned to dance with spiders and scorpions. I would walk out into the desert and find a large stand of cactus with a Tarantula village. There would be webbing covering the cactus in a large circle with dozens of large holes. I would stand in the center and watch the massive spiders slowly emerge all around me until I just couldn’t stand it any more and I’d take off running. Adrenalin was my first high.
I had the standard issue green plastic Army Men that I would play with in the yard. Helen and I would build little mud caves for the army men and in the mornings I would need to evict the spiders and scorpions that would take up residence during the night. I had tuna fish cans 1/2 full of water under each bed leg to inhibit night visitors and on waking in the morning the first thing I’d do is reach down and pick up my shoes and shake the bugs out. The desert was a dangerous place to live and though I might not have known it at the time it honed my senses to an almost Ninja like acuity to all things creepy and crawly.
We would sometimes make the run up through Tucson, across the desert through Yuma and into California and up to Healdsburg and Guerneville where Granny Fikes and Grandma Burke lived. Grandma Burke was kind and wise and everything I thought a grandmother should be. Granny Fikes was old and mean and made me go to church and she always smelled like to much lavender and snuff. when at Grandma Burkes I could watch TV and play with her dog and sit in the huge kitchen and watch her cook huge meals. When I was at Grannies house I had to sit properly on the couch and I was constantly getting in trouble for teasing her Chihuahua Penny.
One one of our trips North the old Buick dad was driving started to have transmission problems. we came down off the Grapevine grade in a white knuckle ride I’m sure was far more dangerous than they let on. Dad found a place where he could get some sawdust and spent a couple hours stuffing sawdust in the transmission while Mom found a phone book and looked up the nearest Used car lots. Dad drove to the Used Car section of town and traded the Buick, certain to run at least another mile or two before it started making horrible noises again, for a Cadillac. Dad was mostly an honest man unless he was dealing with a used car dealer, then it was buyer beware.
On the trip back home through the desert in the early morning hours an Arizona State Trooper managed to catch up with Dad and the low flying Caddy. He pulled along side, smiled at dad and nodded and the race was on, I’m sure dad would have won had it not been for mom having some words about the 100 miles per hour plus we were burning up Arizona highway at. Another trip we all awoke to the sound of cactus scraping the underside of the car and looked out the windshield to see a huge cactus dead ahead. Dad, now much more awake than he had been moments before calmly guided the Caddy back onto the asphalt and Mom did not say a word. Not for a while anyway.
Dad had served 20 years in the Army by 1965 and was due for his last duty assignment that would put him over 21 years. He called back to the Personnel center at the Pentagon and just happened to get an old buddy of his on the line. He gave Dad a choice between Alaska and Hawaii. Mom decided that Alaska was a place she would like to see.
Mom and dad spent a lot of time building a trailer for the expedition North. It was styled on the old chuck wagons used on cattle drives with fold down sides where Mom could set up a kitchen alongside the road. All the seams were screwed extra tight with foam insulation strips to keep the dust out. It didn’t work. By the time we reached Anchorage the Alcan had managed to get dust into every corner of the trailer.
Next: 1965 to 1967: Sourdough Billy
TOO MANY comments, questions! Great read, Bill. I’m stuck to it.