One Saturday morning a group of our Air Force ROTC instructors at Purdue University gathered in my office acting very peculiarly with suspicious looking grins. I had been waiting for several weeks for overdue orders for an overseas assignment. Someone (I believe it was John Ward) kept pointing to a place on a map of Japan on the wall until I finally got the message that the orders had arrived and we were going to Misawa Air Force Base way up in Northern Japan. Someone said to be sure to look up Mama-Sans downtown close to AP Alley. Downtown??! One street with many stores with dirt floors and odoriferous barely-covered sewer lines right in front in the street.

We had all of three days to sell our house in Lafayette from scratch, sort out what was to be shipped to Everett, Washington where Betty and the kids were to live for several months until housing would be available at Misawa, what was to be shipped to Misawa later at that time, what was to go into storage, what was needed for the trip to Everett, take down my 50-foot antenna tower which was to be shipped to Japan along with a total of 2,000 lbs. of amateur radio equipment, pack up and leave. We did it all in the three days! Try that today! Luckily the military encourages amateur radio operation and will ship the gear over and above the normal household goods weight allowance.

I arrived at Tachikawa AFB just in time for a typhoon. No electricity, no hot food in the mess, no flight to Misawa for three days. Finally arrived in Misawa at night in a heavy rain storm and just got to bed in the BOQ when a big earthquake hit. I was wondering how quickly the Air Force could process a resignation.

It was seven months before we could get base housing so Betty and the kids had an apartment in Everett close to her family. I had my ham station and antenna tower at the BOQ and had a direct phone patch home to them several times a week through a good ham friend in Everett. (When I was stationed on Shemya in the Aleutians during the Korean War I had a phone patch call home every single day for the year there in that miserable place.) Talk about a loyal friend! He was Leo Loken, W7IOQ.

Misawa was cool (definitely not the "cool" of teenage vernacular) cloudy, cold, rainy, windy, snowy and typhoony, but we still really enjoyed our tour there and the sightseeing trips. One night we had a crowd at a formal dinner at the Base golf club about four miles from the base center and our homes. By 10:00 PM we were solidly snowed in. It took the heavy equipment from the motor pool until 7:00 AM to reach us and evacuate everyone to the Officers Club. We had 17 feet of snow in two months that winter!

Son Bob, age five at the time, was in our front yard when a formation of three of our F102s flew over. Betty said, "Bobby, look at that formation." Bob replied, "Mom, that's not a formation, that's a three-mation!"

My first assignment at Misawa was Plans and Programs Officer for the 39th Air Division. My first job was to write myself out of the job. I wrote the plan which dissolved the Division and combined its functions into the Air Base Group. I then became the Assistant Base Operations Officer for the Group. Fifth Air Force Headquarters had been on the back of the Group to prepare a long-overdue disaster control plan. They finally set a deadline for the Base Commander, with a short fuse. So that was my next project -- a rush job to get one written. I proceeded to search the base and areas around the base by helicopter and on foot looking for protection from an H-bomb! The only thing we had were steam tunnels so the plan was completed and flown the next day by jet to Tachikawa on the deadline date. Now we were all safe.

I was also the Training Officer which included running the parades and being parade adjutant. Out behind Base Headquarters the Base Commander, Assistant Commander and I would march around out of sight as I checked them out on their parade procedures.
    Click here for a picture of a Misawa Air Force Base parade, taken by 6-yr old Bobby Haven (picture opens in new window).

One day I got a call from a Lt. Col. who started accusing me for something he claimed that I had done and about which I didn't know a thing (there were rumors on the Base that this man might be running a couple of quarts low). When he accused me of doing something unethical, I got up on my high horse and told him off in no uncertain terms. My sergeant who knew who was on the phone was waving cautious signals to me and whispering, "Go easy, go easy!" I figured that there would no doubt be repercussions and that I would be in trouble. At 5:15 the phone rang at our house. It was the Executive Officer saying that the Base Commander wanted to see me at his office right away. Well folks, at that point I figured my career in the Air Force was kaput. As I walked into the office I saw that the entire staff was there. "Oh my God, they are making a federal case out of this -- I've had it!" Col. Byers said, "Well Haven, you have really done it now -- you have really screwed up." I didn't know what to say so figured I'd pretend that I didn't understand. He kept after me though and started to blame me for snow removal problems on the runways during a snow crisis we were having. "But Colonel, that's not in my job description. That's not in my department. I don't know a snow plow from a snowmobile." At that moment he stepped forward and pinned leaves on my shoulders! Then, in front of the staff I told him that darned if I were going to tell him what I thought he had called me in for. I never heard another word from the Lt. Colonel.

Since there was little activity off base we had a pretty active social life on base. Our two teenage daughters spent most of their time at the base Teen Club. They had a lot of fun there, had many friends and when we left Japan there were a lot of teary-eyed good byes. Betty played a little golf on our base course and made a hole-in-one. She casually mentioned it to me a couple of days later.

It was my turn to take a payroll with an armed guard to a Godforsaken isolated radar site on a little island even farther north off Hokkaido called Okishiri Shima. That place was almost as bad as Shemya. If you know how the Japanese pronounce the "r"s (like in sayonara) you will know that place was definitely "Shiri." And I thought one year on Shemya in the Aleutians was tough!

To get there we had to take a navy ship across the Straights of Hokkaido which is worse than going around the Horn. During the night I'd be floating two feet above my bed and the next moment be pressed down into it with a ten-G force. We went ashore by landing craft. It was like D-Day except no one was shooting at us. At least I don't think they were.

When our tour in Japan was up I got orders to go to the Pentagon. I was having conniption fits. I did not want to go there, especially with my family. They had somehow got a copy of my Purdue masters thesis which dealt with a statistical study regarding attitudes toward military service. I don't remember how I got out of it but there were phone calls and TWX's. I got orders to the Systems Command at Hanscom AFB, Bedford, Mass.

We were lucky. We bought a very nice home in Chelmsford and we could not have found a better place for two teenage daughters in high school and a 10-year old boy in grammar school. The girls were cheerleaders, Stephanie was captain of the squad. Suzanne dated the captain of the football team and a few years later they were married. Suzanne had her first two years at the University of Massachusetts and later got her B.A. from UCLA and then her M.S. from USC.

Having two pretty daughters, our house was a continual Grand Central Station of high school kids and football players. There was never a shortage of boys to shovel snow off the walk and driveway. Betty swore up and down that every time the snow was piled high or it was time for trick or treating, I was off on TDY in Germany or Colorado Springs or somewhere else -- anywhere else, actually.

Our office was at MITRE Corporation (MIT Research Engineering) where I was assigned as the human factors engineer on the System Project Office for the development of the then secret North American Combat Operations Center -- the huge cavern-city inside and under 800 feet of solid granite of Cheyenne Mountain outside Colorado Springs. I was responsible for overseeing the contractors working on the system for all personnel related matters. That included the human factor engineering design of the computes and other equipment, coordinating with the Training Command for training personnel for operation of the system, all life support for the button-up period of 30 days, all technical manuals, and coordinating the manpower requirements with the contractor and the Pentagon. It was so much fun!

I had always planned on retiring at 20 years service with the goal of teaching math at Santa Ana College in my home town. It turned out that I was due for the next promotion at that same time but I had just accepted the one position which opened at the College in the math department. At that time if you accepted a promotion you had to serve two more years. So I retired and had a very enjoyable second 20-year career. We bought a home two blocks from the College and I just walked to my classes every day. For the first three years I also taught the one-year surveying course for the engineering majors. That was enjoyable and I could get away from the desk once a week and take the class out for their field work. One project was to lay out a highway with everything staked out for grades, slopes, cuts and fills and earthwork volumes, etc. More fun than a barrel of monkeys, but some of the rattlesnakes didn't think too highly of highway construction.

Stephanie had completed all but her last year of college when she came home between semesters and shook us up with the announcement that she was going to apply to TWA to be a stewardess. Of course, Betty and I had the aforementioned conniption fits telling her that if she quit now she would never get back to college. She said that she would go back later. Later that day she came home with a big grin waving her ticket to stewardess school in Kansas City. She was the only girl of fourteen applicants they selected that day and since she had had two years of French they assigned her to the European flights. She lived in New York City and flew to every major capital of Europe. As her parents, we got to travel all over the world almost free -- Fiji, England, a month driving throughout Europe, a camera safari in Kenya and Tanzania, and two trips to a paradise in Tobago. What a way to go! My colleagues at the College said they were going to force their daughters to be stewardesses. What a shock and family crisis when Stephanie announced she was going to get married and quit. Later, we did quite a bit of travelling in Mexico, and also Tahiti, Moorea, Bora Bora, but how disappointing -- we had to pay for it. Stephanie did go back to college and got her degree from the University of California, Irvine. For a while she was director of the admissions office at the medical school there.

Son Bob also graduated from UC Irvine in computer science. He really hit his niche and has held positions as a high-level engineering manager at several different computer companies in the San Jose (Silicon Valley) area.

Suzanne received a second master's degree from the Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. She became the first woman minister in the one hundred-year history of the Presbyterian Church in Montecito, Calif. Later she became the executive pastor of the church in Albuquerque, being the first woman to hold that position in the church in the U.S.

About 1980 we purchased silver on four-to-one margin. At that time Mexico had just completed the new Baja Highway so we and two other couples from the College in three vehicles made the 1100 mile trek to La Paz during Christmas vacation. There were no hotels then so we camped out every night. Before we left, the price of silver dropped just a little, so because we were going to be where I could not take care of a margin call if it came, I sold. I had a small transistor radio with me and every day on the news from Los Angeles silver was skyrocketing and at its peak our investment would have grown by 8000 percent! Have you ever seen a grown man cry?

Our next investment was a commercial lot in South Lake Tahoe right across from the airport. After paying a high price and high taxes for several years because of its commercial zoning our good old U.S. Congress created the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency which promptly changed the zoning to the lowest category -- general forest. We lost the entire investment. Hundreds of people were hit. I got a group together and we carried a suit all the way to the California Supreme Court. We lost. The Court said the Planning Agency had the authority to rezone any way they wanted to. Normally, the property has to be condemned and owners paid a fair market value. You can really depend on the law and the courts these days. Anyone want investment advice?

I retired from the College in 1984 and we moved to Fresno, California where Betty's two sisters lived. Dear Betty died in 1988 from a brain tumor. In 1991 I met and married pretty Therese. She had lost her husband six years before. He was a civil engineer working as the residential engineer on freeway construction here in Central California. On our honeymoon we stayed at the Hale Koa at Fort Derussy in Waikiki and then on to Maui. We took an Alaskan cruise on our first anniversary and a Hawaiian trip again a few months later.

We belong to the Central California Traditional Jazz Society, the Dixieland Society, with dances every month, and have season tickets to our excellent Fresno Philharmonic Orchestra.

I have been fully retired for eight years now and have never been so busy in all my life. This year I have been president of the Fresno Chapter of The Retired Officers Association and president of our homeowners association. I would like to get on the golf course but that is a rare day. I do manage to maintain contact on my amateur radio station with several old friends from my hometown who are scattered around the U.S.