| Toward the end of training we got our assignment to various tech schools. I was posted to a nine-months Radio Mechanic school at Scott AFB in Illinois. What struck me as absolutely insane was the amount of time spent testing us to determine our best skills to be used most effectively by our government. Then take half a barracks and put them in Radio Mechanic school; send the other half to Radar Operator school and so on. Why all the testing if they were simply filling quotas, regardless of knowledge or experience? Crazy.
Finally came the day in May of 1949 when we received our PFC stripe, packed up and headed home for ten days' leave before tech school. The US Air Force was formed as an independent branch of military in 1947. Before that it was a branch of the Army; the US Army Air Forces (not Army Air Force or Army Air Corp, contrary to popular belief.) We were still wearing Kahki uniforms but transitioned to Air Force blue within a year. So I was one of the first to wear blue. I was also in the last segregated training squadron in the Air Force. |
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| Me and a visitor to Scott - P-47 Thunderbolt from WW II. Nickname Jug. |
| Most of my time at Scott was so-so, with a few exceptions. I would hang out in Base Ops on days off hoping some pilot getting in his monthly flying time would let me ride with him. I flew in AT-6 trainers, C-47 Gooney Birds, and once I flew to Miami in a C-46 transport. This was supposed to be an overnight trip but while we were in Miami, Scott was buried in a blizzard and we couldn't come back for 3-days. One T-6 pilot was a hell of a neat guy. Not much older than me, he asked if I got airsick and I told him I didn't know. He did things with that T-6 I didn't know could be done. He even let me fly it for a few minutes and made a believer of me. |
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| C-46 Commando landing at Scott. |
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| Unusual visitor to Scott, F-82 (two Mustangs) night fighter. |
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| SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, BELLEVILLE,ILLINOIS |
| At Scott Air Force Base in Belleville, IL, I met up with many of the troops from Basic and waited...and waited. New arrivals came in daily but we waited weeks for the next class to begin. We weren’t idle. We were sent out on various make-work projects.
For a kid with a ninth-grade education, I was in over my head. I never felt comfortable with the schooling and had to study hard and cheat to keep up. Cheating was called "Riding the Pony," and most of us did it on the Friday test sooner or later. All over the barracks on Thursday night you could hear some one asking, "Who has a Pony for the test tomorrow?" Then I came down with severe strep throat that put me in the hospital for 2-weeks. If it had happened a few years earlier, before penicillin I would have died. But I did lose my class and had to join another. |
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