Oral History Program Russel Westcott Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 23 October 2020 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Russel Westcott Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 23 October 2020 Copyright © 2022 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Hill Aerospace Heritage Foundation oral history project is a series of oral histories documenting the life stories and experiences of the board members of the Hill Aerospace Heritage Foundation. Board members recall their time in military service, as well as their memories of starting the foundation in 1983 and opening the Hill Aerospace Museum in 1987. Each interview begins with a brief life sketch of the individual board member, then moves onto their memories of the early days of the Hill Aerospace Museum. They discuss ongoing efforts to make the museum the premier location for preserving Utah’s Aviation and Air Force history and name important figures on the Board of Directors, base command, and museum staff who helped to make the museum an important influence in the community. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Westcott, Russel, an oral history by Alyssa Kammerman, 23 October 2020, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Russel Westcott 23 October 2020 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Russel Westcott, conducted on October 23, 2020, at the Hill Aerospace Museum, in Ogden, Utah, by Alyssa Kammerman. In this interview, Russel discusses his life, his involvement with the United States Air Force, and his experiences while serving on the board of the Hill Aerospace Heritage Foundation Board. AK: Today is October 23, 2020. I am at the Hill Aerospace Museum with Mr. Russel Westcott. Do you prefer Russ or Russel? RW: I prefer Russ, but if you write it all out there’s only one “l” on “Russel” AK: Ok. Good to know. We are talking about his life and his experiences with the Hill Aerospace Museum. My name is Alyssa Kammerman and I’ll be conducting the interview. So Russ, starting out, where and when were you born? RW: I was born in 1933 in Durand, Michigan. It’s a little city in central Michigan between Flint and Lansing and I lived in that town until I left to go to college. Lived in the same house from the time I was two years old until I left to go to college. AK: That’s pretty amazing. What do you remember of growing up in Michigan? RW: Well one of the things that I look back on and I tell people jokingly I’m glad I wasn’t my parents because being brought up in a small town, things were far different than they are today. We did a lot of things that a kid today can’t even think about doing and had a lot more freedom. A lot more freedom. AK: Tell me about some of those things. 1 RW: I think I was nine years old and a friend and I decided we wanted to go swimming. I had a 20-inch bike, I didn’t even have a full-sized bike, and we rode double on that bike 11 miles to a lake and went swimming and then rode that bike back home. Needless to say, I was not the most popular person in my family when I got home. There was no sense trying to tell my mother what I hadn’t done or what I had done because my hair at that time if I went swimming told the story that that’s where I’d been. AK: [laughs] How many siblings did you have? RW: I have two brothers. I have a brother that’s 18 months younger than I am and then I have a brother that’s 11 years younger than I am. AK: Ok so there’s a bit of a gap there. Do you remember anything about World War II? RW: Oh yes. I remember a lot about World War II. I remember where I was on December 7th when I heard the news. We had been out on a Sunday afternoon drive and my dad stopped at a friend’s house and went in. When he came back out he told us the news about the bombing at Pearl Harbor. I remember it vividly. My dad had tried to enlist in World War I and they told him to go home and grow up; he was too young. By the time World War II came, he was too old. I can still remember my dad walking the length of our living room and dining room back and forth, back and forth that Sunday night, and his language probably wasn’t all that good. I remember a friend and I used to constantly be playing war and making machine guns and I don’t know whether you know if you take a piece of cardboard and tear it apart and then cut it into a strip, why it looks like bullets 2 going into a gun [laughs]. So we did things like that. I stood on the corner on V-E day hawking newspapers. “Extra, Extra. Read all about it.” AK: You would have been eight years old when the war started and then twelve years old when the war ended? Is that correct? RW: Yeah AK: Ok. So your first job was obviously hawking newspapers then? RW: My first job, I was 10 years old. I was delivering telegrams and I got ten cents a telegram for delivering telegrams. I used to always go in to pick up the telegrams with my fingers crossed because at that time the war department notified people about casualties with a telegram. I never had to deliver one of those. AK: That would be really nerve-wracking. RW: I did a lot of jobs. I worked in a garage as a car wash man and flunkie, and I worked in a grocery store as a clerk. Those were in the days when people came in with their grocery list and just handed you the list and then you went around and collected all the groceries and sacked them up and took the money and then they left. AK: Interesting. How long did you work there? RW: The grocery store? Oh boy. I guess it was the better part of my senior year in high school. AK: Ok. RW: Yeah it would have probably been. I know I was working over the first of the year because I can remember having to go in on New Year’s Day and do inventory. 3 AK: That’s never fun. Going back to World War II, would you tell me about some of your memories of any war efforts you were a part of, scrap metal drives, anything like that? RW: My friend and I used to take our wagons and go around town collecting trash or junk or steel and stuff like that. Then we'd take it up to the local junk dealer and sell it. I remember doing that. My dad was an Air Raid Warden and of course he had all kinds of model airplanes they gave him to study. Then I can remember in school, when we'd have air raid drills, we'd all pile out into the hallway and sit in the hallway, in the middle of the building. I can remember doing that. I don't know, I can't offhand think of anything else at that time. AK: That's interesting that your dad was an Air Raid Warden. Was that kind of the beginning of your fascination with airplanes? RW: No, not really. I didn't even ever imagine being around airplanes or becoming a pilot or anything when I was growing up. That was the furthest thing from my imagination. I didn't know what I wanted to be, but that wasn't something that was on my radar at all. I'm not like these guys that say that when they were 10 years old, they became fascinated with flying. It just didn't happen that way with me. AK: What were your parents’ names? RW: My dad's name was same as mine: Russel G. Westcott. And my mother was so afraid that somebody would start calling me Junior that she put “The Second” on my birth certificate. So I carried that a little while. I hated it. Then I carried “Jr.” on 4 my name for a while, and then after my dad died in 1964, why, I eventually just dropped the “Jr.” also. So I'm surprised that I can even get a passport anymore. AK: What was your mother's name? RW: Rosella. AK: What did your dad do for work? RW: He was an engineer at a small company there in town, called Simplicity Engineering Company. My dad was chief engineer and the number two guy in the plant. I worked there the summer after I graduated from high school. AK: How long did you work there? RW: Just that summer, from July to September. Then I went back in December and worked for the winter break from college, but just the month of December. AK: What year did you graduate from high school? RW: 1951 from Durand High School. AK: You worked in your father's engineering firm during that summer. What did you do after the summer? Did you go to college? RW: Yeah. In the fall of 1951, I went to Michigan State, and that's kind of where my Air Force career started. I walked in to register at Michigan State. I was naive, to say the least, and young and dumb, and when I walked in to register, they said, “You've got to sign up for ROTC. You have to take two years ROTC.” I was at a land grant college at that time, and I said, “Well, what are my choices?” And they said, “Army or Air Force.” The Korean War was on and I thought to myself, “Army guys carry guns; Where is the Air Force desk?” And I went and signed up for Air Force ROTC. And that was the beginning. 5 AK: What kinds of things did they have you do in your Air Force ROTC? RW: Well, mostly it was just general education type stuff and military histories and bearings and things like that. Recognize that at this time, 1951, the Air Force was only four years old. My freshman year they didn't even have blue uniforms for us to wear. We had to wear Army uniforms. Sophomore year we got our own blue uniforms. AK: Did you wear them just for ROTC? Or did you wear them to your classes too? RW: Well, the days you had classes, you wore them. AK: What were you studying in college? RW: Well, I knocked around for a while and didn't know what I wanted to do and I thought maybe I wanted to be an engineer. When I started seeing how much lab work there was with the engineering curriculum, why, I decided that was not a good way to go, because I had a lot of extra hours of academics. So I just switched to Business Administration and got my degree in management. AK: Did you know what you wanted to do with that? RW: Nope. Can we back up a little ways? AK: Oh, yeah, absolutely. RW: In 1951, three days after we graduated from high school, my wife and I got married. So she helped put me through college. She didn't work except in the home. And she’s been with me ever since. We just celebrated our 69th wedding anniversary. AK: Congratulations! So did you and your wife date all through high school? 6 RW: Well, we'd known each other since we were little kids. Her dad worked at the same plant and she lived in a little town seven miles from where we were. We started dating the summer between our sophomore and junior year. [shruggs] That's the way it happened.[chuckles] AK: How many kids did you have? RW: Three kids: Pamela, Randall, and Kevin. AK: Ok. What year did you graduate from college? RW: I graduated from Michigan State at the end of May 1955 and went on active duty in September of 1955. AK: OK, and I am a little rusty on my Korean War history. Was the Korean War still going on at that time? RW: No, the Korean War ended in what was, I think, 1953 or might have been 1954. I think it was started in 1950 and ended 1953. AK: After you graduated from college. Did you stay in Michigan for a little while? RW: No, I took a job at South Bend, Indiana for that summer and then came on active duty in September and went to Preflight and then to pilot training. AK: When you signed up for ROTC, did they allow you to choose your specific job? RW: When you sign up for ROTC as a freshman, why, there's nothing like that. Now I'm talking 50s. I don't know if it's the same today at all. After the sophomore year, you had to apply to go to advanced ROTC. I applied and requested a pilot slot, and didn't get one because I flunked the flight physical. So for some odd reason, and I don't know if I recall right, they selected eight people that were nonpilot or non-navigator for the advanced class, and one of those eight people was 7 me. I have no idea to this day how I made that list because I didn't have a stellar academic record by a long shot. Between my junior and senior year, I went to summer camp at Scott Air Force Base and passed the flight physical. So they moved me into a pilot slot and it just kept growing from there. AK: What sparked your interest in becoming a pilot? RW: When I went to pilot training, the extent of my flying was, I had a cousin that owned an airplane and he took me up one day for about 15 minutes. We were having a family reunion and he was taking everybody up and my wife-to-be even got to fly that day. So that wasn't any big deal. Then at summer camp at that time, it was catch as catch can for the Air Force to furnish airplanes, so my orientation flight at summer camp was in a B-25 and I ended up with, oh, I don't know, less than thirty minutes at the controls. So that was the extent of my flying. The next time I flew, I was in the front seat as a student. AK: So what made you choose to be a pilot? RW: That was just the career that the Air Force had me directed toward. When I went on active duty, I went on active duty with a three-year commitment as a reserve officer. I had every intention of only serving three years, but when I got going at it, I was enjoying it so much. Then when you graduated from pilot training, they had a unique system for assigning you to your next assignment. They split the class into two groups: one group was those that were career officers - in other words, regular officers or indefinite, no date of separation. The other group was those of us who had a date of separation. Everybody in the first group got their choice, and then they went to the second group. Well, I was in that second group 8 and I was down a ways and it became obvious that I was not interested in the airplanes that were going to be available when it became my time to choose, so I signed “Indefinite” at that time. Went career reserve, which added a two-year commitment to my three years. But I said, “I can live with that.” So I got the assignment I wanted by doing that. AK: So what was your first assignment as a career officer then? RW: I got assigned to stay at Greeneville Air Force Base, which was where I was going through pilot training. I got to stay there as an instructor pilot. A unique experience with that was, as I graduated on Thursday, I wrote the Instruments Standard Eval test on Friday. I flew with a standard eval pilot on Monday and I flew as an instructor pilot on Tuesday with a student. They took three of us and made us front-seat only IP’s so that we could fly instrument missions with students. So that was pretty unique. You don't see things like that happen anymore. You didn't see it then very often. Things were different back then. AK: That sounds like a quick turnaround from student to instructor. Was that intimidating? RW: No, I was very comfortable with it. I just thought that was the greatest thing going [laughs]. And it got me flying. I kept flying quite a bit. So no, I enjoyed it. I went to instructor training in the first of the year for three months at Craig Air Force Base in Alabama and then I went back to Greenville and picked up my career as an instructor. AK: How long were you a flight instructor? 9 RW: I was an instructor at Greenville from 1956 to 1960, and then I was an instructor at Randolph Air Force Base and Sheppard Air Force Base from 1963 to 1969. But I've been an IP almost my whole career because every airplane I flew, I was checked out as an IP. Another facet of my instructor career was in April of 1956: I went into my first class and picked up four students and six weeks later I only had one of them left. I had one, unfortunately, that was killed in a mid-air collision when he was up on a solo mission. I had another one that decided he'd had enough and he quit. Then I had a little Ecuadorean student that just wasn't hacking it and I had to put him up for elimination. So I had quite a reputation. When the next class came in, my instructor friends all let my students know what my reputation was. So two years into that tour, in 1958, the squadron adjutant job came open. So I jumped on that. For the last two years there I was, the squadron adjutant plus IP, and it kept me real busy. In 1960, I got reassigned to Alconbury, England in my admin AFSC. But fortunately, when I got over there, there were two things: One is the guys that were in non-flying jobs were called “behind-thelines” pilots and those of us behind-the-lines guys had T-33s, which I'd been flying for five years. So I was able to get a lot of flying time, even in England when I wasn't assigned a primary flying job. AK: Interesting. So were T-33s the original airplanes that you learned how to fly? RW: Well, we started at primary with T-34, T-28, and then went into the T-33 when we got to Greenville for basic training. AK: How long were you in England for? 10 RW: Three years and was fortunate that we could check out an airplane any weekend we wanted and go anyplace we wanted. So I flew all over Europe. AK: Did you bring your wife out there with you? RW: Well, she and the kids came over. They weren't flying all over Europe like I was. But yeah, she and the kids came over. At that time, they did not allow dependents to come over until you had a place for them to live. So you had to go over first, find living quarters for them because there were no base living quarters, and then you could send for them and they'd come over. She traveled over there by herself with three little kids. Yeah. AK: That's amazing. RW: She became pretty independent [laughs]. AK: You would have to be. How did the Vietnam War affect your work? RW: Being overseas as things were just starting, we only heard bits and pieces of what was going on. When I came back in 1963, things started picking up. I had made regular officer while I was in England, so I was committed at that point in time to a career. I got my dander up a little bit because, as the Vietnam War started escalating, many of my contemporaries were bailing out. And it kind of irked me that they would be really happy to be in a peacetime Air Force, but they didn't want any part of the other part of it. So needless to say, that affected my thoughts. I had gotten to Randolph Air Force Base in 1963, so by 1965 I was way up on the list to go to Southeast Asia and was just kind of sitting around waiting for the shoe to drop, so to speak. We had a home there that we bought and we had 11 a lot of friends and my wife was teaching in the local kindergarten and the kids were in school and I thought, that's OK. Then in late 1965, I got a phone call from Personnel and they said, “How are you going to like Wichita Falls?” And I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “We need a T-38 flying safety officer at Wichita Falls and you're it.” And I said, “I'm on top of the list for Southeast Asia. What's going on?” They said, “Well, you'll be at Wichita Falls for about a year and then you'll get your Southeast Asia.” Well, that didn't set real well because I had to uproot my family and everything, of course, to go up there. So 1966 went along and 1967 went along and I'm still there. 1968 came along and I'm still there. So finally I said, I've got to get this anvil off my head, so to speak, and do something. So I volunteered for A-37s. I had studied all the airplanes and found out that A-37 had the shortest leadin training time before we went overseas so that was figured into how long I was going to be away from my family type-thing. My assignment came down early 1969 for F-105s, which kind of blew me away. It turned out the F-105 had the longest lead-in time of any airplane, so I spent from May of 1969 till May of 1970 in training. And I liked the 105, I was really happy with the assignment, but it just blew me away how I ended up in a 105. I extended that length of time of training because as I completed the 105 Checkout school, in early March of 1970, I volunteered to go to Wild Weasel school and I became a Wild Weasel pilot. That little school at Nellis Air Force Base lasted until almost the 1st of May. My daughter was graduating from high school at the end of May, and so I just told the Air Force, I said, “Look, you've 12 waited a year for me. I'm going to take 30 days of leave and you can wait another 30 days so that I can stay home and be there for her graduation.” AK: What would you tell me about what Wild Weasel is? I hadn’t heard that before. RW: So Wild Weasel Mission was a sam-suppression mission, and our job was to go in and protect the fighting force or the bomber force or whatever it was. Our motto was “First in, Last out.” I flew in a two-seater 105 with a weapons systems officer in the back seat. They were called Bears. And it was a very interesting mission. AK: Where did you say you flew that mission again? RW: In June of 1970, I headed for Thailand and went to Jungle Survival School at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Then from there, I went on over to Takli Air Base in Thailand. About the time we got to Takli, they were already starting to close the base and send the 105s home. So I flew out of Takli for July and August. In September, they assigned the Wild Weasel mission to a Korat Air Base in Thailand, which was just up the road a hundred miles or so. We moved there in September of 1970 and then flew out of there until I went home in 1971. AK: What month did you go home in 1971? RW: June again. Everything seems to be June for me when it comes to overseas. And usually June 6th! [laughs] AK: That’s super interesting. So that was two years away from your family. Is that correct? RW: While I was in training, the training was at McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas. And my family was at that time situated in a little town of Burkburnet, Texas, 13 which was right on the Oklahoma border near Wichita Falls. So for that, from August of 1969 until early 1970s, I commuted on weekends between the two, but I was basically gone for that whole year. And then I had my year in Southeast Asia. AK: Would you tell me a little more about Jungle Survival School? What did that entail exactly? RW: [laughs] All of the survival schools were a kick in the butt as far as I was concerned. I loved them. I went to Basic Survival School at Fairchild Air Force Base up in Washington. That was the first stop and that was interesting. A lot of indoctrination. We got to go out and bivouac out in the mountains for a couple of days with little or no food. And we got to be captured and put in a prison camp and things like that. So it's kind of a kick in the butt. Then I left there and went directly to Miami, to Homestead Air Force Base for Water Survival School, and that was another one that I just really got a kick out of it. Parasailed off a boat out over Biscayne Bay and jumped off big towers in a parachute harness to simulate parachute drops and just neat. Jungle survival school was not a very long school. I can't remember how long it was, but it was just a few days. Part of it was academics, teaching you plants and animals and things like that. One of them was a survival thing where they took you up and sent you off into the mountains to hide with three chips in your pocket. Then after you'd been out there for a certain number of hours they turned the, um, I can't remember the name of the little native tribes, you know, going around barefoot and in a thong; They turned them loose to find us. And if 14 one of them found you, you had to give him a chip. At the end of the whole thing, they could turn that chip in and each chip was worth a bag of rice to them. So they had a lot of incentive and they knew those mountains. I thought I was well hidden, but it didn't matter. They found me [laughs]. We had a few guys that escaped that did get caught, but most of us got caught. Then they put us on a bus to leave and all these native people standing there waving at us [laughs]. AK: That sounds kind of like the early days of special forces training. RW: Oh, it just was a miniature part of what Special Forces training would be like. Yeah. AK: Were you technically a part of Special Forces? RW: No. The other interesting thing was that at the completion of the Jungle Survival School, they put a list on the board of people that were going to stay at Clark and I was on that list and couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. Well, we found out that list was comprised of folks that they determined had the highest probability of being shot down and needing the survival school. So they went into a lot of stuff there and some of it at the time was classified. I don't know whether it still is or not, but it was interesting that that was the criteria to make that list AK: What was your rank at that time? RW: I was a major. I was older than the average bear over there. I was thirty-eight years old when I was flying my tour. AK: So you mentioned that 1971 is when you came back from your tour. What were you assigned to after that? 15 RW: As I was approaching the end of my tour, I started thinking about my next assignment. A lot of the guys were being sent back to McConnell as 105 pilots. And I looked at the guys that were going back there and the dates, the ranks of those guys and things, and I thought, you know, they're going to be so top-heavy, rank-wise, that that doesn't appeal to me at all, even though I would have loved to have stayed in the 105. About that time, I got a call from a friend of mine that I served with who was at a Rated Officers Branch, at the Military Personnel Center. I had been a flight safety officer since 1965, in addition to all my IP duties, and Larry called me up and he said, “You're coming up on the end of tour. What do you want to do?” And I said, “I really don't know, but I don't want to go back to McConnell.” He said, “I got a flying safety job open at Eglin Air Force Base and I got one open at Edwards Air Force Base. Which one would you like?” And I said, “Well, Marilyn and I are adamant that we dislike the Southeast United States immensely, don't want to be stationed in the Southeast United States. How about Edwards?” So about the first of July 1971, I went to Edwards. I went in as a flying safety officer, and about four or five months later the chief of safety got reassigned and I became chief of safety at Edwards. And again, from my Shepherd days, I had moved to the T-38 and so I was able to fly the T-38 at Edwards too and flew a lot of different airplanes at Edwards. AK: So what were your duties as chief of safety then? RW: Well, I kind of tried to confine myself as much as I could to the flying side of the house, but as chief of safety, I had ground safety folks; I had, I think, three different people assigned to ground safety. I had an explosive safety, I had 16 system safety under me, and then flying safely. Then as a safety officer and eager pilot, why, I flew a lot. As a pilot at Edwards, it was interesting because Edwards is the Flight Test Center and they also have the test pilot school there. Some people really had a problem associating with or serving with test pilots because they didn't like the test pilots’ attitude. I never had that problem. I got along fine. There were certain missions that I knew I couldn't fly, that it was restricted. A test pilot had to fly them. But I got to fly a lot of chase missions. Chasing put a photographer in the backseat and chase whatever the test mission was while he took pictures. Again, I was an IP. So I just really, really enjoyed my tour at Edwards. I got to fly F-111. Uh, well on that tour I flew the F-104. I can't remember what else I flew on that tour. I had a second tour on Edwards. So anyway, just being assigned at Edwards was really neat. I even got to fly with Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the speed of sound. General Yeager was assigned to Norton Air Force Base, not in a flying assignment. He would come over to Edwards to fly. As you can imagine he was a “legend” at Edwards so he had no trouble getting a flight. One day I got a call to fly as an IP in the T-38 with General Yeager. He was not current in the airplane but you wouldn’t know it. I never touched the controls. We flew for just over an hour and he pointed out all of his favorite fishing spots in the mountains. AK: That’s amazing! So, you mentioned as a flight safety officer, you were still an IP, is that correct? RW: Yes. 17 AK: So what did that look like? Because apparently there are a few different levels to flight safety: there’s the ground safety and the explosive safety and everything. What were you over? RW: All of those things. I had all those people working for me. Now, they were the ones that did all the work, you know. But all of those disciplines were part of the safety office. AK: What did the IP side do for you then? RW: Well, as an IP you could fly with folks that were just checking brand new people in and things like that. And then I became a flight examiner and you could give flight checks. In those days we had to have two flight checks every year. We had to have a normal flying check one time of the year, and then I think it was at your birthday, you had to have an instrument check. As a flight examiner, I did a lot of that. AK: OK, how long did you do that for? RW: I stayed there until 1973. I was looking around and by that time I was a lieutenant colonel and still kind of had my eye on getting the eagle and decided that a flying safety officer slot wasn't going to cut that. So I went down to Randolph and went in to see some friends that had stars on their shoulders. I was working to get an assignment to go back to training command and hopefully be a squadron commander. In the spring of 1973, we had a mission at Edwards. It was the RPV drone mission and we had a whole squadron, uh, doing that. About the spring of 1973, they decided to move that mission, the whole mission, the squadron, everything up to Hill Air Force Base. So I was on a team 18 to come up to Hill to work on the bed-down and the squadron commander was flying the airplane and I was standing at his shoulder and talking to him. I knew that all his lieutenant colonels were leaving the squadron. None of them were coming to Hill. And they start talking to me about that, and I says, “Why the heck don't I come to Hill and get a 130 checked out and be your ops officer?” And this was, I think, on a Wednesday afternoon. On Thursday or Friday morning, I got a call from a personnel officer at Edwards, who says, “What the hell are you doing?” Because he knew I was trying to get this other assignment. And I said, “Well, this looked like a good opportunity, and so I'm jumping on it.” So by the end of Friday, I was set up to come up Hill and be the ops officer up here. And that entailed getting a C-130 checkout. AK: OK. Aside from that, what were some of the other duties that you had as an ops officer? RW: Well, we had C-130s, H-3 helicopters, and H-53 helicopters assigned. So I had flight crews for all of those, plus the flight engineers. And then I was the deputy to the squadron commander, just by virtue of being the most senior guy that was there. AK: That's amazing. How long did you do that for? RW: I did that until nineteen 1976. That mission is the one where we take off in a C130 with a drone under the wing and go out to the Utah Test and Training Range. We'd launch the drone off the C-130 and it would fly around. If everything went well it'd fly around and do its mission and then the controllers would put the drone in a parachute and the helicopter would come in and snag the parachute and 19 pick up the drone and take it in and set it on the ground. If everything went well. It was not a mission that things went well all the time. AK: Ok. Tell me about that. Did it break sometimes? RW: Oh, yeah. We planted a few drones out in the West Desert. AK: How long did that effort go for, as far as testing the drones? RW: Well, they’re still doing it. Well, in the 1980 time frame, or thereabouts, we were still doing some of it. But when I left in 1976, it was going pretty regular. And then we did the ground launch cruise missile up here and that was part of ours. That squadron had engineers and all the support activities that go along with that: administrative types, financial types, and all of those things were part of the squadron that we moved up here. AK: So, was part of your job description testing and perfecting the missile? Or was it something that was already common and used in warfare? RW: We were trying to expand the envelope if you will. We had one mission that was a strike mission, in which the drone carried a weapon and fired the weapon. Once the drone was in the air, the controllers in the back end of the C-130 controlled it. But then you had ground controllers in a van as part of the test mission. Then we had a reconnaissance mission, trying to perfect cameras and ground reconnaissance. So we had a mixture of missions that the drones did. AK: In 1973, when they moved the RPV drone mission to Hill, was that during the Base Realignment and Closure time period? RW: No. Edwards has a very small range operation. You got a lot of air space to do stuff out in the area, but they had a very small range. Our “powers that be” 20 wanted to launch a live missile off a drone and I went ballistic and the wing commander backed me up. In fact, I told them, “if you want an explosion out on the range, I'll plant dynamite and I'll push the plunger,” because I just didn't feel it was safe to do that on that limited range. So we came up here where we had the airspace and the ground range to do it. And we actually did that. We fired live maverick off the drone. Drones were not well accepted in the Air Force at that time. We always referred to it as the “white scarf” syndrome. Pilots did not want to be replaced by unmanned aircraft, so the program died. But I always think of it as the birth of things that turned out to be the Predator and the Reaper that came into being in the 1990s. In a very rustic fashion, a rudimentary fashion, we were doing what they finally were able to perfect. We just didn't have the airframes, and if you launched a drone out, you had to recover it. They did use drones in Vietnam. Limited. There's a famous picture of the Vietnamese standing on the wreckage, claiming that it was an American airplane. In reality, it was an American drone that they had shot down [laughs]. AK: I bet they were confused when there was nobody inside. RW: They never knew the difference. We did. AK: Yeah. RW: So, it was a unique mission from that regard. We had a squadron down at Davis Monthan Air Force Base that was an operational squadron that did it. I never knew for sure, but I think they're the ones that deployed overseas with the drones. But, it was the beginning of the unmanned world. 21 AK: Was that something that was worrisome to you as well? RW: No, not particularly. I always felt like some of the missions we were working on were capabilities that I didn't want to fly. One of the toughest missions in Southeast Asia was guys flying down low and slow, taking pictures. Drones could do that. Unmanned vehicles can do that. You know, we don't need to put a guy up there to do that, unless he's got a death wish. So, no, I never felt threatened. AK: But for the majority of the Air Force, it was that fear of machines taking over human jobs, kind of? RW: There was a lot of that at very high levels, AK: Ok. High levels? Not necessarily the enlisted? RW: Oh no, high-rank levels. People that had stars. AK: That's interesting. Why was it that the higher-ranking were more worried than the enlisted were? RW: Well it was a different culture back then. Those are the guys that have been flying in the 1950s and 1960s. People don't understand today what we did back then. At Greenville, Mississippi, we had two hundred T-33s on the ramp. We would launch seventy, maybe eighty each period, four periods a day, and had virtually no airborne flight control as far as radars and things like that. You take off, and if you were doing transition, why, you'd turn and go out in the transition area. Nobody bothered you. And that's why we had midairs. People were just kind of milling around out there. If we had formation, you went to the formation area. Things were just different then. We would lose maybe fifteen, twenty 22 airplanes a year at Greenville, and on average about 15 pilots a year. It's just not like it is today, and we were not like it had been back in the ‘30s. AK: When did you start to see that attitude towards drones change? Was that a pretty gradual process? RW: Well, by the time that really changed I was out of the Air Force, working down in Salt Lake. So 1976, I came out on the colonel's list and got promoted out of a job. I got reassigned to Andrews Air Force Base as Chief of Safety for Systems Command. Not to my liking at all. I didn't want to go to major command or the Pentagon. I was no longer flying, which was hard for me to accept. And so that two years at Andrews was the worst two years of my Air Force career. Well, I had put on the Eagles when I was out there, so that was a good part. But up to a point where I was actually putting resumes on the street thinking about getting out because I was afraid that - colonels don't fly very much. You've got to be in a specific flying slot to fly as a colonel. You don't do the behind-the-line stuff like I talked about when you're a colonel. And I don't think you do in the Air Force anymore anyway. So I could see the writing on the wall: I wasn't going to get to fly anymore and so I was not a happy camper. In 1978, I was at a meeting at Andrews, and Colonel Ted Twinting sat down beside me. He was the Wing Commander at Edwards, and I'd known Ted since he was a lieutenant colonel on my first tour at Edwards. And we were sitting, talking, and all of a sudden he looked at me and he says, “Why don't you come out and help me run the Wing?” And all I said was, “Dad gonnit Ted!” No I 23 didn't, I didn’t say dad gonnit [laughs]. I said, “If you can make that happen, I'm gone.” Well, he worked at it and he worked at it hard. We had a boss, then a four-star, General Slay. And General Slay knew me quite well. I used to be his racketball opponent, and so he knew me quite well and we got along good. A lot of people couldn't say that with him, but we got along good. Well, he kept stalling and he was reluctant. He made all colonels’ assignments for the whole command nationwide, and he was reluctant to put me in that slot. Finally, he relented. I found out later the reason he didn't want me to be in that slot was because he didn't want me to go out there thinking I could take over as the Wing Commander because I wasn't a test pilot. I said, “I don't have any aspirations. I know what the rules are at Edwards as far as what jobs go to test pilots and which ones don't.” So in 1978, we moved out to Edwards for our second tour there, I was the Vice Wing Commander, and I got to fly the T-38. Flew a lot of interesting missions, chasing ALCMs, air launched cruise missiles, and chasing all kinds of test missions. And it was a job that I could do. All I had to do is put in the hours and I could work my paperwork around my job. Ted, my Wing Commander, loved to fly too, and we meshed as a team like, unbelievable. So, I was there from 1978 to 1980. In 1980, Ted got promoted to one-star, and so he was going to have to move. Before he did, he wanted to change the Commander's position up here at Hill. By now, Hill was a group organization and he wanted to change the command up here. So he says, “Why don't you go up there and run the group?” So in 1980, I came back to Hill, which just broke my 24 heart. All my kids were here in Utah at that time, and it was just a real neat, neat job to have. At that time, we owned the Utah Test and Training Range. The 388th owns it now, but we owned it at that time. We still had the C-130s and the drone missions, so I checked back out in the C-130. We did a lot of GLCM, Ground Launched Cruise Missile, testing at that time. So there's a lot going on and I figured I was good for at least three years up here. Well, I'm coming up on two years and General Slay retired and there were some people waiting in the wings that were just waiting to get their hands on me, and I said, no thank you. I got assigned to Europe, which supposedly was going to be a very nice assignment, but I said no. By then I had 27 years in, and I said, “No. If I go overseas then I'm going to come back with 30 years and it's going to be ‘retire at the port.’” And then what do I do? I said, “Right now I got a lot of people that know me.” So I retired in 1982 with 27 years. AK: And you were a wing commander at Hill Air Force Base as well? RW: Group Commander. AK: That's right. You did say that. RW: Yeah. You had two squadrons. You had the Range Squadron that handled all the range stuff, and then had a 6514 Test Squadron, which was the testing squadron that had the airplanes and things. AK: Did you get to fly as a group commander as well? RW: Oh, yeah. I checked back out in the C-130. I flew 25 out of my 27 years. Very few people can say that. 25 AK: So when you say that you flew, do you mean you were literally at the controls? RW: Oh no, I was in the back, checked out as an IP [laughs], both at Edwards and here. So, yeah. AK: So after you retired, you guys chose to stay in Utah then? RW: I did. I had some contacts here in Utah. One particular contact who was in a very influential position, had told me well before I thought about retiring, “When you get ready to bail out call me.” So I took the summer of 1982 off and goofed. Then I called him, and in September of 1982 I went to work for what at that time was Sperry Corporation down at the airport. AK: What did you do at Speery? RW: The first year or so, I was working in program management. Then I did a stint as a test manager, and then I moved into field engineering and eventually became the group manager for field engineering. AK: So did that field engineering position require you to utilize some of that engineering background that you had from college? RW: Well, yes and no. Over the course of the years, even though I didn't go to school and become an engineer, from the time I started the flying safety stuff, I went to all kinds of safety schools and a lot of them were engineering-oriented. In fact, the flying safety officer course had an engineering class and I just tacked onto at the hip to an engineer that was one of my classmates. I got through that class with his help and did well. So I went to a lot of schools that had engineering as part of the school. I went to an engine safety course, I went to a system safety 26 course. I can't remember all of them now, but I went to a lot of them. So I had some background that way. In field engineering, we were supporting both the Army and the Air Force all over the world, so I had field engineers in Europe, I had field engineers at classified sites. I had field engineers at various sites in the United States. I had field engineers in Korea. So a lot of my supervision was by telephone. But the good part of it is, I spent a lot of time on the road visiting all these various sites, too. AK: And that was all while you were technically a civilian worker then? RW: Yes, but always working with the government, with either the Air Force, the Navy, or the or the Army. AK: So you got to stay with the military a little bit more after retirement. RW: And stay around airplanes. Because a lot of what we were doing was, our equipment was airborne equipment that was mounted on airplanes for whatever service we were supporting. AK: So, I might be fast-forwarding a little, but tell me a little bit about how you got involved with the Hill Aerospace Museum. RW: I worked for four different corporations and worked in the same building. They kept selling the corporation, so I retired from what is now L3 Corporation in 1995, in June I think it was. Again back to June! My wife and I went on a five-week tour of Europe in the fall of 1995. After that, General Reynolds corralled me. I had known General Reynolds since he was a colonel back here in the 1970s. So in late 1995 or early 1996, he said, “Why don't you come on the museum board with 27 us?” He says, “What I would really like you to do is take over cognizance of the gift shop.” So I said, “OK, I'll do that.” So I came on the board and I have been on the board ever since. I am a board liaison with the gift shop. Now, that's a far different position now than it was back in the late 1990s, early 2000s, because at that time we did not have an executive director. So I really was a liaison with the gift shop. I supervised the gift shop, I wrote the job descriptions, I worked in the gift shop, I ran the gift shop at times when nobody else was available in that job. I still am the liaison from the board, but now we have Rob as the executive director, so he does the direct supervision now. So that's relieved me of a lot of that responsibility. The gift shop today doesn't even come close to representing what the gift shop was back in the late 1990s. It was pretty rustic compared to what we got today. We had a manager and then the rest of it was volunteers. We had three elderly ladies that kept the gift shop running. Two or three times the only thing I had to rely on was, either I came in and ran the gift shop, or else I had two ladies, volunteers, that would come in and run the gift shop. The gift shop was about half the size it is now and had nowhere near the inventory it has now. AK: Did you work with Ellie Reynolds on the gift shop at all? RW: Ellie was an old reliable when it came to inventory time. Ellie and my wife Marilyn spent a lot of time counting postcards and doing things at inventory time. But you can always count on Mark and Ellie and Jack Price and his bride. When it came inventory time, they were always there. Back in those days, Jack Price was a big 28 proponent of the gift shop. In fact, he's the one that was able to engineer the changes to get the gift shop to the size it is now. That used to be part of a conference room way back when. AK: So when you first arrived, was this building here, or was it the smaller building? RW: No, this building was here when I first came on the board. I had had several contacts with the museum. I belong to the Order of Daedalians, which has the Hall of Fame up here. I can remember back when we had a Daedalian meeting and Rex Hadley came and briefed us. This would have been maybe in 1983 or 1984. He came and briefed us about the museum because it was just starting then and they had nothing. Then when I was a program manager at Sperry, we were bidding on a program for a missile, and I found out that the museum had one of those missiles here. So I grabbed several of my people and we came down to the museum. This building wasn't here at that time. I think it was in building 1919 where they had the missile at that time, in the old restoration building, I got a chance to look at that missile and see what we were bidding on. So I had some relationship with the museum prior to coming on the board but not a whole lot. This building was here and the first gallery was there. I missed the Aleutian trips where they went and picked up the B-24 and the P-38. That was in the early 1990s and I came after that, but we were still searching for airplanes even after I got on the board. I went on one trip in Alaska when we got wind of some B-26 parts, crash parts. So we went up to Kodiak Island, I think, stomping through the woods, looking at these airplane parts and picking them up. 29 So I had a lot of experiences. And the people on the board, I miss so many of them. I used to sit next to Rex Hadley right over there and Rex would come into a board meeting, and he’d have a little piece of paper about like this [motions about three inches wide and four inches tall]. And it’d be just crammed with his notes of things he wanted to talk about at the board meeting. [laughs] And John Lundquist, Mark, and I were quite close. We’d go to lunch every three or four weeks. So it's far different. AK: Yeah, I’ll bet. How did you get the tips about the different airplanes like the one in Alaska? Was that something that someone sold you, or? RW: You'd have to ask Don Pantone that. Don was our big airplane scrounger, one of them - the primary one as far as I'm concerned. We also had Glenn Norda. He was our on-base scrounger. He had more contacts on base and he could scrounge like crazy on base and get things done. I don't know where they find all these tips and I don't know how they found all the ones where they went up and pulled them off the island - the airplanes that we've got back here in the gallery. But they’d bring those total pieces of crap back and we had a contractor down in Southern California that would take them and we'd get an airplane back out of it. But that was the foundation's big push at that time: trying to build the exhibits and the airplanes that we had on exhibit. And that's why we've got about 70 airplanes on exhibit right now. But you know, Aaron's doing a great job right now. When he found out, some way, about the 117 and pursued that, and he’s pursuing an F-22 that we 30 want to get in the museum. I don't know how these guys come up with all of those ideas, but they do. AK: Were you a part of the efforts for the second gallery being built? RW: It was done while I was on the board, yeah. I wasn't intimately involved with it at all. AK: So you were mentioning that earlier on, the big push was to get more airplanes. What is the push now? What is your mission now? RW: Well, it's broader, I think. You still jump on anything that you can do as far as getting an airplane. That's why we just got the 117, and that's why we just got the Predator drone. They’re working the F-22 to get that in here. That's unheard of; that's an airplane that's still heavily used in the inventory. But it's an airplane that was damaged in the hurricane down at Tyndal two years ago and it was determined it was not fixable. And of course, Aaron works very closely with the Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson. They have to agree to anything that comes here, so he works with them. I'm sure they hear about some of these airplanes from the guys at Wright Patterson, who have feelers out every place. We've got a lot more of a maintenance thrust. We painted a lot of airplanes trying to make them look as nice as we can, and try to present what we think the Air Force would like to present to the people. So there's a lot of that. We've done a lot of stuff within the buildings. The gift shop is a prime example. This board room was all redone here a couple of years ago. We got rid of all the old furniture, and I think these tables were here even then [laughs]. But we got rid of all the old furniture and painted and made it look nicer. We put all 31 these [motions to posters behind him] up on the wall, and we've gone electronic [points overhead to projector] to a great degree. So I think those are all plus. For the last several years the big push has been to try to get another gallery. We want to get these large airplanes out of the weather. I can remember when we talked about the third gallery cost and it was 10 million dollars. Now when we talk about the artist's rendition of what that building should be, it's like 35 or 40 million dollars. But, you know, we've got to do something. Plus the fact that with this new build up around here, other people got their eye on this land out here. They want those airplanes someplace else. So, a logical place would be around behind us someplace, but we've got to have a place to put them. So that's where we are now. We just scaled back and so it's a lot broader. Aaron and his crew, what they've done in education is mind-boggling. Plus the fact that it's so far above me technically that I can hardly imagine what they're doing. What they do with kids out here is just unbelievable. And we take great pride in that. That education center was built out there, and if I remember right, it was something like six hundred thousand dollars. But that wouldn't even touch what we got out there now because they've added so much to it. Now we’ve got the C-130 classroom out there. And so education has just skyrocketed. We're trying to improve everything that's out there and in the gallery as far as signage, making the place look neat, pushing to educate people in the history of the Air Force. That's why we've got the Korean exhibit, that's why we've got the Vietnam exhibit, to try to educate people. Education is a is a big, big portion of what we do here at the museum, I think. And it just blows me away. And I don't 32 know whether you've ever been up here in the old days before COVID, when teachers are bringing a busload of students in here; It was pure bedlam [laughs]. So I’m proud of those things. I'm probably as proud of the education thing as I am of anything else that we've done. AK: That kind of leads into the next question I have for you, which is: how do you feel that Hill Aerospace Museum has impacted the community? RW: Again, prior to COVID, if you came out here during the school year, it was not unusual to see four or five school busses parked out there in the parking lot at one time. So education-wise, we're tied in big time, I think. Now they're doing a lot of online stuff. They did their summer education program online. Kids could take classes online and then they could come out here and have their little passports stamped to show that they'd completed that class. So they've done a lot of stuff like that. Pre-COVID, we had an Easter egg hunt every year and we'd get hundreds of people. We’d put out ten thousand eggs around the airplanes and around the front of the building out there, and we'd get hundreds of people and scads of kids out here for the Easter egg hunt. We'd spend an hour to almost an hour and a half putting out ten thousand eggs and at ten o'clock blow the whistle, and five minutes later the eggs were all picked up. Sometimes it was three or four minutes later. For Christmas, we normally have Santa Claus come. Obviously, I'm sure that's probably going to be diluted down this year. We've had our “Plane Talk” every Saturday at one o'clock. Different people come in and talk about their experiences in the Air Force or other things that are 33 Air Force-related. We get a variety of numbers of folks, but I think Terry was saying we get 60, 70 folks now. A lot of times they'll have, depending on who the speaker is, they'll have people standing around on the outside of the auditorium, no seats for them. Plane Talk has been big from day one, since I've been around here. So that's a big thing. Pre-COVID we had a lot of functions that go on out in the hangar, out in the second gallery. We do retirements out there, we have special functions out there, catered functions sometimes. So there's a lot from the community that goes on out there. The Military Affairs Committee has brought their meeting out there for that type of thing. So we've had things like that where we had community-type things. Yeah, most of our stuff is military-oriented, but there's a lot of other stuff. We just finished yesterday the big golf tournament. We have our annual golf tournament called the Commander's Cup. And Commander's Cup is normally held in early September. This year, the Commander's Cup was the day of the big winds, so they had to cancel it. So they moved it to yesterday. The Commander's Cup is a major fundraiser for us. In fact, the gift shop and the golf tournament are, I guess I would say, the two major functions that we do, that bring in cash to support the foundation. Those monies are operational money for the foundation. All proceeds from the gift shop go to the foundation, and all proceeds from the golf tournament go to the foundation. And then since Rob Alexander has come on as executive director, his interface with his contacts, you know. He was a fundraiser at Weber State and so he has contacts all over. When General Reynolds was chairman, General 34 Reynolds spent a lot of time out here. He was here every day. He spent a lot of time and did a lot of things. Well, when he had to retire, we brought Rob on with the idea that he was going to be a fundraiser and that was what he was hired for. Well, when General Reynolds no longer was here for the day-to-day type activity like he had been for years, that gradually shifted over and Rob started picking up all that stuff. So having him here on-site, full-time employee, all of his contacts, and he does the onsite supervision of the foundation employees. Now, he has nothing to do with the government employees, but the foundation employees, which are the gift shop (used to be the gift shop primarily), and, I don't know, Tory of course. I don't know what other employees fall under him, but that's been a real plus for us. AK: So what have some of your efforts to continue public outreach looked like during the COVID-19 pandemic? RW: Well, it's made it very, very difficult, obviously [laughs]. And just about the time we feel like we're starting to get our arms around something, why it goes away. Like a couple, three weeks ago, we were able to have small functions out here. Well, now you can't do that. And of course, the museum answers to two masters when it comes to COVID: The museum answers to the Air Force when it comes to COVID, but they also answer whatever the states require when it comes to COVID. And sometimes it's the same and sometimes it isn't. So, you know, the fact that we can be open four days a week is a plus. And we started that in the middle of August. 35 I heard Aaron say yesterday that hopefully within a month we'll be able to stay open five days a week. Under normal circumstances, we were always open six days. In years past, way back when, we were open seven days a week, but that put a lot of strain on everyone. And so there's just so much you can do. I think that the museum is doing as good a job as they can, but we can't host. A week ago one of our board members passed away and the intent was to hold his services in the chapel. Well, all of a sudden, COVID changed the rules and so they no longer could hold his services in the chapel. They had to move them to a church. So it's frustrating when you've got all this capability and everything here. It's frustrating to be handcuffed, so to speak. Now, the other thing they are doing is the Education Department gals are doing all kinds of online stuff. They're streaming stuff. Rob is doing a lot with the website, the electronic reach out that you can do is, I think they're really covering the waterfront. AK: Interesting. OK, so I have just a couple more questions and then we'll go ahead and wrap up. Before we do, are there any more stories or memories that you want to share about your time at the Museum or with the Museum Board? RW: Nothing that I can think of offhand. The trip to Alaska was a lot of fun. I went on a couple of trips down to California to the guy who did the aircraft restoring down there to see what was going on. But I just have enjoyed the company. John Lindquist used to hold a social every year. But I really just enjoyed the company of the people that have been on the board. It's been a fabulous experience. I haven't had a bad experience with any of them. A lot of the guys that are on the 36 board, I've known for a lot of years. I've known them in a different life other than just the board life. So it's just been something that I enjoy. I used to have a lot of other volunteer activities that I did, primarily church activities and stuff, which involved some traveling and was time-consuming. I don't do much of that stuff anymore. I've kind of drawn back. So the board is kind of the main thing I do in a volunteer world. AK: Where do you hope to see the Hill Aerospace Museum go from here? RW: Well, obviously, what we'd all like to see is our expansion plan come to fruition. That expansion plan not only included a gallery that would hold all of the big airplanes, which is something that we just really, really need to get done, it also included some modification of this building, relocation of the gift shop, and some other things that were tied into all that. So, you know, that still is going to have to be a goal of some sort. We don't know where it's going to go. And then the whole area up here is changing. All you got to do is drive in the gate out there and you can see Northrop's buildings going up like crazy. If you go up on the base, you can see all the buildings that have gone up as part of the commercial plan for this little area. One of the things they want to get these airplanes to move for is they want to bring some commercial things out here. They're going to have three or four thousand people in those larger buildings and they need some fast-food restaurants, they need gas stations. There's even talk of a hotel being put out here. We eventually got to move the chapel because that land is earmarked for something else. So the expansion out here is just unreal. Now, what we can do 37 beyond that is roll with the punches right now. But we just got to make sure that we continue to give people what they're looking for. AK: Final question: of all the things that you've accomplished during your time on the museum board, which accomplishment are you most proud of? RW: Well, obviously, everything that's happened in the gift shop. That's been my primary focus since 1996. I just marvel at what's been done, and every manager we've had has made improvements, right up until now. The inventory we have, the variety we have, the space we have. Now in today's world, the way they're handling COVID in the gift shop, you know, I just marvel at all of it. Like I said, that gift shop was half the size it is now. When I came on, we were doing some stuff electronically, scanning barcodes, a little bit of barcodes, but now we've got everything totally electronic, totally barcoded. One of the things that I wasn't smart enough to do myself is, I have advocated for an online sales thing for I don't know how many years. Over the years, we made probably at least three false starts getting online with sales. You know, our little Amazon [laughs]. It's not my doing at all, other than the fact that I am a cheerleader for it. It is beyond me technically, way beyond me. In fact, before you got here, Rob and I were talking in his office. There are things I want to do to modernize the online shop because it's not user-friendly right now. They've got some great ideas on how to make it user-friendly. Now, I couldn't get on the computer and implement their ideas, but they got people that can. And so, you know, that's been a big plus. But the whole gift shop thing is, like I said, there were days back then - in fact, I think I still got a key to the gift shop - there were 38 days when we didn't have anybody else to run it and I’d end up out here sitting out here all day, running the gift shop, So, yeah. That's what I'd have to say, is, where we were then and where we are now is far, far different. AK: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much, unless there's anything else, I think we can wrap up now RW: No. AK: OK. Well, thank you so much for this interview. It's been great. I appreciate it. RW: Thank you. 39