Old Navy Training

     Sitting back today avoiding the heat, which is again 100 degrees with a humidity of 13%, I was remembering some of my old teaching partners at the naval aviation technical training center at Millington Tennessee.

     The first I remembered was Ray Myers, an old navy chief who taught with me early on. Ray was a great guy when we were teaching radar special circuits. There was a class where we taught about radar transmitter triggers. Ray always called them transmitter trickers. After a while new students in our two week class would ask me on our first day of the new class when we would have the class on transmitter trickers, the word had spread.

     Later I had a teaching partner from Texas and for the life of me I cannot remember his correct name. He was a real country guy and it showed. His favorite thing to say when students didn’t understand the class material was, “Well shucky dern.” And that became his name. Students would ask, “where is shucky dern?” I don’t know if or what they ever asked about me.     

Another teaching partner was a Marine staff sergeant whose name escapes me at the moment. He would tell new students that I was part of the enlisted astronaut program and had just transferred into naval technical training. They all bought it hook, line and sinker.     

The training center was chock-full of old time navy chiefs and it was a good place to be. The sea stories were terrific and those old chiefs were dedicated to the navy and what it stood for. There was a wealth of electronic knowledge there. That was of course over 40 years ago. When I was first there in training myself, there were instructors who had served in old navy squadrons that used blimps, with flights that lasted for days at a time. One of my instructors was a blimp veteran from those days. He was a big fat fellow and during classes other instructors would open the door and yell, “cast a line, there’s a blimp adrift!” It was all good-natured fun to them.