Sentinel, The Bay 210125

      

      Joyce and I both have countless great memories of our times in San Diego, not that we ever want to go back again. As the Buddhists say, “you can never step in the same river twice” meaning that things change and they are never the same. That said, we both fondly remember San Diego bay. On our first time there if Joyce needed to keep the car for errands she would drop me off at the old Broadway pier in the morning. I could take the small boats to North Island where I worked when ashore and then she would come back to the Broadway pier to pick me up after work. While she waited she would listen to the car radio and a popular song at that time was an Otis Redding song, “sitting by the dock of the bay.” That song we still listen to these days. A popular radio DJ back then was Wolfman Jack which we both listened to every day. We did not have a tv set so we listened to the radio constantly and the Wolfman was the best on the radio. Later times when we went back to San Diego we lived on Coronado, just a short walk to the bay or the beach fronting the Pacific Ocean. Times were blissful in those days. We were young, in love and without a care in the world. One cannot do better than that style of existence.
      My last 11 months in the navy we were living on Coronado and I was working at the North Island air station was also quite nice. It was like a regular 9 to 5 job. I know that I have told readers that I have always been no more than a 76% man. That has been true for nearly all my lifetime. That said, I always wanted to be the best there ever was at something and I tried many endeavors but just never got there, except once. The E-2 planes on the aircraft carriers I worked on and the E-2 planes based at North Island always had problems with their TACAN (tactical air navigation) transmitters for 10 of the 11 years I spent in the navy. Countless technicians worked on them, but never figured out what the problem was. The UHF radios in our planes were always low on transmitter power. They never seemed to get repaired properly either. My last year I was in a good shop and being the rate I was, I could have done anything I wanted or do nothing at all. I decided to tackle both of those problems. The radios and TACANs were constantly pouring into the shop for repair, so I dedicated myself first to the radios and figured out that new men had been taught incorrectly when they started actually working in the shops with the guys that were getting out of the navy. I watched what the new techs were doing, solved that quickly and gave them the info they would need after I was gone. The TACAN was a different animal. That took me a few months to solve. The transmitter outputs were amplified in 2 stages of resonant cavities. They had to be adjusted one at a time and literally by thousands of an inch. The cavities had a small Allen screw on their side. Just tightening the screw moved the spacing in the cavity enough to lose 50% of its output power. The planes landing hard on aircraft carriers was enough to jar and cause slippage in the cavities, causing power loss in the transmitter. Once I figured out to adjust the cavities so when the screw was tightened it moved enough to push the power output up instead of down and made sure the screws were tight, problem solved. It didn’t take long and the TACANS were no longer coming into the shop regularly, until that is, word spread to the east coast outfits that our gear worked properly. It was not unusual for pilots to do weekend training flights and use the opportunity to land near where their parents lived to spend a night and on the way back east they would swing by North Island to dump their non working gear and draw on our supply.
      This has been a long-winded story and if you get this far you know that I usually don't brag on myself, but hey, it’s the only time in 75 years when I was the best there was at something. I always dreamt of achieving that status so now I’ll go back to my usual 76% man and live in obscurity for my remaining days.