Miracle at Charlottesville - Chapter 4

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                       MIRACLE AT CHARLOTTESVILLE

                                     CHAPTER 4

After graduation from the Language School at the end of September, all personnel were sent to Goodfellow AF Base in San Angelo TX for Security School.  Here we learned how we were to apply the language we had been trained in.  Our Top Secret Security Clearances had to be in place before we started classes there.  Not long before this all service personnel would have been sent to such a school at a base of their service branch; that would have been Pensacola FL for us Navy types.  But Uncle Sam had decided to consolidate such training at one location (San Angelo), though each branch was segregated for their training on base.  I was one of two married members of our 14-man Navy class, which had made it through Language School intact, so I lived off base there too, and had to buy a used car to get around.

Steve utilized the train from Monterey to San Antonio via ‘Frisco and L.A. (Del Monte, Coast Daylight, Sunset Limited), then a DC-3 of questionable integrity to San Angelo.  My parents drove to Monterey from Columbus and chauffeured my wife and me to San Angelo.  As mentioned in the previous chapter, I had a movie camera by then, and managed to capture some trains en route.  (Have some neat footage of a section of Santa Fe’s eastbound Fast Mail departing Gallup NM one evening.  Its F units had been sitting and idling all day since the two westbound sections had arrived in the early morning hours where they combined, and carbon buildup made for a spectacular gray exhaust cloud upon departure that came out with a pink tint on the movie film due to fast fading daylight.  The combined train from the coast had come bounding into town behind a quartet of ALCO passenger units, in proper PA-PB-PB-PA lash up.  In those days SF’s transcontinental mail train, Nos. 7 and 8, operated via Raton Pass, but a separate section operated as trains 3 and 4 between Kansas City and Gallup NM via the southern freight route through Amarillo TX and carried passengers in a rider coach.)

Security School started in late October 1966, and ran until early February 1967.  While in San Angelo, Steve and I managed our very first train-chasing trip together, on 12/31/66, up to Sweetwater where we captured the only passenger train left on the long T&P haul from El Paso to Ft. Worth.  We weren’t much impressed with it’s consist - two E-7s, 4 baggage cars, and 2 coaches, all clad in somber “Jenks-era” solid blue paint.  (However, in this era of Amtrak look-alike red white and blue, such a consist would indeed be a sight for sore eyes.  Thank heaven for movies and memories!)  On the other hand both of us did get invites up into the cab during its stop!  The engineer even invited us to ride there to the next stop!!  But we had no way to get back, and my wife, who had come along, didn’t drive.  By the way, the friendliest railroaders I ever encountered were in Texas and, later, Virginia.

Meanwhile, back at school… eventually we all received orders to our first duty stations.  Four of us, including me, were destined for Turkey… Steve and several others were heading to Japan… and only one of us got orders to a ship.  He drew the U.S.S. Pueblo!  Yes, he was on board when the North Koreans hijacked the ship.  Bad luck for him, good luck for me: if he hadn’t been a crewman aboard that ship… well, read on.

(To be continued…)