HOME ON THE RANGE

Recollections of a Range Rat

The Air Force Eastern Test Range Tracking Stations were managed, operated
and maintained by a group of dedicated professionals who referred to
themselves as Range Rats. This narrative attempts to introduce the reader to
those unique individuals and their workplaces.

By: John L. Gladden

© April 2006
 Table of Contents

TOPICS:

PROLOGUE .......................................................................Page 1
THE RANGE CONTRACT ......................................................Page 5
WHO THEY WERE ...............................................................Page 8
STATION 03 .....................................................................Page 12
STATION 04 .....................................................................Page 17
STATION 07 .....................................................................Page 22
STATION 9.1 .....................................................................Page 25
STATION 12 .....................................................................Page 32
STATION 13 .....................................................................Page 39
IN TRANSIT .....................................................................Page 41
INDIAN OCEAN STATION 89 (IOS) ....................................Page 45
THINGS TO DO .................................................................Page 52
THE HUMAN PART .............................................................Page 56
OTHER YARNS .................................................................Page 58
STATION 40 (The Stepchild) .............................................Page 62
SOME BASE SERVICES ......................................................Page 66
MORE YARNS ...............................................................Page 68
THE DOWN SIDE ...............................................................Page 72
THE UP SIDE ...............................................................Page 75
FINAL ANALYSIS ...............................................................Page 76

ILLUSTRATIONS:

Map 1 Eastern Test Range .............................................Page 5

Map 2 Grand Bahama island .............................................Page 12
Map 3 Eleuthera island ......................................................Page 17
Map 4 Grand Turk island .............................................Page 22
Map 5 Antigua island ......................................................Page 25
Map 6 Ascension island ......................................................Page 32
Photo HU-16 Aircraft at Mombassa Airport Hangar ..................Page 42
Map 7 Mahe island ......................................................Page 45
Map 8 Trinidad island ......................................................Page 62

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The author grants permission for copying information contained within this document under the condition
that the information is for personal use and not for commercial reprinting in its present form or context.
 HOME ON THE RANGE
PROLOGUE

The following is drawn from personal recollections, stories related to the author
by other Range Rats and some speculation based on events that were
unofficially reported to have taken place. The only evidence that any of it is
true will be when someone punches the author in the nose for talking out of
school. The period of time in which most of the events allegedly took place
was from 1961 through 1977. Additional information on the locations and
some of the systems and equipment mentioned herein can be found on the
internet.

There is a web site that has a document titled HHR-32 NASA Office of Defense
Affairs: The First Five Years that provides background on NASA entering into
the Air Force Eastern Test Range operations. There was a lot of bureaucratic
bickering and turf wars during the 1962 development of the Merritt Island
Launch Area (MILA). The internet also provides specific information on
Astronauts and their flights by searching for NASA Historical Archive for
Manned Missions.

Pan Am did much of the engineering for the launch complex construction for
pads 39, 40 and 41, which would eventually be known as the Shuttle and
Saturn V complexes, and would support the Apollo and Space Shuttle
programs. Because of that, Pan Am was made ineligible for bidding on the
Kennedy Space Center base support contract which was initially awarded to
Planning Research Corporation (PRC).

Other web sites that provide historical information can be located by searching
for Tracking Stations and Eastern Test Range on the internet. Some of the
islands now have their own web pages that provide maps which indicate the
location of some of the towns and old tracking station or military sites with
some information about their history or disposition. Ascension island in
particular has internet sites for the Heritage Society, The Islander newspaper
and the island Administrator which provide a wealth of information about the
island and it's history.

What occurred on the islands has been written about in many forms and
fashions, from documentaries to pure fiction. This dissertation is not a
documentary although it contains some facts. Neither is it fiction because the
preponderance of the material is based on fact and actual events of history.
Basically it is an observation, put in writing, of some very interesting people
that were part of the space exploration failures and successes.

When there was success or when there was failure for a test, they headed for
the employee club where they let it all hang out. Nobody could out-drink a
Range Rat, which was what they had dubbed themselves in the late 1950s
because of their living conditions. As time progressed, the living quarters
improved as did the transportation and entertainment, but the Range Rat
moniker stuck.

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 HOME ON THE RANGE
The Range Rats were employees of Pan American World Airways, Inc. and RCA
Service Company who lived and worked at the tracking stations located on
various islands in the Atlantic Ocean. They are as much a part of the story of
space exploration as Bob Goddard, Werner Von Braun or any of the NASA
astronauts. They gathered the data that was used to improve the performance
and design of rockets and space vehicles and sent it back to Patrick Air Force
Base near Cocoa Beach, Florida. They also kept track of where the vehicles
and satellites were after they were launched and they recorded that data. The
data that was returned to the U.S. was decoded and translated into reports.
The reports were distributed to the appropriate agency where they would be
analyzed and used to improve future test projects and to evaluate the success
or failure of the current mission.

The purpose of the Air Force Eastern Test Range was to provide the facilities for
research and development of launch vehicles for military and civilian use.
There were no warheads attached to any of the missiles and rockets which
were launched from Cape Canaveral but there were certain military satellites
launched to orbit that eventually aided in the delivery of warheads.

The official mode of transportation up and down range was the Range Liner
which started as a C-47 (commercial equivalent DC-3) and could land and take
off on the short runways at the down range locations. Before the high altitude,
pressurized cabin aircraft were used, each passenger had to wear a parachute.
Somehow, this requirement did not do much to instill confidence in the
probability of a successful flight. The Range Liner only went as far as Antigua
where it would stay overnight and then return to Patrick Air Force Base,
stopping at each major tracking station and San Juan, Puerto Rico in both
directions.

The runways on the small islands were extended to accommodate the Range
Liner which varied over time in types of aircraft used. While the Military Air
Transportation Service (MATS) operated the service, they used C-54
(commercial equivalent DC-4), C-121 Constellation and C-130 Hercules aircraft.

MATS later became MAC, for Military Airlift Command, and the Range Liner
service was contracted out to companies that used commercial versions of the
Douglas DC-6 Stratoliner and Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation. Although
the runways had been extended, it was not enough for large jet propelled
aircraft to land and take off at GBI, Eleuthera and Grand Turk.

The flight crews on the military flights contributed to the successful operation
of the Range almost as much as the Range Rats. The cargo and passengers
that they hauled up and down Range depended on the safe operation of the
aircraft and its timely arrival at the down range destinations. The Loadmaster
on the military flights worked closely with ground personnel from the tracking
stations to unload and reload cargo.

The people who were operating and maintaining the instrumentation, the
facilities that supported the instrumentation, as well as the subsistence,
logistics and security functions might not have impressed the casual observer,
but they were some very talented people.

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 HOME ON THE RANGE
Instrumentation that was installed at the stations during the 1960s was state of
the art equipment. It was designed by Pan Am Systems Engineering in
collaboration with RCA Operations Engineering in the Technical Laboratory
(Tech Lab) at Patrick AFB and was then contracted out by the Air Force for
manufacturing and, in some cases, installation.

The Range Rats had to debug the systems, submit recommended changes to
maintenance and operation procedures and make field engineering changes for
the systems. They not only were responsible for maintaining the technical
documentation, they also had to update their logistics support documents and
training data. Administrative procedures had to be updated periodically and
adhered to. The government sent auditors to the tracking stations from time
to time to ensure that all of these things were in compliance with contractual
requirements.

The old radars like the AN/FPS16 and the AN/MPS25 were phased out at some
locations and were replaced with the longer ranged AN/FPQ6 fixed and the
AN/TPQ18 transportable systems. Telemetry systems were enhanced to
improve the data acquisition for sophisticated systems aboard the spacecraft
that were being launched more frequently from the Cape. Communications
equipment was upgraded over time to provide faster and more versatile data
transmission.

The Ground Electronics Engineering and Installation Agency (GEEIA) was

responsible for many of the communications installations down range, but the
operations fell under the range contract. Pan Am and RCA had a small
communications engineering function at Patrick Air Force Base to coordinate
with GEEIA and develop requirements unique to the test range.

The Range began as the Long Range Proving Ground, became the Florida
Missile Test Center, then was renamed to the Atlantic Missile Range and finally
became the Air Force Eastern Test Range.

While the Range Instrumentation Ships played a significant role in the space
and missile program, they are not part of this dissertation. However, some
Range Rats also worked on them and they should be acknowledged, so the
ships names are provided as follows:

The FS ships: Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India and Kilo.

The C1-M-AV-1 class: Timber Hitch, Coastal Sentry, Rose Knot, Coastal
Crusader, Sword Knot and Sampan Hitch.

Larger ships were: Twin Falls Victory and American Mariner.

Advanced Range Instrumentation Ships (ARIS): USNS H. H. Arnold,

USNS General Hoyt S. Vandenberg and USNS Redstone.

The USNS Observation Island has since been added to the program.

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 HOME ON THE RANGE
THE RANGE CONTRACT

Missile testing of mostly short range types began at Cape Canaveral as early as
1948. The longer range missiles began to be tested in late 1949 and early
1950. Some radar sites were set up in the islands in 1951 for early testing of
Army and Navy ordnance missiles. The down range stations began to be
developed in 1948 starting with Grand Bahama Island. As the missile
programs developed, the Range began to expand in both land bases and with
tracking ships that were used to fill in the gaps between the land bases.

Map 1 - The Eastern Test Range was previously called the Atlantic Missile
Range and stretched from Cape Canaveral, Florida to Ascension Island in the
South Atlantic.

Between 1958 and 1973 the Atlantic Missile Range, later to be named the Air
Force Eastern Test Range by the government, was in the business of
developing launch facilities, initiating launch techniques and providing launch
and tracking support for Intermediate Range Missiles (IRMs), Intercontinental
Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), expendable launch vehicles (ELV) used for satellite
deployment and for manned space flight. Names like Vanguard, Minuteman,
Polaris, Trident, Poseidon, Mercury, Atlas, Centaur, Saturn, Gemini, Apollo and
other mythical names were common speak in those days.

The Space Shuttle was not launched from Kennedy Space Center until 1981,
and by that time the range had undergone a drastic change. Only three of the
eleven original down range stations were still operating and one of those would
be phased out in 1984. In late 1988 Pan Am no longer held the Range Contract
and many of the original Range Rats had retired or returned to the U.S. to
work.

Numerical codes were assigned to initial facilities used in the missile programs,
starting with 0 for Patrick Air Force Base and ending with 12 for Ascension
island. Additional and temporary sites between the cape and Ascension were
given decimal designations or logical sequence in the chain of locations. For
example, Eleuthera was station 04 and Walker Cay was station 04.1 later
changed to 41 for data processing purposes, just as 9.1 became 91 for Antigua.

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By 1965 Range Tracking Station numbers had been assigned for major sites as
follows:

0 Patrick AFB 1 CCAFS 19 KSC

2 Jupiter, Fla. 3 GBI 4 Eleuthera
5 San Salvador 6 Mayaguana 7 Grand Turk
8 Dominican Rep. 9 Mayaguez 9.1 Antigua
9.2 East Isl. P. R 10 St. Lucia 11 Fernando
12 Ascension 13 Pretoria, R.S.A. 89 Mahe (IOS)

The tracking stations that were operated and maintained by the Range
Contractor were officially designated as Auxiliary Air Force Stations. That was
the term used in official correspondence, but to the Range Rats and the
islanders they were tracking stations because that is what they did.

The only tracking stations that are still operational of the original "Down Range
Stations" of the Atlantic Missile Range are on Antigua and Ascension islands.
The U.S. government has found it more cost effective to use satellites, aircraft
and mobile platforms (ships) to provide early launch and tracking support to
Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center. So over time, the tracking sites
that once lined the northern Caribbean area have disappeared and the use of
the land that they were on was restored to the local governments.

On December 31, 1953 the prime contractor for management, engineering,

operation and maintenance of the Atlantic Missile Range became Pan American
World Airways, Incorporated, affectionately called Pan Am. Their major sub-
contractor for operation and maintenance of the range instrumentation over
the years that Pan Am held the contract was the RCA Service Company, a
wholly owned subsidiary of RCA Corporation, which in 1974 was acquired by
General Electric. This team would hold the contract for almost thirty-five years.

When the airline operations of Pan Am began to fail in the late 1970s, the
operation of the Range fell to Pan Am World Services, a wholly owned
subsidiary of Pan American World Airways, Inc. As Pan Am tried to avoid and
later to recover from bankruptcy, they began to sell off their various
subsidiaries. Eventually Pan Am World Services, which by this time was only
providing certain support services at Cape Canaveral, was sold to Johnson
Controls and thus ended the Pan Am era on the Range. After almost thirty-five
years the Pan Am/RCA team had lost the Range Contract to another bidder
effective 1 October 1988.

The migration from being the manager, operator and maintainer of the original
Atlantic Missile Range, with the title of Range Contractor, to being gate guards
and tradesmen at Cape Canaveral was heartbreaking to the older Pan Am
Range Rats.

There were many historical events that the Range Rats had participated in and
the era was brought to an end with the collapse of the company that had built
a reputation for getting the job done, and done right for over thirty years. Most
of the people who worked for Pan Am and RCA stayed on in their jobs with the

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 HOME ON THE RANGE
new contractor, but it would never be like those years of trial and error, joy and
pain, failure and success that made the Range Rat unique.

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 HOME ON THE RANGE
WHO THEY WERE

Except for the location, there really was not much difference between working
at a tracking station and working in the U.S. There was a laid back atmosphere
but there was no laxity in the expectations of management for getting the job
done. There were procedures and regulations that governed the work at
tracking stations, just as there were at Patrick AFB, Cape Canaveral and Cocoa
Beach offices.

The people who manned these stations came from all over. Some had military
backgrounds, some had higher education degrees, some were experienced
craftsmen, some were trained in vocational schools and some just ended up
there by a turn of fate. No matter how they got there, the original Range Rats
stayed there because they had a deep interest in the missile and space
industry. It was new and exciting. It offered an opportunity to get in on the
ground floor and be part of the history making process.

The Pan Am employees tended to be older than the RCA personnel. This could
possibly be attributed to the types of jobs performed. Pan Am hired
carpenters, electricians, plumbers, cooks, firemen, supply specialists,
mechanics, diesel generator operators and other tradesmen. RCA primarily
hired electronic technicians, engineers and related equipment operators.

Ages for the combined companies ranged from twenty to near retirement.
Those who were twenty tried to act older and those who were near retirement
tried to act younger. This should have made everyone somewhere around
forty-five in attitude and demeanor but it came out closer to thirty.

In the early years, there was an "Us" and "Them" attitude between the prime
contractor and sub-contractor personnel. Management corrections were made
and the station personnel began to operate as single team. There was some
grouping among section staff, but by and large it was difficult to tell who
worked for Pan Am or RCA by the mid nineteen sixties. Nor was it always
evident as to who was management and who was a worker bee.

Dress code in the work areas was casual but decent. Short pants and Tee
Shirts were allowable but scruffs were not. The Base Maintenance staff usually
wore durable khaki or denim, mess hall staff wore whites, Fire and Security
staff wore khaki uniforms and all others wore open collar or Tee shirts with
slacks, jeans or short pants. No flip-flops were allowed in the work areas for
safety purposes.

Working on the Range was considered more than just a job by most of the
Range Rats. It was a responsibility and there was a sense of dedication about
these people like none elsewhere. There was a part of them in every launch
vehicle and spacecraft that left or attempted to leave Cape Canaveral.

Yet, when they went to the employee club after work, they did not talk about
their jobs like many people do in the pubs of middle America. They talked
about sports, which could be from three days to many years old in content; or

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investments, which many of them got into with the bonus money they were
getting for being out of country; or just general BS, which almost anybody
could understand. Whatever their conversations, they had a mood of
camaraderie imbedded in them and even heated arguments seemed to be
conducted with smiles on their faces. A physical encounter in the employee
club or anywhere on base could buy you a ticket on the next northbound flight.

Visitors to the stations were made to feel welcome by the Range Rats, no
matter what their reason for being there. They would be invited to the limited
social activities such as cookouts or fishing excursions.

The visitors were not shunned in the employee club as some stranger. Booze
was cheap and someone would buy a round for the Bar. This would be the
trigger for a series of rounds working from one to another down the bar. It was
possible to get completely smashed without spending a dime, depending on
where you were sitting when these rounds started.

A visitor could be in the club and would get the impression that these Range
Rats were just passers-by that happened in for a drink at the tracking station.
There would be the blare of the latest hits in all categories on the jukebox, joke
telling and barroom din. Then, suddenly the visitor might find that they were
alone with the bartender and silence.

If the visitor dared to ask, "Where did everyone go?" The bartender might
reply, "I don't know. Maybe to chow." But if it was not chow time, he would
most likely respond with, "I don't know", because he likely did not. He could
have guessed that there was a test, but he did not necessarily know because
nobody talked about the test. A test might be a missile launch, a satellite pass
or some type of simulation. But nobody talked about them because in those
days we were in a space race with the Soviet Union and all launch and other
test times were classified or treated as highly sensitive information.

That same visitor might then be later surprised, if they stayed in the club,
when all of the people that had showed up for happy hour immediately after
working hours came streaming back into the club in an hour or two. Their
mood might indicate the success or failure of the test, but the visitor would be
hard pressed to tie it together. If the visitor asked about the departure and
return of the crowd, there would most likely be varied responses, all vague and
jocular in content so that the visitor would never know what the real reason
was. If the visitor had a need to know, they would have known.

On more than one occasion, media representatives from TV, newspapers and
magazines would come down to one of the stations when a manned launch
was being made during the Mercury and Gemini program. No matter how hard
they tried to capture the Range Rat persona, they usually got it wrong. The
normal journalistic portrayal was of a drunken lot of hippies who could care less
if the launch and recovery was successful or not. Very few of these journalistic
geniuses had enough knowledge about what went on at a tracking station to
realize the level of skill and intellect employed there. There were no idiots
operating those tracking stations.

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Not all journalists stopped at the surface to size up the Range Rats. There was
a very comprehensive journalistic work published in The National Geographic™
magazine by Allan C. Fisher, Jr. in their October 1959 issue titled Cape
Canaveral's 6,000-Mile Shooting Gallery which was about the test range and
the people who worked there. It was one of the few works that gave detailed
descriptions, supported with photographs, of what the range stations were like
and what the people working there did.

The hours of operation at most tracking stations were 0700 until 1600 (7A.M. to
4P.M.), Monday through Friday, plus "On Call" after hours and weekends. These
hours were strictly adhered to, especially the on call periods.

Pan Am and RCA had each designated critical services that had to be available
on a 24 hour basis. Certain individuals were then assigned to fill these
requirements. The assignments involved aircraft arrivals and security for Pan
Am employees and test support for both Pan Am and RCA. Medical and
Commissary were also on a call up basis, but theirs was not directly due to
contractual requirements that would affect performance rating.

The instrumentation sites were not necessarily located adjacent to the living
quarters and subsistence facilities. This could be why many visitors failed to
understand what the tracking station was there for. If they could have seen the
eighty foot diameter parabolic reflectors of the TAA-8 telemetry antenna, the
slightly smaller antenna of the radar and the quad-helix antenna of the
command destruct site, they might have began to get a clue. The
communication center was the only instrumentation site that was consistently
located at the main housing area for the upper Range sites and there was not
very much showing on the outside to impress a visiting fireman.

If a visitor got lucky they might get to see a live rocket launch by the weather
personnel. Each of the upper range stations had a complete weather station
including balloon and rocket launches with radiosonde payloads. The data they
collected was transmitted back to Cape Canaveral for use in spacecraft,
satellite and manned vehicle launch preparations.

Because of the conditions of on call operations and travel time to and from
outlying sites, the mess hall had to have flexible operating hours. At some
stations it was OK to go in and get a snack if the facility was open in off hours,
and at others you had to be on an approved list. It depended on how much
money was available for mess hall operations. Some were better managed
than others. Some of the people chose to eat meals at the club snack bar, or
off base if the particular station was located where there was off base
restaurants.

On some stations the mess hall personnel would prepare coffee and pastry
trays for some of the outlying sites. These stations had a coffee break policy
that allowed employees in proximity to the mess hall to come in for mid
morning coffee. In later years, the individual sites had their own coffee making
apparatus and the designated coffee breaks faded away.

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STATION 03

Grand Bahama Island, or GBI as it was generally referred to, is one of the larger
of many islands of the Caribbean Nation of the Bahamas. It lies north
northwest of Nassau on New Providence Island which is the capital of the
Bahamas and was once the most popular for tourism. GBI has come up to par
for tourism, starting with the Lucayan Beach development and the gambling
casino in Freeport and other development projects over the years.

Map 2 - Grand Bahama illustrating the location of the tracking station in

relation to Freeport and West End.

Weekend cruises from Port Canaveral and other ports in Florida, by at least
three cruise ship companies, help to stimulate the tourist trade in Freeport and
West End. There are now a couple of good golf courses on the island, but in
the early days, there was only one very crowded course.

Grand Bahama has an almost flat topography similar to southeastern Georgia.

There are many acres of white pine trees and mile upon mile of natural and
manmade canals or ditches. The southern shore of the island is the most
heavily populated. The northern shore is jagged and has tidal marshes that
flood at high tide.

When the U.S. Government began to operate a missile tracking station near
Gold Rock Creek on GBI, there was only the Star Hotel and Jack Tar Village at
West End for glamour and mingling with the upper crust of the yachting
society.

In the 1950s there were few vehicles on the island, so getting from Gold Rock
Creek to West End was quite an ordeal. The roads were mostly logging trails
although one of them was named Queen's Highway. At the time, it was
advisable to use a four-wheel-drive vehicle to traverse the Queen's Highway
since there was no regular road maintenance performed by the local
government.

The Lucayan Beach development was started in the early 1960s and by the
mid 1960s there was a paved highway for about 10 miles to the east of

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Freeport that made the drive into town a little more comfortable. Freeport
developed a boom town atmosphere with bars, restaurants and hotels
springing up almost over night. However, West End remained the principal
seat of government for the island.

The Rendezvous Club was the on base watering hole and employee club where
most of the after work activity occurred in the early days at GBI. The original
club was in two Quonset huts that had been joined in an ell shape. Someone
had donated a piano and bass fiddle to the club. Periodically, one or two of the
Range Rats who had their own musical instruments would come in and an
impromptu jam session would go until the club closed at midnight.

The old Quonset buildings of the Rendezvous Club were replaced with a
concrete block structure in the mid 1960s. There was a bar and lounge, a snack
bar, a TV room and a meeting room all separated so that one activity would not
interfere with another. The building was wholly financed and constructed by
the Range Rats who were members of the club.

The site at Gold Rock Creek was not within easy walking distance of any village
on the island when it was initially set up. High Rock was about ten miles away
to the west and Pelican Point was a little closer to the east. Freeport was about
thirty miles to the west and the village of West End, to where most tourist
came, was even further west. The people lived in a bivouac area like the
military camps of WWI while more substantial buildings were being erected.

When the Lucayan Beach development project began, Freeport began to

prosper from the economic boost of construction jobs and increased tourism
with the lure of casino gambling. The Range Rats who had vehicles or could
get a government vehicle for recreation would make the trip into Freeport
seeking a change from the tedium of station life. There was usually a full load
of passengers for these trips going into town. Getting back to base was each
individuals responsibility.

The drive into town would take them through several miles of pine groves with
islands of palmetto scrub appearing here and there, if they took the logging
roads. If they took the Queen's Highway near the south beaches, the scenery
might be more appealing but the roadway was bordering on dangerous. The
Queen's Highway had huge dips that formed small ponds when it rained and
were deep enough that the water level was above the rocker panels on regular
automobiles. Neither route was considered a pleasure trip.

The casino in Freeport was named El Casino at the time. It was a full service
casino as they go. They had craps, baccarat, twenty-one, roulette and the
symbolic one armed bandits, slot machines.

There were a few of the Range Rats that made regular trips to the casino, but
most of them caught on pretty fast that the odds favored the house. It was a
novel pastime to drop twenty to fifty dollars worth of slugs into the slots or play
twenty-one at the two dollar table. Those who quit when they were fifty bucks
ahead were the smart players. A good rule of thumb was to never spend more
than you win nor more than half a days pay.

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On one occasion, a Range Rat playing twenty-one was a little bit snockered and
should not have been playing. However, he insisted he was perfectly OK and
continued the game. On every other deal he would ask the dealer some stupid
question about splitting his cards, doubling up or some off the wall kind of bet.
He was losing and was trying to come up with some scheme to get his money
back when he should have quit. He finally went broke and none of his buddies
would lend him any more money, so he at last agreed to leave. Everyone was
happy, especially the dealer. The next day he remembered nothing.

The base was supplied by air and sea from Patrick AFB and Port Canaveral in
Florida, respectively. The aircraft landed at the Gold Rock Creek landing strip
and there was a pier High Rock where a small cargo ship, probably a converted
LCU, called the Lucy Boat could tie up. The small ship was later replaced with
a larger converted LST cargo ship which was under contract with the Air Force.
(LCU: Landing Craft, Utility. LST: Landing Ship, Tanks. These were World War II
craft originally used for landing troops and equipment in a battle area.)

Modified military and some prototype Azusa radar systems were used for
tracking the original launch attempts from Cape Canaveral. The acquisition
methods for some of the optical tracking apparatus was by linking to a
manually operated MK51 optical range finder and gun control. Once the target
was acquired and manually tracked by the MK51, the tracking data was
electronically fed to the ballistic camera system so that it could follow the
target. Computers, transponders and advanced technology in design
eventually eliminated the need for the MK51.

The Azusa Mk I radar accomplished its first horizon to horizon track at GBI in
1962. The site leader was so exuberant that he could hardly contain himself.
After the data capture was confirmed he shouted, "We can tell them how high
the water splashed," inferring that they had tracked the target until
splashdown in the ocean.

The folks who manned the tracking stations were a motley bunch at first
glance. They originally lived in tents and Quonset huts and slept on bunk beds
like GIs. The Quonset huts were constructed of galvanized steel without any
insulation on the inside. When it rained, it would deafen those inside and,
during the summer, the sun heated the structures inside to over 100 degrees
Fahrenheit. Air conditioning was a scarce commodity at these early bases.

Potable water was obtained by drilling wells into the aquifer that lies beneath
the island. The barracks and support buildings were eventually built and the
tents and Quonset huts became a memory except for one or two storage
buildings. The barracks allowed two people per room and a bathroom in
between was shared with those in another room.

There was a Range Barber who was on a one dollar per year contract with Pan
Am. He was furnished transportation, food and housing plus $1.00 in return for
providing tonsorial services at eleven down range sites. He was allowed to
charge a reasonable fee for his services. This fee varied over time but it was
always much cheaper than the average barber shop.

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The Range Barber came on the Range Liner with stops at GBI, Eleuthera, San
Salvador, Mayaguana, Grand Turk and Antigua. He would clip as many as he
could per visit and eventually get to everyone during a months time. Many of
the men just let their hair grow long and they would use scissors and razors to
trim it. They fit right in with the hippie generation of the 60s.

At least once a month the barber would make runs out of GBI to Marsh Harbor
on Great Abaco Island and to Carter and Walker Cays where there were
outlying sites to support the navigation and radar systems. These sites were
serviced by helicopter out of Patrick Air Force Base on a regular schedule.

GBI tracking station Fire and Security personnel also supported the presidential
helicopters for refueling when President Richard M. Nixon used to visit Gold Cay
for vacation or other reasons. Fuel for presidential support aircraft had to be
tested in advance and placed under seal to be opened only in front of a
designated agent. Once the seal was broken, an entirely new load of fuel had
to be tested and sealed. Sometimes it was a close call getting the test results
back before the presidential aircraft arrived.

There was a mishap with one of the Secret Service helicopters during one of
these presidential trips. There was a fatality in the mishap and there were also
survivors. Some people on GBI were sweating out the accident investigation
results until it was later determined that the fuel was not the cause of the
malfunction.

One of the phenomena of the Bahama Banks is the lobster march. For
whatever reason, there is a certain time of year when the lobsters migrate.
During this migration, they line up in almost single file and perform a forced
march. Those who know when the march is taking place will go out and just
pick up the lobsters by the dozens. The lobsters just keep on marching like
they are in a trance.

Several of the Range Rats were skin diving fanatics who also liked to eat
lobster and the Langouste lobster is bountiful in the Bahamas. There was at
least one lobster roast or a fish fry per week at GBI during season. There were
some people that seldom ate dinner in the mess hall because someone was
always having some type of cookout.

There was no restrictions on outdoor cooking but there was a restriction on

cooking in the barracks. However, there were those who managed to get away
with preparing their meals in their rooms. Two in particular at GBI even grew
their own vegetables that they cooked. Luckily, they never set the barracks on
fire as a result of their cooking.

The companies did not pay for family housing. Even so, some of the
employees moved their families to the islands although the living conditions in
the early days were not very lush. As time went by, some of the folks bought
property on the islands and built houses for themselves and to rent to other
Range Rats. Some of the first wives to arrive at GBI lived in old house trailers
that had somehow made it to the islands.

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The treat of the week for these wives was Sunday evening at the mess hall
when dependents were allowed to purchase meals at a very reasonable cost.
The Commissary Supervisor at GBI frequently scheduled steaks for the Sunday
evening meal.

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STATION 04

Eleuthera Island became one of the minor instrumentation stations located in

the Bahamas. The Navy originally had a Location, Ranging and Navigation
(LORAN) site there for navigational aid, situated midway between Governors
Harbor and Hatchet Bay. The tracking station housing area became part of the
Navy base for housing, the common mess hall, a communications center and
an industrial area.

Like GBI, Eleuthera is mostly flat with a sporadic hump that appears for no
apparent reason. There are no large wooded areas since much of the land was
cleared for farming. The southern part of the island has the only significant
forestation while the northern part is mostly scrub palmetto on the
undeveloped land.

Unlike GBI, Eleuthera did not have an aquifer underneath the island for a
potable water source although there were some places on the island where
limited amounts of good water could be extracted from the ground. There was
a huge catchment basin constructed on both the Navy base and the tracking
station which fed into cisterns to store rainwater. The rainwater was then
filtered and chemically treated to provide a potable water supply.

Map 3 - Eleuthera Island is 110 miles long and an average of 1 mile wide and
the tracking station was located just north of Governor's Harbour about mid-
island.

Only once did the water supply get critical as a result of a prolonged drought
period. Some of the island natives were hauling water as far as fifty miles to
survive the drought and preparations were being made in the U.S. to send
tanks of water to the tracking station. The drought broke before any of the
planned shipments took place.

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Agriculture was important to the Eleuthera economy and the drought did not
help. Some of the best tasting pineapples and tomatoes in the world are
grown on Eleuthera. The owners of the Blue Moon Cafe in Governors Harbor
were also farmers and grew the tomatoes they used in the restaurant. A
compliment to the Chef, the wife, could produce extra tomato slices with your
order, free of charge.

The Air Force contracted with General Electric Company to install a Missile
Instrumentation Tracking and Measurement (MISTRAM) radar on the island in
the early 1960s to support the Minuteman missile program. The system was a
continuous wave radar with one transmitter and three receiving antenna sites,
the most remote being located on Powell Point. This setup provided a Doppler
effect by measuring the difference between the signal acquired by the three
sites.

When Minuteman was phased out at Cape Canaveral, the radar went with it,
but Pan Am and RCA stayed at Eleuthera with a small contingent of employees
to support the Navy operations. The Navy took over mess hall operations
while Pan Am and RCA provided facilities maintenance and telephone
communications services for the Navy.

The Navy had strict mess hall hours so there was no in between meals
snacking at the Eleuthera mess hall, but there was coffee at mid morning since
Navy personnel were not allowed to have certain electrical apparatus in their
barracks for safety purposes.

The main road was not paved between Governors Harbor and Hatchet Bay
when the tracking station became operational. The base of the roadbed was
prone to developing huge potholes which made driving dangerous. Relatively
few of the islanders owned automobiles but several of the tracking station
personnel had vehicles shipped from the U.S. and U.S. government vehicles
had to travel the main road daily. The road was eventually paved but not
before one of the General Electric employees died in an accident near Hut
Point.

There were two airports on Eleuthera, a strictly commercial one at Rock Sound
and the one maintained by Pan Am for the U.S. Government near the tracking
station and Navy base. The latter eventually became the Governor's Harbor
International Airport since Governor's Harbor was the Principal Seat of
Government for the island. With the one near Upper Bogue, there are now
three airports on the island so tourists can come to Eleuthera for its laid back
atmosphere and sport diving in the coral reefs around the island.

During the period that the station was operational, the indigent people of the
island were unique among the Bahamians. They were neither arrogant nor
unfriendly toward U.S. citizens or, for that matter, any citizen of any country. In
fact, they were among the friendliest of any native inhabitants at any of the
tracking station locations on the upper range . They welcomed visitors to the
island and made them feel comfortable in the environment.

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The history of Eleuthera is different from the other islands of the Bahamas in
that it was the first recorded republic of the western hemisphere established by
the Puritan Pilgrim settlers, even before that of the American colonies. Spanish
Wells on the north end of the island was a sanctuary for the loyalist who fled
the U.S. when the British surrendered to Washington during the American
Revolutionary War. There was very little slavery in the history of Eleuthera.

Eleutherans were proud of their heritage and held their heads high in their
accomplishments with agriculture and tourism development while maintaining
the laid back atmosphere of a remote get-away. They were industrious and
enterprising people who were not afraid of hard work. They were also
surprisingly well educated in comparison to some of the other Bahamian
islanders.

There were some talented entertainers on the island who appeared on Friday
and Saturday nights at a few of the small hotels that were found around the
island.

French Leave was a prominent hotel located in Governor's Harbor and was
frequented by many of the base personnel until the main hotel, lounge and
restaurant structure burned down in the late 1960s. The watering holes of
choice then became the Buccaneer House down town and Ronni's on Cupid's
Cay (Pronounced key).

The Buccaneer House was a favorite gathering place for some of the local
businessmen, officials and tourist on Sunday afternoon. It was a good place to
learn of the modern history of the island through the folklore that was
espoused by the indigent residents. There was a lot of humor in the stories
that were told and this is one of the traits of the Eleutherans.

Those who gathered for these Sunday sessions liked to have a local dish made
with bologna, tomatoes, cucumbers and onions all of which were cubed or
diced and seasoned with apple cider vinegar. After it had been properly chilled
in the hotel freezer, each participant would arm himself with a toothpick and go
at it. There may or may not be fresh bread available.

It was while this dish was being ingested that some of the local lore would be
recounted by one or two of the participants. The tidbits of food seemed to
kindle their memories and they would relate in great detail stories of visitors
who had left some meaningful mark on the island. It was a very entertaining
and tasty way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Some folks got a kick out of watching the sharks feed at the Hatchet Bay
poultry plant. You had to know when to be there to see the waste products
from the poultry thrown into the ocean and watch the lemon sharks go at it.

Most of the Range Rats would rather spend their time in the Hatchet Bay Yacht
Club. The bar was air conditioned and the bartender was a big sports fan who
kept up to date on football, baseball and basketball. He took a lot of bets
without ever writing them down, but he remembered all of them, even the
ones he lost.

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With all of the positive attributes, there were still those on the island who
needed assistance for some things. One of the Range Rats got word through
the local Catholic priest on Eleuthera that there was a dire need for affordable
vision care for the poor children and some of the elderly people of the island.
Contact was made with the Lions Club back in the U.S. and many pairs of
second hand glasses, frames and lenses were sent to the island. The Range
Rat and priest also found an optometrist who volunteered (so to speak) to test
and fit the people with glasses.

Many of those folks had been living a blurred existence until they were fitted
with those glasses. They walked out of the fitting room with smiles, tears in
their eyes and shouts of joy.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, television reception out of Miami was
possible at both GBI and Eleuthera, but at Eleuthera the signal was weak and
the video was very snowy. This resulted in not too many people watching the
TV at the Beachcomber Club, which was the employee club at Eleuthera.
However, when either the World Series or Super Bowl was on, the TV room
would be crowded to the overflow point and the smoke from the cigarettes
made the TV even harder to see.

For recreation, Eleuthera offered good snorkeling, SCUBA diving and other
water sport opportunities. The water was a clear azure to aqua marine color
with almost white sand on the east beaches. There was one place on the
island near Glass Window where the land was so narrow that you could stand in
the main north-south highway and toss a rock into the ocean on either side of
the island

Some of the Eleutherans refer to the body of water on the west side as the
Caribbean, but officially the Caribbean is about 150 miles to the south.
According to the official maps, it is Exuma Sound on the west. Spanish Wells is
on the northern end and Powell Point is on the southeastern end with
Bannerman Town on the extreme southern tip of the island.

There had once been a natural coral bridge at the place called Glass Window
but one of the tropical storms that pass through the islands washed the natural
bridge away. It was replaced with a man made bridge that now connects North
Eleuthera and Upper Bogue to the rest of the island.

Spanish Wells is actually an island of its own, but there is a ferry service
between the two. Spanish Wells also has a fresh water supply and was used as
a re-supply point by the Spanish navy in the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth century. This was the origin of the small island's name.

Cotton Bay Club, about 50 miles south of the base between Rock Sound and
Bannerman Town, was an exclusive club where some millionaires got together
and built a golf course. Juan Tripp, the founder of Pan American World Airways,
was rumored to be among those millionaires. Whether that was true or not,
Range Rats managed to find a way to play the course, usually involving cold
American brand beer.

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When Pan Am became the support contractor for the Navy installation, base
personnel were allowed to play under the Navy recreational program. That
meant that in the late 1960s and early 1970s base personnel could play Cotton
Bay Club for ten bucks and that included the cart. The course was designed by
the same man (R. T. Jones) that designed Augusta National and it played about
the same, 7200 yards from the duffer tees with plenty of water.

Governor's Harbor had a fast pitch softball team that played in an intra-island
league. Their playing field was beside the school house right on the bay of the
harbor. They had to buy a large supply of balls because a well hit ball usually
ended up in the bay. Watching their practice sessions during the season
provided a good pastime on days off.

During the heyday of MISTRAM on Eleuthera, the Beachcomber Club did a lively
business. It had a small snack bar that turned out burgers, hot dogs, French
fried potatoes and popcorn for the movies that were shown every night.

The movie theater was an out door open sky set up which meant that in the
summer season, movies started later in the evening. Sometimes the meteor
showers were more entertaining to watch than the movies.

In the later years, the Beachcomber Club was open to Navy personnel who
were 18 years of age, regardless of rank. Several of the Navy people were
regulars at the club for happy hour after work. They were as sad as the Range
Rats when the club gave up its charter in 1973 and dissolved its membership
due to lack of participation and lack of volunteers to be manager. In 1980, the
Navy disestablished the entire facility and it now lies unused and in disrepair.

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STATION 07

Map 4 - Grand Turk Island with Cockburn Town and tracking station areas
indicated.

Station 05 was San Salvador and Station 06 was Mayaguana. These stations
were phased out early into the manned space flight program. They had
supported the early missile tests of programs like the SNARK, BOMARC, Thor,
Nike and Polaris. They were established much the same as GBI and the living
and working conditions were very similar.

San Salvador claims bragging rights as the original landing site in the western
hemisphere for the 1492 exploratory fleet of Christopher Columbus. There are
at least three markers on the island in different places that indicate where
Columbus put ashore. Some historians believe the San Salvador in the log of
Columbus might even be a different island.

Grand Turk in the Turks and Caicos Islands group was uninhabited until the salt
ponds were discovered and slaves were brought there to work in the salinas.
The slaves were freed in the early 1800s by royal decree but most stayed on
because they had nowhere else to go. The people are very friendly and laid
back. They seem to really enjoy visitors to the island.

Grand Turk was nothing more than a six and one-half by one and one-half mile
sandbar, but it stayed dry enough to build a runway and tracking station on it.
Grand Turk had Telemetry, Radar and Command Destruct as primary
instrumentation. As range instrumentation became more sophisticated and
satellites began to be used for data relay and communications, the Grand Turk
tracking facility became obsolete and was closed in 1984.

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There were photographs hanging in their mess hall of John Glenn, Scot
Carpenter and one or two other Mercury astronauts. The photographs were
taken when Glenn and Carpenter had made their famous flights and were on
their way back to Patrick Air Force Base. NASA had set up a Mercury Medical
Facility there on the tracking station and at that time the airstrip was a
restricted landing area. Turk, as the Range Rats referred to it, was the noon
time chow stop for the regular Range Liner and was also the most isolated
landing area from the general public for other official aircraft.

The Range Rats put up a sign at the landing strip that declared Grand Turk
International Airport as "Preferred by Astronauts". This was the bragging rights
they claimed since Glenn and Carpenter had been brought there for medical
debriefing after they were fished out of the ocean. One of the Range Rats has
since posted an eye witness account on the internet titled The Grand Turk
Island Connection with The Project Mercury/Glenn Flight.

The then Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, had flown in to greet Glenn and gave
the island officials an opportunity to dress up and play the diplomatic role. The
cameras were really clicking for the few hours that it took to process the
astronauts and get them on their way. For such an otherwise insignificant
island, Grand Turk carved a notch in history, thanks to the U.S. space program.

The astronauts were not the only dignitaries to visit Grand Turk. The Queen of
England also paid a visit in 1965 and the Pan Am Base Manager was the only
substantial official available to greet her. For political reasons, there was no
sign erected for that event, although there was a news release with a
photograph that made it back to headquarters in Cocoa Beach via the
company paper.

There was not a lot to do off base at Turk if you did not indulge in water sports.
There was a small village near the base where the local labor was drawn from.
Cockburn town was north of the base and was the seat of government for the
Turks and Caicos island group. The island had a sea salt industry that fell on
hard times during the 1960s and the evaporation ponds (called salinas by the
islanders) lay idle and smelled of dead sea creatures.

Grand Turk became independent by default during the movements by many

colonies to become free of British rule in the 1960s. The island had been
administered out of Jamaica for a while but was stopped when Jamaica
obtained their own independence. The Bahamas did not want to incorporate it
when they became independent, so there it was.

For a while, it seemed that the official currency of the island became the U.S.
dollar as the old British West Indies currency slowly dwindled away. They tried
to use the Bahamian dollar and the British pound but finally settled on the old
greenback as the practical currency, since all the people at the tracking station
and the Navy base on the north end of the island used U.S. dollars and were
the primary economic prop of the island. In reality, the island was officially
under the charge of the United Kingdom.

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Strangely enough, there is now a tourist trade on the island. God only knows
what they go there for, except maybe for solitude. There is plenty of that.
They do have some coral reefs in the area and there is good deep sea fishing
around the island. Outside of that, there is absolutely nothing on the island,
which has only about 7 square miles that are above sea level. They have
revived the seashell and some of the salt industries and the residents of the
eight inhabited islands of the Turks and Caicos group are surviving on tourism.

Station 08 was Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola.

Station 09 was Mayaguez and station 9.2 was East Island both in Puerto Rico.
These stations were phased out in the early 1960s as the range was upgraded
for manned spaceflight and orbital satellite tracking. The Range Liner
continued to stop at San Juan while MATS or MAC planes were being used. The
commercial contractor for the Range Liner bypassed Puerto Rico after the
stations were closed.

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STATION 9.1

Antigua is the main island of the Antigua and Barbuda nation, located at the
north end of the Windward Islands on the elbow of the Antilles. St. Johns is the
capital city and the country has banking, shipping, oil refining and light
industry as part of its economic make-up. Of course, tourism is also a large
part of their economy and they now have a large hotel industry as well as
casino gambling on both Antigua and Barbuda.

There was a period of time on Antigua when the political rhetoric was highly
anti tourist, especially if the tourists were Caucasian Americans. This rhetoric
was fueled further by the news events of the mid sixties of the racial strife in
the U.S.A. For the Range Rats who worked on the island and who were pretty
well known there was no significant incidents. However, it was not uncommon
to see small children heaving stones and obscenities at some of the tourists.

Map 5 - Antigua Island with locations of Tracking Station and major points of
interest noted. Roadways illustrated are for reference only.

The incidents usually occurred with people of poor economic status and who
were generally illiterate. It would be a decade before the economic ills of the
island were fixed and the tourism industry was fully restored. Nowadays, even
the once sparsely populated island of Barbuda is flourishing with hotels and
winter vacationers trying to escape the chills of northern Europe and Canada.

A new automobile could be bought for less than two thousand dollars on
Antigua in the mid 1970s, so most of the base employees had personal
vehicles. All of the main roads around the island were paved and it was a
pleasant drive to English Harbour where Nelson's Dockyard is located or Shirley
Heights to see the remains of Fort Charlotte. From English Harbour you could

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drive around the southwestern part of the island through rolling hills of Fig Tree
Hill and through Jolly Beach, Bolans and Jennings back to St. Johns.

Nelson's Dockyard was named for Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson who
commanded the British fleet in the Atlantic during the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. There is a museum in the Dockyard with some
pretty famous names in the guest register, including British royalty. There is
also a small hotel and restaurant there that was used as a backdrop in one of
the James Bond, 007, spy movies. The dockyard is in a safe harbor and has
yachts from all over the world moored at the marina there.

There were places to go on Antigua like Half Moon Bay where the golf course
and hotel bar was open to the public. There was also Cedar Valley Golf and
Country Club which was nearer the base. The Kensington House in down town
St. John's had steel drum bands that played for an afternoon happy hour and
the Spanish Main restaurant produced a good menu which many of the base
personnel took advantage of.

While the island had a phone system, it left a lot to be desired in audio quality
and was unreliable. During the CB fad, some of the Range Rats installed CB
radios in their cars and used them for communications in lieu of telephones.
CB radio traffic got almost as bad as being on the interstate highway for a
while.

The island is of volcanic formation and has no running streams of water except
during the rain season. Wells have to be drilled hundreds of feet to reach
potable water, so cisterns are built into many of the older houses to store
rainwater. There is one large reservoir in the southeastern part of the island
but during drought periods it is not sufficient as a source for the entire island.

When the U.S. Government built Coolidge Airfield there during World War II,
they included a huge cistern underneath the runway. The water from the
cistern was filtered and treated by the tracking station and was a major water
supply for the city of St. Johns and the tracking station until the Antiguan
government installed desalination plants. St. Johns and most of the other little
villages on the island now have good government provided drinking water.

In the early days of the Range, it was not advisable to stop just anywhere to
partake of the local cuisine on Antigua. Diarrhea was common from drinking
local water and eating in the wrong restaurants. By the late 1960s, those risks
had mostly disappeared. Some big name hotels, like Hyatt, had started to
move onto the island and standards were improved in the smaller mom and
pop hotels. Independent restaurants also improved their sanitation standards
and Antigua became a popular winter retreat for many North Americans and
Europeans.

In the mid 1960s there were people that the islanders called lepers living in the
land fill area where the base garbage was dumped. The garbage was
supposed to be dumped into a burning pyre of scrap lumber and cardboard to
prevent the people living in the land fill area from eating any of the food
scraps. The people living there were so desperate for food that they risked

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severe burns to retrieve some of the scraps. The local government eventually
relocated these people to facilities where they could receive proper assistance.

Poverty was a major problem on Antigua after the sugar cane industry went
away. The labor class of people had no training in anything else. The narrow
gauge railroad was shut down and cotton was tried as an agricultural
substitute for the sugar cane, but the Mediterranean climate would not support
large cotton crops.

The northeast side of the island is usually dry and wind blown. The southwest
side of the island is more tropical but is also very hilly and not conducive to
farming. There is an area in the middle of the island where farming is
productive but this alone could not support the economy.

The Antiguan government, with the help of the United Nations finally got some
light industries to move there so that people could get jobs and begin to
improve their lot. Today, the nation of Antigua and Barbuda is a tourist
destination.

The indigent personnel who worked at the tracking station were looked upon
with envy by their peers in the early 1960s. The local base employees were
able to own their homes, wear new clothes and buy many things that some of
their peers could only dream of. There were very few of these employees who
left base employment of their own accord. The majority of the local employees
who were initially hired at Antigua in the late 1950s and early 1960s either
retired from Pan Am or were there when Pan Am lost the Range Contract in
1988.

In addition to providing jobs for island inhabitants, the U.S. government

provided substantial revenue to Antigua in the form of lease payments for both
the tracking station and the navy base that was located adjacent to the
tracking station.

Antigua was the air traffic hub for the Range with the Range Liner making a
turnaround twice a week, and the long haul cargo flight to Ascension and South
Africa coming through twice a week. Hurricane hunter aircraft also used
Antigua as a refueling and food stop. The military aircraft landed at the old
Coolidge Airfield which had become Antigua International airport and was in
proximity to the tracking station.

Although the schedules indicated that the flights would arrive during or shortly
after normal working hours, they frequently came later in the evening. Some
arrived very late and had to be unloaded so they could continue on or leave
early the next day. This required a standby crew to be assigned for such
eventualities. Since the local employees who would normally perform these
duties had no telephones and could not be called in, the U.S. personnel had to
be on call to meet these late arrivals. Each person who worked around an
aircraft had to be qualified for ramp access for safety and security purposes.

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The refueling operation at Antigua was performed by a local commercial
company either before or after cargo operations. Material handling equipment
could not be operated around the aircraft during refueling.

While the USAF tracking station provided their cargo, subsistence and facilities
maintenance support, NASA had their own tracking facility operated by Bendix
employees at Dow Hill for the Saturn V-Apollo program. Dow Hill was located
closer to English Harbour than to the Coolidge area, so some of the Bendix
employees would go to the Admiralty restaurant at the Nelson's Dockyard hotel
for lunch rather than drive back to the tracking station mess hall.

A new two story, air conditioned barracks was built at Antigua in the mid 1960s
with NASA funds to provide housing for the Bendix employees. Since many of
them lived off base, Range Rats were moved into the unoccupied rooms. This
new barracks eventually eliminated the need to use Quonset huts for housing
at Antigua.

Data was recorded at the tracking station on magnetic tape as part of launch
support and other tracking events. The tapes were treated as classified
information and required a clearance level of secret or higher for an individual
to handle. There were a limited number of those clearance levels among the
ramp workers at the airport, which meant that certain individuals were on
almost perpetual aircraft support duty in addition to their normal duties.

This type of perpetual duty sometimes caused a morale problem which had to
be appeased now and then with some free time off during normal working
hours. Some visitors would view these people taking leisure time during
working hours as goofing off, and it was sometimes written about in news
articles as such. One such printing in an Orlando daily newspaper received
some informative rebuttal from an irate wife of one of the Range Rats who had
returned to reside in Florida.

While the U.S. payroll personnel received displacement bonuses on their

salaries, some of them were not adequately compensated at stations like
Antigua during the latter years of the Pan Am regime. U.S. personnel
reductions were made during the 1970s to maintain possession of the range
contract by lowering labor costs. This meant that the on call duties fell to
fewer and fewer people. That meant that at Antigua, only one or two people
shared all duty after normal working hours and there was a lot of it at that
station.

For long periods of time the average work day might be 12 to 14 hours and
could in some cases cut into the weekend. This was what proved the
dedication to the space program by many of the Range Rats. There were no
Air Force flights delayed due to ground operations at any of the Pan Am
supported landing sites.

The Satellite Club was the name of the employee club at Antigua and that was
the place to be on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong put his boot on the
moon. One of the Range Rats had rigged a frequency generator to transmit
the video signal from the telemetry site so it could be received on a TV set at

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the club. We were getting live video feed with audio piped in from the Cape on
sub-cable when the historic event occurred and the place went wild. The next
few days were not so cheerful because they had realized that now those guys
had to get back to earth. The return flight and landing really should have been
the big celebration.

There was one bit of folly that some of the Range Rats on Antigua used to
engage in. They would get some tourist chicks, or even some of the younger
wives engaged in conversations at the employee club and the guys would start
chatting about what happened at one of the cat houses on the island. Of
course, the girls had no idea what a cat house looked like, since they had never
been in one, but as the stories unfolded, their curiosity would peak.

After several glasses of courage from the bar, the girls would declare that they
would like to go to a cat house. Naturally, the guys would act embarrassed and
pretend that they would not want to insult the girls by taking them to such a
place. That usually did it. The girls would then demand to go, because these
guys were hiding something.

When they got to the house of ill repute, it was always a big laugh because the
girls expected to see scantily clad women doing lap dances and other sexually
explicit things and all they saw was a bar with a bunch of guys drinking and
maybe a few playing pool. There might be one or two women there, but they
were usually sitting at a table fully clothed and alone. That got to be a popular
island initiation for new female arrivals on the island, the cathouse tour with
the Range Rats.

In fact, prostitution was illegal on the island, but there were places that used a
loophole in the law to operate. There was only one place where the house
collected the money as a direct transaction and rumor was that the owner of
that place had every politician on the island in his pocket. All of the other
places rented rooms to the girls as a place to live and any money that was
exchanged was between two private parties with no bookkeeping.

The ladies would really have gotten excited if they had been at the Flamboyant
Lounge, a combination cathouse and disco, when one of the Range Rats rode
his motorcycle through the swinging doors of the bar and ordered a beer. What
he got was the proprietor leaping over the bar with a machete and threatening
to decapitate him.

To get even for the humiliation, later that night the biker brought in a donkey
sporting a straw hat and neckerchief and ordered a beer for it. There came the
machete again. The owner had no sense of humor.

The proprietor did have a melancholy streak. When some of the Range Rats
that he liked showed up, he would open up the disco side of the establishment,
unplug the jukebox and use an old 78 RPM record player to play an antique
album of the big bands. Had the records not been played so many times that
they had become scratchy, they would have been collectors items of Dorsey,
James, Krupa, Miller, Shaw and others.

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While there was no advertised cases of people flipping out and going bonkers
at the tracking stations, there were a few that were a little spaced out. They
performed their assigned duties alright but their off-duty performance could be
spooky, like one person who threw his luggage into the shower stall, turned the
water on and went to chow with the water running. The guy who lived in the
adjoining room wanted to take a shower but heard the water running so he
waited, and waited, and waited until he thought there might be a problem. He
checked the shower, saw the luggage and almost blew a gasket.

By this time the luggage owner was on his way back to the barracks with a
briefcase that he always carried with him wherever he went, day or night.
Most people, who did not know what his job was, thought he might be the
crypto custodian because he did work in the Communications Center.
However, he was not the custodian and it was later revealed that he did not
have business related items in his briefcase.

When he came into the barracks and found his destroyed luggage piled in a
heap in his room, he confronted the guy next door. After being told what kind
of canine family lineage he had and the microscopic volume of brain attributed
to his common sense for having his luggage in the shower, he calmly stared at
the other guy, held up his briefcase officiously and said, "I've got a dossier on
you and I am going to add this incident to it." With that, he retreated to his
room and never spoke to the guy again.

When word of the incident got around, everyone just steered clear of the
briefcase guy. Nobody ever found out why the luggage was in the shower to
begin with. Not that anyone really cared. There had been loonier things
happen on the range.

The briefcase guy was later caught in one of the contract reductions that
occurred periodically and was laid off. He sent a card back to the base
commander for all of the guys stationed at Antigua, thanking them for the
camaraderie and for making him feel welcomed during his short tour there.
Nobody was sure if it was tongue-in-cheek or if he was sincere.

Antigua was the first station to have female U.S. payroll employees as
permanently assigned personnel. RCA sent two female technicians there and
they were pretty much accepted without a lot of hoopla. Range Rats could
accept anybody as long as they pulled their own weight, but man, woman or
child that did not do their fair share got a clear message in short order. While
everyone helped each other in emergencies, nobody was going to do another
person's job for them. There was not enough manpower available for that kind
of operation.

One of the women gave it up after a few weeks into the option period, but the
other one toughed it out for the full term of the contract. The one that stayed
did not seem to find a lot of difference between working at the tracking station
and working in the States, except that room and board were free at the
tracking station. The first clue that she was going to stay was when she
bought a car from one of the Range Rats who was transferring to Ascension.

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Station 10 was on St. Lucia island and station 11 was on Fernando de Noronha
off of the Brazilian coast. Both of these bases were short lived and were
phased out in 1962 when the range underwent a major reconfiguration.

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STATION 12

Ascension Island, once designated on world maps as HMS Ascension picket ship
to discourage an attempt to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena Island, is a
relatively new island in the south Atlantic Ocean. If was formed by a volcanic
eruption and except for a rainforest on top of Green Mountain, the island is
devoid of natural water sources. Cisterns were used to capture the infrequent
rainwater by the early British inhabitants at the Green Mountain farm and in
Georgetown where the marine cargo dock is located. Fresh water is now
supplied to most of the island by the tracking station's desalination plant.

Map 6 - Ascension Island with significant locations noted and primary road
system illustrated.

There was a stand of Norfolk pine trees that was believed to have been planted
high on the side of Green Mountain in the 1700s to provide a supply of mast
poles in case of emergency. The trees were fifty or more feet high and there is
no evidence that any were ever used for their intended purpose.
There was a species of sooty tern that migrated to Ascension for mating season
that the British had dubbed "Wide-awake" birds. This was because of the of
their call which phonetically sounds like they are saying the words. These gulls
are credited for bringing most of the seeds for the vegetation that is there.

There was an island ordinance that required official permission from the British
Administrator to transplant or remove any of the natural flora on the island.
There were a few shrubs moved from the mountain to the "Gulch" which was
the older housing area just behind the mess hall. Some of the Range Rats
brought plants like Bougainvillea with them when they returned from trips off
the island and planted them around the barracks. Those that were watered
frequently did quite well.

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Standing in the lower plains of Ascension island and looking toward the
mountain, it is obvious how the name came about. The very top of the
mountain was the only place on the island that had any vegetation to speak of.
Almost daily, clouds formed around the top of the mountain to provide the
moisture necessary for the foliage to prosper. But the rest of the island was
starved for fresh water of any kind. Over time, the vegetation began to work
its way slowly down the mountain.

There was one place on the road to Green Mountain that was like going from
one world to another. As you came to the crest of a hill, there was a cut
through a ridge for the road like a gateway. On the lower side, everything was
desert like and barren of vegetation. On the upper side as you pass through
the cut, there was greenery. Although it was mostly low scrub brush and
cactus, it was such a stark change that it would give pause to think.

The tracking station main housing area is located about two miles from
Georgetown at the base of Red Hill. Red Hill is just that, a huge hill of red dirt.
The hill was apparently pushed up by the high pressure during volcanic activity.
On the rare occasions that it rained heavily at Ascension, the hill posed a risk
to part of the base from mud slides. To preclude a major disaster, large pits
were bulldozed out along the side of the hill to catch or slow the erosion toward
the base housing area.

Ascension was not only strategic during Napoleon's internment on St. Helena,
but it had served as a strategic military asset in World War II by acting as a
relay point for aircraft that would fight the Germans in North Africa.

The Belgium troops that were to be used in the African Congo to quell the
uprisings in the 1960s were staged on Ascension in a bivouac area near the
One Boat golf course. There was a travel restriction on nonessential range
personnel to and from Ascension during that period of time.

During the Falklands War, the British used Ascension as a refueling stop for
their aircraft. Tracking station employees supplied the ground support for them
as they did for all aircraft that was authorized to land at Ascension. One of the
Pan Am ground service crew spent over thirty years on Ascension until he
retired in Florida after working his final years for the company which replaced
Pan Am in 1988.

The airfield there is a restricted landing area. Aircraft must be pre-approved to

land there, or be in a declared emergency. For a restricted landing area, the
island got a high frequency of landings. The Brazilian and South African Air
Forces used the facility from time to time, and there were periodic British
flights in addition to the regularly scheduled U.S. Air Force flights. The only
commercial flights to land there were charter flights, usually for some
government's purpose. There were no scheduled commercial airline flights
that landed there.

There were cargo ships that delivered goods from the U.S. and England but the
primary lifeline for fresh food and BX supplies for the tracking station was the
Air Force cargo flights. Some of the aircraft used to maintain the support over

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the years have been the C-121 Constellation, the C-124 Globemaster II, the C-
130 Hercules and the C-141 Starlifter. Aircraft serving Ascension had to be
able to make the 1400 miles between Ascension and continental landfall
without refueling. They also had to be able to carry both passengers and
cargo.

Other U.S. aircraft that landed there during the Pan Am era were the modified
Navy P-3 Hurricane Hunters and the C-135 Atlantic Range Instrumentation
Aircraft (ARIA) that assisted in early launch telemetry tracking and data
recording. Of course, as we progressed into the jet age, the old WWII runway
had to be extended significantly to allow planes like the ARIA to land and, most
importantly, to take off. You cannot safely land a large plane there without
ground instrumentation assistance due to the topography of the runway.

Ascension was another long workday station. Very seldom did the flights arrive
during normal working hours for cargo operations. These operations were
almost always done on overtime by the St. Helena employees. These
employees took great pride in their work and they referred to themselves as
Saints. Unlike indigent personnel on Antigua, the Saints lived on station and
were available to work the aircraft whenever they came in.

There was a regular crew assigned to this task and they had the operation
down to the minimum effort with maximum output level. They could take the
incoming cargo off and load the outgoing cargo on in less than 30 minutes
after wheel stop on the parking ramp. They got a few hours of overtime pay,
which prompted a lot of Saints to volunteer for that crew when a vacancy came
up.

The cargo was stored on the aircraft on large aluminum pallets that were
locked onto a built in conveyor roller system. The Saints had installed a set of
conveyor rollers onto a flatbed trailer that was long enough to hold three of the
aluminum pallets. The trailer was slightly lower that the C-141 cargo bay floor
so the incoming pallets could be pushed off of the plane directly onto the truck
bed in a few minutes. The outbound cargo was never more than one pallet so
it could be loaded with a forklift truck in just a few more minutes. When
everything was tied down or locked down, it was finished.

But there was more to it than just loading and unloading the cargo. The
luggage had to be delivered, the Commissary items had to be separated and
taken to the mess hall receiving area and the rest went to the Supply receiving
area. Only when a pallet might be mixed with cargo for different destinations
would there be some significant delay in operations while the Ascension cargo
was extracted and the pallet was reconfigured for flight.

The U.S. Government did their best to make life pleasant at Ascension, since it
was 1400 miles from the nearest continental landfall. Ascension had the best
recreational facilities of any of the bases. There was tennis, basketball,
softball, skittles and various water sport activities. The employee club held
bingo once a week with cash prizes starting at ten dollars and going upward.
The blackout game payoff could get pretty high at times with the rollovers.

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Although the waters surrounding the island were treacherous, there was a
recreation boat available for fishing excursions. It looked like an old Navy PT
class converted for civilian use. This boat was also used during stevedoring
operations when a cargo ship came in or when the fuel tanker arrived. You had
to get your name on a long list of applicants for a space on the boat for
recreational fishing. The Saints loved to fish and really took advantage of this
resource.

There was a commissary store in Georgetown that the British operated where
things like European cheese, gourmet canned products and fresh meat from
the Green Mountain farm could be purchased by employees who liked to do
cookouts. The store also had some automotive maintenance items like oil,
batteries, spark plugs and tires in the later years.

The U.S. and British Government had decided to allow base personnel to
purchase the vehicles that would otherwise have been pushed into the ocean
when they reached their point of replacement. This reduced costs to both
governments for providing recreational vehicles to base personnel since
privately owned vehicles required the drivers to pay their own way.

The British established a commercial gas station so that those who bought the
surplus government vehicles could purchase gasoline. There were four or five
regular automobiles on the island that had belonged to previous island
Administrators or other British officials.

One 1963 Mercedes had been shipped in by a retired U.S. Air Force officer who
listed Ascension as his permanent residence upon retirement, so the
government paid for the air transportation to get it there. He had been hired to
work on Ascension prior to his military retirement. He sold the car when he
decided he really did not want to work at Ascension and flew on to South Africa
as a space available retiree.

The car had to be converted from diesel to gasoline since there was no place to
buy diesel fuel on the island. The conversion, which was done by some of the
Saints, significantly affected the performance of the engine but it would still
climb Green Mountain. It was still pretty easy to re-sell a vehicle on Ascension
since the supply was limited, so the Mercedes resold several times.

Ascension Island is roughly six by five miles in area, approximately 30 square

miles. It has a road from the airfield to Georgetown, with one that intersects at
One Boat that goes to Two Boats. A branch off the Two Boats road goes
through Moon Valley, on the northwest part of the island, and up the back side
of Green Mountain and around by Devil's Ashpit, where the NASA S-band radar
and deep space network (DSN) facility was located, and intersects with the
main road to the Green Mountain farm. The farm road goes back down and
intersects with the other side of Two Boats to Flight Operations road, which
comes back to the airfield to Georgetown road. There are a couple of spur
lines off the main roads, but that is essentially the highway system of
Ascension Island.

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While SCUBA diving was very dangerous at Ascension, there were several
Range Rats, Brits and Saints that formed a club and did quite a bit of SCUBA
diving around the island. One of the dangers was the underwater currents that
could throw the diver into the sharp edges of lava rock towers that protruded
out of the sand. Another danger was the sheer drop off that occurred less than
a hundred feet from shore. The tricky currents around the island can propel a
person downward before they realize what is happening and an inexperienced
diver might panic and go the wrong way to get out of the current, making it
more difficult to get back to shore. The club rules forbade a diver from going in
the ocean alone and while two were diving, one must always be watching the
other.

There had been some near misses at Ascension but none of the qualified and
certified divers had been lost. The only loss by drowning had been when
someone was washed away by a ground swell while fishing off the volcanic
rock projections or during cargo off-loading operations from a ship.

A ground swell is a rising mass of seawater unlike a wave. A wave is part of a

ripple line, but a ground swell is like a bump on the water. The ground swells
that came in at the dock could be as much as twenty feet from the top of the
swell to the lowest point. Then they just dissipated into nothing.

The Saints who worked the lighters that ferried cargo from the ship to the dock
had to be alert when the crane was making a lift from the lighter. If the crane
operator could not keep the hoist line taut, the sudden drop when the ground
swell dissipated could cause the cargo to snap its rigging and come crashing
back on the lighter. The Saints had to dive overboard to avoid being crushed
or severely wounded.

A few did not get out of the way and a few that did get out of the way did not
survive the dive into the treacherous water. If they did not, these workers
should have received extra hazard pay for this task. They operated under the
British Port Captain authority and were not on Pan Am payroll.

The Saint's home island of St. Helena is about 700 miles southeast of
Ascension. Like Mahe used to be, it was accessible only by sea. There was a
ship, referred to as the mail boat, that brought the labor force to Ascension and
took vacationers and those terminating employment back to St. Helena. The
Saints signed a contract for one year at a time to work on Ascension. They had
an option to renew the contract without returning to St. Helena and some had
stayed at Ascension for long periods of time before returning home. They were
not paid high wages by U.S. standards, but for the St. Helena economy, they
were well paid.

When the Saints were first hired to work for Pan Am, they performed mostly
labor tasks. Over the years they became foremen, supervisors, leads and one
had become Base Accountant when Pan Am lost the range contract. The
employee club was also managed by a Saint.

The United States government made it allowable for the Saints to fly on U.S. Air
Force planes to the U.S. for vacation and many of them would take advantage

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of the privilege. They could come all the way to the U.S. for vacation or
change planes at Antigua and go to England or elsewhere.

Once a year there would be a musical revue put on by some of the local talent
on Ascension and sponsored by the employee Volcano Club at the tracking
station. It was amazing how much talent was gathered on that small island.
The Saints really got into the swing of things with setting up the stage, the
lighting and the sound systems. Some of the young Saint and British ladies got
together and choreographed some dance routines. There were Elvis
impersonations, Tom Jones impersonations and other performers just being
themselves for a two hour production that would equal anything on Broadway.

For social life, different groups would get together and have fish fries, crab
boils or some other type of cook out. Fish cakes made to the St. Helena recipe
were real sinus cleaners. One fish cake equaled three beers. Those things
were loaded with some kind of pepper that was hotter that cyan or jalapeño.
The problem was that it did not hit you full force until about half way through
the second one.

One of the Range Rats received a Royal acknowledgement for organizing the
Ascension Island Historical Society and starting the Ascension Island Museum
with relics that he had picked up around the island. He researched them and
cataloged them and made placards for each item. He got permission from the
British Island Administrator to use an abandoned Fort Hayes building on Goat
Hill to display the items and the museum was born. Many items were later
added to the museum and there was an official curator that took care of things.
Only those people authorized to work on the island ever had the opportunity to
see the museum, but that is quite a few people. There were occasional visitors
to the island who had to put in there in an emergency that had an opportunity
to see the Ascension Island Museum.

The museum was moved from Fort Hayes later on because it had been
neglected and some of the items succumbed to corrosion and mold. The
society gained renewed enthusiasm and the museum is now maintained
through donations. There is a website on the Internet for the society.

There were some movie scenes made in the Moon Valley area near Broken
Tooth for some British sci-fi flicks. The area was strewn with volcanic ash and
huge cinder rock formations with natural pits and crevices. There were
mounds of red dirt that peeked through the ash now and then, but there was
no vegetation at all. It was truly comparable to the topography of the moon.

Morale was generally high at Ascension, although there were rumors of people
becoming psychologically distraught there. One story was about a guy who
refused to deplane and went right back on the same plane. The story is
doubtful because the planes did not go right back. There was no guarantee
that a plane going to South Africa would be the same plane that came back.
Some planes were diverted by the Air Force to another assignment after they
left Ascension.

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Once a person was involved in their work, the time went pretty fast and
vacations came around quicker than at other stations because, at Ascension,
extra vacation was accrued each year. Many of the folks had as many days
carryover as was allowed because it was difficult to use it all every year unless
they just dropped everything and left. That was not the makeup of most Range
Rats.

The U.S. base at Ascension also had a full blown hospital with a permanent
Physician. The other stations only had medics to dole out APCs (high grade
aspirin) and antibiotics. Except for emergencies, only the U.S. personnel and
Saints on contract to Pan Am were allowed to use the hospital facility. The
British had their own clinic but it paled in comparison to the Pan Am hospital.
Surprisingly, there were very few serious illnesses, injuries or deaths at
Ascension or anywhere on the range over the years that Pan Am held the range
contract.

There was a lot of friendly rivalry between the U.S., the Brits and the Saints on
the island. Rounders (a form of stickball or baseball) was one sport where even
the few women that were there could not only participate in, but in many
cases, they excelled in.

There was a softball league, a skittles league and golf league. That's right,
there were two golf courses on Ascension Island. There was the old course at
Georgetown and the One Boat championship course which had been founded
by one of the Pan Am Range Physicians. Grass was played as a hazard since
the low lying areas of the island were mostly volcanic ash. The greens were
constructed with sand and used motor oil, then spread thinly with fresh sand.
The greens, when groomed with a squeegee type tool, were slow but true.
Water hazards were simulated with chalk lines painted on either side of a
gulley that had eroded during the infrequent rain storms. It provided a unique
golfing experience and you learned to swing a club without taking a divot. If
you did not swing that way you scooped a lot of volcanic cinder ash and nicked
the club head.

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STATION 13

Pretoria, Republic of South Africa, is the Administrative Capital and did not give
the appearance of being a metropolitan area. However, when taken together
with the surrounding small cities and the larger city of Tshwane, it had a
population of around one and one half million people.

The Air Force Eastern Test Range location was set up outside the city. There
was a AN/MPS-25 radar and a telemetry installation there. The RCA personnel
operated and maintained the radar and telemetry but the communications
systems, which had been configured in old Global Tracking Network (GLOTRAC)
vans, were operated by the South African Post Office personnel who were in
charge of all communications in the country. The communications facilities
were about forty miles from the ETR facilities.

Pan Am had a representative at Pretoria and one of his duties was to make sure
the transient personnel between Ascension and Mahe, Seychelles got off of and
onto the correct aircraft at Jan Smuts Airport near Johannesburg. He assisted
transient employees in things like transportation, passport renewal, obtaining
visas and arranging lodging in the hotels.

The Afrikaners (Direct descendents of the original Dutch and English

inhabitants) were in control in South Africa during the years that Pan Am held
the Range Contract. Apartheid was the order of the day. Only Caucasians were
allowed in public parks to loll about or promenade their families through the
neatly trimmed hedge rows and flower gardens. People of color were
considered of lesser standing and were segregated in South African society like
the caste system of India combined with the segregation of the Negro in
America.

There were non-Caucasians who owned businesses and held skilled labor jobs
but there were none in positions of government that could significantly
influence the future of South Africa. Blacks were referred to as Kaffirs and were
treated almost as non-human by the many Afrikaners. Nelson Mandela
was jailed for his activity with the African National Council (ANC). Many years
later he would become President of the Republic of South Africa.

The show windows of the stores in South Africa had many U.S. goods displayed,
although there was supposed to be a trade embargo in effect because of the
apartheid. The goods were most likely obtained through third party brokers
since the prices were considerably higher than U.S. prices. Yet, the South
Africans were willing to pay the prices to get the designer jeans and other fad
products from America. The Rand was the currency standard and one Rand
could buy a good steak dinner in the late 1960s.

The Range Rats liked traveling through South Africa. Some of the folks who
were stationed on Ascension would take their vacations in South Africa. It was
like going to the U.S. except for the funny accents and everybody driving on
the left side of the road. There was plenty to do in Pretoria, Durban, Cape Town
or Johannesburg.

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South Africans spoke English and Afrikaans as official languages. Afrikaans is a
derivative of Dutch, mixed with some English and other languages. Almost
everyone understood English so it was easy for the Range Rats to get around
and make acquaintances with the inhabitants. Some of the employees that
were stationed there met girls whom they later married and traveled the Range
with.

South Africans are big on Cricket and Soccer. They fill the bleachers at a
soccer match and the Cricket matches are a big social affair. These sports
were to the South Africans what baseball and football were to the Range Rats.

Since South Africa is in the southern hemisphere, their seasons are opposite
that of the U.S. When it is winter in the U.S.A. it is summer in R.S.A. The
Range Rats traveling through would sometimes get caught without the proper
seasonal clothing if it was in the June through August time frame. None of the
other stations required more than a light jacket on the coldest days.
Fortunately, they could find a store within walking distance of the hotel to
acquire the proper attire.

Range Rats who were going back to Ascension from South Africa would buy
fresh steak from a popular butcher shop in a village near Pretoria. They would
pack the steaks in a cooler with dry ice and carry it aboard the U.S. Air Force
plane as luggage. There would be a big cookout on Ascension when they got
there. The South African beef was some of the best and was very cheap in
comparison to American beef prices.

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IN TRANSIT

Until the Air Force began to fly cargo planes that could fly the entire distance
from Antigua to Ascension, they used to land in South America for refueling.
The scheduled stopover was usually Recife, Brazil but on occasion it might be
Suriname or Trinidad.

There was a relief flight crew based at Recife for the old C-124 aircraft. It took
twelve hours for the flight from Patrick AFB to Recife with a stop in Antigua and
maybe Trinidad. The relief crew then made the flights to Fernando de Naronha
and Ascension before turning the aircraft back to the original crew for return to
CONUS (Continental U.S.).

For some reason, when Recife was the designated stopover, the plane would
malfunction and there would be an extended stopover until parts or a new
plane arrived, whichever the Air Force opted for. The Range Rats would get a
room at the Boa Viagem (sounds like Bo Vee-aahge') hotel and then carouse
the town. A couple of their favorite places were Cora's Steak House for a good
meal and the House on Stilts, the unofficial name of a nearby cathouse that
the Range Rats shortened to HOS.

Sometime after MAC had started direct flights to Ascension from Antigua, one
of the Range Rats that had visited Recife reported that the Boa Viagem area
had been bulldozed and a big redevelopment project was underway. Everyone
was sorry to hear about the demise of the HOS.

Recife had the sprawling Boa Viagem beach that was within walking distance of
the hotel and the business district was also nearby. The Range Rats could find
enough things to keep them busy until departure time.

During the civil war in the early 1960s it was somewhat intimidating when
armed guards got on the U.S. Air Force bus that Pan Am operated and walked
up and down the aisles checking for smuggled arms. They carried 45 caliber
automatic assault weapons at the ready and aimed about head high to the bus
passengers. They did not smile or talk, just looked and left.

Pan Am and the Air Force had permanent representatives stationed there as
part of the Eastern Test Range operations. Their biggest headache was
rounding up all the passengers when it was time to board the plane. Most of
them could be found at the HOS.

To get to Mahe, Seychelles, required travel to Nairobi, Kenya and a short hop on
local airlines to Mombassa, where Pan Am operated a HU-16
Albatross seaplane between Mombassa and Mahe. Most likely, the traveler
would spend at least one night in Nairobi since the connecting flights to
Mombassa were not scheduled to coincide with arriving flights from South
Africa. Hotel accommodations in Nairobi were comparable to U.S. facilities
except for the beds. They could have had better mattresses.

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HU-16 Albatross (Front right) at the Mombassa, Kenya hangar in 1965, the
year that Pan Am began to operate the round trip flight to Mahe. Photo by
John James.

During the time that Uganda and the Congo were in political upheaval, Nairobi
was used as a political refuge by several members of the opposition parties. It
was not unusual to hear some heated political arguments in the cocktail
lounges of the hotels. Some of the arguments became very physical. It was
not advisable for a Range Rat to participate in those types of discussions.

Most of the countries that were in political turmoil had been under the colonial
rule of Great Britain or another European country for many years and had
recently obtained their independence. Some of the new governments became
stable within a few short years while others have yet to achieve stability.

The flight from Nairobi to Mombassa went over the Samburu game reserve in
the Great Rift Valley and if the traveler was lucky enough to catch the
diplomatic charter flight, herds of elephant, zebra and gnu (wildebeest) could
be seen on the savannahs below. The charter flight was a four seat, single
engine plane that flew from around one thousand to fifteen hundred feet high
and the regularly scheduled De Havilland type aircraft with turboprop engines
flew at an altitude too high for meaningful rubbernecking.

Landing at Mombassa was hair raising, to put it mildly. The airport was
situated atop a mesa type formation that jutted out of a hillside. The end of
the runway with the prevailing wind seemed to be about 15 feet from the edge
of a sheer drop off of about 200 feet. The distance from the edge of the cliff to
the end of the runway was probably greater, but not much. There was a
constant updraft as the plane approached the runway and then suddenly it
dissipated causing a downdraft effect.

There were many close calls and a few that did not clear the edge as they were
caught by the sudden lack of updraft while the pilot was fighting to keep the
nose down. The runway was too short to try to over-fly the updraft. The other
end of the runway was not much better. Needless to say, there were no wide
body jets landing there.

Mombassa had fewer choices of hotels than Nairobi and they were not nearly
as modern. Fortunately, Mombassa was at the coast and there was usually a
breeze from the ocean that kept things bearable. Both cities are very old and

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much of the colonial architecture was still evident. Kenya had only been
independent from the British since 1963.

There was a strong dislike by some Kenyans of South African Caucasians and
not much more for American Caucasians during the 1960s. If a South African
became belligerent with a customs or immigration official, they would not be
granted entry into the country and the delivering airline would have to arrange
to get them out of the country. Range Rats learned to say yes sir, no sir and
thank you sir with great humility when traveling through Kenya.

In fact, American Negroes were not given much credibility by the Kenyan
populace. One of the Negro Range Rats declared that he would rather travel
through South Africa than Kenya.

Hotel and restaurant staff were generally cordial and performed their duties
without any overt malice. Bartenders are probably the same the world over,
they do not take sides between customers and they do not get into political
discussions. Other than that, some tell better jokes than others.

The Kenyans were very tribal in their social make-up and Joseph Kenyatta, the
President, had his hands full to prevent tribal warfare. Although not widely
publicized, there were tribal skirmishes periodically that required government
troops to move in and establish calm. However, in comparison to its neighbors,
Kenya was a docile country.

Another possible delay in route might be caused by the HU-16 not being
operational. It could be disabled in Mahe, or it could be disabled at Mombassa.
In either case, it meant another day at company expense to take in the sights
of Mombassa, and it is not that large a town in area that a person can spend a
lot of time touring, although the population was at around 500,000 inhabitants.

One man, who worked for one of the other contractors at the Mahe tracking
station, and his new bride were caught in one of the unscheduled layovers.
Their luggage had been lost and with it were checkbooks and other valuables
that they had packed for their adventure on Mahe. Because of the strict
monetary policy of the Kenyan government which limited the amount of over
the counter currency exchange, they could not get cash to buy clothes, so they
wore the same clothes for three days. They washed and dried them each
night. It was not clear if their lost luggage was ever found and returned to
them before they left the station a few months later.

The people on the streets of Mombassa were a little more friendly than those in
Nairobi, probably because it is a port city and ships crews from all over the
world come there. The people were more accustomed to seeing strange faces
and attire. There was a Kasbah there but a stranger would be advised to go
into it accompanied by a trusted bodyguard, especially if dressed in Western or
European garb.

Many of the tourists would sit at a sidewalk cafe on the main boulevard, drink
one liter bottles of Tusker's beer and watch the world go by. After two or three

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of those large beers, the world would go by in a pretty fast blur, especially if it
was the blue label.

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INDIAN OCEAN STATION (IOS)

Mahe, Seychelles is the main island of the Seychelles group located about 1500
miles due east of Mombassa in the Indian Ocean. It was about six and one half
hours flying time in the HU-16. Although it was a propeller driven aircraft there
was a jetlag effect after arrival and it took almost an hour to recover normal
hearing. You also had to hold your feet up on landing and takeoff in the water
because the pressure forced sea water under the floor of the passenger
compartment. It was a normal event but would give the first time flyer on the
Albatross a start.

Map 7 - Mahe Island, Seychelles with basic road system and location of tracking
station, airport and points of interest.

There were no windows on the Albatross like the commercial airlines, so

everyone had to find another way to stay occupied. It was too noisy to hold
meaningful conversations, so everybody mostly just sat there and stared at the
ceiling, read something or slept. If the crew knew you were a supervisor, they
might invite you to sit in the radioman's seat in the cockpit. There you could
monitor the radio communications with Air Traffic Control and have a good view
of the vast ocean below.

Mahe remained a Crown Colony until the mid 1970s and the first Prime Minister
of the independent Nation of the Seychelles was ousted in a coup d'etat shortly
after the transfer of government from the British. The tracking station
remained under the original terms of a treaty agreement prior to the granting
of independence by the British.

The drive from the Port Victoria docks, where the HU-16 parked, to the housing
site on the other side of La Misère mountain was somewhat breathtaking. Not
that the scenery was that great, but because the road was narrow and only had
one shoulder. The other side of the road was sheer cliff for most of the uphill

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run. Someone who had not had experience driving on the left side, in U.S.
made trucks, on a narrow road would have really been shocked when meeting
a Japanese made lorry coming at you with a load of passengers hanging over
the sideboards waving at you. With time, it grew on you.

Electrical power and telephones were available throughout the island although
telephones were not really required. News could travel by word of mouth
faster than at any other tracking station location. This phenomenon was
referred to as the Bamboo Telegraph. The system was apparently developed
by the girlfriends of the young men at the tracking station to ensure the fidelity
of the relationships.

The main instrumentation site sat on the pinnacle of La Misère. The dome for
the antenna could be seen from Victoria and looked like a huge golf ball.
The housing area was about a mile down the other side of the mountain with
the Receivers communications center located about halfway between the two.

Most of the Range Rats who were assigned to Mahe had spent considerable
time on the upper range and were used to driving U.S. made vehicles on the
left side of the road. Still, the steep and deep drops over the side of the road
made the Range Rats concentrate on their driving in any type vehicle.

As they were going down the narrow winding road, one of the new arrivals in
the back seat remarked that it helped to have had a few drinks before riding on
those roads. The Range Rat said, "Hell, if you think it's bad back there, you
should see what it looks like from up here!"

One of the stops had three names, Les Grand Trionon , The Top Hat and The
Green Door. It was a bar which sat on a ledge that had been dug out of the
hillside up the mountainous ridge that separated Victoria from Beau Vallon and
the public beaches. It was called The Green Door by most and was one of the
hang outs for base personnel. The bartenders were usually pretty young ladies
who liked to tease and be teased. They had a high turn-over rate of barmaids
because the young men at the tracking station would either marry them or
take them as a live-in girl friend or buldeau.

After a brief tour and some period of time telling tall tales at the pub, they
made it back to base with only one minor mishap. The car ran out of gas about
one third the way up the mountain. Turning around on that narrow road at night
was tricky, but fortunately there was a driveway to back into and they were
able to coast most of the way back down to a gas station. For a few extra
Rupees, the proprietor got out of bed, opened up and filled the tank. The two
never asked for a ride with the Range Rat again.

There was another Range Rat that had supposedly been partying most of the
night down town. His buddies offered to drive him back to the base, but he
declared he was OK. The story goes that he ran off the road and crashed
through the ceiling of a house. Neither he nor anyone inside the house was
hurt and when the occupants came to see what had happened, he got out of
the car, pulled a comb from his pocket and while combing his hair, he asked,

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"Is this the U.S. tracking station?". Reportedly, he then passed out. He never
denied the story when it was repeated in front of him.

Vehicles were required to be equipped with seat belts to be allowed to park on

any part of the installation. Most of the base personnel were only too happy to
comply. Seatbelts saved several lives at that station. There was a departure
from the road about every four months on average.

One car, driven by a Seychellois who worked on base, missed a curve and
lodged between two boulders about fifty feet from the edge of the road. If he
had missed those boulders, there was nothing else to stop him for about four
hundred feet and he would have had much more than the small gash on his
forehead, assuming he would have survived.

One employee pulled to the side of the road and dropped two wheels over the
side of the road. He got out of the car to assess the situation and the entire
car tumbled over the edge. Luckily it was only about a five foot drop and he
could retrieve the car fairly easily with a winch hoist.

One of the Senior Contract Representatives even scooted his car off the side
while returning from one of the Base Commanders cocktail parties. He left the
island shortly thereafter.

This station was a real change from the Atlantic range tracking stations with
the exception of Trinidad. The entire island was tropical in nature with foliage
galore and rain that came down in buckets at least twice a day.

One of the wonders of the islands was the coco de mer. It has been described
as a double coconut that, when husked and polished, looks like a cutaway of a
woman's hips and pubic area on one side and buttocks on the other. It is in
fact the worlds largest single seed with a meat similar to coconut. Only the
Seychellois are allowed to gather these and use them for commercial purposes.
They are mostly found on the island of Praslin and are strictly controlled for
export purposes.

The island also had a vast amount of cinnamon trees and when the workers
were harvesting the bark you could smell the aroma wafting through the air.
There were also cashew trees that grew wild on the island. The Range Rats
were cautioned upon arrival that the tasty looking, red, apple shaped fruit was
toxic. The maids would pick the fruit from the ground as it fell off the trees, lay
it in the sun to dry and then eat it. That's real cashew nuts.

Mahe also had a sanctuary for giant tortoises that are believed to be over a
century old. The species had been thought to be extinct but were discovered
to still exist and are now protected by the government. There is a breeding
program for them in an effort to repopulate them into nature.

The aircraft operation had been assumed by Pan Am in 1965 when another
company's contract expired and two of the pilots had transferred from the
airline division of Pan Am to the HU-16 operation. The HU-16 was
decommissioned soon after the Seychelles International airport located south

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of Cascade on Mahe became fully operational in 1971. Although it flew for
several more months, landing at the airport instead of the bay at Port Victoria,
the last flight for the Albatross was a very somber event.

Pan Am was not the Prime Contractor for the Mahe station since it fell under
the authority of the Western Test Range which operated out of Vandenberg Air
Force Base California. Pan Am was there under a cross service agreement
between the Eastern Test Range and the Western Test Range, which included
the aircraft operation.

The Pan Am Base Manager, who would have normally been the number two
man under the Air Force Base Commander, shared this spot with four other
senior contractor representatives of varying titles. The main instrumentation
site manager was a Philco-Ford employee and was called the Site Manager as
opposed to the Base Manager and the others were called Senior Contractor
Representatives.

The Pan Am Base Manager was responsible for facilities maintenance,

subsistence and communications. The Pan Am sub-contractor, RCA, took care
of the communications. The logistics support for the Base Support activity was
separate from that for the instrumentation support, except communications,
and entailed all of the same functions that it did at the Eastern Test Range
stations. The difference was that the cargo run up and down the mountain was
done in a U.S. made, oversized, flatbed truck.

All of the other vehicles on the island were more suitable for narrow roads and
had right hand drive so the driver was nearest the middle of the road. It was
probably a good thing that the big truck had left hand drive so the driver could
see how close he was to the edge when meeting another vehicle. It would be
better advised to sideswipe another vehicle than to plummet from fifty to three
hundred feet down.

When the Queen of England visited there in 1971, they were parading her
around the island in an old open top military type vehicle that looked like a
half-track with wheels. It broke down between Victoria and Cascade when they
were taking her back to the airport. Prince Philip calmly exited the vehicle and
began to chat with the Seychellois who had gathered by the roadside to catch
a glimpse of the passing Queen.

There did not appear to be an abundance of security detail in the party and the
Prince just ambled about from one person to another until the relief vehicle
arrived. They apparently borrowed the only Mercedes on the island that
belonged to the local subcontractor that furnished the Pan Am labor force.

There were supposed to be three flights a week by the HU-16, and it made
most of them. They moved the main flight operations office from Mombassa to
Mahe in mid 1971 in preparation for the phase-out. It was easier to make
disposition of the contract residue in Mahe than in Kenya.

The Kampala and Karanja from the same company, British-India Steamship,
made scheduled calls to Mahe with cargo for the tracking station. Sometimes

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they had everything that was on the manifest and sometimes they did not.
Eventually the remaining cargo would show up. If it shipped from South Africa,
it would be there. If it shipped from Mombassa, it might be there. It is not
something a person wants to get used to, but it was almost a ritual.

When the ships came, it took several days to uncrate the cargo, process
receipts and make distribution. Items were shipped from the U.S. in
consolidated shipments in eight by eight by four foot wooden shipping
containers and metal conex containers. Until the commercial airport opened,
the HU-16 was the only way to get emergency items delivered or to evacuate
emergency medical cases if there was need to.

The hospital on Mahe was not very modern and lacked many things. The U.S.
government donated some old single person bunk beds to the hospital when
they were replaced in the base housing area by more modern beds. The
hospital was very happy to get such a donation. The only problem was getting
mattresses and sheets for them.

Mahe industry depended heavily on the importation of goods for all of its
industrial development. The tracking station likewise had to rely on cargo
deliveries to maintain its functionality. There were certain items that were
more practical to purchase locally, such as automobile parts for the Japanese
manufactured vehicles that were used on base. Pan Am had gotten a waiver to
buy the Japanese made vehicles for safety purposes shortly after taking the
base support function in 1965.

The dealership in Victoria had agreed to keep service station items and repair
parts in stock if Pan Am purchased a certain number of vehicles. For the most
part, the dealership lived up to their end of the bargain. There were only a few
times that parts had to be flown in from elsewhere to get critical vehicles on
line.

The mess hall was also authorized to purchase certain vegetables and seafood
locally. Meat products were sent by refrigerated container from South Africa.

There was no BX function under the Commissary Supervisor at Mahe but

tobacco products and toiletry items could be purchased by U.S. employees at
the employee club. Most other personal items could be purchased in Victoria,
the capital city for the Seychelles Islands.

The Mahe employee club, named the Satellite Club like the one on Antigua,
was operated a little differently from the Eastern Test Range clubs in that the
Base Commander could commandeer the club for diplomatic use. He was
required to throw a shindig at least once a year for all the local ministers and
representatives of other governments who resided on the island. This stuck in
the craw of some of the troops who were on shift work and wanted to have a
nip at night when they got off. They could not access the bar because of the
official party and had to go to bed sober. This was eventually worked out so
that a temporary bar could be set up elsewhere on base and the Base
Commander went on with his party.

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Some of the Base Commanders on Mahe preferred to rent a place downtown to
throw their parties, but after the club was renovated and new furniture was
installed, it was as good as anything that could be rented downtown and much
cheaper.

The employee club had originally been nothing more that a small bar just
outside the mess hall entrance with a sprawling patio under a galvanized steel
roof. There were no walls, so when it rained, everyone would move to the
leeward side. The remodeling added a ceiling to reduce the noise level during
rainstorms and drop down bamboo curtains that helped shield against the
tropical rains blowing in were also installed. The bar was also moved down
onto the Patio level and the old bar area was enclosed and converted into a
pool room with a regulation pool table.

On Mahe, the Base Commander was in complete charge of everything and one
or two of them took it to the extreme. On the upper range stations, the Base
Commander was the Contract Monitor and dealt with the local governments as
the U.S. representative for things concerning the treaties or issues related to
local employees. The Pan Am Base Manager was in total charge of the base
Operations and Maintenance, including the monitoring of sub-contractor
performance.

While the Pan Am presence on base at Mahe was by cross service agreement,
that agreement made the terms of the Range Contract, by reference, in full
force where the cross service agreement was otherwise silent. That meant
that the employee club was chartered under the Air Force Eastern Test Range
contract and not under the cross service agreement.

The club was non-existent until Pan Am arrived on site. It was this little item
that had gotten the concession for the alternate bar when the Base
Commander used the club for diplomatic parties. Although unproven, it was
believed by many that the Base Commander later tried to discredit the
employee club officers with their respective companies, if they had
participated in the negotiation of the alternate bar settlement.

The base newspaper that had been started by one of the minor contractor
employees was editorializing the progress of the negotiations during the entire
episode. The Base Commander did not especially like the slant of the editorial
columns since they portrayed him as some kind of a Grinch. The newspaper
was suspended shortly after the settlement was reached and the Editor was
very closed mouth about why he stopped publication. There was good reason
to believe that coercion might have been a factor.

Some of the folks thought that Providence had brought revenge when a second
lieutenant that came over as a communications officer turned out to be
apparently gay. He brought his live-in male companion with him and they
rented a place off base. The Base Commander was livid and could not get a
transfer off the island arranged fast enough for the lieutenant. In fact, some of
the people were surprised to find out that he had ever been there.

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THINGS TO DO

There were those who would sign on to work down range and then after three
or four months they would decide it just was not their bag. It takes a certain
self reliant, independent, non-anticipatory type of person to work on a semi-
remote tracking station. Of course, nowadays, the locations have all changed
considerably from the original conditions that faced the Range Rats. Although
all but two of the ETR tracking stations are no longer there, the economies of
the upper range islands have all improved and tourism is rampant in the
Bahamas and the Antilles.

There are businesses on most islands now where a person can buy the same
things as are available in the U.S. There are entertainment facilities and other
pastimes available that were not there in the old days. There is the internet
and satellite TV that will soon be accessible, if not already so.

There were dormitory styled barracks at Antigua and Ascension tracking

stations which provided adequate privacy for each employee. The community
latrines were no longer used. There were shared bathrooms between two
rooms and some VIP rooms had a private bathroom. There was maid and
laundry service with free meals a minimum of three times a day.

The BX which was run by the prime contractor, had every personal commodity
a person might need at tax exempt prices. The Range Rats were some of the
best dressed people in the islands for casual wear because the purchasing
agent at Patrick Air Force Base would buy top of the line clothes for resale
through the BX at great prices. The Ascension BX also sold golfing equipment,
electronic items and a limited amount of jewelry and perfume. The Jewelry and
perfume made good gifts for those Range Rats returning home after a long tour
on the island.

There was a great mail order business transacted at Antigua and Ascension.
Sears merchandise and J. C. Whitney automobile parts and accessories were
popular catalogs. There were lesser known specialty catalogs for hunting and
fishing, military surplus, model building and electronics items that the hobbyist
used to order gadgets and gizmos from.

Hobbies ranged from model building to lapidary (stone cutting and polishing)
and some were very profitable. There were rock collectors, bottle collectors,
stamp collectors, sea shell collectors and miscellaneous collectors. There were
other enterprises started like making and selling jewelry.

When it came time for vacation, many of the Range Rats would go to Brazil or
Costa Rica to avoid the physical presence in the U.S. This allowed them to get
all of their tax withholding returned to them. It also provided the opportunity
to buy precious and semiprecious stones at bargain basement prices. They
had no Customs problems since they were exempt under treaty agreements
with the host countries at the tracking stations.

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So long as they did not try to bring contraband through the Customs and
Immigration station at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida when they returned from
down range, they had a very profitable enterprise going. Almost every visiting
fireman that went to the down range stations, at one time or another, brought
back some type of product that a Range Rat had sold them, and as long as
they declared it to Customs it was legal.

Some of the people spent their spare time studying and got their college
degrees through correspondence courses. There were two or three colleges for
which their respective companies would reimburse employees for the costs of
correspondence courses and a few even went on to get graduate degrees.
Others took courses for equivalency certificates or specialized training in a
technical skill.

There were very few news articles or TV commentaries about these folks,
probably because the reporters themselves never got much further than the
bar at the club. Most visiting news people were there for a specific purpose, to
get the astronaut story once they were fished out of the ocean during the
Mercury and Gemini programs. Since the cheapest booze and most sanitary
conditions were usually found on base, the reporters hung out at the club.
Even Walter Cronkite was a visitor to the tracking stations.

The Range Rats found ways to avoid boredom and cabin fever at every station.
At GBI, there was an island soft ball league formed that comprised three to four
teams, depending on the number of British expatriates that could be dared into
playing an American sport. It was not difficult to get a Bahamian team
organized.

The home team was responsible for providing the cold beer and soft drinks for
the players. There was always a more abundant supply of drinks when the
games were played at the tracking station field. The Range Rats won most of
the home games when the visitors took advantage of the free cold American
beer.

Some of the folks picked up hobbies, like automobile mechanics, out of

necessity. You either learned some of the more practical things like changing
oil, filters and spark plugs or you paid a good price to get it done for you.
Some of the Range Rats even learned how to change fuel pumps, water
pumps, alternators, distributors and other not so common items. Its amazing
what learning aptitude one has when it is the difference between sitting in the
barracks reading a book or driving to the golf course.

Another way to escape the stress was to leap out. This was a practice by a
daring few at GBI and Eleuthera who would leave by commercial aircraft on
Friday afternoon and return on Sunday afternoon. Since only a valid U.S.
drivers license was required to enter the U.S. from the Bahamas and vice
versa, no record like a visa stamp was made of their physical presence in the
States so they could still claim their tax benefits.

There were two problems with leaping out. One was that if you did not get
back by 0700 on Monday, you might get fired. The other was that if you

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claimed the tax exemption and the IRS caught you, it could mean a fine, jail
time or both. The problem was not as acute if you only went to another island
and did not go to the U.S.

Some of the guys who leaped out found that a gift of a bottle of whiskey to the
appropriate customs supervisor would put them at the head of the line, coming
and going so that they always had plenty of time to make connections at
Nassau. In fact, the infrequent traveling Range Rat had only to mention the
name of one of the gift givers to be moved up in line.

While Ascension would seem the most likely, the severe alcoholism rate was
probably highest at GBI and Grand Turk because of the isolation of the sites
from any civilization like U.S. cities have and minimum entertainment facilities.
However, the majority of the Range Rats drank in moderation and some not at
all, but the club was the social area for after work gatherings.

There was a different movie every night. Often it was one that had not yet
been released in the U.S. There were pool tables that were kept in good
condition by a contractor that came down range periodically to re-cover them.
There was table tennis at some locations and others had a weight room for
working out. Some clubs held bingo games once a week. There was TV
reception from Miami and Fort Lauderdale for GBI and Eleuthera. The island of
Antigua had its own commercial TV station. Ascension did not have TV but
they did have an AFRTS affiliated radio station with up to date news and music.

On the upper range stations, the Range Liner brought copies of the Miami
Herald, Orlando Sentinel and in later years Florida Today newspapers. The
folks could keep up with sports, stock market and other news without being too
far out of date. There was book swapping tables at some locations, where all
types of publications could be found to read.

When all else failed, there was always the employee club and snack bar. The
snack bar could produce anything from a hot dog to a full meal at some of the
stations. In the lounge area of the club there was a choice of seating at the bar
or at tables. There was usually a designated area for darts that allowed people
to pass by safely. Some clubs sponsored Bingo games and others just provided
a juke box with current selections that someone either donated or the club
manager in some cases took the initiative to order.

The employee club at each station had elected officials that made up a board
of governors who were responsible for hiring the manager and ensuring
compliance with bylaws as well as company and government regulations.
The club manager hired the staff for the lounge and snack bar and was
responsible for day to day operations. The Base Accountant kept the books for
the club and produced monthly financial reports and the club was audited
annually. The range of amenities provided by each club varied from station to
station.

The only reason a person would get bored on one of the tracking stations was
that they tried. Between the extended work hours, hobbies and some of the
organized sports there was not a lot of time left to be bored. Some of the

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people did withdraw for whatever their reasons, and these folks were left alone
to sort it out for themselves, unless they asked for help. One thing you learn
on those bases is that you do not get into someone else life, unless invited.
Because of the already close living and working conditions, privacy is very
sacred.

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THE HUMAN PART

There was some off base social life at GBI, Eleuthera and Antigua. The Range
Rats who had brought their families down to the islands would invite some of
the "bachelor" folks to their homes for dinner, fondue or cocktail parties from
time to time and then the bachelors would reciprocate by taking the married
folks out to a restaurant for dinner, or throw a family oriented cookout with
some special cuisine that they had finagled onto the island. These sometimes
turned into "gotcha" type situations where one was trying to outdo the other. It
could be great, as an invited bystander, to reap the benefits of some fine
eating.

These affairs also fostered a social intermingling with indigent islanders and
members of the expatriate community who worked on the island. British Cable
and Wireless had a contingent on almost all of the islands where there was a
tracking station. Many were neighbors of those Range Rats living off base.
The average age range of the British expatriates was about the same as those
of the U.S. personnel at the tracking stations, so a lot of friendships were
formed and many have flourished over the years.

On the islands where there was substantial tourism, it became a game to feed
the tourist a bunch of malarkey about what the tracking station did, like
tracking UFOs and other alien things from outer space. If was a good come on
for some of the young single guys. They would end up bringing some sweet
young thing to the base for a new movie and a meal at the club snack bar, and
maybe a couple of drinks in the lounge and whatever else happened.

There were quite a few of the Range Rats who married indigent residents or
Brazilian or Cost Rican girls that they met while on vacation. At some of the
bingo games, or other get-togethers at the employee club when the wives
were there, it looked like a U.N. gathering. This made for interesting
conversations among the different cultures and social beliefs.

It was not an easy life for the U.S. wives of the Range Rats, especially those
with young children. The local schools were not equipped to handle the
additional burden of expatriate children. They struggled enough with the
native island population.

The U.S. Government sent a civil service school teacher to Antigua, at one
point, to provide education support for Navy and Range Contractor dependent
children. There was also private tutoring or private school available for enough
money, but these facilities were for only the elementary grade levels. Several
families left the range so their children would not be deprived of a proper
education.

Those citizens of the islands, who were well educated, were lucky enough to be
financially able to go to Europe, Canada or the U.S. to get their higher
education. There were many of them who did go on to college, but during the
early days of the range there was a dire need for schoolbooks and teachers for
the elementary grades on most of the islands.

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The Range Rats started a drive to get used schoolbooks donated for stations
like Grand Turk and San Salvador. They appealed to co-workers back in the
U.S. to help get books donated and it worked. Some of the Range Rats even
volunteered to teach part time. Some of the employees who retired on the
islands used their knowledge to teach specialized courses in the island schools.

There were others who retired from the range and opened businesses on the
islands. They did not all survive in those businesses for various reasons, the
biggest being that the local government was very strict about how a business
was operated.

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OTHER YARNS

There were a few people who attempted to start a business on Ascension

island. The problem they ran into was operating without a license from the
British government and using a United States government aircraft to export the
goods without authorization. They were lucky to keep their jobs after they
were caught.

Of course, they played ignorant and said that they understood that employees
could ship personal effects as part of their employment benefits. This was
true, but not canned fish for resale and exceeding the 400 pounds maximum
per year limit. The weight limit had to be accrued based on years of service
and was to be used when employees transferred or were terminating service.
Range Rats were entrepreneurial to say the least.

Even though they were caught and the business shut down, they had managed
to get enough through the system and sold to pay for all of their equipment
and supplies to run the cannery, so they lost no money in the deal.

One of the Dee Jays at the AFRTS affiliate, Volcano Radio, managed to get "The
Battle of New Orleans" banned from the airways by playing it every fifteen
minutes and dedicating it to the British Administrator of the island. The
Administrator lost his sense of humor after about four hours.

There were employees who traveled from one station to another for various
reasons. Some of these travelers were assigned to a permanent station on
down range status so they would qualify for the bonus. Others were operating
out of company offices at Patrick Air Force Base or Cocoa Beach on temporary
duty (TDY) status. These were the news bearers, much like the caravan drivers
of yore in the Middle East. They would have the latest gossip from one station
to another, rumors of layoffs or transfers and upcoming events at
headquarters. When they came, there would always be a night or two of loud
drunken reunion at the club before everybody fell back to routine.

The construction crew traveled from base to base doing major building
construction, runway maintenance and road repair. They also laid underground
cables and operated heavy equipment for construction related tasks. These
were versatile craftsmen for the most part, who could do carpentry, electrical,
plumbing and masonry work, but there would usually be at least one who was
certified for each trade so that all work was certifiable.

Unlike the stereotypical construction workers of the U.S., these guys were
mostly mild mannered and quite astute. They could be the rough and rowdy
types if someone wanted to push it, but that was a very rare occurrence.

While on GBI for a project, the foreman of the Construction Crew barged into
the office of the base manager, interrupting a confidential meeting with one of
the base supervisors. This particular base manager had a reputation for snap
temper tantrums but in this case he quietly asked what he could do for the
foreman.

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The foreman told the base manager he needed one of his used tennis balls.
The base manager gazed at the foreman for a minute, then told the supervisor
that they could finish up later and left with the foreman to get a tennis ball.
The supervisor was bewildered, since he had fully expected to see the base
manager, an ex-marine, use the K-bar knife he kept on his desk to skin the
foreman for intruding without even knocking on the door.

As it turned out, the Construction Crew had been pulling underground cable
through a conduit and the pull line had broken loose. They needed the tennis
ball to use as a seal in the conduit so they could use air pressure to blow the
cable back out before it seated and then start the pull again. The base
manager had guessed that it was a real emergency requirement since it was
otherwise too ridiculous.

In addition to the Range Barber who traveled alone, there was a traveling Base
Accountant to make sure the local employees could get paid while the regular
accountant was on leave, a relief Commissary Supervisor for mess hall and BX
operations, and for a while there was a roving Fire and Security Chief and a
roving Supply Supervisor.. All of these except the barber and Base Accountant
were eventually phased out and personnel on site acted for the regular
supervisors in their absence.

The U.S. government installed a submarine cable along the island chain from
Cape Canaveral to Antigua early in the missile testing programs. The cable
had to have repeater stations to boost the data and audio signals at periodic
intervals to prevent data loss or drop out.

There was a team of divers that performed the undersea cable inspection and
maintenance, and they were all cases of walking nitrogen narcosis. When they
were on station, it was not just one or two nights of drunken reveling, it lasted
from the time they arrived until they left. Apparently, the danger that these
divers encountered in performing their jobs gave them an extremely high
tolerance for alcohol. But they were good at what they did, both professionally
and partying.

One Sunday afternoon while the divers were on Antigua, they were trying to
find something to do besides sit in the club and drink. They had tried to get a
recreational vehicle but for whatever reason could not. One of the Range Rats
who was stationed at Antigua was going for a ride around the island and
offered to take the divers with him. They bought a case of beer and accepted
the invitation.

It is a pleasant drive to travel from the tracking station to Parahm Road toward
English Harbour and across Fig Tree Hill to Jolly Beach and into St. Johns. This
was the route that was being traveled when somewhere on the Jolly Beach side
of Fig Tree Hill one of the divers yelled, "Stop!".

Everyone piled out of the car wondering what the devil was wrong. He
immediately gathered a handful of rocks and began throwing them up an
embankment toward a palm tree. The other two divers joined in. The Range

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Rat who was driving just stood there in a daze and finally asked what they were
throwing at.

"There's a coconut up there", said the one who had yelled to stop. After a
couple of seconds of scanning the tree canopy, the driver spotted the solitary
coconut dangling from a palm. Several cars passed while the divers were
attempting to bring the fruit down and each time they had to wait for the
divers to finish throwing their rocks and get out of the road.

The coconut was finally knocked down by one of the divers climbing the
embankment an using a broken off tree limb to do the deed. They used a
machete that the Range Rat had in his car to open the coconut and sat in the
middle of the road to devour it. They were like kids at a picnic.

These guys were not bashful at all. When they were doing a job at GBI they
came into the club one night and one of them brazenly walked to a table where
there was a good looking lady, sat down and began to chat her up. It so
happened she was the girl friend of one of the Range Rats who was notorious
for punching people out for general principal and he happened to be out of the
lounge at the moment. However, he returned within a couple of minutes and
without a word, walked around to where the diver was sitting, picked the chair
up with the diver in it and carried him to the other end of the lounge where he
gently deposited him at a table of card players. He then went back and calmly
sat down with his girl friend. Everyone began to breathe again and the night
passed without incident.

It turned out that they were very good friends who did a lot of recreational
diving together. However, the reputation of the guy with the girl friend was
such that everybody had expected to see some kind of brouhaha. Had it been
anyone else trying to chat his girl friend up, there probably would have been a
very nasty scene. The guy not only had a nasty temper, he was a trained
boxer.

The Inventory Audit team would blitz a station. Their job was to audit the
Supply operation and the capital property accounts. They came in, set up, did
the first count, a recount and reconciliation and they were out of there. The
account custodians had to get into overdrive to make sure that miscounts,
posting errors and mixed stock conditions were all properly handled during the
reconciliation to avoid erroneous adjustments.

The people on the team were not responsible for identifying records errors or
physical stock errors, they were there to count what was in location and match
it to the balance on the record. If it matched, good. If it did not match, the
custodian had a problem.

It was this team that brought the most news, rumors and gossip. It must have
been the short visits that somehow caused the permanently assigned people to
confide so much to these travelers. They would not be there long enough to
cause repercussions from any information that was passed on to them, and
after all, they worked out of headquarters so they could be trusted, right?
These were the last people you would want to confide in. Not just because

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they were auditors but because they could not wait to get to the next station
and tell what they knew.

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STATION 40 (THE STEPCHILD)

The Trinidad tracking station was not part of the original test range and was
short lived. The Eastern Test Range took the radar site in 1962 after the army
had finished using it for the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS)
prototype project. The original radar had an organ pipe scanner (named for an
array of waveguide resembling a pipe organ) for continuous multiple target
horizon surveillance and a tracking antenna for automatic trajectory tracking.
The organ pipe scanner was disabled for Eastern Test Range purposes and only
the tracking antenna was used for range support. The radar was deactivated
and dismantled in the early seventies since it was no longer useful for Eastern
Test Range purposes.

Map 8 - Trinidad Island with Naval Base, Tracking Station and other points of
interest illustrated.

Prior to the deactivation of this site, it was one of the most sought after
assignments. The young folks liked it because of the good looking young
women on Trinidad and the older married folks liked it because it had all the
necessities of family life. There were the perks of being able to shop at the
Navy exchange and commissary, not only for cost but for the U.S. products just
like downtown.

Conversely, there were some court cases that made all Americans who lived off
base somewhat wary. One of these was about a man who had allegedly caught
a prowler creeping into his home and had taken a stick to him and beat him
down before calling the police. The prowler was arrested and did a few weeks
in jail, whereupon when he was released he sued the man who had beat him,
and won his suit. There were other similar cases of burglary and home
invasion where the perpetrator ended up with the better outcome. Apparently
the Trinidad and Tobago system of jurisprudence favored the downtrodden.

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The thieves in Trinidad had developed a gimmick that reduced their risk of
capture during the commission of their crimes. They would use a long bamboo
cane to lift a pair of trousers or hand bag or other items of opportunity through
an open window. The cane would have razor blades embedded so that the
sharp edge protruded outward. Since very few homes in Trinidad had air
conditioning, many people left their windows open at night and many had no
screens. If a victim happened to wake up and see their trousers or a purse
floating out the window and tried to grab the cane, they would be cut by the
protruding razor blades. Trinidad was the most notorious station for these
types of off-base irritants.

Trinidad was also notorious among the Range Rats for its bordellos. The
legality of these was questionable, but they operated pretty openly, especially
in a small settlement near the Chaguaramas Navy base where the tracking
station was located.

For things to send home, Port of Spain, the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago,
was a good place to shop. There were many items of local craft that could be
bought for very reasonable prices, but luxury items and durable goods were
out of sight.

Carnival was a very big deal in Trinidad. Celebrated like Mardi Gras in New
Orleans, the people spend many hours during the year preparing costumes,
floats and displays for Carnival. The displays and floats would reflect the
heritage of the different Indian, Chinese, African and European cultures that
made up the Trinidad and Tobago populace.

The waterfront area in Port of Spain was not a pleasant place to browse around.
There was a Bauxite loading elevator there and everything within a half mile of
it was rust colored.

There was also a shanty town slum area alongside the main highway that ran
from Piarco Airport to the Navy base. It had open sewers and limited running
water facilities. It stank so bad that it took your breath away. A heavy haze
from cook fires hung over the area in early morning. The hundreds of people
bicycling to work were reminiscent outlaws in the old cowboy movies with
handkerchiefs or other coverings over their mouths and noses as they passed
by. This area was finally razed and bulldozed in the late sixties after a cholera
outbreak.

Domestic labor was cheap, so most of the Range Rats who lived off base hired
housekeepers, cooks and laundry maids to take care of their everyday chores.
This gave them a lot of leisure time to play tourist on weekends and see the
cricket matches on the Queens Park Savannah from the veranda of the Trinidad
Hilton hotel up the mountainside, while sipping a Planters Punch rum drink.

Trinidad did not have good beaches near the tracking station. For the beach
lovers, it was over an hour drive to Maracas Beach on the northern shore of the
island, and even then the beach was not that great.

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Transportation on Trinidad was not hard to find. The Range Rats who did not
own a personal vehicle could easily hire a Taxi at very reasonable rates.
For forty T&T dollars (about $20 U.S.) a Taxi driver would devote his entire day
to chauffeuring a fare around the island.

It was more entertaining to drive through the mountains or down to San

Fernando or through the banana and nutmeg farms where you could watch a
skinny little burro pulling a two wheeled cart stacked fifteen feet high with
sugar cane. You would swear that the burro should not be able to touch its
hoofs to the ground but it would trudge right along.

Night life in Port of Spain was bustling most of the time in early evening. After
their independence in 1962, the government took measures to provide jobs to
the very poor and unskilled. Much of it was menial labor but they were paid a
wage by the government that was better than most were used to earning.
Slowly, the economic conditions for the lower class began to improve and, as
they did, the businesses flourished. However, around midnight it was like
someone turned the faucet off. Everything got quiet, traffic was almost non-
existent and lights were out.

The Navy had entertainment provided by the USO at the Chiefs and Enlisted
Men's Club on the Navy base that included groups like the Pan Am Jetstars
Steel Drum Band. They were the original steel drum band of Trinidad. The
band was sponsored by Pan American World Airways with the personal
approval of Juan Tripp. The band was first organized by a Trinidadian music
teacher for kids who could not afford regular musical instruments. That band
could play any type or style of music that was ever written, from jazz to
symphony, from country to pop.

The tracking station personnel were authorized to frequent the Navy clubs.
There was no employee club at the Trinidad tracking station. There was a
small honor bar set up in a corner of the mess hall, but there was no real club
facility.

The first night at the tracking station could be unsettling for a visitor. The
howler monkeys talk to each other at night and hearing that sound coming out
of the jungle can send chills down a persons backbone. If that is not enough,
wait till you walk out the next morning and are standing face to face with a four
foot long iguana lizard. Its anybody's guess which moves the fastest to get
away from the other. Then you look around and see the Range Rats who are
assigned there chuckling because they did the same thing and they knew what
was going to happen.

The mess hall at Trinidad had to have served the best food on the range.
Everything was purchased locally, including fresh milk. The milk was a luxury
normally enjoyed only at GBI and Eleuthera where it could be flown in every
other day. Most of the stations had been using powdered milk solutions or
canned milk. But the crowning glory for meals at Trinidad was the vegetable
bar. Fresh garden vegetables like radish, tomato, cucumber, celery and
lettuce, and melons like cantaloupe and casaba were put out twice a day. The
meat was also procured locally and was not stringy like the frozen product at

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some of the other stations. You could truly enjoy a meal at the Trinidad
tracking station mess hall.

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SOME BASE SERVICES

Part of the perks for working down range was that food, laundry and
housekeeping services would be furnished. While the services were available
at each station, no two stations were exactly the same in the way they were
provided.

All of the range mess halls served good food as far as the menu was
concerned. Pan Am had a nutritionist that made up suggested menus for use
by the tracking station chefs. The food was filling and nutritious although it
sometimes came from cans and quick frozen containers. The local mess hall
could buy some products locally when they were available, but there were
restrictions for safety reasons. Any supplier had to be qualified to avoid having
any epidemic inadvertently introduced on base.

Mahe was a challenge for the Commissary Supervisor to provide a good menu.
Much of the food supply came from South Africa under a contract with a
supplier. If wieners were ordered, it was essential that beef be specified,
otherwise they sent mutton and they would have to be tossed because nobody
would eat them. The other problem was the time that a container might sit on
the dock in South Africa or get accidentally off-loaded in Mombassa before it
was sent on to Mahe. There was fresh seafood which was locally procured and
it was good.

On top of the re-supply problems, the Mahe mess hall had to support a 24 hour
operation with three shifts, and a day shift with offset hours from the other
three. The Mahe mess hall was almost on a full time operation 7 days a week.
The employees liked that because if they missed a regular meal they could
always go in and pick up a snack. There was no snack bar in the Mahe
employee club since the mess hall was in close proximity.

The Commissary Supervisor was responsible for all subsistence functions which
included housing, maid and janitorial service, laundry and mess hall.
It could sometimes be a thankless job when there was a glitch with one or
more of the services.
Maid service was provided for cleaning the living quarters. Some bases were
better than others at this task. The bed linen got changed once a week and
the laundry was picked up and returned regularly. If any of the clothes required
special handling, it was advisable to pay the maid extra to do it by hand.
Bathrooms were kept clear of mold and were sanitized with disinfectant. The
dusting, sweeping and moping left a lot to be desired at just about all the
stations, but it was passable.

One of the humorous stories that the Commissary Supervisor in Mahe would
tell was about when they finally got the industrial clothes washers and dryers.
The base laundry had previously been contracted out through Pomeroy Limited
who was the local sub-contractor to Pan Am for labor and certain related
services.

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The story went that the base personnel were happy that their laundry was
being returned faster but they noticed that a lot of the buttons were cracked
and zippers were problematic. The Commissary Supervisor said, "Yeah, I
understand the problem. Its the new washing machines. As soon as I get
those laundry women to understand that the clothes go in the machines and
stop them from beating the clothes across them, everything should get better."
The local washer women did their laundry in the streams by beating them on
the rocks in lieu of a washboard.

Ascension island laundry services also provided dry cleaning and they had
modern steam presses instead of hand irons. They were also pretty good with
special handling items without having to pay the extra tip. The Saints just took
pride in doing a good job.

When the laundry was finished, it would be placed on your bed in your room.
The maids were not allowed to open your closets or dressers to put the clothes
away. Some of the Range Rats even locked everything so that they could not
be opened. That might have been overkill since there was very few cases of
thievery attributed to the maids.

Medical services were provided at each base with a qualified paramedic to do

simple diagnosis and dispense medication for colds and minor infections. The
medical service could also perform first aid for broken or dislocated bones and
treat minor cuts and bruises. Where available, the patient would be referred to
a qualified physician on the island when the case was beyond the scope of the
paramedic. Otherwise, the employee could leave the island to seek their own
treatment. Treatment for industrial injuries would be paid for by the company
when company authorized resources were utilized.

A limited amount of recreational equipment was provided and controlled by the

Pan Am Medical Supervisor. A vehicle could also be checked out for recreation
and on Grand Turk, Antigua and Ascension there was a recreation boat
available for qualified personnel.

The Base Commander could notarize documents and obtain embassy services
if required. He could also certify certain things like drivers license renewal
tests.

All in all, there were very few services that were not available at a tracking
station. Income tax services was the main one that was not available as a
regularly assigned function at the bases. Most of the folks had either learned
to do their own tax returns, or had made arrangements with a tax preparer in
the U.S. to get it done.

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MORE YARNS

The Ascension housing area underwent changes over the years with new
barracks being built and the installation of a high capacity desalination plant
among other things. The Volcano Club had been located adjacent to the mess
hall until the mid 1960s when a new building was constructed on the western
edge of the housing area.

When the old club was in existence, the movie theater was located on the back
side of the same structure and there was a recreation room in between with
pool tables.

The door at one end of the bar in the old club was usually left open and the
stool located there was normally empty. Newcomers to the island found out
why that stool was empty when they sat there, because "Raider", one of the
burros that roamed the island, would come to that door to bum free beer. If
you did not buy him a beer, he would bite you on the butt to get your
attention. He preferred Budweiser.

The story goes that Raider always showed up for the movies. He would check
to see if it was a western, but if it was not, he would move on to somewhere
else. If it was a western, he would plop down in front of the seating area and
watch the movie. Some of the Range Rats would feed him pop corn.

Raider was accidentally killed during one of the authorized Donkey Kills that
are held on the island periodically. The burros used to run wild and reproduce
at will. They have all been removed from the island now.

Despite the jokes about the quality of labor in Mahe, there were skilled
craftsmen there using tools like those that were prominent in the U.S. at the
turn of the twentieth century. The tools might have been old but the quality of
work was fantastic.

The employee club hired a local tradesman to put in a new ceiling and some
paneling. He had no power equipment, but he did precise work with a hand
saw, an adz, wood chisel and planes. His finished product was outstanding to
say the least.

It was even more amazing to watch a stone mason build a retention wall
around the base of a hill at a new barracks building site. He used nothing but a
sledge hammer and a stone hammer and carved pieces from granite boulders
that fit precisely into the places that he had measured only with his eyeballs.
He used no mortar but as he finished each tier of rocks, the wall was as sturdy
as concrete, and each tier was on a level plane. Watching him was better than
watching a good movie.

The Seychellois were eager to learn. Most of them were avid readers of fashion
magazines, news magazines and sports magazines. They were curious about
the outside world. Their primary source of news for years had been sailors
from the Asian fishing fleets, visitors from cruise ships and crews from naval

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vessels that would make port of call. The cargo supply ships were in, unloaded
and gone, so they did not bring much news, even if they did come regularly.

The Seychellois were friendly folks and seemed to really like the Americans.
One of the base employees remarked that "A Seychellois girl is the greatest
date in the world. You can buy them an orange soda and get a champagne
magnum of loving." It was true that most of the young women were not after
money or material things. They just wanted someone to marry them and take
them off that island, and quite a few did.

There was a good relationship between the local Mahe officials and base
management. This helped the employees in their relationship with the local
populace. If any of the employees got out of line and it was reported to the
Base Commander, the employee would likely be declared persona non gratis
and ejected from the island with a nasty-gram to the employee's management.

One company sent three employees over to perform a specialized task on

some of the primary instrumentation. One of them dressed in native American
garb, another had a frizzy head of hair that looked like he had suffered mild
electrocution and the third was not too far from average except he dressed in
California modern, wore a goofy hat and sported a neat goatee and sideburns.

The guy with the frizzy hair held a masters degree in electrical engineering and
the other two were both college graduates. Their education was not enough to
impress the Base Commander. He pegged them as hippies and allegedly sent
a protest back to his headquarters. His protest apparently went unheeded, but
in the meantime someone reported that one of the trio had lit up a joint
(marijuana) downtown. The Base Commander allegedly acted on this hearsay
evidence and ordered them off the island before they finished what they came
to do. He was adamant that the U.S. image would not be tarnished by base
personnel, even if they were there on a temporary basis. The Seychellois
police, who provided security for the base, escorted the trio to the airport.

Range Rat life on Mahe was not quite as hectic as on the Eastern Test Range
stations. For one thing, although there was a lot of tracking activity, there
were no missile launches to support. The island life, while somewhat confined,
was a lot more pleasant with a tropical rain forest environment.

One small hotel near Sunset Beach had a magnificent view of the ocean and a
cove down below where you could sit at an outdoor table and sip a drink. You
might get to see the fishing dog if you were lucky. There was what looked like
a black Labrador Retriever that loved to swim in the cove and try to catch the
fish that swam there. The dog would spend as much as a half hour fishing on
some days.

One of the minor contractor (Not Pan Am, RCA or Philco-Ford) came rushing in
the employee club one night and kept saying "It was him, I'm sure it was him".
After a couple of drinks to calm him down, he finally divulged that he had been
to the same little hotel for some kind of special dinner and had met a man that
he was sure was Yul Brynner. He had danced with the lady who was with the
man and assumed that she was his wife. It was never determined whether the

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man was Brynner or not, but nobody else reported seeing anyone who looked
like him.

The city of Victoria was about a 10 minute drive from the housing area on three
miles of a scenic, although narrow and winding road. There were two or three
good beaches all within ten to twenty minutes from the base. The sea shell
collectors found a mother lode in cowries, queen conch, cones and other exotic
types of shells. Diving and snorkeling were also great in the Indian Ocean
waters for exploring and spear fishing.

Local fishermen brought in their catches and sold them at the market in
Victoria daily. The smart shoppers got there early to get the best picks. When
the Spanish mackerel ran there would be groups of boaters that would go out
together and string a long net out. They would then herd the schools of
mackerel into a small cove where others on shore would wade in and scoop the
fish out with dip nets. There would be plenty for everyone to fry, bake or stew
for a few days.

Sailing was available for those who wanted to join the yacht club. Local boat
owners were very friendly and were glad to have guests that could help with
rigging and other sailing chores.

One of the Range Rats who bought a boat there decided to sail it back to the
States with only he and his wife as crew. He had never sailed the boat on the
open sea before, but he did go out for a couple of test runs, staying near the
island, before he set out for home.

Now, he is not going east from Mahe to India and through the south Pacific to
California via Hawaii. Oh, no! He is going west to Africa through the Suez and
Mediterranean and across the Atlantic, or around the Cape of Good Hope and
up by Ascension to see some buddies and then on across the Atlantic to
America. Good luck, using a sextant to navigate! Oddly enough, he made it.

Nobody was quite sure he had, because the coordinates he kept sending back
to Mahe, as long as the signal could be received, had him plotted right across
Bombay, India. He apparently was mixing his east and west latitudes or
something. But in a few weeks he had checked in at Mombassa and called the
company representative there to let him know he had made it that far. It was
some months later before word got back to Mahe that he had reached the U.S.
without incident. It is still unknown whether he went through the Suez or not.
All this before the GPS units were available to the general public.

The HU-16 was still making the run between Mombassa and Mahe at the time
and they had been looking for him, but never caught sight of him at sea.

The waters around the island could be dangerous. One of the Seychellois
employees showed up at the dispensary one day with a case of blood
poisoning in his leg. The nurse gave him some antibiotics and sent him to a
doctor downtown. When he had the problem under control in a few days he
came back to work and told how he had come by the malady.

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There was a hotel near Belle Ombre that had a small cove and beach which
provided a scenic view from the hotel bar. He had been dip netting for fish in
the cove and thought he had scraped his leg on a piece of coral that is
prominent there. When the pain suddenly hit him like a hornet sting, he
realized what had happened. There is a species of blowfish there that is
extremely toxic to some individuals if it brushes against a person a certain way.
He happened to be one of those individuals.

He had immediately rushed home and applied a home remedy but it was
ineffectual and the blood poisoning had set in. He was in extreme pain until
the medication took hold and began to fight the poison. He vowed to wear
boots the next time he went dip netting.

One of the Range Rats who did a lot of diving around the island had some
photographs of some of the exotic sea creatures and one was of that species of
fish. What an ugly critter. It just looked nasty, slimy and blotchy with little
spiny things on its side. Those are what get you.

Some of the cone species of mollusks are also very dangerous. They have a
needle like stinger that darts out the small end of their tapered shell and flicks
around randomly as a defense mechanism when it is agitated. One species
has a venom that affects the neural system and can bring death in less than 15
minutes. The Range Rats who dove for shells in Mahe were very careful when
handling these.

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THE DOWN SIDE

Living on base at the tracking station was not so bad, but the married folks
who brought their families to the islands and those who got married in the
islands had to adapt to an unfamiliar lifestyle. There were no supermarkets,
department stores or shopping malls from which to acquire the needed
household items. Shopping was a whole new experience for most of the wives
and some of them gave up and returned to the States. Some not only returned
to the States, they also filed for divorce if the spouse refused to give up his job
down range.

Base personnel were allowed to shop in the Navy commissaries at Eleuthera,

Turk, Antigua and Trinidad. This provided some relief for the married folks who
had infants since they could get most of the food and hygienic items. It also
helped with the adult diet.

The younger couples were especially vulnerable to the poor economic

conditions of the islands. Elementary education was available for the children,
but it was not of the quality available in the U.S. Higher education was almost
non-existent. Teenaged dependents were usually sent back to the States to
attend high school and if there were no relatives to act as guardians, the wives
usually went with them.

There were a preponderance of Range Rats who were alcoholics by the AA

standard of taking the second drink. Yet, alcoholism did not create a major
impact on operations at the tracking stations. There were a handful of cases
where employees went for rehabilitation and were placed on programs to keep
their jobs. Most of them fared pretty well while some could not resist the
temptation of the cheap booze and proximity of the employee club or, as one
or two did, became closet drinkers and ended up leaving as a medical case.

All in all, most Range Rats stayed sober during working hours and drank in
moderation after work. There were a good number of teetotalers, but they
would come to the club and drink sodas or just join in the rap sessions.

There was also some who used illegal drugs but they were never significant in
number at any station. If they were caught on station using any illegal
substance, from marijuana to heroin, they were immediately terminated on
station and sent to the U.S. on the next plane for final processing.

In addition to those caught by base management or Security, the U.S.

government began to send teams to the stations in the mid 1970s with sniffing
dogs to search the barracks and work areas for drugs. They checked both the
civilians and Navy personnel at Antigua and found mostly marijuana stashes.
The civilian employees were arrested and returned to the U.S. for further
action. The Navy personnel were processed through military procedures.

When there were disputes between the indigent personnel and a U.S.
employee, they had to be settled according to the treaty at that particular
station. In the Bahamas, there were Commissioners for specified parts of the

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island on the larger islands and each island had an Administrator or Magistrate.
These were the officials who dealt with base management to resolve the
disputes and there was usually an amicable settlement made.

One incident occurred between an RCA employee and a non-employee

Bahamian over a car sale. The Bahamian had gone to the Commissioner and
told his story and the Commissioner had sent him to see the Base Manager
without taking any part in the process himself. A meeting was set up between
the RCA employee, the Bahamian and a management representative for the
base.

The Bahamian stated that he had bought the car from the RCA employee for
three hundred dollars and the RCA employee had brought the car back on base
where the Bahamian could not get to it. The RCA employee said this was true
but that was only part of the story. It turned out that the Bahamian had made
a down payment on the car of one hundred dollars and was supposed to make
weekly payments to finish out the three hundred, at zero interest rate.

The RCA employee realized that the man could not afford to make big
payments so he had agreed to reasonable weekly payments. The man had
missed four weeks of payments and the RCA employee had seen him drinking
in a local beer joint, so he repossessed the car.

The Bahamian had admitted to missing the payments and did not deny that he
had been to the beer joint every payday for those missed payments, but he
needed the car and wanted someone to sympathize with him.

The RCA employee agreed to renegotiate with the man, but it was doubtful that
the man would ever get the car or his one hundred dollars back. The local
Commissioner was fully aware of the circumstances and had no complaints
against the RCA employee since the Bahamian admitted that he had agreed to
the terms of the sale.

Base management had to go through these types of exercises on several

occasions to show that they were concerned for the welfare of the local
populace and to ensure that indigent people were not scammed. The base
employees seldom tried to con the local civilians because in the early days of
the range, many of the island people had very little to support themselves or
their families with.

One thing the Range Rat needed to be careful about was getting involved in
local politics. While they had no official standing as a U.S. representative, the
islanders looked upon them as such. Saying or doing the wrong thing with
respect to the local government could spark an international incident.

There were some Range Rats who had their biased and bigoted opinions about
the local politicians and some problems did occur. Fortunately, these were few
and far between and those employees were dealt with promptly to remove
them from that station. Depending on the degree of harm with diplomatic
relations, the employees would either be transferred or terminated.

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Over the years that Pan Am held the range contract, the tracking stations and
local governments had very good relations. This was probably because the
Base Management was very firm in insisting that employees abide by a code of
conduct that would preclude incidents with indigent personnel.

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THE UP SIDE

After a Range Rat had two or three years behind them, they would blend into
the local environment at any of the stations. You could find some of them in
the little wine shops around the island playing dominoes with the islanders or
taking fishing trips with one of the local commercial fishermen. Some even
learned to play games like Waree (pronounced Waah'- ree). This is a
complicated game, akin to Backgammon except the board is made of wood
with eight indented pockets and a passel of colored stones that are used as
game pieces.

One Range Rat was initiated into the local Masonic lodge on the island where
he was stationed. He was very proud of his accomplishment and became one
of the most active members of the lodge.

The Range Rats were members of the local communities, the same as if they
lived in the U.S. The ones who were devout in their religions participated in the
local religious activities. Those who were interested in non-political civic affairs
helped the local officials to organize and carry out civic projects. Those who
were interested in furthering the educational opportunities of the children in
the islands assisted in getting text books or school supplies sent from the U.S.
through donations and sometimes even paid out of their own pockets.

The Range Rats mingled with local society by joining golf and yacht clubs when
they were convenient to the bases. This allowed the indigent populace to get
first hand knowledge of the types of individuals who worked at the tracking
stations. The employees who belonged to those clubs were aware that they
were unofficially representing the United States and for the most part, they did
a good job at it.

Competitions were promoted between base personnel and the local inhabitants
for various sports with official rules and consequences. Awards were presented
to the winning teams with great fanfare and aplomb. It made for good public
relations when the games were held on base and the visitors were allowed to
bring their families to attend the movies and utilize the club facilities. Many
local dignitaries attended the competitions and rooted for their teams. A good
time was had by all.

The highest compliment that could be paid to a Range Rat was to be invited to
a local family celebration or a private outing where only the islanders normally
went. This was an indication of acceptance without reservation and a prudent
person would not refuse the invitation. It was not uncommon for a Range Rat
to be solicited to act on behalf of a parent to give a bride away when
circumstances prevented the natural parents from doing so.

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FINAL ANALYSIS

There are many untold stories of how the Range Rats gave of themselves to
help those who were not as fortunate in the islands. One reason for not
making a big deal of it was probably to avoid the potential embarrassment to
the local governments since they had not done some of these things.

These island nations were just born to independence from Great Britain during
the 1960s and their plates were full with priorities for building economic
infrastructure and establishing political stability. Health and education was not
a high priority in the infancy of some of these governments. They were more
concerned about revenue, trade and employment opportunities. These were
the things that would be needed to pacify the population and pay for
government obligations.

It was a real struggle for these young nations, with some of them leaning
toward the communistic side of socialism in the early years. In the 1970s they
became more stable and now have more of a market economy and very stable
governments. Some of the local officials did formally thank the Range Rats for
some of the altruistic acts during those formative years.

Those Range Rats who lived and worked on the tracking stations became part
of the island life whether they wanted to or not. It was difficult to spend years
of ones life in that environment without some of it rubbing off on you.
Whatever preconceptions a person had before they went down range to work,
it would certainly change after just a few months of living there. For those who
stayed and made a career out of the space industry, the range was their home.

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