Nuclear Missiles Where?

In April 1958 U S Navy Fighter Squadron 174 (VF-174) had its mission changed from fighter to training squadron as it became the sole F8U Crusader training squadron on the east coast of the United States.  All pilots assigned to future F8U aircraft squadrons would learn the intricacies of flying the bird at this facility.  All fleet squadron maintenance personnel would also be trained here.

Two years later, April 7, 1960, I joined the VF-174 Hell Razors as they were known, based in Jacksonville, Florida.  I was due to spend some 2 ½ years in that illustrious and coveted position.  The previous November 1959 I had been selected as a First Class Petty Officer, an AMS 1, or Aviation Metalsmith Structures First Class.  As such it was but a short while until I became the training petty officer for the structures division of the squadron, responsible for the training program for aviation metalsmiths throughout the east coast concerned with the F8U aircraft.  I also ordered and received all maintenance parts and supplies necessary for the day to day operations of our division.

In mid-October 1962 when I arrived at the squadron one morning there was such a flurry of activity I was hardly sure I was at the right place.  As a training squadron we had no use for guns in our aircraft and as a precaution against them being fired by accident the guns were all removed from the aircraft.  Now they were all being reinstalled using all manpower that could be made available.  Suddenly overnight our mission changed from training to fighter status.  It seemed Soviet attack missiles had been discovered on Cuba’s north shore, and that President John F. Kennedy had committed our country to having them removed.  We were closer to a possible nuclear war than I hope the world shall ever see again.

Thankfully cooler heads kept this possible catastrophe from escalating, in a few days the extreme danger was over, and things quieted back down, but I hope the world never comes this close again to that possibility.

Lawton Coat of Arms

In days of old,

when knights were bold,

and muskets not invented,

men would go,

to meet their foe,

with ready lance, contented.

The Lawton Coat of Arms is described as:

Argent on a fess between three cross-lets fitche sable, a cinquefoil of first, pierced of the second.  Crest-A demi-wolf salient regardant argent, vulned in the back gule, and licking the wound.  Said what?

This is what is known as Blazon.  Argent is silver or white.  Gules is red, while sable is black.  A fess is a stripe across the center of the shield.  A cinquefoil is a five pointed depiction of a rose.  Regardant means an animal facing backwards.  Salient means projecting or standing backward.  Vulned means wounded.  Demi means half.

When a helmet is used a Knight’s would have an open visor, while a titled gentleman’s visor would be closed.  Either would be shown in profile.

Using the Blazon description it means the Lawton Coat of Arms has a silver shield with a black stripe.  On the stripe is a rose.  There are three crosses of a type called Fitche that appear to pierce the shield.  Atop the shield is a half wolf standing and looking rearward.  It is wounded in the back, red, and licking the wound.  The profile closed helmet shows it is a titled gentleman, but not a Knight.  The leafy patterned part is called mantling and is typical of fifteenth and sixteenth century styles.

All descendants of the original grantee in the male line were entitled to use the Arms.  However only the head of the family could use it as it were, all other family members had to change it in some manner.  That is why one can find different depictions of the Arms.  Originally the design was placed on a surcoat worn over a suit of armor for ready identification of Knights in battle.  That is where the Coat of Arms name derived from.  Later it was drawn on shields, pennants, and horse blankets.  The total trappings were called the Achievement.

Nancy Jane Fletcher Morton Stephens

At age 16, in 1860, Nancy Fletcher married Thomas Morton in Iowa.  In mid 1864 Thomas, in partnership with Nancy’s brother William Fletcher and their cousin John Fletcher, set out on an extended freight shipping trip to Denver, hundreds of miles west through Indian Territory.  Nancy, not yet twenty, went along on the journey.  They wended their way westward until the night of  August 7^th when they camped by Plum Creek near its confluence with the Platte River in Nebraska Territory.

Shortly after daybreak the next morning between sixty and one hundred Cheyenne braves charged down from a bluff overlooking Plum Creek.  The nineteen-year-old Nancy Morton was hit by an arrow in the left side, and by another in the left thigh.  As she hit the ground a following wagon struck her.  She ran for the river where she saw her cousin, John Fletcher.  Just then an arrow struck his chest; he shuddered and died.  She spotted her brother hiding in the grass.  As he arose telling her to run for the wagons, three arrows hit him.  His final words were, “Tell my wife Susan I am killed.  Goodbye my dear sister.”  Nancy was then taken captive by the warriors.

A ransom was paid for Nancy Morton, but after she was released and rode a short distance, she was recaptured.  She was ransomed a second time and again recaptured.  Finally, in February of 1865, a Government agent was sent with a new tactic.  He took a large herd of horses along with him on his journey.  At strategic spots he left them in pairs, ever closer together as he neared the Indian encampment.  When he paid the ransom and Nancy was released, he raced away from the encampment with the Indians once more in hot pursuit to recapture their valuable commodity.  The agent and Nancy stayed ahead of the pursuers until they reached the first pair of awaiting horses.  They rapidly switched animals and began leaving the Indians with their tiring mounts behind.  This procedure was used again and again the entire distance back to safety.  She always recalled that she had been treated with the utmost respect, the Indians keeping her merely as a source of wealth.

On November 19, 1865 this tenacious frontier woman remarried, this time to George Stephens.  In August of 1866 she gave birth to her first of three children, a daughter she named Eveline.  When Eveline was nineteen, in February of 1886, she married William Lincoln Lawton, the son of Philip and Jeanine (Gault) Lawton, born respectively in England and Scotland.  William and Eveline had one daughter, Lulu Maud Lawton in 1893.  She married Smead H Purinton.

The World Stood Still

October 15, 1962  Aircraft photography revealed missile launchers under construction on the island of Cuba.

October 22, 1962  President John F. Kennedy announced their existence to the American public.  He also declared a quarantine of the island, a blockade, nothing in, nothing out.  He further stated to the Soviet Union to remove their missiles from Cuba.  Low-level photo flights were ordered every two hours over Cuba.

October 25, 1962  As the entire world held its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop, the United States military, mightiest in the world, was placed on the highest status possible.

October 26, 1962  The Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) Premier Nikita Khrushchev wrote President Kennedy that the USSR would remove the missiles if the United States would promise never to attack the Cuban island.

October 27, 1962  A United States U2 photo aircraft was shot down over Cuba.

October 28, 1962  Premier Khrushchev agreed to the United States demands and the excruciatingly tense threat of the unthinkable nuclear war was staved off for at least a short period of time.  The collective world breathed a sigh of relief as tensions slightly relaxed.

As was true of  the later experience of the twin tower disaster, millions of people can relate where they were during the missile crisis.  I was in a U S Navy fighter training squadron in Jacksonville, Florida.  At the very beginning of the crisis our status was shifted from training to a full-fledged aircraft fighter squadron.  All aircraft guns were loaded and tested for readiness.  Their wings fairly bristled with live missiles of various types.  All leaves were cancelled immediately.  Some aircraft were on the runways with engines idling at all times.  Others were ready for backup at a moment’s notice.

Much later it was learned that Fidel Castro, leader of Cuba, recommended to Premier Khrushchev that nuclear missiles be fired at the United States.  He fumed mightily when it was not done.  The madman knew not how stupid that would have been.  Had a single missile been launched from Cuba at that time the world stood a grave danger of being annihilated.

Honestly

There was a time in my life when I held a part-time second job taking care of a string of vending machines.  Some of them had candy bars, while others had cold drinks, and still others held hot soup and hot beverages.  Most, but not all, were in enlisted military living quarter areas.  Once a day I made the rounds with my personal vehicle supplying the machines, extracting the coins, and insuring their proper working order.  If they had minor problems I might fix them on the spot, but if it was a larger malfunction I reported it to higher-ups that sent in repairmen.

On occasions a machine might malfunction in such a manner as to yet accept coins but not give forth the desired product.  It was possible for several dollars to accumulate before some caring individual might place an out-of-order sign on it.  When I arrived on the scene under these conditions I would make an attempt to understand the problem and repair it if I was able.  Often it was caused by some person attempting to get something from the machine under dubious circumstances.  In other words a false object of some sort was inserted in the coin slot in an attempt to gain a free product.  In most cases this was a dishonest attempt to steal the product, but one could not state that as always true.  Given the benefit of the doubt, it was possible the object was inadvertently inserted, such as a coin-like object might have been in a person’s pocket, and without looking at it could have been placed in the coin slot.  So, was this an honest mistake, or a dishonest attempt at minor theft?

By taking a quick inventory of the machine I, of course, knew how much money should have been in the coin box.  If there were several dollars extra, who did the money belong to?  It, of course, belonged to whoever had placed it in the coin slot and received no product in return, but that would have been nearly impossible to determine.  In actuality, if a person walked up to me while I was there, and stated he lost a quarter in the machine, I merely handed him a quarter with no questions asked, but I yet walked away with more money than was necessary to account for lost inventory.

Sticking with my honesty point of view who then owned that excess money?  It was not my money merely because it was in my possession, yet had I kept it no one except me would know.  It did not belong to the organization I worked for as they had done nothing to earn it.  There was no practical way to determine the rightful owners and return it to them. 

In reality I turned in the total amount of money in any machine whether it was over, or under, the required amount to offset inventory.  I bring up the question to illustrate that under some circumstances it is nearly impossible to be entirely honest, no matter how much it be desired.

Rattlesnake

My brother Dell and I were out hunting rabbits on a dreary sort of a Sunday morning in December during the late 60s on the Naval Air Station north of Meridian, Mississippi.  Both of us were in the Navy, but that had little to do with what we were doing.  We belonged to the Base Sportsmen’s Club and therefore hunted the Base woods and meadows for rabbits nearly every weekend during the fall season.

On this particular day we had a pack of six beagles out working for all they were worth, but nothing seemed to be moving, probably due to the moderate rain that was falling all morning.  We tried several separate areas, each time gathering the dogs up and placing them in the back of my 1948 Jeep CJ1, and moving on to some other well-known (to us) area.  After three or four hours of this even we gave up.

We decided it was time to gather in the dogs, pack them into the Jeep, and head for our respective homes.  I blew on my silent whistle and my Sue dog readily came.  After we placed her in the dry Jeep Dell began gathering up his dogs.  He had never trained them to the whistle, and some readily came to his voice call, while others were not so ready to go back to their humdrum life in a wire fenced run.  Becky and Joe both came and we put them in the back with Sue.  After some more calling another showed up and we captured it too.  The last two were not so ready to cede to a rabbitless day.  Dell decided to walk into the nearby woods after several minutes to bring them out to the Jeep.

Dell always carried two or three chain type leashes in a coat pocket.  Being chain they would fold into a pocket readily, and he hardly knew he was carrying them.   After a few minutes in the woods he appeared at the edge headed back toward the Jeep.  I watched him approach until he was no more than fifty yards away from me.  He had a beagle on a leash in each hand and walked steadily toward me in the ever steady-falling rain.  When he got to that distance, suddenly a rattler sprung up out of the grass directly in front of him.  It seemed to strike at him, but somehow missed its target and went harmlessly past his left leg.  Possibly that was all it intended to do.  As it passed through between Dell and the beagle on that side the Beagle tried to take a bite out of it, but it too missed its intended target.

I looked on in horror with absolutely nothing I could do at that distance.  Had I even been expecting it to happen I could not have shot it, but I didn’t even have a gun loaded, much less was I thinking of shooting the snake.  Dell stopped dead in his tracks, frozen in an uncontrollable fear.  I called to him, but no answer, nor movement, was forthcoming.  I slowly walked toward him watching for any sign of the snake, or any other, carefully placing each footstep as I got closer.  When I got right up to him I spoke his name.  There was still no answer.  I then slapped him, and in an instant he was normal again, with no recollection of the past few moments.  He didn’t know how I had got from the Jeep to where he was without his seeing me arrive.  He didn’t recall seeing the snake either.  He had no idea I had struck him.

We put the last pair of dogs in the Jeep and headed for home.  Soon we had dipped the dogs in tick medicine, and put them back in their pen where they immediately went into their shelter and shook spreading the medicine within the structure.  Only then did we enter the warmth of his home, and after removing our thoroughly wet outer clothes, and wiping down our shotguns, we each enjoyed a good hot cup of coffee.

Naval Air Station Hospital, Jacksonville, Florida

December 24, 1960, Christmas Eve, I was 22 years old the previous July.  A good friend named Rodney D. (Rocky) Lewis called and asked if I could help him change a rear wheel bearing in his car.  He was from Georgia, and he and his wife and daughter wanted to go home for Christmas, but the wheel bearing had gone bad during the day.

We removed the back axle with the attached wheel bearing.  We took it to a parts place where we thought they would use a hydraulic press to remove and reinstall a new bearing on the axle for us.  They had no mechanic on duty because it was Christmas Eve.  We tried several places all with the same result.  We then returned to Rocky’s home.  I decided we could remove the old bearing somehow, and the new one would not be difficult at all to replace.  I tried to pry it off with several available tools with no luck.  In desperation I picked up a hammer and cold chisel in an attempt to cut it off.  I made little headway until I picked up a larger hammer.  When I swung the sledge, the bearing broke and pieces flew everywhere.

It was only a few minutes later until we had the new bearing in place and reinstalled the axle in the car.  Rocky, Harriett, and the baby were good to go, but for some reason I was seeing black spots in front of my eyes.  When Rocky returned from a short test drive I told him I needed to go to a hospital as I had something wrong with my vision.  From the clinic on Cecil Field I was removed to the US Naval Hospital at the Naval Air Station Jacksonville a few miles distant.

X-rays showed that I had some retained foreign bodies deep within my right eye and it was bleeding internally.  Pieces of magnetic steel, non-magnetic steel, and cement from Rocky’s porch steps were all embedded within the eye.  With the use of an electromagnetic needle the magnetic particles were removed by Doctor Lauuwe, but the remainder of the particles stayed where they were.  After six weeks of bed rest with bandaged eyes I was finally allowed to arise, but with very little vision in that eye.  I spent about half of 1961 in the hospital and the other half on light or limited duty.