Читать книгу Vignettes - Life's Tales Book Three - William M.D. Baker - Страница 8

It was winter of 1955, the Cold War was at its hottest, and I was heading-up a team of eleven that was installing a Supply System on several Strategic Air Command Bases in support of the new B-52. The systems were called Card-a-Type Systems made by IBM and were in the in-between time of punched cards and the first computers. Essentially, they were “programmed” punched card systems controlled by large and very complex wired control panels.

Our modus-operandi was one of frog-jumping. That is, we would start one base, move on to the next, bounce back to the first, jump to the third and so on. It meant a lot of travel, but the bases came on-line in the shortest period of time.

This story takes place when the advance element consisting of myself and two technicians were traveling in an unmarked station wagon from Davis Monthan AFB in Tucson, Arizona to Mountain Home AFB in Mountain Home, ID. The weather was horrible and travel was slow. In Denver because the snow was deep and coming down hard we opted to spend the night in a hotel and parked the station wagon on the street. In the rear of the station wagon was all of our technical materials including wired control panels, punched cards and manuals. While the materials were critical to our mission they were not, by themselves, classified.

The snow continued all night and in the morning when we approached the car from it’s rear we could see the rear window had been broken out and snow was in the rear of the wagon where our materials should have been. We anxiously dug through the snow hopefully looking for our materials. No luck, everything was gone.

We hurried back to the hotel and I called the police giving them full details of who we were, what we were about and how necessary it was that the materials be immediately found and returned.

It was if by magic that before we could check-out a police cruiser pulled up outside and a sergeant announced they found the materials in an alley. We joined the officers, went to the cruiser and examined the returning materials. Not only was everything there, it was also neatly stacked and absolutely dry! Not a speck of moisture anywhere. It was found in an alley? I don’t think so.. It is mysterious how things can just disappear and reappear without an explanation. Could there be more story to this story? I think so.

END