Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

I wrote a couple of months ago about the odd and (usually rightfully) obscure movies that we got in the AFRTS shipments of programming back in the day that I was a lowly airman, working the night shift in the TV control room at FEN-Misawa. Indeed, we received many an odd selection of movies in the weekly package of TV programming.

In the first year or so of my service, the weekly TV program package came on half-hour long film reels, and then on Umatic ¾ videotape cassettes, which were a lot less messy to deal with – but still had their own challenges, mostly because the cassettes were held together with about thirty teeny metal screws, which had the dismaying tendency to come loose in transit – and then drop into the innards of the playback machine, necessitating much swearing by our engineering staff and possibly damage to the delicate machinery itself. As our experience developed with that format, a small Phillips-head screwdriver was routinely chained to the rack where the daily programs were pulled from their metal traveling cases and lined up the night before by the on-duty operator. Yes, part of that duty was to tighten ALL the screws holding each and every tape case together, the rollers, and the little metal flange that was supposed to protect the tape itself. In some cases, we went to the extent of opening and carefully rethreading the tape through the various rollers and take-up reels. Yes, we probably weren’t supposed to be doing this, but … whatever. The program had to air, especially if it were a very popular one. We all got very good at administering first aid to ailing Umatic cassette tapes.

Anyway – the movies. Many of the movies in the package were … grade C. The bottom of a double feature in a dollar theater in the bad part of town. Or so old and/or low rent that they were aired late at night back at home, interspersed with commercials for shady used car lots. It was a bafflement for years – why did AFRTS generally seemed to get the absolute dregs when it came to movies? We kind of got it that the military post-Vietnam was about as popular as a case of herpes with the Hollywood set, and perhaps that was the reason. We shrugged and moved on.

In the fullness of time, I finished the tour in Japan, whiled away a pleasant year in the Public Affairs office at (now closed) Mather AFB. After that, I did a tour at Sondrestrom AB, Greenland, of which it was often said, “Not the end of the world – but you can see it from there!” Sondrestrom was thirty miles north of the Arctic Circle and saved from complete and total isolation by also being the main international airport for all of Greenland.

During WWII the US Army Air Corps, after careful consideration, sited a transit airfield on that exact spot, because of usually favorable local weather conditions, as opposed to the generally unwelcoming weather conditions practically everywhere else on that continent. For an isolated military base, Sondrestrom AB hosted a constant trickle of international travelers on the Danish side of the base where the international airport terminal and hotel complex was situated –  separated from the American military side by nothing more than a narrow road around the top end of the landing strip.

(The runway had been built half on hard ground and half on fill blasted out from the hills and dumped into the end of a 40-mile-long fjord. It bent downhill in the middle. Only very experienced pilots of large aircraft were permitted to land and take off from Sondrestrom, situated as it was at the end of a 40-long, straight-as-a-die fjord with tall mountains lining either side.)

Anyway, there had long been an Air Force broadcasting squadron detachment at Sondrestrom. For exactly how long, I didn’t know; the very oldest discs in the library of AFRTS-Radio releases in the record library there (specifically in limited issue to AFRTS-Radio outlets only, beginning with #1 sometime in the early 40’s) were on enormous 16-inch records, and numbered in the 600s.

There was also – because this was an Air Force establishment, a range of recreational venues, all catering to the Air Force personnel, the Danish and American contract employees, Danish staff of the Royal Greenlandic Trading Co., and the airport. This included NCO and officer clubs, a small indoor swimming pool (said to be the only such in Greenland) and the BX movie theater, which usually showed first-run movies about six months after said movies opened Stateside. The co-location of the BX theater, and the international airport and hotel in such a remote site had a strange and incidental bearing on the lack of good movies in the AFRTS weekly packages, for a reason that I didn’t hear about until a decade later.

I did a year-long tour in Greenland and departed for a follow-on to Greece – my choice as a reward for a year in a place that couldn’t possibly be any more remote unless it was the Antarctic. Eventually I finished out my overseas assignments in Korea, at AIG-Yongsan, in the heart of downtown Seoul. In a conversation with an older NCO, who had knocked around military broadcasting for some years longer than I had and had a wider repertoire of stories about that specialty and some of the very odd characters in it. When I mentioned that I had done a tour in Greenland, he told me how our broadcast detachment there was the direct cause of movies in AFRTS-TV weekly packages being routinely so third- or fourth-rate for decades.

I honestly do not know if the story he told me was true or not. I am certain that it was technologically and in practice possible. Being in such isolated location, with only the semi-weekly transport aircraft from the States, and international flights taking a northerly route as a lifeline to the larger world – military personnel stationed there get very, very bored. It’s always dangerous when intelligent people in an isolated situation get bored. Because they do creative things to alleviate that boredom, especially when there is no one around to advise against the most … er, creative diversions.

What is supposed to have happened is that whoever was in charge of the BX movie theater got together with someone at the broadcast station.

(It may have been the same person, actually. It was a small base, and a lot of personnel doubled up on extra jobs. The year I was at Sondrestrom, the NCOIC of the Security Police unit was also the senior enlisted advisor, and manager of the BX theater.)

That person, or persons enabled the almost-new movie releases intended to be shown at the base theater to be taken to the station – and broadcast. This spectacularly violated a pair of iron-clad rules, the first being that only TV and radio programs provided by the AFRTS programming center can be aired by stations worldwide. The other larger rule violated – and the one with major outside-the-military implications – was that the movies to be shown in the base theater had not been released for broadcast in any form. That those movies were being illegally broadcast at a dinky military TV station with a total reach of maybe five miles in any direction, thirty miles north of the Arctic Circle made no difference. It violated the rights of the various movie copyright holders – yet it might have passed unnoticed.

But it didn’t. Apparently, according to my acquaintance, a fairly prominent studio executive happened to be passing through the international airport. Stuck in the airport hotel for a night or two, he turned on the TV in his room … and saw one of his studio’s new releases being broadcast. Illegally. When that executive got back to the States, the word went out from him, and just about every other movie production house that AFRTS was henceforward on the bad books; from then on, only used-up movie dregs were released to the AFRTS TV programming center.

I really don’t know if this occurred as my informant told me, as it was a story passed along like a game of telephone. But I – and anyone who ever tuned into AFRTS during the last quarter of last century can truthfully testify that, yeah – the movies broadcast on military TV stations were a very odd and generally low-rent collection.

Another story from the wacky world of military broadcasting – I thought I had written this one out before – maybe I have, but that must have been so long ago, that it’s lost in the archives.

This really happened; the whole story was verified by the then-news director, who I worked for as a station manager some years later, around the time that I decided that I didn’t want to go into broadcast management with AFRTS. It came to me around 1989 or so that every AFRTS station manager I had ever worked for had cracked up in some interesting manner, either mentally, physically or personally. (It was a stressful job, with a great deal of responsibility and very little actual control over anything much – a certain guarantee of killing levels of stress.) I wanted to retire in good health at 20 years with all my original issue of marbles, and eventually did a sideways slide into a related video production field.

Anyway – there was an incident in the late 1970s involving a Russian fighter jet flying a little too low and slow over an American carrier, in a manner presumably meant to be intimidating by buzzing the carrier, and which resulted in some panicky news stories, along the lines of “OMG the Russkies are trying to provoke something!” At this time the Far East Network was headquartered in Tokyo, and at Misawa we rebroadcast their radio feed, with a five-minute long newscast at the top of the hour for most of the day save for when we broke away for our local morning and afternoon shows.  FEN-Tokyo’s radio section boasted a full set of golden-throated trained DINFOS announcers, one of whom was a guy with a deep, resonant speaking voice, and possibly the emptiest skull ever recorded as being possessed by one of that ilk. He would become known far and wide as the Ted Baxter of the Far East Network; an absolute legend in military broadcasting at that time, and not for good reasons.

It came to be that Our Hero was the duty announcer the day that the story of the Russian fighter buzzing the American carrier came over the wires. At that time, we had teletype machines printing out the various stories sourced from AP and UPI. It was a matter of pulling copy off the teletype, arranging the various stories in order – most important first, counting up the lines of text (14 per minute was normal reading speed for us) writing out something to bridge between stories, editing or adding as necessary. Our Hero popped his head around the news directors’ office door, and asked casually, for the correct spelling of “strafed”. The news director, with his mind on other matters, spelled it for him and went back to work. Our Hero went into the on-air studio and waited as the hour-long music program came to an end. The minutes ticked by – top of the hour; time hack, station ID, opened the mike and launched into the first story. The On-Air warning light outside the studio door was red; alerting anyone that the mike was hot, and not to open that door until it went out.

Some minutes into the newscast, the news director was struck by an awful premonition – a feeling of absolute certainty so powerful and urgent that he dashed into the studio – disregarding the On Air light and ripped the news copy out of Our Heros’ very hands. When the news director verified the story to me, some years later, he claimed that he broke into a cold sweat and nearly had a heart attack on the spot. Our Hero had come about two lines from announcing to everyone within radio-hearing that a Russian jet had strafed an American aircraft carrier. Our audience didn’t just include American military personnel and dependents, but a substantial shadow audience … to include diplomatic personnel of all nations who listened to FEN. This would have had serious international repercussions for everyone, up and down the chain of command – and all of this escaped by a whisker by the news directors’ sudden premonition.

Our Hero, though – was completely oblivious. In the aftermath, as he was being yelled at by the news director, the program director, and for all I know, the det commander, he looked at them all in bafflement and asked. “Strafed? Buzzed? What’s the difference?”

Believe it or not, he was around for years in AFRTS, and became a legend, rather like Bigfoot, bouncing back from near-disaster after near disaster, as if he was glazed with Teflon. Nothing every stuck to him, and no one could figure out how he managed to make the rank that he eventually did. The best anyone could come up with was he was the nephew of someone high up in the Pentagon. Very high up. That, or incriminating pictures.

( I wrote this memory of a barracks Christmas when I first started blogging, and expanded it for my memoir – from which this long reminiscence is pulled. I was stationed in Japan, then, a junior airman assigned to the FEN detachment.)

All during the year, Thea and I had not given up on our idea of celebrating a proper Christmas in the dorm. We needed to develop a critical mass of people who would go along with it, and something of a sense of community in the barracks. Marsh was keen as well; she reveled in holidays, any holidays, and the foundation was laid over the summer when the three of us began cooking a slightly more elaborate dinner for ourselves every Sunday afternoon, and sharing with anyone else who happened to be hanging around the day room, bored and hungry on a Sunday.
“Bring a plate and a fork, and a chair from your room! That was our cheery invitation— there was a sad shortage of chairs around the dinette table at the kitchen end of the day room. The girls from the Public Affairs office, Shell and Shirl, and any of Shirl’s constantly rotating flier boyfriends joined in, as did Tree and Gee. The resident vegetarian fixed a vat of eggplant parmigiana, another girl, newly arrived, had the touch with the most perfect fried chicken I had ever eaten. I had bought a crockpot and constructed marvelous stews and chilis. The weekly dinner was well established and well attended, even after the dorm was converted from all-female to an ordinary Air-Base group dorm…

In November, it only seemed logical to plan our own Thanksgiving dinner. We took up a fund for groceries, did a headcount of who wasn’t going to their supervisors’ houses and immediately hit a snag:

“Who’s going to do the turkey?” was the main question, followed by “Well, who helped enough at home to stuff and bake a 20lb turkey without giving anyone food poisoning?” AFRTS spots at that time of year always spent an inordinate amount of time dwelling on this unpleasant possibility.
I had helped Mom and Granny Jessie with the holiday turkeys and was unwary enough to admit it. Before I could come up with a plausible way to wiggle out, I was rushing to the commissary with a pocket full of crumpled notes and change on the Wednesday afternoon, with just fifteen minutes before I had to be up the hill and on-shift at the TV station.

Turkey, 20+ pounds, frozen solid: OK, I would leave it to defrost outside in my car during the shift; Northern Japan in November was slightly chillier than the inside of most refrigerators anyway. Onionscelerysagesausage…bread. Mom always bought a loaf of bakery wheat bread, tore each slice into clunks and dried them on a sheet-cake pan in the closet where the hot water heater lived. I zigged down the bakery aisle, threw a loaf into the basket and headed for the quick-checkout register, making it to work with about a half-minute to spare.

Didn’t even notice until I got back to the barracks that night, and took out the bread so that it could dry overnight, that I had a loaf of rye. There was no way to get a loaf of wheat bread, no way at all. It was nearly midnight, and even there was such a thing at the Japanese grocery store the next morning, it would be too late. The turkey had to be in the oven first thing.

“Oh, go ahead and use it anyway,” Marsh consoled me. “Who’s going to notice a couple of caraway seeds with all the other stuff and gravy on top!”

No one did, and it made fantastic stuffing. We all lay about afterwards burping gently and nibbling on just one more bit of pumpkin or pecan pie. I can’t remember who launched the trial balloon for our Christmas— either Marsh, or Thea ventured.

“You know, we could do a really nice bash for Christmas….”

The room perked up, interest had been piqued.
“A way bigger turkey…”
“Maybe not, the oven can’t handle it.”
“Steamed pudding… a ham, too.”
“They’ve got a fake Christmas tree in storage, and a box of decorations, too…”
“Our doors…. We could decorate our doors… and… and…. Have someone in to judge a contest on Christmas Eve.”
“Santa! They have a couple of Santa Suits at MWR!”
“He could bring gifts… we can draw each others names, and get a gift… and Santa can deliver them…”
“OK, who all is going to be here… make a list.”

The room bubbled with enthusiastic plans: the dinner would be bigger, more lavish than Thanksgiving… Santa would deliver the gifts on Christmas Eve, after the judging of the doors. Thea and I exchanged slightly smug looks: yes, this would be a vast improvement on the year before. Our cunning plan came together, as those who would have been otherwise inclined to stay in their room and gloom through the holiday were seized by the spirit of competition in decorating their doors with wrapping paper, and lights, to buy small plastic fir trees downtown and put them in their rooms. I began making ball ornaments from Styrofoam, covered with velvet and laces and gold braid, and baking tray after tray of cookies, telling everyone they were for the guys at work.

The regular dinners in December became planning sessions: we drew names, arranged for renting the Santa suit, inveigled the Catholic chaplain – the most approachable of the base chaplains – into judging the door contest, set up the somewhat bedraggled fake spruce that the dorm manager pulled out of storage. Kenny, one of the five male residents, volunteered to be Santa, although he was young and skinny, and looked more like an adolescent Donald Sutherland than Santa Claus. Some of the girls put up lights in their windows, which reflected pastel colors onto the snow outside. The upstairs and downstairs corridors became a mini-Christmas Tree lane, with tinsel and paper and ribbons applied to the doors or doorframes. Thea made a small door out of cardboard covered with paper like her own room door, and attached it to the wall just above the baseboard, several feet from her room, and parked a pair of felt dolls, 28 inches tall and tricked out like Christmas caroling mice in front of it.

On Christmas Eve, I was taking one last tray of cookies out of the oven, while the Chaplain was going around, reviewing the doors.

“Come and see how Kenny looks,” Thea said, “He’s got the costume on, but we need another couple of laundry bags for the presents.”

Even a couple of pillows stuffed down the front couldn’t transform a lanky and somewhat drunken 19 year old into a convincing Santa, but this one would arrive bearing gifts. Thea and I hastily rounded up two more GI green laundry bags, and began filling them with gift-wrapped packages, making sure that no one had been left off, there was a present for everyone. Almost everyone else was already in the dayroom, listening to the Chaplain award first prize in the door-decorating contest – to Thea’s Christmas mouse door! We cheered heartily, and the Chaplain took himself off, and Kenny lurched into the dayroom, with a lumpy laundry bag over his shoulder and dragging two more.

“Merry Christmas, ho ho ho… and have you all been good little girls and boys this year?” He leered at the room, and was answered with a raucous chorus of “Yes, Santa” and “Hell no, Santa!” He reached into the first bag, and squinting blearily, read off the name. Everyone watched as the gifts were opened, slowly and individually, while Kenny kept up a stream of drunken, slightly obscene but very funny patter, and the piles of torn paper and ribbons mounded up at our feet.

Thea and I swapped a satisfied glance: the room was filled with laughter and lights and good fellowship. Tomorrow we would dish up a lavish Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. Like last year, everyone in the barracks would still be thousands of miles from family, in a foreign country, but we would not be alone, and we would have Christmas joyfully.

I had one more little thing to do. A lavishly large box of cookies had already been left in the break-room at FEN, but all the rest—brownies and sugar cookies and macaroons, and peppermint sandwiches- were divided amongst thirty little bags, tied with ribbon and a little tag “A Present from Sandy Claws”. Just before midnight, when light showed under the doors of only the night owls or insomniacs, I went around and quietly hung a bag of cookies on each door.

Everyone deserves that unexpected surprise gift at Christmas.