Memoirs
was there also. We went into the coffee shop to wait for the baggage. Guest was to take my family
and me to our house. So I asked Colonel Duke if I could go home with my family and meet
tomorrow morning to be oriented.
He said , "This is your orientation now. I'm getting on that airplane you got off of and going back
to New York. So if you want to ask me some questions, you've got about 20 minutes." [Laughter]
I didn't know what to ask, so I said, "Well, I'll see you, Colonel. Thanks for holding the line.
What do you suggest I do?"
He said, "I want you to do one thing: get the damn hospital turned over." That's the project which
got this other fellow in trouble. Duke left shortly thereafter. So we all went over to our house and
settled in. Our assignment at Goose Bay, another critical assignment, began. This wasn't
supposed to be good in a lot of people's minds, but it proved to be outstanding. Lots of reasons.
One, there was limited communications with the district headquarters in New York. I couldn't
call on the phone. I could communicate by radio, and that was problematical because of the
weather conditions. If I wrote a letter, it took a couple of weeks. Colonel Morton Solomon's
philosophy was very simple, "You're out on the end of the line where I can't help you. Just do
a good job. I can't afford to have somebody out there that can't do the job."
Turned out that every colonel that survived an assignment to a remote site later became a general.
Carroll Dunn, Bill Stames, Frank Koisch, Dick McConnell, myself. Solomon's track record in
developing officers to their full potential was great. He gave you every opportunity to succeed,
but he didn't protect you to the point where you couldn't fail. He wrote all his efficiency reports
in longhand. Somewhere there's one on me to the effect that with a little more experience I'd be
a pretty good officer, and that was about the size of it.
Well, anyhow, there I was at the end of the line, so to speak, and we then proceeded to put in 20
months of the most concentrated, 100 percent effort of any time in my life because of the
circumstances. We only had a few months of the year to work outside so we had to spend the
whole winter doing inside work, preparing and planning for the next construction season, and
then executing it efficiently. Safety was a great problem because of ice, snow, and extreme cold.
inches of concrete over the runways, installing a
The Goose Bay program involved placing
complete automated refueling system, rather sophisticated, a central heating system for the base,
400 new houses, new electric distribution, and much more.
The new electric power plant included two
generators. They had to be tested in
the wintertime, and we had no way to test them except by using the base load. General Knapp
decided at the last minute it was too big of a risk. He feared that if the new generator broke down,
it would damage the old diesel generators, and the flight line would be shut down.
So we had to come up with another way to do it. Interestingly enough, we used a construction
camp for the base load. We organized everybody so that at a certain time of a fixed day they'd
plug in all their irons, their space heaters, and turn on every piece of electricity they could find.
We generated enough demand out of our construction camp that we could test these generators.
That was the one time I got in dangerous straits with Colonel Solomon. I had sent a requirement
down to the district telling them of my dilemma when the commanding general had changed his
mind on letting us use the base load. The base suggested we build a water rheostat, so I fired
down there a letter asking the district for some help on this thing, especially if they have any
better ideas. I got this long document back, which some staff person sent me. It didn't say a thing
I didn't already know. So I fired back another wire, which I'm sure got to Solomon, that said, "I
don't need all this information. I just want a decision." That created a little problem, I think, but
it also probably got their attention because I had explained what I was going to do and I wanted
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