Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
In a world where storytelling has been our link to the past since the days of cave drawings, there exists a timeless tradition. It's the art of passing down knowledge, and for Military Veterans, it's a crucial piece of their legacy. Join us on the Veterans Archives Podcast, where we dive deep into the heartwarming and awe-inspiring stories of those who served, no matter when or where.
Here, Veterans get the chance to be the authors of their own narratives. Through guided interviews in a relaxed and safe environment, they paint their experiences with their own words and unique voices. The result? A memory card in a presentation box, a precious gift they can share however they please.
But that's not all. These stories find a secure home in our archive, a treasure chest of experiences for future generations to explore. The best part? It's all a gift to the Veteran – our way of saying thank you for their service.
Tune in to the Veterans Archives Podcast, where history, heroism, and heartwarming tales come to life.
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Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
From Air Force Radar to Automobile Manufacturing: Mike Sweeney's Story
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Mike Sweeney's life unfolds like a quintessential American story spanning the mid-20th century to today. Growing up in 1940s Lansing, Michigan when children roamed freely and milk arrived via horse-drawn cart, Mike's journey weaves through pivotal moments in our collective history.
The son of hardworking parents, Mike became the first in his family to attend university, studying at Michigan State when tuition was an unimaginable $125 per term. His educational path led to a career in personnel administration, but Vietnam loomed large for young men of his generation. Rather than waiting for the draft, Mike proactively enlisted in the Air Force.
Perhaps the most poignant chapter of Mike's story centers on his marriage. Wed in February 1968, he shipped out to Vietnam just twelve days later. Despite this challenging beginning, their union has flourished for 56 remarkable years—a testament to commitment in an age where relationships often seem disposable. As a weapons controller in Vietnam, Mike mastered complex radar calculations using circular slide rules and grease pencils, skills that seem almost archaic in our digital era.
Returning stateside, Mike built a 34-year career with General Motors, finding particular fulfillment in mentoring young engineering talent. His pride beams brightest when speaking of family—his educator daughter with four degrees and two accomplished granddaughters pursuing their own dreams in teaching and medicine. Throughout the conversation, Mike's values shine through: commitment, hard work, and helping others.
As Mike reflects on a life well-lived, his parting wisdom resonates with timeless simplicity: "If you find someone you love, marry them. It may be tough, but stick to it because that's a commitment. Don't throw away relationships. Work hard, do the right thing, and learn how to live so you can help others." In today's fast-paced world, such steady wisdom deserves our attention.
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Growing Up in Lansing
Speaker 1Good morning. Today is Friday, april 18th 2025. We're talking with Mike Sweeney, who served the United States Air Force. Good morning, mike.
Speaker 2Hey, good morning Bill. How are you?
Speaker 1I'm great, great, great to see you this morning.
Speaker 2It's good to be here.
Speaker 1Yeah, sometimes it's good to be anywhere.
Speaker 2I heard it's better to be seen than viewed. I haven't heard that one.
Speaker 1I had a first sergeant that used to say every day above ground is a good day.
Speaker 2Oh, it is too.
Speaker 1Yeah, absolutely. So we'll just start out our conversation with when and where were you born?
Speaker 2I was born in Lansing, michigan, at a hospital that doesn't exist anymore I believe it was called the McLaughlin Hospital, down on the east side of downtown. Born and raised in Lansing and spent all of my life basically in Lansing, with the exception of the military life.
Speaker 1Okay, and where did you live when you were a kid? Like in, like what part of Lansing.
Speaker 2I lived on Lansing Avenue at Lansing.
Speaker 1Oh.
Speaker 2That's just north of Willow Street School, the old Willow Street School, just north and west of the School for the Blind.
Speaker 1Okay, all right, which is no longer there.
Speaker 2I see no, it's apartments now.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, I see that the house is still there, but nothing else, yeah, so let's talk a little bit about that. What was it like growing up for you?
Speaker 2You could go anywhere without locking your doors for you. Uh, you could go anywhere without locking your doors. Um, it's been outside most of the time. Uh, we were close, three or four blocks from the river. So as kids we grew up uh, along the river, fishing, uh, hiking, uh, doing things we shouldn't have done Um, like uh, climbing on the the idle boxcars and running across the top of them, Never did anything with the switches, but it was fun. Growing up we played street ball, we hollered if there was cars coming so we could get out of the way. I grew up at a time when, early on, we actually had a milkman that would come with a horse-drawn cart you know, you'd think I'd be older than that, but we remember those things and they would deliver milk to the back porch.
Speaker 1Wow, now, just out of curiosity, was that quality dairy that was delivering it at the time?
Speaker 2Probably, I couldn't tell you. Okay. Back then the names of places didn't mean anything to me. I just knew the milkman delivered milk and he had a horse-drawn cart.
Speaker 1So what year were you born? Then I was born in 1944. Okay, all right, I got you. So, yeah, but that's a good time to be growing up, then.
Speaker 2It was, it really was. You know we had no fears of shootings or abductions or anything like that. You know we were out until the streetlights came on or the old man whistled for us to come in.
Speaker 1Right. Either way, you were home, right, right, do you have brothers and sisters?
Speaker 2One sister older, Dorothy. She was eight years older than I.
Speaker 1Okay, so you guys didn't really hang out then.
Speaker 2Not really. No. She left the house early on and got married young. Oh, the boy down the street.
Speaker 1Okay, all right. Well, tell me a little bit about your parents. What do you remember most about your mother?
Speaker 2My mother was a worker. She worked all the time my parents both worked. She had had a variety of jobs. She grew up in a family of 13 in southern Indiana on a farm. She wasn't a stranger to work. She wasn't a stranger to work. She would take a nap for 15 minutes in the evening after supper and then she'd wake up and get right up and say did I? Snore Did she.
Speaker 2And I was business. She worked for the state. That was her final job working for the state. She died young. She was 60 when she passed oh, that is young.
Speaker 1Yeah, that is. I have to ask a question, though did she snore?
Speaker 2um, I don't really recall that she did oh, okay, the reason I asked my.
Speaker 1Uh. So my grandparents lived on erie street in lansing, um, right right off of cedar, behind the quality dairy there anyway. Um, my grandfather would come home before he worked at Motorwheel. He'd come home from work and he would take a 15-minute nap. But that guy, he would take a nap in the upper part of the house and you could hear him in the basement snoring.
Speaker 2Oh, I can believe that my mother during the Second World War worked for the. She helped build Norton bomb sites in.
Speaker 2Indianapolis, okay, she helped build Norton bomb sites in Indianapolis, okay. And big cities if you haven't lived in a big city, there are dangers there and there have been forever. And she had, and I still have it she had little, she called it a trout knife and it was a very small knife and a sheath, leather sheath, that she carried in her purse. But when she and she walked to work to apart from her apartment, to work in the bombsite factory, and she said, uh, coming and going, she had that little trout knife in her hand just for just in case made her feel better, right that made her feel better.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah. So what about your father? What are some of your memories of him?
Speaker 2My dad taught me how to hunt. He had me shooting when I was five years old and we did a lot of hunting together and we played a lot of catch, a lot of ball. That's pretty much what I can recall.
Speaker 1Okay, all right, I'm curious about something. So my, my father-in-law, grew up on Pennsylvania street in Lansing and, um, he would skip school and go hunting and I thought he was. He was hunting, hunting in lansing. Did you ever do any of that?
Speaker 2no, the closest. Uh, we came to that not with my dad, but with the high school buddies. Uh-huh, we, we would hunt pheasant along the northern uh border of the lansing airport, where there were no fences, state road was open, uh and there. It wasn't a international airport at the time, um, and it was just. It was different. It was different back then oh yeah progress has hit in, hit in and, uh, things have changed right right. Progress is what we call it that's right, I guess let's pave over the world, yeah there you go.
Speaker 1I think there's a song about that, actually from the 60s, but so you know how was school for you. What elementary did you go to?
Speaker 2School was always easy for me. Not that I'm anybody that's brilliant but I went to Willow Street School, had a good time there, learned a lot. Any, any, anybody that's brilliant. But I went to Willow street school um, had a good time there, learned a lot, went to a CW auto Um, and from there on to Sexton high school.
Speaker 1Okay, what year did you graduate, sexton?
Speaker 2I graduated from Sexton in 1962.
Speaker 1Oh, okay, All right and um yeah, so it sounds like school was pretty good for you.
Education and Early Career
Speaker 2It was. Yeah, we weren't bused at the time there was. There were busing for the rural kids but not for us. I did a lot of walking from from auto junior high to and it was junior high then, not middle school. Right. And a lot of walking from back and forth from Suxton.
Speaker 1Yeah, and that's the kind of the way Lansing was set up. You had your local grade schools and then you had your junior high, which was fairly close, and then I think the high schools, of course, were a little bit further out, but it was really convenient as a kid because you just walked to whatever school you needed to go to.
Speaker 2Well, I said there was no school of choice back then.
Speaker 1You went to the school where you were supposed to go right, yeah, exactly, and a lot of those schools are still there, oh that's true.
Speaker 2They're rebuilding uh willow willow street uh elementary school yeah, I've seen it's. It's like a almost a three-year project it is, it's it's, architecturally it's, it's odd it is.
Speaker 1That's a great way to say, cause I've seen all the all the new building going on, cause I know Mount Hope school is being rebuilt and so on. So yeah, it's a progress. I guess it is Yep. So um you, uh you. You get to Sexton high school and you graduate Now did you go in the service right after graduation?
Speaker 2No, I was the first in our family to go to university, so I applied for and was accepted to, michigan State University and I started that fall the fall of 62, as a freshman.
Speaker 1What was your goal there?
Speaker 2My goal was to get a degree.
Speaker 1Did you have an idea of what you wanted to do? I had no clue.
Speaker 2My first two years it was like no preference and I kind of wandered. Registration for classes was in a big room with a lot of students and you just kind of wandered. I think back then I didn't have much assistance from counseling career counseling and I finally settled down about the junior year and declared a major.
Speaker 1Okay, and what did it end up being?
Speaker 2Personnel administration.
Speaker 1Okay.
Speaker 2Business major. Yeah, so this is interesting too, like a four-year degree takes five years now.
Speaker 1Snell administration Okay, business, business major, yeah, so did you do the? So this is interesting too, like a four year degree takes five years now, was it the same way back then?
Speaker 2It took, uh, four years and one semester. Okay, one summer semester. All right. It's amazing. Yeah, yeah, I'll tell you about MSU. It uh, it ast. I'll tell you about MSU. It astounds me today to see what tuition is, and I commuted from home so I didn't have that typical college experience, but tuition was $125 for 12 or more credits.
Speaker 1And that's not per credit. That's for all your credits.
Speaker 2It's not per credit. Wow, $125 for 12 or more credits. Uh, it just staggers me to see what uh tuition is today. Of course, I've got two granddaughters that are uh, one is is uh got her master's degree already and and what they pay for tuition is just unbelievable.
Speaker 1I agree, I uh put my daughter through Michigan state university and wow. Oh yeah, it's, it's mine, mine bending.
Speaker 2And they're increasing the fees constantly.
Speaker 1Right, right, yeah, I think that's all. We could have a two-hour discussion on what's going on with that.
Speaker 2Oh boy.
Speaker 1I have my ideas, so you graduated, though you got your degree.
Speaker 2Graduated, got my degree at the time and while I was going to school. I worked summers at the old Fisher Body Plant. I was like a vacation replacement in the summer and I worked in the Human Resources Department personnel office we called it back then and I did a variety of jobs as replacing people when they went on vacation and that helped. That helped pay tuition, buy books Seems like I paid more for books than I did for tuition.
Speaker 1I think that's the plan. I think so. I think that's how that works. Yeah, you know it's interesting. So it used to be personnel, then it was human resources and now they're even calling it people in culture, Like we just keep changing the name of what it is. Yeah, don't you wonder about that yeah, well, again that it's that word that we keep using as progress. I think, right, yeah, so how long so you? Just how long did you stay at fisher then?
Speaker 2uh, I worked for a fisher body, uh, for 34 and a half years, uh, actually, uh, I'll say fisher body went away, just like Oldsmobile did, but the facilities were there. I got an opportunity to work at the Olds facility Same kind of work, different people. That was probably one of the best parts of my work career is the people that I got to meet at Oldsmobile and different functions forward planning, maintenance and engineering and I I my other staff was the human resources department or the personnel department, and it was good. That was a good time.
Speaker 1Yeah yeah, those were great jobs. My dad retired from Oldsmobile, so I get it. So at what point did the Air Force come into the picture?
Speaker 2Almost well before I graduated from university. Okay.
Speaker 2I realized that you were going to serve in Vietnam. That's just the way it was. I had that student deferment. I realized that student deferment would come up. So now, what Do you wait for the draft? Do you do something proactive? So I went ahead and signed up.
Speaker 2It was a delayed enlistment program and I signed up to go into the Air Force, which happened, and before I graduated, I think, the draft board knew that my student deferment was going to be up and I had a letter from the draft board that says you need to appear before the draft board in in preparation for being drafted. So I did, you know, went to Fort Wayne and got the induction physical and all that and appeared before the draft board and said hey, you know, I've already volunteered in a delayed enlistment to serve in the Air Force. And they said okay, now, when will that take place? And I said they tell me I'm going to be inducted into the Air Force mid-March. That would have been 1967. Okay, and they said, okay, that's fine, but if you don't serve, you will be drafted the very next day.
Speaker 2We will come find you, and so it worked out all right. You know I am, march 17th came around and and I enlisted in the air force okay, okay.
Speaker 1And where did you go to basic.
Speaker 2Basic training was at San Antonio, at Lachland Air Force Base.
Speaker 1Okay so that really hasn't changed over the years? I don't think it has no, tell me a little bit. So what was that like? Getting to basic training?
Speaker 2Hot, Hot. We suffered long with everybody else. I recall, uh, after a Reveille, uh, and before we had to gather for the morning PT, there was a? Uh, an Air Force band practicing and they practiced that song. We got to get out of this place.
Speaker 1I know exactly what song you're talking about.
Speaker 2Yeah, and uh, we commiserated. Oh yeah, and uh, we commiserated with each other, but uh, basic wasn't horrible. Uh huh. You know it's not like uh Paris Island for the Marine Corps.
Speaker 1Right Right Air Force a little bit different.
Speaker 2It is.
Speaker 1Yeah, and how many weeks was that?
Speaker 2Do you remember? I think it was 90 days.
Speaker 1Okay, so really quick kind of in and out.
Speaker 2It was an officer candidate school program.
Speaker 1Okay, oh, because you had your degree Right, right, Okay, so it was kind of the quick. Here's what the Air Force is about, and getting you ready for your service.
Speaker 2Right. We had no idea what we were going to do until we got our orders.
Speaker 1Yeah, so where did you go from basic?
Speaker 2From basic. I went to a place that I couldn't figure out what the orders meant. And I had them and I looked at it and it was Picks Town Air Force Station S-D-A-K. I said what is that? And then finally somebody said well, that's short for South Dakota. And I said where's that? So I went to a little radar station in very rural South Dakota, right on the Missouri River.
Speaker 1So it's a little bit different from how you grew up.
Joining the Air Force
Speaker 2Oh, quite a bit, yeah, Quite a bit. A lot of good guys there. We stayed at a our officer's quarters were in the old General Pick Hotel and it was Army Corps of Engineers base at one time when they built the Fort Randall dam, uh, right under Missouri river, so it was. It was not bad duty, I mean it was isolated right. But it was not bad duty.
Speaker 1And not a lot. Not a lot to do in South Dakota Is there.
Speaker 2No, no, the best part of that, I think, was eight week uh training at uh Panama city, Florida, at Tyndall, therefore space.
Speaker 1Yeah, I can imagine that'd be a whole lot different.
Speaker 2Yeah, it was nice on the beach. Nice Left my girlfriend at home. You know that wasn't the good part of it.
Speaker 1Well, no.
Speaker 2Wandered, wandered the streets of Panama city looking for a uh uh, looking in the windows of the jewelry stores. You know what kind of? What kind of wedding engagement ring and wedding ring do I want to buy, you know?
Speaker 1So you were your, your gal back home was pretty serious then.
Speaker 2We were. We didn't really realize that until the separation right, yeah, yeah, what's that old saying?
Speaker 1uh, distance makes the heart fonder.
Speaker 2Yeah, so it's true for us it was yeah, yeah okay, all right.
Speaker 1So you uh, you were there for eight weeks. Did you end up getting a ring while you were?
Speaker 2I did. I bought the ring and brought it home and proposed and she said yes, her family said yes.
Speaker 1Oh, that's perfect.
Speaker 2We were married in February of 1968. And 12 days later I shipped out to Vietnam.
Speaker 1Oh my gosh, that must have been hard for both of you.
Speaker 2It was. It was hard for both of us.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's a tough goodbye.
Speaker 2Well, a lot of marriages don't last with that kind of early separation.
Speaker 1That's true.
Speaker 2People don't realize in marriage there's a commitment and it's a lifetime commitment. It's too easy now to just throw away relationships.
Speaker 1I think people forget that marriages work.
Speaker 2Oh, yeah, every day.
Speaker 1There's that beginning part of the marriage where you're in love and you're kind of in that honeymoon, but then there's the part of the marriage where it's actual work. It's good work. Oh yes. But you got. You can't just give up when it gets tough.
Speaker 2You got to keep at it Right. A lot of tenacity. I know our high school football coach, bob Boshoven, was a U of M grad and the one word that he used over and over again when you're out there practicing was tenacity. You've got to have tenacity.
Speaker 1That's a great word.
Speaker 2Stick to it.
Speaker 1Is that a really good impression of him?
Speaker 2He was a nice man, yeah, and a good coach.
Speaker 1Oh, yeah, yeah, I can imagine. So you get married and then you're off to Vietnam, so you've been married for how long then?
Speaker 2Now you mean. Yeah 56 years. Yeah, wow 19,. Whatever that was 67.
Speaker 11967, 68,. Yeah, Wow, that's you know what. It shouldn't be surprising that someone's been married that long 1967, 68. Yeah, Wow, that's you know what. It shouldn't be surprising that someone's been married that long, but it is.
Speaker 2I know it's amazing. It is, um, my 50th high school reunion. Well, he sat at a table, it was a round table and I think there were four couples, my one buddy from uh middle school, junior high school, all the way through university, was at the table with his wife and two other couples, rex Stelgius and Bob Franchino. All of us still married to the same women, which was pretty amazing, because you could look around and see a lot of uh, failed marriages or marriages that people just gave up on uh and threw away those relationships.
Speaker 2You know, but our table was different.
Speaker 1Well, and if you think about it, the seventies was when, when divorce kind of became you know the thing to do. And so, yeah, I mean you were part of that group that either stuck with it or didn't, but a lot of them didn't.
Speaker 2A lot of them didn't.
Speaker 1Yeah, well, that's great. You know our mutual friend. They're celebrating 75 years.
Speaker 2I know, it's just absolutely amazing.
Speaker 1That's yeah. Yeah, his birthday's coming up and then their anniversary's coming up, so anyway, I digress. So you, uh, you ship off to Vietnam. And uh, where, where do you go?
Speaker 2Uh, well, that was interesting. Uh, I flew out of um. I'll tell you the story about that. Okay.
Speaker 2Uh, I married into a really good, close knit family. I couldn't have asked for a better set of in-laws. I had the airplane ticket out of Lansing to Sacramento I don't even recall where the stop was in between, but my father-in-law had a sister that lived in Sacramento that's my wife's Aunt, ada and he called her and he said my son-in-law is coming out there, he's going to land at San Francisco International Airport and can you meet him there? And of course she said yes. So, uh, she and her son, uh, not David, david's brother, I'll think of his name before. All right, yeah, you can call me. Well, they met me at the airport. It was late, late in the evening, and I got a whirlwind tour of San Francisco, uh, with an ADA and her youngest son, um, she had told her brother, my father-in-law. Of course I'll meet him, you know, uh, he's family, wow. So, uh, we did that and and uh, and then she worked for the uh California highway patrol and she lived in Sacramento. So, um, we, we finished that whirlwind tour and then she drove back to Sacramento and, uh, the next day took me to uh Travis air force base and I flew out, then Got to Vietnam at Saigon Tan Son Nhat Airport Air Force Base and had my orders, of course, and people had no idea where I was going.
Speaker 2They had no clue. Somebody said well, I think it's Da Nang, so how do I get there? Well, you go here to the ops building and catch an airplane that's going to Da Nang. So I did, and it stopped in Pleiku and I went into the ops building there. I said do you have any idea where this outfit is? And they looked at the order. So I was just, and it stopped in Pleiku and I went into the ops building there. I said do you have any idea where this outfit is? And they looked at the order and saw it and said, yeah, it's up on the hill right there.
Speaker 2So there I was en route to Da Nang and stopped for probably a courier flight and got a Jeep up to the hill where the air force station was, the radar station was and that was my uh, my home for a year.
Speaker 1Okay, and you were there. You were, um. So did you like oversee radar operations? Is that how that worked? But what?
Speaker 2I was a uh they, they called it a weapons controller and I learned to do with the radar air-to-air intercepts, mainly learning for defense purposes. But it turned into a sub-segment of hooking fighters up to aerial refuelers. Oh, okay. So back in the day, radar back then on the airplanes weren't nearly as sophisticated as it is today. That's more an example of progress, I guess. Yeah.
Speaker 2But we had manual radar, not the sophisticated computerized SAGE. They called that semi-automatic ground environment. It was just manual radar. You had a big old, clunky radar scope and you had ground-to-air radios and you learned how to calculate intercepts based on altitude and speed and all those other factors. We use circular slide rules to make our calculations and a grease pencil on the screen. Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah, there is a lot that goes into that calculation. I did fire control in the Navy and so, yeah, that fire control solution. There's a lot of math involved in that.
Speaker 2Oh, without a doubt.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2One of my buddies over the over the course of the years was a uh, uh, he was a math teacher and turned into be a school high school counselor, cincinnati, and I met him on Florida and uh, larry was in the army. And and uh, he did, uh I I guess you'll call it fire control for artillery calculating, uh, what needed to be calculated, you know right. Depending on the ordinance they were releasing.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's not. I don't think it's boring work either, I think it's kind of no it's for him.
Speaker 2It was very challenging for us, it was very challenging. Yeah.
Vietnam Service Experience
Speaker 2Uh, we didn't know what we were going to experience. Fortunately not a lot of, uh, not a lot of emergency aircraft Uh, but uh, they usually come. We were central Highlands at Lake who and um, although we had uh fighters at the base, they were close air support uh groups. We had uh T-37s, t-37s, a-37s, I call them that the Vietnamese Air Force flew. But we also had the A-1 Sky Raiders, which were the old fold-wing big propeller aircraft. They used to fly off carriers that were based there, spads with their call name. We had our own spooky, our own Puff the Magic Dragon at Blake that flew a combat air patrol over the bases at night.
Speaker 1That's quite an airship there.
Speaker 2Oh, it's amazing, and of course they progress. Turned us uh, an AC one 30 into a uh gunship with howitzer. Uh, I don't remember if it's a one, oh, five, uh, or or what, but can you imagine that?
Speaker 1I can't imagine being on that when when they fired those weapons. I understand it moves.
Speaker 2Yeah, when you fire that cannon, the aircraft actually moves sideways, and it's a big aircraft too.
Speaker 1I flew on many of those. Well, yeah, you think about like the big battleship, like the Iowa. If they do a full broadside firing with those 16-inch guns, that ship moves in the water sideways yeah. Yeah, I can't imagine the whole airplane thing just kind of shocked me.
Speaker 2You had to qualify periodically. So I had the opportunity to fly in a jet up the coast to Da Nang and we circled. It was miserable, it was monsoon season, the weather was miserable and we circled that airstrip at Da Nang I don't know how many times before. Finally they were able to break through the clouds and land and then up in a jeep up the top of Monkey Mountain to the Air Force radar site there. We had to be careful when we did our intercept training because it was close to, I want to say, hainan Island I'm not sure which, it was out in the South China Sea. We had to make sure we avoided Chinese airspace.
Speaker 1Yeah, they'd get a little upset, wouldn't they?
Speaker 2I would think so yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah, so how was your? It sounds like your tour of duty was um. You know you had a lot going on, but uh, anything you want to share about your time in Vietnam other than what we've talked about?
Speaker 2Uh, I learned how to play bridge.
Speaker 2Oh and I haven't played since. Um, our first uh quarters was at the old McPhee compound and it was rough. It was French hooches. If you were lucky, you had screened in the top, my first experience with a mosquito netting. You know that you had a framework to use over your cot to keep the critters out. We set not a mousetrap, but it's called a rat trap. We set rat traps out and once in a while you hear that thing go off. You say, well, we got another one. It was a little crude.
Speaker 2And then the last five and a half months probably, they had built quarters for us right on the air base itself. Prior to that we had to ride in a crew cab to work I don't remember how far it was from the MACV compound to the air base and the quarters were significantly better. We had an army fort south of us, uh, quite a ways uh fort, I can't remember the name of it. Anyway, it was always a cloud of dust. You could look off and say, yep, that's, that's where, that's where the grunts are, you know, down there.
Speaker 1Always moving around kicking up dust.
Speaker 2I tell you, but the duty was good duty we had. It was 24-hour duty. We did what the FAA does today, basically flight following, hooking up the fighter bombers to forward air controllers. It wasn't. We actually had a mess hall, you know. We had an officer's club as well. My wife always gets in charge, out of some of the voters, I took of the of the Filipino ladies that were singing and dancing, you know. Uh, once in a while we get a USO show. Yeah.
Speaker 2No, no big names, but uh, it was fun for us to do that.
Speaker 1No, no, bob, hope for you guys.
Speaker 2No Bob hope, uh, no Ann Margaret.
Speaker 1Oh, that would have been worth going but it was, it was okay.
Speaker 2Good duty. Looking back on it, you forget the bad things, I think. Yeah.
Speaker 2And remember the good things, had a good crew that we worked with. I can recall, uh, my very when, when I left, when I got to play coup, got off the airplane, figured out, my uh duty assignment was up on the hill and I got a ride up there. The operations officer was having a meeting with with the crew and he was, he was chewing butt, he was hot, and that was my introduction to him. He was an interesting guy, a good guy. I, I, I can't think of his name right now, but he was a captain. However, he had been selected to be promoted to major and he never, let you forget that captain promotable.
Speaker 2Oh man, and that really rubbed us the wrong way. You know, here I am, uh uh, a gold buyer, second Lieutenant coming up there to go to work and listen to this guy. But it's okay, Everybody moves on and he moved on.
Speaker 1Right, right, that's true. Yeah, hopefully he actually got to put the major pin on.
Speaker 2Our duty was good. We helped build a Quonset hut for training. Quonset hut, uh, for training. Uh, it was a uh, a joint project, not just the Quonset hunt, but uh, that whole, our whole function was joint with the uh Vietnamese air force and they weren't a much good. Uh, it's just the way it was. You know, right.
Speaker 2Um, we tried not to let them get in our way. Uh, I, we had one of our guys, george Reamer, his uh brother. He did the same work that I did. His brother was a uh F four pilot, uh, and he flew reconnaissance and they they would correspond and once in a while his brother would fly through our airspace. Oh they got we kind of if he knew we get George on the on the screen and on the radio so at least he could control him when he went through, which is fun.
Speaker 1That's kind of nice.
Speaker 2Our uh, our shifts were interesting. We worked 12 hour, 11 hour day shifts and a 13 hour night shift, and on Monday you did a quick turnaround.
Speaker 1Oh, so you're like yeah, the day shift.
Speaker 2Folks went home at six and then they uh came back, uh, at midnight and they had a short stint midnight to 7, and the day shift was 7 to 6. So you're always working, yeah, always working.
Speaker 1You're either going to work or you're just going to sleep, right? That's right, yeah, so you were there for a year, and then your tour is up.
Speaker 2Is that what happened? No, we wanted it to be up. Yeah.
Speaker 2You know one of my buddies. There was Howie Spellman, and Howie was from New Jersey and he did not talk a lot. My wife says I don't talk much but she'd really be amazed at Howie. He'd sit at the radar scope and a flight of F-100s would come up out of Tuiwar fan ring and they'd click in on the radio. They'd say Peacock, peacock litter, do one flight. And Howie's sitting there looking at the screen Peacock, litter, do one flight. Do you have contact? I said, howie, you got to talk.
Speaker 1I can't see you shaking your head.
Speaker 2Anyway, the story is Howie and I got orders about the same time, and Howie's orders? Well, we got major command orders, not outfit major command. So how he got his orders, it was, uh, air defense command and uh mine was, uh, U S air force, Europe, you safe? Well, I'd had enough of being overseas, I didn't want to go to Europe, I want to go home. Right.
Speaker 2I had a wife yeah, you know, I hadn't seen her in a year. Well, we did have. We did meet up for our anniversary in Honolulu and that was nice. But I said, howie, you're going to go to Point Barrel, alaska, or maybe you're going to go to North Dakota, maybe Minot, and he didn't like the sound of that. I said you want to trade orders? So we got a hold of the personnel officer and talked him into trading orders for us. So Howie went to Templehof in Berlin and I went to Homestead in Florida. That's not a bad swap, that was good duty, berlin and I went to Homestead in Florida.
Speaker 1That's not a bad swap.
Speaker 2That was good duty, that was real good duty.
Speaker 1Yeah, and so how long were you at Homestead then?
Speaker 2We were at Homestead a little over two years. Our daughter was born there on the airbase. All right and it was. We had fun, we had good duty, uh we'd get a weekend pass and and uh, we'd go down to the keys or uh, entertain family if they had a chance to visit. Uh, that was. It could have been better. Hot is hot. Yeah, you know we lived, uh lived on a on the base, uh base housing and a duplex and we were right across the street from the fourth T and the golf course.
Speaker 1Oh well, that's not bad.
Speaker 2Not bad at all. That was, that was good duty, we enjoyed it, we really did but we were ready to go home too. Yeah, it must've been nice, though, to have her be with you for that part of your time.
Speaker 2Oh yeah, it was great. Uh, she went with me to South Dakota, uh for four months and 12 days, right, you know, and we lived there on uh, on the on the site, uh for a uh uh. Well, they had the uh general. It was the old um army uh base, uh for the Corps of Engineers. Right.
Speaker 2We're building the dam and we had a one bedroom house, you know kind of like row houses. Yeah, you know, you'd see in in the in the uh, coal mining days, you know that's kind of what it was like. It was nice, it was decent. She learned how to fish and she learned how to cook. Her mom is a good cook and I recall she made biscuits one time, first time she ever made biscuits. Couldn't eat them, so we took them down the river and floated them across like skipping stones, that's a great memory.
Speaker 1Wow, did she finally figure it out though?
Speaker 2Oh yeah, she's a good cook.
Speaker 1Yeah, well, that's good, that's good, so you? So you served a total of how many years then?
Speaker 2A little over four, four and a half years, okay, from uh, from uh March of 67 to August of 71.
Speaker 1Okay, and then you moved back to Michigan.
Speaker 2I moved back to Michigan, back to home, back to Lansing. I had been on leave from General Motors, so I got reinstated, went back to work.
Speaker 1Okay, and you had your daughter at this time.
Speaker 2Daughter yep.
Speaker 1Okay, only one child then.
Speaker 2We did. We lost another child shortly after birth, but yeah, we had the one daughter.
Speaker 1Okay, all right, and so you kind of just get home and pick up your life at GM.
Speaker 2We did yeah.
Return to GM and Professional Career
Speaker 1And how was that? So you said you were there for 34 years 34 and a half years. Okay, I don't want to miss that extra six months.
Speaker 2No, I didn't either yeah. It helps towards pension.
Speaker 1Yes, it does. Pensions are a good thing. So yeah, so tell me, like, what was work like for you? So you were at Fisher.
Speaker 2At Fisher.
Speaker 1Uh-huh.
Speaker 2And were you at Fisher for most of that time? Then Most of my work time was at Fisher, with a little hiatus to Oldsmobile for about maybe five years. I did a variety of things, from employment office to clerical work to labor relations work, working with the UAW. I moved on to salaried personnel where I got involved in the benefit plan administration and record keeping for the salaried workers. One time we had over 600 salaried workers and that's dwindled considerably.
Speaker 2I did student programs 600 salaried workers, yeah, uh, then that's dwindled considerably. Um, I did uh student programs. So I did a lot of recruitment of uh high school kids, uh to come and work uh for general motor says engineering students. I worked with them uh at uh GMI, which is now Kettering university, and he'd get those engineering students I think it was a co-op program and they would go to school for so many months and work for so many months and get them acclimated to automobile manufacturing and see if that was something they wanted to do. Did a lot of work with recruiting uh high school kids to uh who are already in school, already in university, to uh come to work for us in the summer as an intern and got them exposed to uh manufacturing. I met a lot of good kids and I found that there's a real hotbed of engineering talent in northwestern Clinton County in that Palomo Westphalia Fowler area.
Speaker 1Well, that's interesting because it's very rural, very you know farm country. Well, they knew how to work, you know?
Speaker 2Yeah, absolutely, I said what did you do this past summer? So I picked rocks at the Simmons farm. I said, well, if you pick rocks, you know what work is like.
Speaker 1Yeah, let us teach you something. That's right, yeah.
Speaker 2I wanted uh these young people, men and women, both who uh who wanted to uh contribute to manufacturing. I called them. Uh uh, they contribute to manufacturing. I called them. They wanted to learn about dirty knees engineering, where you actually get down on your hands and knees and solve problems and make things work. Met a lot of good kids.
Speaker 1Yeah, probably had a great influence on them too. I mean to have a good mentor teacher to bring you into that group.
Speaker 2I had one student. My wife used to work at Mervin's and she would close on the night that we had uh, uh, the uh sharp park fireworks or uh independent state fireworks, and she'd get out at 10 o'clock and I'd meet her there. And here's this young man and this girl coming up, mr Sweeney. Mr Sweeney, I'd like you to meet my girlfriend, julie. Well, this was Doug Kuhn from Kiwamo, and he was just a student, just a college student. You know. Well, doug married Julie and when he graduated he got hired and I still have his letter. He wrote me a letter after he had been there for 25 years, thanking me for being a mentor and for getting involved and providing him the opportunity to uh. And he married Julie, by the way, that's great.
Speaker 2And for an opportunity to have a good life and and and uh provide for his family. So those are nice memories.
Speaker 1Yeah, you can't ask for more than that. That's um, that's kind of like a. It's a wonderful life moment where you get to figure out that you really helped somebody. Yeah, that's, true, and they and they told you that's, that's fantastic, and and so I want to ask something, though this is kind of off topic, but I remember my dad worked at Oldsmobile. Every, every year, they would have like an auto show for the employees, where employees and their families would go and you could see the cars that were coming out the following year.
Speaker 2Do you remember that at all? I do not remember that at all.
Speaker 1Okay, all right.
Speaker 2Well, you've got to consider that things change just about every model year. Yeah, yeah. I'm amazed at what went into the dye work and the center shapes changes and that's a lot of work.
Speaker 1Oh, yeah, I remember every July my dad would get two weeks for changeover and we'd go to. We'd go to, um, oh gosh, cedar point, because he had two weeks off. So we'd go to Cedar point. That was our big. So we'd go to cedar point, that was our big, that was our big deal. But yeah, so 34 years.
Speaker 2So you retired in the early. I retired in uh march of 2000 okay, all right, and then.
Speaker 1So march is so in. In march, you, you, I'm trying. March seems to be a month for you. There's a couple things that happen in march for you. Uh, you left for the military in march yeah, so you retired in march. And and what did you do after that? I retired pretty much yeah, you do some traveling, or we?
Speaker 2traveled. Uh, we, uh, uh. We purchased a, uh, a winter home in florida, and if somebody would have told me early on that you're going to spend your winters in Florida, I said no, thank you. I've been to Florida. It's hot, I don't know if I want to go down there, but the winters were fine. We had a nice, nice place, comfortable place. Trying to sell it now.
Speaker 2Uh uh, uh, we had, uh, some unfortunate experience with, uh, the two hurricanes this past season Hurricane Helene and Milton, the damage in our park, horrible damage in our park, some damage to our unit, but it's a buyer's market there now. Right.
Speaker 2So it's tough. There's over 40 places for sale in our park alone and it's difficult to sell and with Nancy being on dialysis it's tough to travel. We can do it, we did it. The center works very well for her in uh assigned to a dialysis center, uh close to where we uh were or are in Florida. Uh, this past season we went down just for the month of January and the close center they could get her into was uh about half, about 40 minutes away.
Speaker 1Uh at three times a week you know, it's a lot of traveling while you're in florida, yeah, yeah. So tell me a little bit. One thing we didn't talk about was your, your daughter. Do you want to? Do you mind talking about, like, what does she do?
Speaker 2and oh no, uh, I got, I've got a great. Uh, I got a great family Our daughter Michelle, with one L. I don't know why, but when we named her, that's what we did.
Speaker 1Just seemed right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2She's a good student, loves to read and learned how to play the trumpet in middle school and became the lead trumpet player at her high school. The Grand Ledge Went on to a university, at Western Western Michigan University, and she was in the marching band for two years. And that was fun. We'd get season tickets for the football games yeah, why? So we could watch the marching band.
Speaker 1That's exciting stuff.
Speaker 2And she I think these are my words now I think she decided that practice with the trumpet and carrying that trumpet around was too much. So she's musical. So she took up choir and she was in the choir for the last couple of years at Western. A good student graduated. It took her seven years, which I remind her of often Right.
Speaker 1You're obligated to let her know.
Speaker 2And she got two bachelor's degrees in those seven years. She also finally settled down and decided she wanted to become a teacher. So her first degree was in university studies, or, said in my terms, no preference.
Speaker 1No preference degree. Yeah, there you go yeah.
Speaker 2So she got her teaching degree and teaching certificate. So she left Western with the two bachelor's degrees, got a teaching position at right there on the border of I-69 and US 12,. Whatever that city is escapes me, It'll come to me on the way home.
Speaker 1Cold water.
Speaker 2Yes.
Speaker 1Okay, it took me a minute, but cold water. I only know that because I think they have a drive-in movie theater down there.
Speaker 2Anyway, she took to teaching well, taught middle school, loves middle school. Kids got married and she lived. She had an apartment there in Coldwater. Then, after she was married, her husband was still a student at Western, so they moved to an apartment in Marshall. Okay. And then when Johnny graduated they came back to Lansing area. For a while she drove from Lansing to Coldwater to teach and then she landed a position at Williamston in the Williamston district, a nice little close knit community. It's an interesting community. It has a lot of money and it has no money at all.
Speaker 2Family wise, she loved the kids and she, oh, and during that time she, uh, went to MSU and got a master's degree in education. I call it English. They call it liberal arts. Yes, uh, not liberal arts. Uh, well, that'll come to me too. Language arts, yes, language arts.
Speaker 1Yeah, okay, you have to have a fancy name to justify that tuition.
Speaker 2And she always liked books, always liked reading. She's a voracious reader. So she said there's a possession opening in the high school library. So she, while she was pregnant with her first child, she drove back and forth at night after work to Wayne State, hired at Detroit and got a master's degree in library science. So here she is with four degrees at teaching for what we consider.
Speaker 2She considers peanuts, which is what we seem to pay, considers peanuts Right, which is what we seem to pay teachers and nurses. And then she views it a little differently than I do. She was also a union rep at the high school and she got a little crosswise with the building administrator and he eliminated the librarian position.
Speaker 3Oh wow. So what a coincidence that's okay, I love kids anyway.
Speaker 2So she went into the middle school and she's been a middle school teacher, english teacher, ever since. Oh married a young man that is a gifted musician, and Johnny has a profound hearing loss and he is a tremendous musician and his major at university was music. Uh, with a viola, uh, a little bit bigger violin yeah and of course, that um today about two dollars and 95 cents to buy you a cup of coffee right uh came from a very musical family, a family of educators.
Family and Teaching Legacy
Speaker 2His father's a former band director at his high school in St Clair Shores, His mother's a singer and a teacher, both teachers, both educators, Both far-out liberals, as many teachers are. And of course Johnny, the son-in-law, grew up with that.
Speaker 2But with my daughter pushing him he went back to school at msu and he got a master's degree in special ed okay and he's been a special ed teacher at the same district at williamston, not high school, ever since he graduated and it's good, it's good for him, you. He kind of taught himself to play the piano, so he has both of those, he's mastered both of those instruments. He can play the double down to Georgia on the violin and he can play some pretty mean keyboard stuff as well and in the summertime keyboard stuff as well. And in the summertime you might find him out at the band shell at the McCormick Park in Williamston as they have a little musical group that plays at least once during the summer.
Speaker 1I have to shoot out there this summer and listen for him.
Speaker 2It's Thursday evenings and you just bring your own chair, you set the yard and the lawn and they have a variety of different performers that come out there once a week during the summer. Michelle has two daughters great kids, great kids. The oldest is a extremely intelligent. Well, they're both sharp, intelligent. The oldest one loves books, like her mother. The youngest one, she, doesn't read. I'd rather not. But the oldest one, jenna, was a fourth generation western michigan university student and grad and in four years she earned a bachelor's and a master's degree that's pretty incredible, you.
Speaker 1You pointed out to her mom.
Speaker 2Yeah, we're really proud. We're proud of both of them, but I keep telling them the oldest one her name is Jenna. I said you know school comes. I mean, you work at it, but school comes pretty easy for you. Why don't you go ahead and get a PhD? I know it's a lot of work, a lot of time involved, but you can become a university professor and I think you'd love it. Also and she doesn't want to do this she could become a researcher. You know, when she as much as she loves to read, she would be good at it, but she wants to be a teacher.
Speaker 1Yeah, you can't. I mean, my daughter is a teacher and that was her goal from middle school. She just always wanted to be a teacher. You're never going to get rich being a teacher, but she loves her job.
Speaker 2Oh yeah, now Jenna did an internship at Portage Central High School in English Language arts and she liked the district, liked the people, liked the students and they had a position opening up in the middle school when she graduated. But it didn't open up in time. So she said, well, I made a commitment to the state of Michigan to teach for five years and an opportunity presented itself to her to teach at Williamston in the high school as a Spanish teacher. Of course that was her minor, she didn't like that, but she accepted it. She said yes. Shortly after she said yes, the Portage Central opportunity came and she had to turn it down because she gave her word to this district. Shortly after she said yes, the Portage Central opportunity came and she had to turn it down because she gave her word to this district that she was going to teach there.
Speaker 2So I'll belabor my grandkids a little bit, because they're super. She is just going to teach one year. She's already turned in her resignation and she's already got an apartment in Kalamazoo this summer. July. I think, and she's looking for an opportunity to teach English, which she really wants to teach language arts. Uh-huh. And she says I'll find a job.
Speaker 1I bet she will.
Speaker 2Oh, I think so Now she'll be 23 in June. The youngest one will be 21 next month and the youngest one, maya. She's a good student in what she likes, right, and she wants to work in the medical profession and before she graduated from high school she became certified as a phlebotomist and a medical assistant, so she had both those certifications. She's now working as an MA for the University, michigan State University Medical Center and Family Practice. She loves it, she likes doing that and I think, and she's studying. She's now at, I think, davenport and she'll get a degree, some kind of medical degree, when she finishes. And her boss there seems to think you could give him a PA. Why don't you think about being a PA? And I think she wants to work, I think, with pediatrics. So they're both good kids, you know.
Speaker 1Yeah, it sounds like everything kind of come full circle and they're kind of all doing great, which is, you know, what more could a parent ask for than to see their children and grandchildren flourish like that? Yeah, so you know, as we kind of come to the end of our conversation, I want to make sure that we talked about everything you wanted to talk about. So is there anything else that we missed that you wanted us to say?
Speaker 2Oh golly, I uh, I'm not sure I love my family. They're good kids All of them. Uh, I know my son-in-law's uh on the on the brink of a, a cochlear implant, which will be a major lifestyle change for him. He's anxious. A little bit of anxiety there Sometimes borders on a little bit of fear, when you think they're going to drill a hole in my skull. Yeah, but I think he's come to grips with that and it'll be a learning process and I think that he's going to do fine.
Speaker 2My daughter, for 15 years or more, has had a second job teaching for the University of Phoenix online. Here she is with her full-time teaching position at the middle school in Williamston and teaching other people not just kids either, but other people to become teachers, and she does it all online. But she's traveled to a variety of places in the state just to observe her students in the classroom and to see how they're doing in the classroom. She's been to Detroit up in the Thumb out here in the western part of the state. She drove into one school in inner city Detroit one time and parked her car on the street, walked up the building.
Speaker 2When she got in they immediately locked her in a closet because they had lockdown and then when she got out, they were making bets the teacher's making bets on whether her car was going to be there when she got finished.
Speaker 1A pretty tough area, Wow. So yeah, she sounds very busy. She is, she's very busy.
Speaker 2she likes what she's doing she loves what she does and she's got enough time, I think, with the uh williamson district to retire if she chooses to do so yeah uh, which she says, maybe another three years it's got to be on her time, right sure, yeah, it's good that she can do that.
Speaker 1Yeah, well, you know you have uh lived quite a life. Um sounds like a great family, married into great family. Um served your country, had a great career, um, you know, a good retirement.
Speaker 2I don't regret any of it, really. Uh I the fact that, and I'll go ahead and say this that General Motors thought so little of the salaried workforce that they canceled all of the retirees' health insurance and life insurance. So, no dental, no vision, no health insurance. Well, you're on Medicare, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1You got health insurance you know, yeah, you got life, you got health insurance. So, yeah, I, uh, I remember when they restructured, it impacted my, my father as well, even though he was not salaried, he was hourly, but yeah, he lost a lot of benefits as well. Yeah, it was not a good thing yeah, didn't hurt the executives.
Speaker 2Well, it may have hurt their, but their their bonuses for a short period of time.
Speaker 1Right, they still draw millions of dollars yeah, yeah, my dad doesn't get his profit sharing anymore either. No, yeah, so it all went away. Well, I do want to ask you one final question, if I could and I ask everyone the same question, and that when someone's listening to this in the future, when you and I aren't here anymore, what message would you like to leave people with?
Speaker 2Well, I would encourage people to. If you find someone you love, marry them, and it may be tough, but stick to it, because that's a commitment that you make. Don't throw away relationships. Work hard, do the right thing, go to church, learn how to live so that you can help others. And that's pretty much it, you know all right. There's a lot. There's a lot out there that you can give. You just don't realize it yet.
Speaker 1All right. Well, you know, thanks for giving your time to me today sitting down here for the for this hour that we've, that, we've chatted and I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2You're welcome, Bill. It's my pleasure Interesting. Thank you.
