Crescent A NOVEL
John Thomas Pierce
Further environmental legacies: Hospital Safari, Million Dollar Speedway, One-hundred Foot Drop
Excerpted here – Ch.2 Rose State & ch. 13 Air Depot
CHAPTER 2 ROSE STATE
Early 1970’s
Dust Bowl years, wartime ones, too, Oklahomans departed family farms, often settling for a less colorful but more dependable factory surroundings, many near Oklahoma’s City. While multiple features spurred the development of Oklahoma City and its surroundings none was more important than the War Department’s 1940 decision to partner with a centrally-positioned city to develop what it referred to as an Air Depot.
Texas’ 1912-era mineral rights legislation migrated north, allowing Oklahomans to sell land while retaining key mineral rights, mostly notably oil and gas royalties, sometimes termed oil leases.
Oklahoma City furnished multiple employment possibilities, stretching from meat packing to warehousing, recently dominated by aircraft logistics and repair, processes centered at Tinker Air Force Base.
If certified welders, numerically-controlled machinists, and skilled sheet metal workers numbered among the Tinker workforce, it also contained clerks and supply specialists. Barring further training and qualification, clerical workers spent entire careers performing routine, repetitive entry-level tasks, or as described by the more pessimistic, in dead-end jobs.
Oklahoma’s universities supplied the Air Force base with degreed engineers and accountants, often highperforming individuals while their non-degreed counterparts settled for less. The dedication of Oscar
Rose (then Junior) College on May 15, 1970 changed all that.
In late January 1969 Mid-Del Superintendent Oscar Rose apparently died from a stroke or heart attack while actively lobbying for school funding restorations in Washington. Prior to Rose’ demise, he had devised creation of a Midwest City-based college.
The college’s 1970-Armed Forces Day and dedication ceremony featured General George M. Johnson, flanked by Congressman Tom Steed and Oklahoma’s governor, David Hall. Johnson, the Tinker Air Mobility Commander declared ‘Education and the Armed Forces (to be) inseparable.’
Thus, for Midwest and Del City the commissioning ceremony ushered in a fresh and more inclusive era, one proclaiming ‘all of us’ as a guiding principle.
CHAPTER 13
THE AIR DEPOT
February 1978
Policies for naming military bases vary by service. The Air Force usually names posts in honor of leaders, Eglin and March, Rickenbacker, too, while the Army mixes leaders’ names with locations, Leonard Wood and Leavenworth. The Navy and Marine Corps largely ignored former leaders in favor of location designators, some of a nautical nature, hence, Port Hueneme.
Midwest City’s Air Depot site had previously accommodated a Douglas aircraft manufacturing plant. Its 1948 Tinker designator honored Pawhuska’s distinguished son, Major General Clarence L. Tinker, lost in a 1942 LB-30 Liberator raid targeting Wake Island-based Japanese forces.
For hundreds of Oklahomans, if sharecropping were a pre-war vocation, Tinker-field employment became a succession plan. Possibly to rival Dallas, Oklahoma City’s leaders annexed semi-rural properties across nearly six hundred square miles, irritating their counterparts in nearby Midwest and even Del City.
Strong winds are said to favor aircraft testing and development, where better than central Oklahoma, given fourteen mile per hour annual windspeeds. While Wichita leaders emphasized their airport’s midcontinent location, Oklahoma City memorialized aviation pioneers, Wiley Post and Will Rogers, naming its two airports in their honor.
Characteristics of Tinker Air Force base’s work force guided the new Midwest City college. While nearly
all Air Force officers had previously mastered figure and write exercises such as those associated with integral calculus and literature classes, that wasn’t the case for its enlisted airmen nor many of its civilian workers. Nevertheless, climbing an aviation career ladder meant being able to figure and write.
While motion pictures depicted students strolling wooded paths to lightly-attended classrooms, the Rose collegiate experience markedly differed. Instead, anxious Rose learners peeked in lecture hall windows even before the previous lecturer concluded, eyeing further seating selections. Sadly, even marginal tardiness risked inviting ridicule by tapping on an intentionally locked classroom door or skipping an evening session altogether.
As students departed fifty-minute class sessions, eraser-wielding instructors energetically scrubbed chalk boards. Within minutes, spaces previously dedicated to Maternal and child health turned their attention to Principles of plumbing.
That evening Attaway had described colligative properties, noting that certain solutions are altered by the presence of dissolved substances ones he defined as active solutes. While most class attendees prepared chemical solutions at work, they remained at least mildly interested in the topic. While hardly colligative experts, some were also familiar with MilSpecs, the government’s performance standards intended to qualify military materials, chemicals among them.
Attaway watched a first-row Japanese-American female creating meticulous, albethey tiny cursive notes. But having overrun his fifty-minute time
allotment, he neglected questions and answers, mostly preparing to depart the campus.
However, the Nisei female caught up on an adjacent breezeway, one faintly illuminated by sub-optimal tin-can lighting fixtures. Dr. Ozby, could you entertain a question?
Accommodating the breezeway-based inquiry…‘Sure.’
‘Do undissolved solids alter colligative property-derived melting or boiling points?’
Attaway responded. ‘Colligative-based changes are limited to active dissolved substances. Possibly, minor effects from undissolved solids, not much there.’
Her post-class passion perhaps piqued curiosity on his part, too. ‘Does this question have origins in a Tinkerbased or Mil-Spec protocol?’
‘Yes and no. I’m at Falcon Industries, an off-post vendor, where we use Type 2 TCE solvent to clean and refurbish aviation fire suppression systems. Per the Mil-Spec, we recycle the solvent until it discolors and picks up particles, making it unusable.’
Even given dim breezeway-furnish lighting, Attaway detected a slight rash on her cheeks, maybe the bridge of her nose, too, wondering what role TCE might have played in producing those lesions.
The odd A-1 and A-2 nicknames had arisen as a family joke, All-Star A-2 Alastair, Globetrotter appropriate certainly, and Th-Attaway, characterizing an investigative, detective-like persona.
Thus, here came Th-Attaway. ‘So, what do they do with the waste TCE?’
More abbreviations and further giggles. ‘Well, our foreman marks the 5-gallon TCE cans as WB-WK. ’
Amused but uninformed, Th-Attaway. ‘WB-WK?’
‘He translates WB-WK as World’s Best - Weed Killer, frequently disposing of it near roof and fence lines. Who knows, maybe our foreman takes solvent home for similar uses and purposes.’
Again, Attaway. ‘My duties include minimizing, other times even eliminating, hazardous exposures. Would your foreman, Falcon’s management for that matter, let me help reduce solvent-related exposures?’
‘Can’t say for sure but I can ask. Regardless, I’m back here Thursday for class.’
Nau’s TCE – WB-WK - Trilene dilemma was thus deconstructed by two A-listers, AB and A-1.