Interview with Roger William Anderson, September 20, 2005

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Roger Andersen September 20, 2005 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Mary Palevsky © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/ researcher with an interviewee/ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/ his individual life experience. Produced by: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Roger Andersen September 20, 2005 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: Birth, family background, childhood memories of World War II, interest in building model airplanes, early jobs with the railroad and Los Alamos, meeting with Edward Teller, and college education. 1 Military career, U. S. Air Force: basic training, electronics instructor, flight training. 11 Assigned to Hunter AFB, GA; works in Ground Training, attends Squadron Officers’ School. 21 Meets and marries Rebecca Blackman. Birth of three children. 24 Missions out of North Africa: flying and respect for weather. 28 Assigned to McGuire AFB, NJ; works in and designs command posts. 35 Temporary assignment to SAC Headquarters, Paris, France; memories of Kennedy assassination. 37 Interviews for and receives classified position with the 1129th Special Activities Squadron, Area 51, NTS. 39 Begins work on the A- 12 aircraft, Area 51, NTS. 43 Francis Gary Powers and the U- 2. 46 Discusses design requirements for Stealth- type aircraft and how they are built, including Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works, designer and builder of stealthy aircraft. 49 Job experience as applied to assignment to Area 51: types of aircraft flown, command post experience. 54 Importance of tankers in flying stealthy aircraft. 55 Details command post and how it operates. 56 Lockheed and Oxcart pilots and the missions they flew. 58 The YF- 12 program. 60 The SR- 71 program. 65 U- 2s and their history and uses. 66 Conclusion: Flies the A- 12 trainer. 68 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Roger Andersen September 20, 2005 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. Mary Palevsky: OK, Roger, so I just want to start by asking you to state your full name, date of birth, place of birth, and a little bit about your family background. Roger Andersen: OK, Mary, my name is Roger W.— middle name is William— last name is Andersen and it’s spelled A- N- D- E- R- S- E- N— maybe a little unusual. I was born on March 12, 1930 in southwestern Wisconsin in a little town by the name of Sparta, the only town that had a hospital nearby. The little town that I lived in was Cashton Wisconsin; the little town in those days around 700 people. My mother was one of ten children in a farm family that lived near Cashton— a little area called Portland— and she’s of Norwegian heritage. And my father was born and raised in Chicago; he was a traveling salesman and met my mother as he traveled throughout Wisconsin. They married, and I mentioned this earlier, that I’m the result of the old traveling salesman- farmer’s daughter routine. And I have one brother, or I had one brother, and I have one sister. My brother’s name was Fred Andersen and he died about a year- and- a- half ago. My sister is Dorothy Twesme and she lives in Wisconsin. Now, Andersen with an “ E” is also a Norwegian name, is that correct? Well, yes, there could be some discussion on that. There’s a little bit of Danish, I guess, in my background, but mostly Andersen is Norwegian- inspired, as far as our history is concerned. Just this summer, Becky and I went to a family reunion. About 350 people were there. This was very close to where I was born and raised. And this is on my mother’s side of the family, and they’re called the Benrud family; a lot of people have those. I should’ve brought the book along. You UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 would’ve gotten a kick out of looking at it because it’s about this thick [ indicating thickness]; they print a book with all of the descendents in that family, and it’s all computerized. Wow. So it’s a couple of inches thick and it’s all computerized. Yeah, it’s about like that [ indicating thickness], maybe about an inch thick, but it’s spiral- bound, and it’s very detailed. And it was interesting to see a lot of my relatives, some of them I don’t even know— with that many people around, it’s hard to see everybody. You want me to tell you a little bit about my childhood? Please do. Well, you know, I was born and raised in this little town. Cashton is in a rural community in southwestern Wisconsin, dairy farms mainly. That’s changed a lot over the years, but still basically dairy land. I went to the Cashton grade school and high school, as my brother and sisters did. My father was in the car business. He sold Ford cars and tractors and so forth along with an uncle of mine, my mother’s sister’s husband; he did that for most of his life. Later on, he was in the insurance business and so forth. I graduated from Cashton High School in 1948. Well, back up a little bit. So you’re a teenager during World War II. Yes. And what’s that like? You know, I was like a lot of young people during that era. I remember the collection of metal and so forth for the war effort. I bought savings stamps, like everybody did, to get an $ 18.75 bond. I still have some of those, as a matter of fact. My brother was in the Signal Corps in Europe and landed in France and was in that whole World War II thing. And I corresponded with him and he sent me a lot of things and he brought things home. So that was my first interest, I think. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 How much older was he than you? My brother was about eight years older than I was, eight or nine years. He was a [ 00: 05: 00] mining engineer, or became a mining engineer, after the war effort. But he was with the Signal Corps and it was fascinating to me. Plus he built model airplanes like I did when I was a kid. So you did. You were interested in airplanes then. Yes. I’ll never forget, my brother and a friend of his built a glider in my dad’s garage. The garage had a partition; it was a like a two- position garage, two stalls. And they kind of forgot about the partition. They built this thing and were going to take it out of the garage and realized that they couldn’t get it out. So they had to take it apart and then bolt it back together. I don’t think the glider ever flew, but it fascinated me. And I also loved to fly kites and I built a lot of different kinds of kites. That was something that I did when I was a young guy that a lot of kids did, we would go fly our kites. I got a prize one time for a kite that I had out so far that I could barely see the kite. It took me the better part of the day to wind it back in. We just did a lot of interesting things like that, as a kid. Now in school, did you have any particular interests as a student in high school? I think one of my big loves was basketball and baseball and that sort of thing. I loved sports. I played in the band. I could’ve been a much better student. Unfortunately, there were so many things I wanted to do that I kind of got involved in those. I was an OK student but I could’ve done much better. My sister was an outstanding student, and my brother was academically sound, too. I maybe could’ve done much better; I found that out when I got into college a little later. So your sister’s also older than you, or younger? My sister is also older than I am. She’s about three or four years older than I am. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 So you were the youngest of the three. Yes. I was the baby of the family, you’re right. Now, when I graduated in 1948 from high school, I had an aunt by the name of Ruth Andersen who had lived in Chicago for years. She was involved with the Atomic Energy Commission [ AEC], and worked down in New Mexico at— well, the name escapes me. It’s a famous place, of course. Los Alamos? Los Alamos. Thank you. She worked at Los Alamos, and when I graduated from high school, she came up for my graduation from Chicago where she was spending the summer. She said, Would you like to help me drive my brand- new 1948 Chevrolet coupe back to New Mexico and I’ll get you a job there for the summer? Now had she been there during the war? Yes, she was there during the development of the atomic bomb. Do you know what she worked on? She worked for, I think, the University of California. I think she was a buyer. That’s as I recall it. I can make sure. That sounds right. And she was very involved in that. Whether she worked on the program in Chicago— I think she might have— but then she eventually moved to New Mexico at Los Alamos. So I helped her drive there— I was fascinated because the car had a push- button radio, and you maybe don’t recall but they had visors that you could put on the outside of the car, a little visor, sun visor. No. I never heard of that. Well, I thought we were in the latest available electronic vehicle that you could drive in those days. So I did go there and she got me a job. I worked in the hospital at Los Alamos. I drove an ambulance there— another thing that fascinated me. I was eighteen years old and they had these UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 big Packard ambulances. And so I did that; I worked in the hospital, worked the switchboard, drove the ambulance, and pasted X rays, that sort of thing. That was kind of what I did that summer. Before you go on, though, I’m just curious. Do you remember any impressions of coming from a place like Wisconsin and then Chicago to the Southwest, to Los Alamos? Yes. When I was in high school, my folks really trusted me and let me work on summer jobs because when I was a sophomore in high school, I worked on a traveling crew with the CMSTP [ 00: 10: 00] and PRCC. It seems to me that’s the Chicago- Milwaukee- St. Paul- and- Pacific Railroad. The Milwaukee Road is what they call it. But I worked for two summers there, between my sophomore and junior and junior and senior year. And that was fascinating to me because although I didn’t go to the Southwest, we worked in Minnesota and Iowa and I lived on this crew— we lived in boxcars that they fixed up for us. I worked with the bolt- tightening crew, for a fellow by the name of A. M. Anderson— had the same name, spelled with an ��� O.” But we were on that crew and we tightened bolts where the rails are joined together. Every ninety feet they’re joined together by a couple of plates and some bolts. So that was an interesting job for me. So you’d been away from home and you’d traveled some. I’d been away, and I’d traveled with my folks a little bit, but I’d never been really that far away for any period of time, so this was a little bit newer for me. And my impression was that the Southwest was really devoid of trees and that sort of thing, not a lot of green grass, but an interesting area and I enjoyed working there. You know, that was early on with the Atomic Energy Commission. Did you have to have clearances then? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 No, I don’t recall having any— I think I filled out some paperwork, and maybe there was a clearance of sorts. I worked for a company called Zia Company. Somewhere, someplace, I’ve got some documentation of that. That’d be great to see. I might even have a paycheck from there. I don’t even remember what we were paid. That would be great to see. I think the most fascinating thing that happened was when I was ready to come home. My aunt suggested that I could save some money by seeing if somebody wanted a car driven back, because people did that from time to time. So I put my information in the— they had a little daily bulletin that came out, eight- and- a- half by, you know, the legal sized. And I think on the second day I put it in there, I received a call. And it was from Dr. Edward Teller. No way, Roger. Yes, it’s a true story. And someplace I think I have some documentation on this, too, because he wanted his car— this was 1948. I think it was like a 1942 Plymouth— I’m not sure about that— that he wanted driven back to Chicago. And so he said, I want you to come over to my house. Which I did. And when I rapped on the door and he opened the it— now you’ve got to remember my heritage and my background. There were a couple of naked kids running around inside the house and that kind of got my attention, I guess. But he invited me in and he said, with a little bit of a German accent that he had, he said, I have a document for you here to sign, a contract of sorts, and I’m going to give you a certain amount of money, and I want you to deliver this car to this address in Chicago, and the money I’ll give you should cover it. I think the amount was fifty dollars. That wouldn’t get very far in gas prices today, would it? Anyway, I signed the contract with him and I drove the vehicle back. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 Now, there was a young lady that worked in the hospital that had just gotten married to one of the security guards. The security guards were uniformed and a lot of them were on horseback, pretty sharp- looking guys, most of them had college degrees. I think that was maybe one of the requirements. So she had just married one of those young men, and her married name was Lorena Hyatt [ sp]. There’s really an interesting part to this I’ll come back to later, but anyway she said, Can I ride back with you? And I said sure, because her husband was being transferred and she wanted to drive back to Iowa, which is right on my way. So we loaded everything up. Dr. Teller had hundreds of wire hangers in the back end of the trunk of this vehicle, and I remember that quite well because we also put stuff in there. And Lorena had a lot of things that she’d gotten when she got [ 00: 15: 00] married and we put those in the back seat and in the trunk. And the first day out, we had a flat tire. Remember, now, I had fifty dollars to get back. I think the tire was maybe like eight or ten bucks. Actually, I turned over some money when I delivered that vehicle in Chicago about three or four days later. We drove to Denver the first day. But I had to get into the trunk. And that’s when I saw all these wire hangers, and so it took me a half- an- hour to get the wire hangers in and out. Did you know who Teller was? Well, I knew that he was the father of the hydrogen bomb, but that hadn’t happened yet. My aunt told me who he was. She said, You got a call from Dr. Teller? And I says, Yeah, I think his name is Ed, Ed Teller. She said, Dr. Edward Teller. [ And I said], Oh. Jawohl. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 So anyway, my discussion with him was pretty brief. You know, not too long ago, this is a couple of years ago, he spoke here at UNLV [ University of Nevada, Las Vegas], and I went down to hear him. I wish that I had asked to say hello to him, I should’ve done that and told him that I was the guy that delivered his Plymouth to Chicago back in 1948. It would’ve been kind of interesting. I want to pull that together about when I come back to Las Vegas, there is something about this Lorena Hyatt that’s kind of interesting. So I worked that summer and then I went back home and I enrolled at— at that stage of the game, it was LaCrosse State Teachers College in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. I went to school at LaCrosse for about two- and- a- half years. I was the only third- year that was what they call a “ not special student.” I hadn’t declared my major. And now I’ve got to ’ fess up here a little bit. I was not a good student. I was more a student of the social room, playing the piano, and I had a lot of fun doing that. I did not crack the books like I should have done. It’s embarrassing even now. But I became very good at drinking beer and meeting young girls. Now this is a kind of a Wisconsin thing, you got to understand. I think it’s maybe more universal than that. I think it probably is more universal than that. So I went to school at LaCrosse. I played in the band. I took a lot of subjects. I remember Shakespeare. I must’ve been issued at least, you know, the small books, maybe eight or ten of them. I don’t remember even opening one, really, and it’s sad because that was my opportunity to do some things and I just didn’t. In the beginning of my third year, my dad said, You know, Roger, you’re not doing very well academically. And that was no surprise to me. And he said, Your brother and sister did much better than you. Do you have the ability? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 And I said, Well, I suppose I do, Dad. I guess I could work harder. And he said, Well, you’re going to have to because I’m not going to support you anymore. You’re going to have to figure out your own way because we’ve done that for two years and I’ve heard some promises here that didn’t come to fruition, so you are on your own. Well, that got my attention, and I knuckled down, and I got some jobs. I put up storm windows for people. I mowed lawns. I raked lawns. I worked at Walt’s, a supper club. It, but anyway, it was in downtown LaCrosse. LaCrosse, incidentally, is about thirty- five miles west from where I was born and raised in Cashton, right on the Mississippi River. And so I began doing all those things. I was living actually up in a converted attic in a home that was about a couple of blocks from the campus. And I worked at the vets’ co- op there, which is where the vets ate. I worked for the vets and I earned my meals over there. So that����s how I got by financially, and I was doing much better. In the summers, the [ 00: 20: 00] summer previous to that, I worked in Milwaukee at an American Can Company plant, a brand- new one, and drove a lift truck and I was an operator there, making beer cans and the different types of cans that they did. And that was an interesting job that summer. I stayed with my uncle and my cousin, Paul Lee; Dr. Lee was a general practitioner there in Milwaukee, one of my favorite uncles. Well anyway, I did not do well academically but I was picking up my act and getting my act together, I guess I should say, when my dad called me and said, I have a card here, a postcard from the Draft Board, and they want you to report to them. And I said, Dad, do not send that to me. This is the Korean War, and so I suspected that that would be coming up. I’d already talked to the recruiters but I wanted to check this out a little bit further. And I also wanted to talk to my sister’s husband, who had been in the Navy and was a commander in the Navy and a lawyer and a circuit judge at that stage of the game in a little town UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 in southwestern Wisconsin. And he said check this out at Great Lakes Naval [ Training] Center, which is between Milwaukee and Chicago. So I jumped on a train and went down there and I talked to some people there and they said, Well, you can get into the NAVCAD program, but it looks like it’s going to be at least thirty to thirty- two months before you’ll be able to go through that program. You’d have to enlist in the Navy and then wait until your time came up. NAVCAD? The academy? No, not the Naval Academy. This was a naval cadet program to become a pilot and you had to have some college and that sort of thing. Well, I’d already checked with the Air Force and the Air Force said that it would be about twenty months. And that got my attention. I took the cadet test for aviation cadets and passed it, and so they said, Enlist and it’ll be twenty months. So I came back to LaCrosse from that weekend jaunt to see if I could do it. I even went to Chicago and checked with the Air Force there, but the story was all the same. So I went back and I enlisted. And so I never did see that postcard that was telling me that I’d have to see the Draft Board. I did what a lot of young people did at that stage of my life. This was right around Christmastime and I had been working in the Post Office because our team was going to play in the Cigar Bowl in Tampa, Florida and a bunch of us wanted to go. Now you got to remember, I’m paying my way so I had to buy my books and pay tuition and stuff, and it was pretty reasonable but, wages were not that great and everything. So I did a lot of odd jobs and I got this job for a couple of weeks with the Post Office. I was right in the middle of that and I had to terminate it. I went home for a couple of days— they gave me three or four— this is right around Christmas. Christmas of? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 This would be Christmas of 1950. Something doesn’t track there, but I’ll check the times on that. So I then reported to Minneapolis- St. Paul and got on a troop train for San Antonio, Texas [ Lackland Air Force Base]. I went to this Air Force base and I reported in like a lot of guys. There were thousands and thousands of people going into the service then, and the Air Force was no exception, so they had people sleeping in tents and stuff. Now I was fortunate that I was one of the last groups to get into the barracks. I remember one of the things that I did in the barracks was what they call the latrine guard. And the reason they had us there was because these guys came in from the tents and would try to sleep in the barracks, even in the latrine, because it was so cold and they didn’t have enough blankets, [ 00: 25: 00] they were sleeping on cots and it was cold as heck in Texas. At this particular juncture, you know, it was like January, and it was cold, and a lot of guys got pneumonia. Several of the guys died. It was really a tragedy. And I thought, you know, guarding latrines? Is this what the Air Force is all about? I thought maybe I’d made a big mistake. And they didn’t have uniforms. We marched around. I had a blue serge topcoat and white bucks and I marched in that for a couple of weeks until they finally got us uniforms— one day they’d give us shoes, another day they’d give us pants, on other days they’d give us shirts. So we just slowly worked into that. And so now I’m an enlisted guy in the Air Force. Lackland is the name of the Air Force base. I think I was there only three weeks. And I also remember guarding a swimming pool at two o’clock in the morning. There wasn’t any water in it, you know. Then I really began to get suspect about the Air Force. We did a lot of marching. So I thought, well, if the Air Force is all marching and guarding empty pools and that kind of stuff, I’m going to have to rethink all this. And then they shipped us out. In the meantime we had taken tests and so forth, what they call stanine tests, and the idea, I guess, is to “ stay nine,” have a high score. I think mine must’ve UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 been in the electronic area because I ended up going to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. And I went through an electronics fundamental course there. I also went through a more advanced radar course. And then, because I’d been going to LaCrosse State Teachers College, they must’ve seen that on my records, they said, We’d like to have you come back as an instructor in electronics fundamentals, which I did. I took two classes through, and that was interesting. And so many of the young people there, there were a lot of people with college degrees. Now these are enlisted folks with college degrees and they wanted to put in their few years and get out. So I had electrical engineers in the class, you know, much smarter than me by a long shot about electronics, and I’m teaching half- and- full- wave rectifiers and that sort of thing. So what I did was I utilized them and I said, Look, let’s do the basics, what you have to learn in this particular area, for the next couple of weeks that I’ll have you, and you’ll be moving on. And I said, The sooner we learn the basics here, you can pass the test. We had electronic boards that they’d snap things together, make them work, that sort of thing. So it was interesting. And we were doing some tests with Ohio State University at the same time. They had people there evaluating these tests that we were giving and how we were instructing and so forth, so that was kind of— So the question arises for me, it’s electronics. Is it for communications in the planes? Yes. This was all headed for some radio, but mainly in the area of radar. That’s where I was going to be. I was going to be an airborne radar guy. I would imagine a mechanic. I maybe would not be flying. I would be repairing and installing electronic gear in relationship to radars. Gun- laying radar, I think, was the main thing at that stage of the game, and technically I’m not really sure what that’s all about. Gun- laying radar? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 Gun- laying. In other words, it would be used in relationship to aiming guns at a particular target, that sort of thing. So I was at Keesler for a pretty good period of time. About halfway through 1953, after I’d taken several classes through, they said, OK, we’re going to let you go back now to your specialty, and they shipped me out to Waco, Texas. So I went to Waco, and I wasn’t at Waco very long at all. They had B- 25s there and we were working on the radar set- ups in those aircraft, the old B- 25. Little did I know that I’d be flying that in about a year. [ 00: 30: 00] So at any rate, I then received the information that my cadet class was going to be starting, and they sent me to Valdosta, Georgia to do some more testing, just updating some things, I think. I went right from there into the aviation cadet program and I reported to Bartow Field, Florida, which is near Cypress Gardens, to kind of place it for you there. I reported there like a lot of other young guys that were going to go through this same program. We had a number of French cadets that were there and they were sergeants. Kind of unusual, but they had flying sergeants in the French Air Force. One officer who was one of the fellows that I roomed with, a fellow by the name of Didier LaHache, I’ve stayed in touch with over the years and just have communicated with him on the Internet recently. So the first three or four weeks of that was marching, again. We got very good at marching and we did an awful lot of it. And then our cadet class started and we’d have academics in the morning, flying in the afternoon, or flying in the morning, academics in the afternoon. The academics were basically about the power plant in the airplane, and we were flying a T- 6, which was what we referred to kind of as a tail- dragger. In other words, it has a tail wheel. It’s not a tricycle gear. It sits high, and so when you taxi with it, you have to taxi “ S” like this [ demonstrating] to be able to see in front of you, to clear your way. It had a big radial engine UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 on it. This is the first airplane I’d ever flown, and it was not like a Piper Cub. It was a pretty powerful little airplane to me, I thought. My instructor’s name was Robinson— he was a civilian. We had military check pilots, but all of the instructors were civilians but most of them were of military background. Robinson had thousands of hours of flying time, and had little respect for my lack of ability. He was a pretty tough customer, and he always told me I was going to kill myself. Well, unfortunately, he killed himself flying an airplane years later. But, you know, the day I soloed he said, Well, that’s enough. I’m getting out of here. You take this thing. Go kill yourself. I don’t need any more of this exposure. So I had a great deal of confidence in myself. He was the kind of guy that just took the stick and racked you in the legs with it like this, [ demonstrating movement]. I’ll tell you one incident. We ate early in the morning. I went to the mess hall at 4: 30, five o’clock in the morning. We marched everyplace we went. And we had powdered eggs and that kind of stuff. But I was hungry and I ate quite a bit and had milk and cereal and eggs and all of that stuff, and then I went to fly; that maybe was not a smart maneuver on my part. It’s the only time I ever got sick in an aircraft. This is not a good story to tell just before lunch, but we’re not at lunch yet so we’re OK. No, we’re not at lunch yet. Go ahead. Tell the story. So we went up and we climbed up to eight or nine thousand feet, and he said, All right, Andersen, give me some rudder- controlled stalls. Well, you do those power on and power off, and you pull the nose of the airplane up like this [ demonstrating angle] until it starts to stall and it starts to shake and vibrate and then it falls off on one wing or the other, and then he wants to see your recovery procedure. So we did both of those, power on and power off. We did UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 a number of those. And I said, My stomach is not feeling so good. Those powdered eggs. I don’t know. So then he says, Well, all right, that’s enough of that. That’s enough of that. You’re not positive enough. You’re not doing this the way I instructed. We’ll try some spins. So he says, Take me up to eight thousand feet, eighty- five hundred. So we climb up to eighty- five hundred and he says, Now this is the way I want you to do a spin. And he spun the airplane and we went down to maybe forty- five hundred feet, something like that. And I thought that was kind of interesting. That’s the first time I’d ever been in an aircraft in a spin. So he says, All right, climb me back up. So I climbed back up. He says, OK, do [ 00: 35: 00] me a spin. So I did a spin. And he did not like the way I entered the spin. And he was maybe right. I was maybe at a pretty flat angle. And you’ve really got to pull the power off, you got to hit the rudder, you got to jam the aileron, and then the airplane goes into a spin. And well, that was not what he wanted to see at all. Take me back up. Let’s do another one. I did, I think, three spins, or four, and on the fourth one I knew I was going to have a problem. He said, That’s enough. Take me back to the airfield. I can’t any more of this. So we went back to the airfield and he said, Do an overhead three- sixty. Which means you come over the airfield, you make a tight turn, come back around, and then just come right in and land. I said to him just as I started the three- sixty, I said, I might have a problem here. And he says, What’s your problem? I said, I think I’m going to barf. And he said, Oh, all right, well, let’s go. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 And I took the airplane around and got on