The Shells of Pigeon Creek Genealogy Web Site
The ancestors, descendants, and cousins of the Shells of Pigeon Creek, Alabama.
Notes for John Wayne Hickman
I completed High School at Greenville High on May 30, 1963 and joined the Air Force three months later. My career in the Air Force ran from September 1, 1963 until October 31, 1985 and I retired in Fort Worth, Texas after 21 years. In the Air Force I was stationed or had temporary duty at San Antonio, Texas for basic training, Denver, Colorado for tech school, and Shreveport, Louisiana for my first duty assignment. Other assignments included Omaha, Nebraska; Lompoc, California; and finally Fort Worth, Texas. It was in Shreveport that I met and married my beautiful wife Cheryl Gay Moore.
While in the Air Force I traveled overseas to Viet Nam, Thailand, and Turkey. The southeast Asia tours were three and four months, but the Turkey tours were for six and fifteen months. I was lucky to have two careers in the Air Force in which I took great pride and enjoyed, as a photo maintenance man and as a maintenance analyst for the Chief of Maintenance at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas.
My first assignment after basic training and thirty-three weeks of Technical Training in Denver was at Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, Louisiana. This was a great assignment for me working at the 2nd Reconnaissance Technical Squadron. I arrived there two years after the Cuban Crisis and the United States was still making U2 recons over Cuba. While stationed at Barksdale I completed three short TDYs (temporary duty assignments) to southeast Asia. In 1969 I made my first trip to Turkey on the Black Sea at Sinop, 80 miles from Russia. When I arrived at Sinop, I quickly learned that the Air Force didn't require my services there as a photo maintenance man. I completed my first three months driving a 10,000 pound fork lift, working with an international crew, and assembling a radar device.
For the last three months I served as a clerk-typist, where I got into trouble for letting a secret document go off base without proper markings. The funny thing about that is I didn't know what I was doing, had no training, and the document had to pass through screens by the Army and Navy. But because I typed it, I got the blame. I had talked with my commander several months before this about the need for a clerk-typist and not a photo man. I talked with my congressman and wrote letters back to headquarters in the States. I didn't believe it when, after 181 days, I was replaced by a real typist and returned to the states receiving full credit for a remote tour.
My new assignment was Omaha, Nebraska, a real treat for a southern boy with an arrival in January. It was 20 degrees below zero the first night and my truck, which was filled with 40 weight oil and STP, would not start until the service station replaced the oil with 20 weight. Later that month Cheryl, who was now about seven months pregnant, flew up so we could look for a house. It was so cold that week that the old Ford truck would start some mornings and some mornings would just grunt. We took a room, if you could call it a room, in a small town ten miles south of the base. It was about eight feet by eight feet, which included the bathroom, but it was all we could afford back then. Each day we got the old truck running and drove around looking for a house. Every time we stopped we tracked snow back into the truck on our shoes. We soon had ice about an inch thick on the floor board and I don't think it ever melted, even with the heater running on high all the time. We located a house within a week and Cheryl returned to Shreveport to wait for the birth of our son Chohn. Chohn was born March 18, 1971 and they soon moved up to Omaha with me.
In late 1974, I returned to Turkey for the second time, arriving on New Years Eve in Adana on the Mediterranean for 15 months. I completed my assignment in February of 1978 and was on my way to Vandenburg AFB, California and what turned out to be my last assignment in photo maintenance. I picked up Chohn and a new car in San Antonio on my way. I tried to get the Air Force to release me from the photo field so I could stay in San Antonio as an Air Force recruiter, but they said they couldn't do that because of the shortage of people in my career field. Little did I know that three years later they would tell me to get out because there was an overage in my grade. Cheryl followed us to California two months later after she rented the house in San Antonio.
In the summer of 1981 I was informed I would be required to make a career change. I picked Maintenance Analyst School because they had a two month self-paced school and I could get an assignment to Texas. I went to Illinois and, working twelve hours per day, completed the school in one month with honors. I hated to leave the photo career field because of the changes I had seen and the equipment I had worked on. In the eighteen years, I had worked on many different types of photo equipment from small hand-held cameras to large copy cameras that would fill a room. Film developing and printing machines that created pictures from U2s at Barksdale, F4s in Viet Nam, SR-71s in Japan, and the missile program at Vandenburg. In the fall of 1981 we had to leave California and what was, for me as I look back, a Utopia. The three years at Vandenburg with all the sports for Chohn, the small community feeling of on-base housing, and Cheryl's work with the NCO wives club and my work with the 1369th will always stand out for me as a time when all was right with our world.
The last 4 years, before retirement, I worked in a job that required me to compile and analyze data, write reports, and make recommendations on actions to correct problems. It was at Carswell that I got my first chance to work with computers and I loved it. In 1984 I received an assignment to Germany, where we had always want to go. However, Cheryl and I had made a promise to Chohn years earlier about staying in one place so he could make friends, put down roots, and complete high school, so I declined the assignment and retired on 31 October 1985.
In the Spring of 1986, because of the knowledge gained in the Air Force, I was able to obtain a job with the General Services Administration in Fort Worth, Texas in the Inventory Management field. Experience researching and ordering parts for different types of equipment in the Air Force and work in the maintenance analysis field paid off. In five years I was able to rise to a supervisor in Inventory Management.
If asked what I've learned in my first 50 years I would have to say that a person can do anything they want to with a good mind set and hard work.
John Wayne Hickman. Descendants of John Hickman.
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