To All
Good Tuesday Morning August 8 2023.
I hope that your week is off to a good start.
A BIT LONG TODAY BUT SOME NEAT THINGS and there is no test at the end…
Regards,
Skip
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Thanks to Fingers
Ship,
Would you please put eh following notice on the "List." Thanks, Fingers
The Hoffner family cordially invites you to join us for a funeral mass to celebrate the life of our beloved father, Captain Conrad "Connie" Hoffner, USN (Ret.).
DATE: Friday, August 25th, 2023
TIME: 10:30am
LOCATION: Our Mother of Confidence Catholic Church, 3131 Governor Dr, San Diego, CA 92122
RECEPTION: Immediately following the service in Serra Hall (located right below the Church)
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This Day in Navy and Marine Corps History:
August 8
1860 Screw frigate USS San Jacinto, commanded by Capt. William M. Armstrong, captures the American slaver Storm King with 619 slaves on board, off the Congo River. A prize crew from the steam frigate sailed the captured slaver to Monrovia and turned 616 freed Negroes over to the United States agent there before proceeding to Norfolk with the prize.
1861 During the Civil War, the frigate USS Santee commanded by Capt. Eagle captured the schooner C.P. Knapp in the Gulf of Mexico.
1863 During the Civil War, the screw steam gunboat, USS Sagamore, commanded by Lt. Cmdr. English, seizes British sloop, HMS Clara Louisa, off Indian River, Fla. Later the same day, Lt. Cmdr. English captures British schooners, HMS Southern Rights and HMS Shot, and Confederate schooner, CSS Ann, off Gilberts Bar.
1924 USS Shenandoah (ZR 1) secures herself to the mooring mast on USS Patoka (AO 9), making the first use of the mooring mast erected on shipboard to facilitate airship operations with the fleet.
1933 Commander, Aircraft Battle Force, requests the authority to use variable-pitch propellers during forthcoming exercises on six Boeing F4B-4s of VF 3 based on board USS Langley (CV 1) and on one (F4B 4) of (VF 1) on board USS Saratoga (CV 3).
1942 USS Narwhal (SS 167) sinks Japanese crab boat, Bifuku Maru, southeast of Sharia Saki while USS S-38 (SS 143) sinks Japanese transport, Meiyo Maru, at the southern entrance of St. George Channel, between New Britain and New Ireland. Also on this date, USS Silversides (SS 236) attacks a Japanese convoy emerging from Kobe Harbor and sinks freighter Nikkei Maru in Kii Strait.
1987 USS Fort McHenry (LSD 43) is commissioned at Lockheed Shipyard, Seattle, Wash. The Whidbey Island-class dock landing ship is named for Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Md., the fort for which its 1814 defense inspired Francis Scott Key to write the lyrics for the Star Spangled Banner.
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Today in World History August 8
1306 King Wenceslas of Poland is murdered.
1570 Charles IX of France signs the Treaty of St. Germain, ending the third war of religion and giving religious freedom to the Huguenots.
1636 The invading armies of Spain, Austria and Bavaria are stopped at the village of St.-Jean-de-Losne, only 50 miles from France.
1648 Ibrahim, the sultan of Istanbul, is thrown into prison, then assassinated.
1786 Jacques Balmat and Dr. Michel-Gabriel Paccard become the first men to climb Mont Blanc in France.
1844 Brigham Young is chosen to head the Mormon Church, succeeding Joseph Smith.
1863 Confederate President Jefferson Davis refuses General Robert E. Lee's resignation.
1876 Thomas Edison patents the mimeograph.
1899 The first household refrigerating machine is patented.
1925 The first national congress of the Ku Klux Klan opens.
1937 The Japanese Army occupies Beijing.
1940 The German Luftwaffe attacks Great Britain for the first time, beginning the Battle of Britain.
1942 U.S. Marines capture the Japanese airstrip on Guadalcanal.
1944 U.S. forces complete the capture of the Marianas Islands.
1945 The Soviet Union declares war on Japan.
1950 U.S. troops repel the first North Korean attempt to overrun them at the Battle of Naktong Bulge, which continued for 10 days.
1963 England's "Great Train Robbery;" 2.6 million pounds ($7.3 million) is stolen
1974 President Richard Nixon resigns from the presidency as a result of the Watergate scandal.
1978 Pioneer-Venus 2 is launched to probe the atmosphere of Venus.
1979 Iraq's president Saddam Hussein executes 22 political opponents.
1983 Brigadier General Efrain Rios Montt is deposed as president of Guatemala in the country's second military coup in 17 months.
1988 Angola, Cuba and South Africa sign a cease-fire treaty in the border war that began in 1966.
1989 NASA Space Shuttle Columbia begins its eighth flight, NASA's 30th shuttle mission.
1990 Iraq annexes the state of Kuwait as its 19th province, six days after Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait.
2000 The Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley is raised to surface, 136 years after it sank following its successful attack on USS Housatonic in the outer harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
2007 An EF2 tornado hits Brooklyn, New York, the first in that borough since 1889.
2008 Georgia invades South Ossetia, touching off a five-day war between Georgia and Russia.
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ROLLING THUNDER REMEMBERED Thanks to the Bear … Bear🇺🇸⚓️🐻
OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER (1965-1968)…
Thanks to THE BEAR
Subject: ROLLING THUNDER REMEMBERED… 8 AUGUST
Skip… For The List for Tuesday, 8 August 2023… Bear🇺🇸⚓️🐻
OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER (1965-1968)
From the archives of rollingthunderremembered.com post for 8 August 1968…
Notes from a meeting at SecState's home…
This following work accounts for every fixed wing loss of the Vietnam War and you can use it to read more about the losses in The Bear's Daily account. Even better it allows you to add your updated information to the work to update for history…skip
Vietnam Air Losses
Access Chris Hobson and Dave Lovelady's work at: https://www.VietnamAirLosses.com.
This is a list of all Helicopter Pilots Who Died in the Vietnam War
. Listed by last name and has other info
https://www.vhpa.org/KIA/KIAINDEX.HTM
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Those who are not interested in the dialogue that follows, will enjoy the link at the bottom showing the history of the aircraft.
Make sure and watch the video after you read the story of the flight's captain. This is an interesting story. It shows how it was first proven possible using radio control models.
Be sure to watch the video at the end
A quick "trip report" from the pilot of the 747 that flew the shuttle back to Florida after the Hubble repair flight. A humorous and interesting inside look at what it's like to fly two aircraft at once. (I have decided to adopt one of "Triple Nickel's" phrases : "That was too close for MY laundry!")
Well, it's been 48 hours since I landed the 747 with the shuttle Atlantis on top and I am still buzzing from the experience. I have to say that my whole mind, body and soul went into the professional mode just before engine start in Mississippi, and stayed there, where it all needed to be, until well after the flight. Iin fact, I am not sure if it is all back to normal as I type this email. The experience was surreal. Seeing that "thing" on top of an already overly huge aircraft boggles my mind. The whole mission from takeoff to engine shutdown was unlike anything I had ever done. It was like a dream -- someone else's dream.
We took off from Columbus Air Force Base on their 12,000-foot runway, of which I used 11,999 feet to get the wheels off the ground. We were at 3,500 feet left to go of the runway, throttles full power, nose wheels still hugging the ground, the copilot calling out decision speeds, the weight of Atlantis now screaming through my fingers clinched tightly on the controls, tires heating up to their near maximum temperature from the speed and the weight, and not yet at rotation speed, the speed at which I would be pulling on the controls to get the nose to rise. I just could not wait, and I mean I COULD NOT WAIT, and started pulling early. If I had waited until rotation speed, we would not have rotated enough to get airborne by the end of the runway. So I pulled on the controls early and started our rotation to the takeoff attitude. The wheels finally lifted off as we passed over the stripe marking the end of the runway and my next hurdle (physically) was a line of trees 1,000 feet off the departure end of runway 16. All I knew was we were flying and so I directed the gear to be retracted and the flaps to be moved from flaps 20 to flaps 10 as I pulled even harder on the controls. I must say, those trees were beginning to look a lot like those brushes in the drive through car washes so I pulled even harder yet! I think I saw a bird just fold it's wings and fall out of a tree as if to say "Oh just take me". Okay, we cleared the trees, duh, but it was way too close for my laundry. As we started to actually climb, at only 100 feet per minute, I smelled something that reminded me of touring the Heineken Brewery in Europe. I said "is that a skunk I smell?" and the veterans of shuttle carrying looked at me and smiled and said "Tires"! I said "TIRES? . . . OURS? . . ." They smiled and shook their heads as if to call their captain an amateur. Okay, at that point I was. The tires were so hot you could smell them in the cockpit. My mind could not get over, from this point on, that this was something I had never experienced. Where's your mom when you REALLY need her?
The flight down to Florida was an eternity. We cruised at 250 knots indicated, giving us about 315 knots of ground speed at 15,000' The miles didn't click by like I am use to them clicking by in a fighter jet at mach .94. We were burning fuel at a rate of 40,000 pounds per hour or 130 pounds per mile, or one gallon every length of the fuselage. The vibration in the cockpit was mild, compared to down below and to the rear of the fuselage where it reminded me of that football game I had as a child where you turned it on and the players vibrated around the board. I felt like if I had plastic clips on my boots I could have vibrated to any spot in the fuselage I wanted to go without moving my legs . . . and the noise was deafening. The 747 flies with its nose 5 degrees up in the air to stay level, and when you bank, it feels like the shuttle is trying to say "hey, let's roll completely over on our back" . . . not a good thing I kept telling myself. So I limited my bank angle to 15 degrees and even though a 180 degree course change took a full zip code to complete, it was the safe way to turn this monster.
Airliners and even a flight of two F-16s deviated from their flight plans to catch a glimpse of us along the way. We dodged what was in reality very few clouds and storms, despite what everyone thought, and arrived in Florida with 51,000 pounds of fuel . . . too much to land with. We can't land heavier than 600,000 pounds total weight and so we had to do something with that fuel. I had an idea . . . let's fly low and slow and show this beast off to all the taxpayers in Florida lucky enough to be outside on that Tuesday afternoon. So at Ormond Beach we let down to 1,000 feet above the ground/water and flew just east of the beach out over the water. Then, once we reached the NASA airspace of the Kennedy Space Center, we cut over to the Banana/Indian Rivers and flew down the middle of them to show the people of Titusville, Port St. Johns, and Melbourne just what a 747 with a shuttle on it looked like. We stayed at 1,000 feet and since we were dragging our flaps at "flaps 5", our speed was down to around 190 to 210 knots. We could see traffic stopping in the middle of roads to take a look. We heard later that a little league baseball game stoped to look and everyone cheered as we became their 7th inning stretch. Oh say can you see...
After reaching Vero Beach, we turned north to follow the coast line back up to the shuttle landing facility (SLF). There was not one person laying on the beach . . . they were all standing and waving!" What a sight" I thought . . . and figured they were thinking the same thing. All this time I was bugging the engineers, all three of them, to re-compute our fuel and tell me when it was time to land.
They kept saying "Not yet triple, keep showing this thing off" which was not a bad thing to be doing. However, all this time the thought that the landing, the muscling of this 600,000 pound beast, was getting closer and closer to my reality. I was pumped up! We got back to the SLF and were still 10,000 pounds too heavy to land so I said I was going to do a low approach over the SLF going the opposite direction of landing traffic that day. So at 300 feet, we flew down the runway, rocking our wings like a whale rolling on its side to say "hello" to the people looking on! One turn out of traffic and back to the runway to land . . . still 3,000 pounds over gross weight limit. But the engineers agreed that if the landing were smooth, there would be no problem. "Oh, thanks guys, a little extra pressure is just what I needed!"
So, we landed at 603,000 pounds, and very smoothly if I have to say so myself. The landing was so totally controlled and on speed, that it was fun. There were a few surprises that I dealt with, like the 747 falls like a rock with the orbiter on it if you pull the throttles off at the "normal" point in a landing, and secondly, if you thought you could hold the nose off the ground after the mains touch down, think again . . . IT IS COMING DOWN! So I "flew it down" to the ground and saved what I have seen in videos of a nose slap after landing. Bob's video supports this!
Then I turned on my phone after coming to a full stop only to find 50 bazillion emails and phone messages from all of you who were so super to be watching and cheering us on! What a treat, I can't thank y'all enough. For those who watched, you wondered why we sat there so long. Well, the shuttle had very hazardous chemicals on board and we had to be "sniffed" to determine if any had leaked or were leaking. They checked for Monomethylhydrazine (N2H4 for Charlie Hudson) and nitrogen tetroxide (N2O4). Even though we were "clean", it took way too long for them to tow us in to the mate-demate area. Sorry for those who stuck it out and even waited until we exited the jet.
I am sure I will wake up in the middle of the night here soon, screaming and standing straight up dripping wet with sweat from the realization of what had happened. It was a thrill of a lifetime. Again, I want to thank everyone for your interest and support. It felt good to bring Atlantis home in one piece after she had worked so hard getting to the Hubble Space Telescope and back.
And a video, in case you haven't seen the shuttle carrier aircraft:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcI1e4KiDv0
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Thanks to Dr. Rich
On Aug 6, 2023, at 11:31, DD Wolfe wrote to Dick Rutan:
Click on screenshot for Amazon site … or HERE
Dear Sir;
If I may: "your next 5 minutes"........
I just finished your excellent book. You are one of those guys that I wanted to be like when I was a kid growing up on a diary farm in "no-where" Ohio.
There have been many mentors sent my way over the years. With their help, a solid 2.0 GPA and 2 years of college I ended up slopping in to an F-100 Air Guard slot in the Ohio Guard at age 20. 2 of my F-100 IP's in the Tucson ANG in 1975 were Don Sheppard and Ted Powell, as you know both Mistys. Those guys were "Av- Gods" to me as were many more of the Nam Vet IPs there.
Our first 5 rides in the Hun were in the backseat and Powell was my IP. Ride 1 I'm strapped in the back: "Lt Air Training Command", sleeves down, gloves on, mask on and both visors down. Powell came up the ladder, looked at me with disgust and gave the "hit the air" signal to the mechanic. He proceeded to complete the start standing outside on the ladder and climbed in following air and elect disconnect. Connected to the intercom he said," Wolfe, you look like an idiot back there, these things can blow up during start ya know."
"Really ? Should I stand outside with you during start on the next ride Sir?" Powell replied; " No, I'm just letting you know these things blow up during start and you look like an idiot." I knew he was jerking my chain and frankly, I loved it. The Tucson ANG in those days was Fighter Pilot Hun Heaven!
Eventually the mentors led me to United Airlines in 1978. In 1981 I was furloughed from UA and got a job working for Beech during the Starship years. We ( the Beech employees) were at the NBAA Convention in Dallas when Linden Blue showed the video of the Starship coming in from space and flying a low level over Lake Powell (you?). Man was that cool ! Following the video we were escorted out to see the real Starship. HOLY CRAP that plane was beautiful ! The Cheyenne 4 parked next to it looked ancient.
Back at UA and in the sunset of my career I ended up flying the B-747 demo in the Fleet Week airshow for 5 years. I was the "line stiff" representing the 12,000 UA pilots. Why was I selected? Line check airman qualified in both seats and "Hun Driver". The other 2 pilots were from the UA flight test section; USN test pilot George Silverman and USAF test pilot Joe "Sack" Sobczak.
A couple of years ago I was at Oshkosh with Joe and you joined us for dinner. That's when I found out about your book.
Your book spoke to me on many levels Dick, from overcoming an occasional " not wanting to be there" in fighters to being involved with those self serving schmucks with zero integrity. I have no tolerance for those people.Your chapter about running for Congress speaks volumes about a very serious problem in our country- Politics. I was once a Republican but I no longer recognize the party and have become an "independent". Again, honesty, integrity on both sides of the aisle. WTF?
Dick, thank you for your service to our nation and thank you for everything you and Burt have done for aviation and space. It's amazing that you flew the Voyager all the way around the world and that Burt's space ship beat the altitude record of the Gov-Funded X-15 !
I'm planning to attend the next SSS reunion. If you're there, I'll buy ya a beer.
"Your 6 is Clear Sir......Shoot Shoot Shoot "
Wolfman out
Don Wolfe, Auburn CA
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One of the Most memorable events in my life.
That day at Luke AFB 1966 when that Blue Crew Van pulled up and dropped me off in front of an F 100D all by myself and were going to let me fly it solo for the very first time.
Then riding one on fire from over north VN trying to make it feet wet.
Dick RUTAN
Ltc USAF (Retired)
Fellow Aviator
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Thanks to Dr.Rich
Colonel McPhail
Thanks to Mike R.
For your pilot buddies. My friends uncle…
Friends, my dad's little brother was honored at last weekend's Osh Kosh Air Show.
They believe he is the last Corsair pilot from World War 2. He will be 102 in October. He flew 241 missions in WW2 and Korea. Here is an interview if you are interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-GaK4oryNA
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Thanks to Shadow
I'm sitting here watching the families of those lost in the withdrawal from Kabul testify…with tears in my eyes! Turn it on… watch it… never forget it!
Shadow
This is a national tragedy from the top down. Absolutely unforgivable
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Thanks to Dan
Skip,
After reading your "Chicken" stories in List #6543, I thought I would add my own "chicken story", which your readers might find entertaining:
As a prelude, let me explain to your readers that I had two combat tours in Vietnam, the first in the Infantry, the second flying AH-1G Cobra Attack Helicopters, but both tours with the 101st Airborne Division. The Division is known as "The Screaming Eagles", due to the famous Division patch. However, the Vietnamese had never seen an Eagle, and referred to us as "The Chicken Men".
The Army's uniform code states that the patch of the unit to which you are currently assigned, is worn on the left shoulder of the uniform. However, once you have been assigned to any unit in combat, that unit patch can be worn on the right shoulder. Therefore, once I returned to Vietnam for a second combat tour, both with the 101st Airborne Division, I could wear a "Screaming Eagle" patch on both shoulders.
At the time that I returned for my second tour, I was one of only seven people in the entire 101st Airborne Division, that could wear the patch on both shoulders, sort of a mark of distinction. But, remembering that the Vietnamese thought of us as "Chicken Men", and the fact that aviators always treat each other with irreverence, none of your readers should be surprised to learn that everyone referred to me as a "Chicken Sandwich"!
Dan Bresnahan
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This Day in U S Military History
1942 – The invasion of Guadalcanal continues as the remainder of the first wave of American troops come ashore. Advancing rapidly inland, they capture the Japanese airstrip intact, renaming it Henderson Field. The missions on Tulagi and Gavutu are completed and the islands captured. Due to Japanese air and submarine attacks, Admiral Fletcher decides to withdraw his carriers, leaving the cruisers and transports near the island. .
1942 – During World War II, six German saboteurs who secretly entered the United States on a mission to attack its civil infrastructure are executed by the United States for spying. Two other saboteurs who disclosed the plot to the FBI and aided U.S. authorities in their manhunt for their collaborators were imprisoned. In 1942, under Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's orders, the defense branch of the German Military Intelligence Corps initiated a program to infiltrate the United States and destroy industrial plants, bridges, railroads, waterworks, and Jewish-owned department stores. The Nazis hoped that sabotage teams would be able to slip into America at the rate of one or two every six weeks. The first two teams, made up of eight Germans who had all lived in the United States before the war, departed the German submarine base at Lorient, France, in late May. Just before midnight on June 12, in a heavy fog, a German submarine reached the American coast off Amagansett, Long Island, and deployed a team who rowed ashore in an inflatable boat. Just as the Germans finished burying their explosives in the sand, John C. Cullen, a young U.S. Coast Guardsman, came upon them during his regular patrol of the beach. The leader of the team, George Dasch, bribed the suspicious Cullen, and he accepted the money, promising to keep quiet. However, as soon as he passed safely back into the fog, he sprinted the two miles back to the Coast Guard station and informed his superiors of his discovery. After retrieving the German supplies from the beach, the Coast Guard called the FBI, which launched a massive manhunt for the saboteurs, who had fled to New York City. Although unaware that the FBI was looking for them, Dasch and another saboteur, Ernest Burger, decided to turn themselves in and betray their colleagues, perhaps because they feared capture was inevitable after the botched landing. On July 15, Dasch called the FBI in New York, but they failed to take his claims seriously, so he decided to travel to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. On July 18, the same day that a second four-man team successfully landed at Ponte Verdra Beach, Florida, Dasch turned himself in. He agreed to help the FBI capture the rest of the saboteurs. Burger and the rest of the Long Island team were picked up by June 22, and by June 27 the whole of the Florida team was arrested. To preserve wartime secrecy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered a special military tribunal consisting of seven generals to try the saboteurs. At the end of July, Dasch was sentenced to 30 years in prison, Burger was sentenced to hard labor for life, and the other six Germans were sentenced to die. The six condemned saboteurs were executed by electric chair in Washington, D.C., on August 8. In 1944, two other German spies were caught after a landing in Maine. No other instances of German sabotage within wartime America has come to light. In 1948, Dasch and Burger were freed by order of President Harry Truman, and they both returned to Germany.
1945 – The Soviet Union declares itself to be at war with Japan as of midnight (August 9th), citing the Japanese failure to respond to the Potsdam Declaration. Commissar Molotov says that the USSR has declared war because Japan is the only great power preventing peace. He indicates that it was in the interests of shortening the war and bring peace to the world that the Soviet Union has agreed to the Allied request made at Potsdam to join the war. Furthermore, Molotov states that the Soviets had been asked to mediate by Japan, but that proposal had lost all basis when Japan refused to surrender unconditionally.
1945 – The Japanese Supreme War Council agrees, late that night, that they should accept the Potsdam Declaration if the monarchy is preserved. Some of the objections from the military are overruled by the Emperor himself.
1945 – The survivors of the USS Indianapolis are rescued. Only 316 of the 1196 men onboard the ship have survived.
Medal of Honor Citations for Actions Taken This Day
GROBERG, FLORENT A.
Rank and Organization: Captain, U.S. Army, Company: 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Division: 4th Infantry Division, Born: 8 May 1983, Poissy, France, Departed: No, Entered Service At: Bethesda, Maryland July, 2008, G.O. Number: , Date of Issue: 11/12/2015, Accredited To: , Place and Date: Asadabad, Kunar Province, Afghanistan, 8 August 2012. Citation: Captain Florent A. Groberg distinguished himself by acts of gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving as a Personal Security Detachment Commander for Task Force Mountain Warrior, 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, during combat operations against an armed enemy in Asadbad, Kunar Province, Afghanistan on August 8, 2012. On that day, Captain Groberg was leading a dismounted movement consisting of several senior leaders to include two brigade commanders, two battalion commanders, two command sergeants major, and an Afghanistan National Army brigade commander. As they approached the Provincial Governor's compound, Captain Groberg observed an individual walking close to the formation. When the individual made an abrupt turn towards the formation, he noticed an abnormal bulge underneath the individual's clothing. Selflessly placing himself in front of one of the brigade commanders, Captain Groberg rushed forward, using his body to push the suspect away from the formation. Simultaneously, he ordered another member of the security detail to assist with removing the suspect. At this time, Captain Groberg confirmed the bulge was a suicide vest and with complete disregard for his life, Captain Groberg again with the assistance of the other member of the security detail, physically pushed the suicide bomber away from the formation. Upon falling, the suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest outside the perimeter of the formation, killing four members of the formation and wounding numerous others. The blast from the first suicide bomber caused the suicide vest of a previously unnoticed second suicide bomber to detonate prematurely with minimal impact on the formation. Captain Groberg's immediate actions to push the first suicide bomber away from the formation significantly minimized the impact of the coordinated suicide bombers' attack on the formation, saving the lives of his comrades and several senior leaders. Captain Groberg's extraordinary heroism and selflessness above and beyond the call of duty at the risk of life are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect credit upon himself, 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division and the United States Army
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Thanks to Bill
America's first 'top secret' Medal of Honor went to a Japanese-American fighting in Korea James Elphick, We Are The Mighty Hiroshi Miyamura Wikimedia Commons Hiroshi Miyamura was born to Japanese immigrants in Gallup, New Mexico, in 1925. This made him Nisei — Japanese for "second-generation."
At the outbreak of World War II, Miyamura witnessed many of his fellow Nisei being shipped off to internment camps. Gallup, however, was not located within the relocation zone, and even if it was, the townspeople were ready to stand up for their Japanese neighbors.
Safe from the internment camps, Miyamura enlisted in the US Army volunteering to serve with the famed Nisei 100th Battalion, 442ndRegimental Combat Team. Unfortunately for Miyamura, by the time he reached Europe to join the unit, Germany had surrendered.
He returned home, stayed in the Army Reserve, and married a fellow Nisei woman who had been interned in Arizona.
Miyamura looked like he might pass his time in obscurity until North Korea charged across the 38th Parallel on June 25, 1950.
Recalled to active service, Miyamura joined the 3rd Infantry Division's 7th Infantry Regiment in Japan as it prepared to join the combat on the Korean peninsula.
Landing on Korea's east coast, Miyamura and the rest of the 3rd Infantry Division stormed into North Korea before being driven back by the Chinese intervention.
The 7th Infantry Regiment helped cover the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir and was the last unit to leave Hungnam on December 24, 1950.
Miyamura and his comrades were then placed on the defensive line around the 38th Parallel where they actively repelled numerous Chinese Offensives.
The war then became a bloody stalemate with each side battling across hilltops trying to gain an advantage.
One such hilltop, located at Taejon-ni along a defensive position known as the Kansas Line, was occupied by Miyamura and the rest of Company H, 2nd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment. 2
A map of China's offensives in the Korean Peninsula. Wikimedia Commons After dark on April 24, 951, Miyamura quietly awakened his men – a trip flare had gone off in the valley below their position. In the faint light of the flare, the Americans could make out large masses of Communist troops advancing on their position.
The Chinese 29th Division smashed into the entire 7th Infantry Regiment. The hardest hit was the 2nd Battalion holding the right flank. By 2:30 the next morning, they were surrounded by the Chinese.
Miyamura, leading a machine-gun squad, ordered his men to open fire. As the American guns roared to life, the Chinese fell in droves. But still they kept coming.
After two hours of relentless fighting, Miyamura's machine-guns were down to less than 200 rounds of ammunition. He gave the order to fix bayonets and prepared to repulse the next wave of Chinese attackers.
When that attack came, Miyamura jumped from his position and savagely attacked the enemy. He blasted off eight rounds from his M-1 Garand before dispatching more Chinese with his bayonet.
He then returned to his position to give first aid to the wounded. When he realized they could no longer hold, he ordered his squad to retreat while he gave covering fire.
He shot off the last of the machine-gun ammunition and rendered the gun inoperable before pouring another eight rounds into the advancing Communist. Machine-gunners. Wikimedia Commons According to Miyamura's Medal of Honor citation, he then "bayoneted his way through infiltrated enemy soldiers" until he reached a second position and once again took up the defense. During his withdrawal, Miyamura was wounded by a grenade thrown by a dying Chinese soldier.
The attacks grew fiercer against the second position. Elsewhere along the line, the rest of the battalion had been ordered to begin a withdrawal south to a more tenable position. Miyamura, realizing their position was in danger of being overrun, ordered the remaining men to fall back as well while he covered their retreat. 3
Miyamura was last seen by friendly forces fighting ferociously against overwhelming odds. It is estimated he killed a further 50 Chinese before he ran out of ammunition and his position was overrun.
Exhausted and depleted from blood loss, Miyamura and numerous other men from the 7th Infantry Regiment were captured by the Communists.
Despite his heroic efforts, Miyamura's ordeal was far from over.
After being captured, the men were marched North for internment camps. Miyamura set out carrying his friend and fellow squad leader, Joe Annello, who had been more severely wounded.
Others who fell out of the march were shot or bayoneted. At gun point, the Chinese forced Miyamura to drop his friend. Miyamura initially refused but Annello convinced him. They said goodbye and Miyamura marched on.
He would spend over two years as a prisoner of war at Camp 1 in Changson.
Men of the 1st Marine Division capture Chinese Communists during fighting on the central Korean front, Hoengsong. Wikimedia Commons While he was there, the decision was made to award him the Medal of Honor for his actions on the night of April 24 and 25.
However, due to his staunch defense and the large numbers of enemy he killed, it was decided to keep his award classified until he could be repatriated for fear of retaliation by his captors.
Finally, on August 20, 1953 Miyamura was released from captivity as part of Operation Big Switch. When he arrived at Allied lines, he was taken aside and informed that he had been promoted to Sergeant and also that he had received the Medal of Honor.
Miyamura returned to Gallup after the war and settled down.
Then, in 1954, over a year after the war ended, a man walked into Miyamura's work – it was his old friend Joe Annello. Both had been sure that the other had died in captivity until Annello read Miyamura's story and traveled all the way to New Mexico to see if it was true.
Miyamura is still in Gallup, in the same house he bought all the way back in 1954.
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AMERICAN AEROSPACE EVENTS for August 8, 2020 FIRSTS, LASTS, AND SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENTS. THANKS TO HAROLD "PHIL" MYERS CHIEF HISTORIAN AIR FORCE INTELLIGENCE, SURVEILLANCE, AND RECONNAISSANCE AGENCY
8 August
1903: The Langley gasoline engine model plane was successfully launched from a catapult on a houseboat; however, the flight did not last very long and the vehicle was uncontrollable. For this reason, the Wrights received credit for the first sustained, controllable flight. (24)
1908: At Camp d'Auvours, France, Orville Wright broke French records for duration, distance, and altitude. (8)
1910: A civilian mechanic, Oliver G. Simmons, and Cpl Glen Madole built and installed the first tricycle landing gear on the Army Wright plane. (4) (24)
1913: Lt Harold Geiger (US Army) flew a military airplane for the first time in Hawaii at the Fort Kamehameha Aviation School. He flew a Curtiss E two-seater, Signal Corps No. 8, over Pearl Harbor. (21)
1933: The Navy accepted the variable-pitch propeller. (24)
1945: At NACA's Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, scientists published an article suggesting that it may possible to fly an aircraft with an atomic engine and brick-sized fuel source around the world nonstop several times. (8: Aug 90)
1946: The Convair XB-36 Peacemaker flew its first flight. The "Peacemaker" was a strategic bomber that was built by Convair and operated by the USAF from 1949 to 1959. The B-36 is the largest mass-produced piston-engine aircraft ever built. It had the widest wingspan of any combat aircraft ever built, at 230 feet. The B-36 was the first bomber capable of delivering any of the nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal from an internal bomb bay without aircraft modifications. With a range of 10,000 miles and a maximum payload of 87,200 lb., the B-36 was capable of intercontinental flight without refueling.
1947: A. L. Berger of Wright Field received the Thurman H. Bane Award for 1947 for work in developing new types of high temperature ceramic coatings for use in aircraft engines. (24)
1950: KOREAN WAR. Advancing N. Korean forces caused the 18 FBG to evacuate Taegu to Ashiya. The 307 BG, newly based in Okinawa, flew its first mission. (28)
1952: KOREAN WAR. Fifth Air Force fighters flew 285 close air support sorties, the highest daily total for the month. At night B-26s flew three voice broadcast sorties totaling almost four hours over enemy-held positions near the east coast. (28)
1955: Over Edwards AFB, the X-1A rocket research plane exploded on its B-29 carrier and was jettisoned to destruction. NACA pilot Joe Walker escaped safely. (3) (8: Aug 90)
1961: The USAF launched the Atlas F from Cape Canaveral for the first time. It was designed to store liquid fuels for a long time and for a short countdown. It was the only Atlas model put in hardened underground silo lift-launchers. (6) (24) Operation SWIFT STRIKE. This joint USAF-Army exercise at Fort Bragg began when USAF airplanes dropped 7,500 paratroops of the 82d Airborne Division into the area. (16)
1962: In tests to reveal the relationship of speed, altitude, and angle of attack to aerodynamic heating of an aircraft's exterior surfaces, the X-15 No. 2 reached nearly 900° F while flying at about 90,000 feet and about 2,900 MPH. Major Robert A. Rushworth flew the aircraft. (24)
1967: McGuire AFB received the last C-141 Starlifter, the "Garden State Starlifter," to be delivered to a MAC base from Lockheed. (18)
1969: The C-131A Samaritan flew its last domestic aeromedical evacuation mission. Samaritans flew nearly 437,000 accident-free flying hours to airlift some 400,000 patients during their 14-year history in domestic service. (18)
1972: An over-the-horizon radar system radar system, capable of detecting missiles as they penetrate the ionosphere, came under the operational command of ADC. This system had sites in both the Pacific and European areas.
1975: Five AFRES and ANG C-130s flew 104 sorties through 15 August to drop 1,400 tons of fire retardant on fires in southern California. (21)
1984: The first USAFE C-23 Sherpas entered USAF service in the European Distribution System. (16)
1990: Operation DESERT SHIELD. The first USAF transport, a C-141, arrived in Dhahran. The aircraft had a reserve aircrew. (16) (26)
1998: Boeing-Rocketdyne and Air Force Research Laboratory personnel conducted the first successful test burn of the RS-68 rocket engine at Edwards AFB. It was the first new large liquid-fuel rocket motor developed in the US in 25 years. (3)
2007: Air Force officials in Washington DC signed a production contract with Lockheed Martin to add 60 F-22 Raptors to the Air Force inventory by December 2011. The multiyear contract for the fifth-generation fighters saved the Air Force $411 million as compared to a traditional annual procurement program of three separate, single-year contracts for 20 aircraft. (AFNEWS, "Air Force Signs Multiyear Contract for F-22," 8 Aug 2007.) Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne certified the synthetic Fischer-Tropsch fuel blend for the B-52H Stratofortress in a ceremony at Edwards AFB, Calif. (AFNEWS, "SECAF Certifies Synthetic Fuel Blends for B-52H," 8 Aug 2007.) Elmendorf AFB, Alaska, welcomed its first F-22 Raptor. Its arrival made Elmendorf the second operational base in the Air Force and the first base in Pacific Air Forces to receive the new air superiority fighter. At Elmendorf, the F-22s joined the 3rd Wing and the Air Force Reserve Command's 477th Fighter Group. The 477th Fighter Group became the first Air Force Reserve unit to operate and maintain the F-22. (AFNEWS, "Elmendorf Welcomes F-22 Raptor," 8 Aug 2007.) .
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Thanks to Dr. Rich
The Secret History of the First Microprocesser, the F-14 and Me
THE STORY OF the first microprocessor, one you may have heard, goes something like this: The Intel 4004 was introduced in late 1971, for use in a calculator. It was a combination of four chips, and it could be programmed to do other things too, like run a cash register or a pinball game. Flexible and inexpensive, the 4004 propelled an entire industry forward; it was the conceptual forefather of the machine upon which you are probably reading this very article.
That's the canonical sketch. But objects, events, people—they have alternate histories. Their stories can often be told a different way, from a different perspective, or a what could have been.
This is the story, then, of how another first microprocessor, a secret one, came to be—and of my own entwinement with it. The device was designed by a team at a company called Garrett AiResearch on a subcontract for Grumman, the aircraft manufacturer. It was larger, it was a combination of six chips, and it performed crucial functions for the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its first flight this week. It was called the Central Air Data Computer, and it calculated things like altitude and Mach number; it figured out the angle of attack, key to landing and missile targeting; and it controlled the wing sweep, allowing the craft to be both maneuverable when the wings were at about 50 degrees and very, very fast when they were swept all the way back.
Ray Holt was one of the engineers for the Central Air Data Computer. He is probably not someone you have heard of—how could you have? He worked on the project, one of two people doing what's called the logic design, for two years, between 1968 and 1970, with a team that included his younger brother, Bill. He couldn't tell anyone about what they had built, and the project was kept quiet by the Navy and by Garrett for decades as other engineers were awarded credit for inventing firsts. Later, when he was able to talk about the device, people were skeptical. Maybe they were uncomfortable with history being revised.
I wanted to know more about him. Ray has always been in the margins of my life, ghosting around the edges of my consciousness. I remember visiting his parents' house in Compton, California, when I was very young. His family came to our place once, and I have a memory of chasing one of his three sons up the stairs. One time, when I was in my mid-twenties, I unknowingly sat next to him in the audience at a health food talk my mother was giving. She was surprised to see us sitting together when she came out afterward to say hello.
Ray Holt is 76 years old now. He lives in rural Mississippi, where he teaches high school STEM classes and runs a robotics nonprofit. Me, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, with my husband, a software engineer, and two sons; I've been an editor at WIRED for more than a decade. Ray and I reconnected over the summer, and after he told me his story, I wanted to learn more about the Central Air Data Computer and its place in history—and how his life might have branched around mine.
His career as an engineer almost didn't happen. Growing up in Compton, Ray made extra cash fixing bicycles and old tube radios; in high school he was class president and a great baseball player, but he was also a B student who had difficulty reading. His teachers sometimes discounted him. One once said to him, "I wish you were as good a student as Bill." Everybody loved Bill. Math genius, they said. When Ray took an aptitude test during his senior year, he was told that he had low mechanical ability. He was told, "Don't go into engineering."
He made his way to the University of Idaho; Bill was off to Stanford on a baseball scholarship. Ray was struggling until he took a course called Physics of Electricity. He aced it. He got an A in calculus, made the dean's list, and ultimately graduated with a degree in electronic engineering from Cal Poly Pomona, getting job offers from Bendix, Westinghouse, and Garrett AiResearch. Turns out, Bill was interviewing at Garrett too, for a job as a computer programmer. They both decided to work for Garrett, but maybe for Bill the decision was a little more layered: At the time, he was dating a young woman he had met at Stanford named Sally Wetzel, who happened to be the daughter of the president of Garrett AiResearch. Later, she would be Sally Fallon—my mother.
THE STORY OF my mom and Bill is an alternate history, one lightly sketched in the mind and emotionally charged, a little trickle of current.
Bill met Sally when she went to a party for incoming freshmen. "We were together from the first day I was at college. We were an item," Sally says. In addition to being smart, extremely athletic, good looking, and kind, "Bill was musical. He played the clarinet and had a beautiful voice. It was so much fun to harmonize with him in church."
Bill and Sally dated all through college.
When I was young, I'd find Bill's signature and inscriptions in books I idly plucked from shelves on bored afternoons. He had lovely cursive handwriting. Squirreled away in my possession is a book of e.e. cummings poetry that he gave Sally in 1967. This is the inscription:
To Sally on Christmas, 1967
Whatever distance lies between us (but cannot blind our eyes to the happiness we owe), howmuchever time separates us (but does not calm the fire of two minds and two hearts bound in one soul); we will always be "wonderful one times one" …..
I love you,
Bill
A shadow relationship. A reminder, perhaps, that my mother existed before I did, had her own noncanonical life that stretched back beyond the one that had instantiated me.
I had always kind of known about Bill, and I had always been curious about him. He was so handsome. So smart. Poetic, too. When I got older, I'd sometimes Google around to see what else I could find out about him. I knew he had worked at Garrett, and I once found a list of people who worked on something to do with the F-14. His name was on it. A Ray Holt was on the list too—must be some other Holt, I thought. Weird, though, right? I said to my husband. Who could that be? I didn't make the connection with the man who once visited my parents' house, or the one sitting next to me at the conference. I could have asked Sally, of course, but I never did.
My husband did some Googling of his own, more directed, efficient, unromantic, logical Googling, and found that Ray Holt had a website. That led my husband to a slim autobiography Ray had self-published called The Accidental Engineer. He gave it to Sally, who was flabbergasted. She emailed Ray and we all set up a Zoom call: She had known Bill had worked on some computations related to fighter planes, but she never knew Ray had been involved.
AND WHAT A plane to have been involved with. It is my personal truth that the F-14 is the most radical, hella gnarliest airplane in history. I was 13 when I first saw Top Gun in the theater; I had the soundtrack on cassette tape. Maybe the opening scene is etched into your neural network too, the '80s synth chords rising portentously as the Tomcats whine their way into position on the flight deck. Then the afterburners blast to life in the dawn's early light, and the thing punches into the atmosphere. It is arguably the star of the movie and it doesn't even chew gum or take its shirt off. As Dave Baranek, a former Naval Flight Officer and Topgun instructor, who operated the radar from the back seat of F-14s starting in the early 1980s, puts it, "We felt like rocket men flying this thing." The back seat is what made the F-14 an especially good vehicle for a movie: Maverick has a Goose, and you can have a friendship and a death and an emotional arc.
One of the things that made the plane so revolutionary was its wing sweep abilities. The Navy had wanted a plane that could go faster than Mach 2 but still be an agile dogfighter, easy (ish) to land on an aircraft carrier, and able, also, to fly relatively slowly so it could growl around the ocean on patrol. A wing that changes position enables this. Check out the scene in Top Gun where Maverick turns to head home after a dogfight. His wings are out and he's kind of floating slow in the air there. Then the wings sweep back and he zooms to the aircraft carrier. When it's time to land on that harrowingly short runway, the wings swing out for a lower landing speed that gives the pilots a fraction more time to react. (I am an unabashed apologist for the Blue Angels' F-18 Hornets that buzz the San Francisco office every year before Fleet Week. Next-generation ultra-octane fighter jet, yes, but still.)
When the wings of the F-14 are out, it has a lot of lift and it can fly relatively slowly. When they're further back, the plane is a maneuverable dog fighter. And when they're swept all the way back, the Tomcat goes fast.
The F-14 wasn't the first plane to have wings that changed position. The long-snouted F-111, which started flying in the late '60s, allowed the pilot to shift its wings mid-flight, grasping a lever on his left-hand side and sloooowly sliding it back. The F-14 wings adjusted themselves automatically—largely thanks to the Central Air Data Computer designed by the Garrett AiResearch team of two dozen engineers, including Bill and Ray.
On Ray's first day of work at Garrett, in Torrance, California, the personnel manager walked him over to a box and took off its lid. Inside was what looked like a big heavy transmission. "It was quite pretty, gears and cams and gold and silver or chrome," Ray says. He was looking at a mechanical flight computer for an F-4 Phantom. You are the only person in your department to have taken a computer design class, the man said. Your job is to turn this into a 100 percent electronic computer for a new airplane.
IT'S FALL 2020, and Ray is sitting in a workshop explaining to me how you design a microprocessor. Black metal-frame shelves to his right are filled with bins and boxes; wrenches dangle like piano keys from a wooden workbench behind him. Genial, kind, encouraging, supersmart, in wire-rimmed glasses, Ray often wears one of several Ole Miss baseball caps, but not today. He's at Wilkinson County Christian Academy, where he teaches subjects like computer science, electronics, and drafting. An array of orange tubs at the back of the room holds resistors, capacitors, wire, and other tinkerer's bits and pieces. "We are trying to find out what the kids are really interested in," he says. "Some like to build, some like to program, some like electricity."
Today, Ray teaches engineering classes at Wilkinson County Christian Academy; he also has a curriculum that he recently put online.
He glances down from the Zoom screen and then holds up a sketch of what looks like a sideways family tree of ovals and lines connecting and branching out. Each of these logic gates represents a mathematical operation inside the computer, which takes information about air speed and temperature and altitude gathered by probes on the nose and belly of the plane, feeds it to quartz analog sensors inside the Central Air Data Computer box, and turns it into digital information.
Ray walks me through how he and the team developed the system. One guy would work out the math, another would do the big-picture system design. Ray focused on the detailed implementation, sketching it out on paper. They built a physical prototype that put all the circuits in place. Bill programmed the Fortran simulator that helped check the team's work. Along the way, the manufacturer, a company called AMI, would assess the prototype. "They would say, well, we think the design will work, but the chips won't work because they're too big, or they're going to get too hot," he explains to me. "They're not going to be reliable. So you're gonna have to change this part." And the guys would go back and change the paper design and the prototyping and Bill would run the simulation again and they'd iterate until AMI said they'd be able to manufacture it.
Ray kept samples of the chips after they were manufactured by AMI and put together this album in 1971.
The Central Air Data Computer allowed co-processing, which means you could shove math calculations off onto other chips. It ran, Ray told me, what is called pipeline execution of instructions—the next instruction could be started while the previous instruction was being completed. Plus, it could be configured with multiple CPUs, if you wanted, and it was fully self-contained. This all meant it was flexible and expandable, and it was powerful and reliable and there wasn't anything like it in the world at the time.
When they were kids, the boys "fought like brothers": Bill would hide around corners and jump out and scare Ray. Once Ray knocked Bill's teeth out with a broom. But of their time at Garrett, Ray says, "Those were our best years together. We had lots of time to share intellectually—and play flag football."
I still possess several of Bill's books of poetry.
Ray served as best man when Bill and Sally got married in May 1970. The couple rented a little bungalow on 34th Street in Santa Monica for $250 a month, and sometimes a Garrett colleague and friend of Bill's, another engineer named John, would stop by. Things were good.
BILL WAS IN the office one Saturday in September, working on a parabolic reflector project with John, when he had a seizure and passed out. John found him on the floor. Bill was diagnosed with a brain tumor the size of a baseball. He died a week later, and the funeral service was held at the church where he and Sally had gotten married. The same people were there; the wedding party acted as pallbearers.
Sally had enrolled in a master's program at UCLA, and her first day of class was the day after Bill died. I cannot imagine the will it took to get in the car and drive there. She parked about a mile away from her classes and had to walk across campus, past the cheerleaders and the football field. "I thought to myself, well, the test is going to be if I can make this walk and hear all these things and smell the grass and not burst into tears," she says.
It took a while, but she made it.
I had known about Bill; I had known he died. But I hadn't known about this day, when Sally had to engineer her own way through awful sadness, until now. It's piercing: Writing a story for WIRED about Ray, this low-key not-uncle, somehow revives this gleaming not-father who once stood with Sally in the doorway to a different life that never happened.
She and John got married in 1972, and in 1973 they had me.
WHEN THE FIRST F-14 flew in December 1970, Popular Mechanics was rhapsodic:
"It will be … a fighter—a dogfighter in the old tradition. It will turn and roll with the best of them, even at supersonic speeds, keep up with most of them straight-and-level, and outshoot any of them with guns, rockets and missiles. It will fly fast and it will fly long.
In short, the F-14 is an air-superiority fighter, designed to clear the skies of anything that might threaten the fleet."
And the Central Air Data Computer worked. Three years ago, Ray spoke to a noncommissioned officer who had been in charge of maintenance for the F-14s and she told him that they never changed out the technology.
It was a terrific breakthrough, to have turned a mechanical thing into an electronic device, especially one that was so rugged and accurate and dependable and could perform at the extreme temperatures and stress levels required by the military. But Garrett then simply turned to the next contract; it made lots of aerospace systems, for lots of customers. NASA even.
Ray wrote a paper called "Architecture of a Micro-processor," for Computer Designmagazine, but the Navy and Garrett didn't want it published. Security reasons. Indeed, one of the hardest things for Ray after Bill died was the fact that the F-14 project was secret. Which meant Bill's part in it was secret. "I had no opportunity to brag about Bill's contribution," Ray says.
My mother stayed in touch with Bill and Ray's parents over the years. Their father, Mark, would garden with Sally in the months after Bill died. Mark was part Cherokee, and he was very proud of that fact. "He would never say he was from Oklahoma," Ray says. "He would say, 'I'm from the Cherokee Nation.'" Before Oklahoma became a state, nation members were offered an allotment of land, typically between 80 and 160 acres, a large portion of which the government took back over the ensuing decades. Mark was part of a class action lawsuit against the government, and when Ray was in high school Mark got a check. A dollar an acre. He tore it up. "He never talked again about Oklahoma
Ray designed other microprocessors for other companies; in the early '70s he and his business partner contracted with Intel to teach other engineers how to use the 4004 and the 8008—that was a little weird. And here's a cool thing: He also designed a flexible and easy-to-program single-board computer called the Sym. Bart Everett, who ultimately became the technical director for robotics at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific, used it inside two sentry robots he built called Robart I and Robart II. The next generation, Robart III, was "one of the most significant autonomous systems in the world," he says. Kind of an early precursor to (if you squint your eyes and don't trace the family tree too assiduously) much more famous and advanced machines, like the Boston Dynamics robots. Ray was a vice president at Honeywell for a while. He did some consulting. And when he retired, he went to Oklahoma to see his family's land. He spent eight years there, occasionally visiting the houses his family had lived in, and when he found the deed to his family's original plot, he went there too. It's some kind of Army training center now, so he couldn't go on it. He just looked over the fence to see the land that should have been his.
When Ray was about to leave Oklahoma, he got a call from an old friend, Dolphus Weary, a pastor and racial justice advocate. He asked if maybe Ray, who had founded a group called Christian Athletic Association back in 1977, would come down for a little while and help local Christian ministries build websites. (The way Weary tells it, Ray is the one who called him—history is told a number of different ways.)
Liz Patin first met Ray at a robotics competition, and today they are frequent collaborators.
So Ray moved to Mississippi. He was supposed to be there for a year; that was a decade ago. He got his master's in education and established Mississippi Robotics, which runs after-school programs for kids all over the state, holding robot competitions twice a year. He teaches engineering classes. Liz Patin, a teacher who often works with Ray, told me that Ray is most passionate about the underdogs, and being sure kids don't get discounted and left behind. "Just finding something that a kid can do well, and promoting it, and making sure that the kid is aware of it. You think you can go conquer the world after you talk to him." She calls the kids "little Ray Holts." I love that.
WAS THE CENTRAL Air Data Computer the first microprocessor? Well, histories are complicated. In 1998, Ray finally got clearance from the Navy to tell people about it, and The Wall Street Journal published a piece titled "Yet Another 'Father' of the Microprocessor Wants Recognition From the Chip Industry." The Intel engineers who share the title told the paper that the Central Air Data Computer was bulky, it was expensive, it wasn't a general purpose device. One expert said it was not a microprocessor because of how the processing was distributed among the chips. Another—Russell Fish—said it was, noting, "The company that had this technology could have become Intel. It could have accelerated the microprocessor industry at the time by five years." But other people around that time also wanted to claim the title of father of the microprocessor; there were some big patent fights, and not everyone even agrees on the exact definition of a microprocessor in the first place.
"The discussion," says Fish, who today runs an IP licensing company called Venray, "is not a technical one, it is a philosophical one." At one point he wrote that the 4-bit 4004 could "count to 16," while the 20-bit Central Air Data Computer "was evaluating sixth order polynomial expressions rapidly enough to move the control surfaces of a dogfighting swing-wing supersonic fighter." (And anyway, Ray notes that the Intel system actually required a number of external circuits for most applications.) When I spoke to Fish recently, he said he had gone back and read through the documentation. "What Ray Holt did was absolutely brilliant," he says. "Particularly given the timeframe. Ray was generations ahead, algorithmically and computationally."
Official histories have a way of hardening, but notice the very careful language on Intel's website today when it describes the 4004 (emphasis mine): "the first general-purpose programmable processor on the market."
The device Ray and the team had invented, this noncommercial, not-on-the-market microprocessor, was a stumped branch on a family tree. It flew a plane that could go fast and slow and fire missiles with unprecedented precision, but no next thing was born from it. A brilliant and beautiful secret butterfly that didn't beget other butterflies.
Except.
Ray says he likes to find out "what the kids are really interested in." For Skylar DiBenedetto that was VR and 3D printing.
What Ray is doing now is launching another set of little histories, individual ones, as he nudges hundreds of students down a different path, through a different set of logic gates. "As a robotics teacher, it's astronomical, really, what he does," says Skylar DiBenedetto, a former student of his. Ray and Liz helped Skylar discover VR and 3D printing, and now she's a freshman at Ole Miss, the first person in her immediate family to go to college, where she helps run the virtual reality lab.
And he's not stopping. In our last conversation, just before Thanksgiving, he describes the after-school program for public school kids he and some other collaborators want to start after the new year. He is wearing a cap commemorating the last flight of the F-14, and a cross is affixed to the doorframe behind him. A friend of a friend has donated a big space, and he and Liz Patin and a few others are going to talk to local leaders and teachers and set it up. Maybe down the line he'll even raise enough money to execute on his idea for a Christian-based STEM high school—the sketches for it look amazing, with classrooms and labs arranged around a central robot-competition area. When I ask Ray if it's a stretch to say that his work to connect with kids is a little bit reminiscent of the way he was able to connect with Bill when they were working on the F-14 project, he says, "Not a stretch at all." Maybe they could have even started a company together. "I think we probably could have made some useful products."
Ray ultimately decided to transition out of a cutthroat technology industry and shift his focus to youth sports, describing it as a way for him to keep a connection with Bill. Unless you follow your passion, he says "life can get useless, boring, and without meaning."
On the weekend before this piece is due to publish, I find myself gazing idly at the bookshelf under the television and my eyes focus on a small volume called The Portable James Joyce. It looks old, and I can't remember ever actually opening it, but something scratches at my brain. I pull it out and turn to the front. It's inscribed. William B. Holt 1/6/65. I flip to the table of contents. A few stories are underlined lightly in pencil, including "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and "The Dead." A young man, organizing his early days at university, five years before a death he could never have foreseen, reading a short story that ends with a man wondering about a boy his wife used to know, one who died.
Bill's death too seems so unfair, so premature. If he had lived, it would wink Ray and Sally onto different paths, maybe with more recognition, less heartbreak. But then I would vanish, becoming exchanged for another self, on another timeline, a branch of a different tree. Instead I have had the pleasure of getting to know Ray, this curious not-relative. Someone from my … past? Present? Lineage? Not-family? Families, like histories, tend to prefer clean, stable lines. This circuit starts there and goes to that. This computes, the robot will move, the plane will fly. The potential is fulfilled.
But life is tangled, conditions change: The wing sweeps, the man dies, the innovation is lost to time. So we set a new course, we take a breath, we launch ourselves into the sky.
This story has been updated to reflect minor edits to the piece as it was prepared for the April 2021 issue of the magazine.
Sarah Fallon is the deputy web editor at WIRED, where she works on cross-platform projects, digital packages, and other broad editorial initiatives. Previously she was articles editor for the magazine. Before that she was a senior editor focusing on data visualization stories, essays, features, and packages. Three packages she helmed... Read more
TIPS: SARAH_FALLON@WIRED.COM
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