Thank you list, Part IV continues...

with thanking the people I encountered in my working life.

It begins with my first permanent duty station, at Homestead AFB in Southern Florida.  First on the list is my very first commanding officer, Kenneth W. Saylor.  He'd been the Director of Base Administration, which is a misleading title.  It's the function that handles all of the truly administrative areas of the base, file management, forms and publications management and so on.  It's an important job and yet an unimportant job and he somehow managed to get himself fired from that job.

In the military, officers who get "fired" don't get kicked out of the service.  An officer can only be dismissed from the service by a court-martial board.  Fired officers are given relatively unimportant postings until they get tired of it and retire, or are forced to retire.  He was given command of the Group Headquarters Squadron, another strictly administrative post where he was the designated squadron commander of all of the people who weren't assigned to other squadrons.  The maintenance, operations, personnel and other such people who weren't commanded by a squadron commander, but worked directly for a division director.  As the commander of the Group Headquarters Squadron, he was actually the boss of one first sergeant, one unit training manager, one dormitory manager, one civilian secretary and three administrative types.  I was one of those.  Now you have background on a number of the people I'm about to describe.

What did I learn from Lt Col Saylor?  That you should be very careful about reaching beyond your grasp.  For some unknown reason, he was tape-recording all of his phone conversations with officers that outranked him and having his civilian secretary transcribe them into Memos for the File.  When the Wing Commander found out about this, he fired him again and told him to put in his retirement papers.  Which he did, although not without protest.  If you're doing something that you know will piss the boss off, you need to think long and carefully about it before doing it.

Then there was the First Sergeant, Hollie Meadows.  He was what we refer to as RSOAD, which is an acronym for Retired, Still On Active Duty.  I never did find out what he'd done before becoming a First Sergeant and it isn't important.  He did as little work as possible, came in late, left early and yet, taught me two very valuable lessons.  One is that you go where the work is.  There were three places he went, three afternoons each week.  The pizza pub, the NCO club and the bowling alley.  He hung out there, drinking coffee and made himself available to the troops who didn't want to have to go see him in his office.  They could go see him anonymously.  The second lesson, which I've heard other places, is that it's easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.   When a new commander I'm about to comment on took over, he wasn't aware what MSgt Meadows was doing on those afternoons when he departed early.  At first he was very pissed off about it.  He asked me, the youngest in the office to "rat" on MSgt Meadows.  When I told him what he was actually doing, he later called him in and told him he should have just told him what he was doing and that he was fine with it.  But if he'd asked, he might have been told "no".

That next commanding officer was Lt Col Godfrey.  He'd been an aircraft maintenance officer after his flying days were over and he'd been a good one.  But the new Director of Maintenance wanted someone else in his billet and we got him as our new commander.  He was a good commanding officer and he made the most of his staff.  His lesson was surround yourself with experts and then listen to their expertise before making your own decision.  He didn't always do what we on his staff recommended he do, but he always listened, asked good questions and then made up his own mind.  I'll confess now something I'd sworn to keep secret.  He gave me the power of the "pen", since I could sign his name in an exact replica of his own signature, with the understanding that it was a power that was to be used on a very limited, sparing basis, and only when it was something trivial but urgent.  I never abused that power and preferred to just get him to sign things himself.  But I felt trusted and valued under his command.

Our next commander was a Lt. Colonel whose name I won't mention because of an anecdote I'm going to relate.  He'd been a command pilot and worked in several operations slots before there was some incident that resulted in his being removed from functioning involving operations and given this strictly administrative role.  He didn't moan or groan and took to it like a duck to water.  He worked hard at being a good CO, got involved in visiting our intramural sporting events and hung out in the dorm on occasion with those of us who lived there.

He taught me to never take anything at face value, and to ask questions when something doesn't seem right.  How did he teach me this lesson?  We had an airman in our unit that was a lot like Corporal Klinger on M*A*S*H but without the dresses.  He wanted out of the service very badly, but not badly enough to commit any infractions that would have gotten him a less than Honorable Discharge.  Finally one day, he marched into the Commander's office and closed the door behind him.  He declared "sir, I'm gay and I want out of the Air Force."  The reports I got on what happened next are almost identical.  The commander got up from his chair, unbuckled and unzipped his uniform trousers and dropped them and said "prove it."  The frightened airman ran from the office and never bothered the CO again about a discharge.  The only discrepancy between the two stories is whether or not the CO dropped his boxers in addition to his uniform trousers.  I think that in the long run that detail is relatively unimportant.

Then there was my final commanding officer while I was at Homestead, another Lt. Colonel whose name I won't mention, who had been an aircraft maintenance officer without ever having been a pilot.  He'd managed to derail his shot at promotion to full Colonel and was very bitter about it.  One of the many lessons I learned from him (and there were some positive ones too) was you never make your boss look bad in front of one of his or her peers.  Another Lt. Colonel was in his office discussing an airman that he wanted to see discharged right away.  The CO called me in and said "start a 39-12 against so and so".  39-12 refers to then Air Force Manual 39-12, which involved administrative discharges under less than honorable conditions.  I, being an expert in the topic said, "sir, you can't do that.  Under present conditions she doesn't qualify for 39-12, only 39-10."  Yes, 39-10 refers to Air Force Regulation 39-10, which can also lead to a less than honorable conditions discharge, but is limited to the types of relatively minor offenses this female airman had committed.  He yelled at me that I was to never correct him, ever again and threw me out of his office.

She got a discharge under AFR 39-10 in the end.  I was right and he was wrong.  But what I should have done was lock my heels, say "yes sir" and tell him later that we had to use the other rules for her discharge and not to have made him look like he wasn't in control of his subordinates.

I'll get to Zachary W. Taylor and John J. Major in my next list, but there are just a few more folks to mention before I'm done with those I encountered at Homestead.  Next up is TSgt Willie Richardson (and like all of the people I've referred to earlier in this list, he's long-since retired and quite possibly deceased).  He was my immediate supervisor for much of my time at Homestead.  He was an excellent NCO in terms of knowing his administrative technician skills but he was a lousy supervisor who took advantage of his subordinates.  I learned that you need to not use people who work for you, but cherish and value them instead.  When he moved out of the barracks into his own apartment, there was a large, expensive rug in his room and he wanted to leave it there.  He had nowhere to put it.  I was moving into his room, because the room's latrine adjoined the barrack's manager's office and had to be occupied by a staff member or left vacant.  He insisted that the rug had to stay and I agreed.

But when he was approaching retirement, he wanted his run rolled up and moved to the storage space, prior to shipping it to wherever he was going and he wanted me to do it.  I refused and told him it was his rug, he should move it himself.  I hadn't wanted it and I'd only let him keep it there because he insisted.  I'd had to spend all my time living in that room walking on eggshells because I couldn't possibly let anything bad happen to his rug.  When I refused to help him, he grabbed me and threw me against the hallway wall.  When I started to step away, he did it again.  I told him that if he laid another finger on me, he wouldn't be retiring, he'd be getting a court-martial for assault.  There was a witness, and I could have pressed charges.  The CO talked me out of doing so.  But that is not how you treat subordinates.

One more, but then I'll stop, however there are more people at Homestead that I need to thank for their lessons, so that's where I'll pick up in Part V.  But I can't finish this without mentioning Sgt. Edmond R. Williams, aka "Fast Eddie".  Fast Eddie was the guy who got me settled in when I first arrived.  He was a master scrounger, super-master manipulator and got more done by trading favors than working hard.  He taught me to scrounge, to manipulate and was such a good teacher, I ended up being better at those skills than he was.  Then he said "my work is done" and he went off to England.  Thanks, Eddie.  You were a great teacher.  The finest lesson he taught me was as long as you follow the rules, no one will end up caring how you got things done, as long as you get them done.