Page 77 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

around this two by four-mile island. There’s not as much fog, and it is still another
month before we get our first snow. But sometimes, we get very high winds when the
typhoons that are far to the south swing far enough north to affect us. One day, our
radio-sonar airman, Glenn Law, was trying to launch a balloon when a strong blast of
wind dragged him several feet before he could release it properly.

On October 13, we got our first snow of the fall, but it didn’t stay on the ground. We
had been noticing the distant mountains on Attu becoming covered with more snow
over the past few weeks. We were expecting a big storm to hit us the next day with
winds as high as 90 mph, so I spent the day nailing strips of wood over the tar paper
covering the chapel so it wouldn’t be torn off by the wind.

A couple of days later, I went to see a movie, “The Clown”, starring Red Skelton. He
died at the end of the movie which made it very sad. We also saw a short subject about
water skiing in Cypress Gardens, Florida. It really looked good to see the warm
sunshine again. I went to the dry cleaners to pick up a pair of my light gray, wool pants.
I had spilled coffee on them and it didn’t come out. I finally decided to rinse them in
some warm water and Tide detergent. It turned the water very dark, but the pants came
out clean as a whistle!

Things have been changing on Shemya since last summer. The first big change was the
removal of the large 35 mm movie projectors, and replacing them with 16 mm ones.
The movies still looked good, but it saved a lot of money spent on film. In September,
three hundred engineers were shipped out, and there were very few coming in to
replace them. They had finally removed the organ from the chapel, and I had just
started training my replacement at the weather station. Our commanding officer finally
cleared me from duty and gave me a character rating of excellent, and an efficiency
rating of excellent.

CHAPTER 20 - Farewell to Alaska
On November 2, our winds started to increase. By evening they reached 70 mph, and
the rain was very heavy. I was down to the last two chapters of Revelation in my RSV
Bible. I read the next to the last chapter the next morning and the final chapter on the
plane flying back to Anchorage. When I got off the plane at Elmendorf, the temperature

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