A TAC Missileers “Mini-Reunion” was held March 20th and 21st, 2014 in Cocoa, Florida. The highlight of the gathering was a visit to the Air Force Space and Missile Museum at Cape Canaveral.
Be sure to see George Mindling’s blog (A Blog for Something Really Important) for a summary of the event.
If you would like to take your own ‘”arm chair” tour of the Air Force Space & Missile Museum, click here.
Really neat tour. Nice to see those well preserved old missiles in the hanger.
Sure wish Sid Smoot had attended so we could get to the bottom of the unsolved mystery of “Who Launched Captain Arthur’s Hard Hat”.
Sid wrote about it previously. Captain Arthur (1962) replaced our much beloved Captain VanSaun at Pad 21 and made it his personal mission to bring spit & polish to the Pad 21 Launch Crew AKA the rat pack. After a week or two of him marching around the launch pad wearing his gleaming hard hat while barking orders at us it was time for his first launch. After the launch he reached for his hard hat so he could inspect the launch bay and low & behold it was missing…………….
Rumor had it that Captain Arthur “might’ve” launched his own hat.
The inquisition followed, we were individually brought into the Captain’s Office and grilled, threatened, cajoled, etc.
So here we are +50 years later and nobody knows for sure.
The TAC Missileers 2014 Mini-Reunion was a great couple of days, with outstanding people all.
The CapeCanaveral Tour was indeed the high-light of the Reunion, with an excellent and totally knowledgeable tour guide. It took me right back to my time and place on the Cape, with the 1st Pilotless Bomber Squadron in 1953 and early 1954, prior to our deployment to Bitburg, Germany.
All Super-Kudos to Max Butler to arranging, organizing and conducting this very pleasurable and memorable event for all who attended. Huge Thanks, Max, as always, for your doing all this for everyone. George Mindling, a terrific guy, was our historian on-site and added much to this experience.
John Gibbs, Missileer
wow….that was quite a tour………I remember a lot of the old birds from the tour I spent at cape
Canaveral,61-63…….thanks a lot for making it available……