Okay. You want to shut this off? No, that’s just a message come through. I’ll make it quiet.
That was from Tristan. You know, I came back from overseas, and I guess I was on a pretty big high. I had accomplished much more than I ever anticipated I would have.
And you came home. And when I came home, and they assigned me to San Angelo, to the dam base over there, a fighter pilot with more combat time than 90 percent of the other ones. Yeah.
And I was getting a crappy job over there in engineering, because I had my mechanical experience before. Engineering, I was doing a bunch of ragtag old planes. At a time when everybody was getting out of that, I’d come down into my office, and one of the soldiers in charge of this department, he was getting out of the army, and I had to try to find somebody else to take his place, and a bunch of crappy things over there.
And I got so disgusted. And I also think that my long stay in combat, I kind of had what they called combat fatigue, and I didn’t realize that all of the strain that I’d been through had affected me mentally a little bit. Oh, yeah.
Go ahead. And so I just couldn’t take it. And so when they came by and said, are you supposed to sign this paper, that I’d sign up for the indefinite stay in the Air Force, I said, I ain’t going to do that.
I didn’t want to sign up. Well, I didn’t really realize that meant that I was going to get out, but that’s what that meant. Explain that.
So the next thing, I had orders to be discharged. And I could have remade that, but like I say, I think I was kind of disgusted with things, and I just said, what the hell, I’m going to get out. And I did the thing I didn’t think I’d ever do, get out of the service.
And life went on from there.
He was farming there, he and she and Lorraine, and I took him to the Officer’s Club a couple of times. I was out to farm visiting on the farm there. Eola is where he’s at, that’s right close to San Angelo.
Oh yeah, that’s right.
That was getting me down. I didn’t believe I could handle that too long. Where were there, what, three years? Three years.
Roughly. Again, I was very… The good thing I got out of that was a cancer machine over there. Yeah, formaldehyde is a known percentage.
Oh, I was working in it at 90% concentration. I couldn’t breathe it, the air with it. And walked in it.
It cured my athlete’s foot pretty good, though. Well, that’s good. You wouldn’t want to trade that for cancer.
Well, I remember working there one night. It’s amazing what… I don’t see how in the hell that plant worked, anyhow. It was a really strange process, which hadn’t been used since La Quinta, practically.
When you take butane and propane, you bring it in there, and you’ve got a furnace with natural gas in it, and pipes running back and forth. And you run that butane through those pipes, in that red-hot pipes. Okay.
And when it came out, they’d squinch it. They’d drop it in the water. That was the most critical point, and the operator on that thing, there was just a few of them that could do it.
They had to catch it at exactly the right temperature. If you let it go too far, it’d explode. And if you didn’t… It converted the chemicals, the makeup of the chemicals.
Changed, yeah. Chemically changed. Chemically changed that mixture.
They’d drop it in the water and squinch it. Well, the water that came out made formaldehyde. That’s where they got the formaldehyde.
And the rest of the light stuff made ethanol and methanol and… Oh, okay. All the alcohols. And so forth came out of the other end, the light ends.
Well, I was working in separating after the primary unit where the first separations took place. Separating the chemicals. Had huge, those huge towers.
Right, they were distillation. Constant, you know, the steam would condense. I remember seeing them.
And I worked in that. And we made methanol and ethanol and formaldehyde. No, the formaldehyde… Yeah, I worked in the formaldehyde unit too.
It was a separate unit I worked in, yeah. And they had that formaldehyde constant. You see, they wanted to concentrate it more.
When it came out of the quench water, it was diluted. They had to remove the moisture out of it to get the formaldehyde. Well, to do that, they had great big vessels.
And to make it boil better, they put a vacuum jet on it. Instead of having, you’re boiling it with a minus pressure. Yeah, it’s like being up in altitude.
Yeah, well, they suck it more out than the boiler would make it. So you had a minus pressure in there. And we used centrifugal pumps.
You try getting a prime on a damn pump that’s got a pump from a minus pressure source. I spent a whole night working. Oh, I remember you talking about that.
Damn, we’d finally get mad and just cut the damn vacuum off and get some pressure on it. Get the pump started. Get the prime on the damn pump.
But at that time, you was walking with formaldehyde on the floor, you know. And we got to where, hell, you could breathe that stuff, it wouldn’t kill you. And we had to clean up people there, you know, clean up around there in the units.
And one of the guys broke a glass tube to give us the level in the tanks, you know. He broke one of those and the formaldehyde came out. And boy, we had to leave him out of there.
He couldn’t breathe. It didn’t bother us at all. We got so used to it.
But we had a gas master where we could use them if it got too bad. So we had a—it was a very big cement thing. And all the pumps where we worked were underneath the cement.
And that cement thing was an evaporation thing. We had all our coils up there, and there was water, constantly cooling coils up there where they’d cool the steam and convert it back to liquids. So we were working underneath that.
Not an electric pump in the place. It was all steam turbine pumps because no electricity sparks. Yeah, sparks are not good.
All the lights were specially, especially encased things. And the lamp fumes were so you could hardly breathe.