Lubbock, Texas, from my windshield, Part II

In the summer of 1989 we were finally heading back to the good ‘ol US of A after six years overseas. I reasoned that I’d never be promoted to Major as I became an officer after almost nine years of enlisted service. Besides, the Air Force was slowing down it’s promotion boards in order to force people like me, with a lot of enlisted time, into retirement. I had planned for years to one day be an Air Force Reserve Officer Training Course (AFROTC) instructor before I retired. To that end I got a Masters Degree in Education while stationed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany (1984-1986). I was pretty sure this would be my last military assignment.

I was accepted to be an AFROTC instructor and received an assignment to Texas Tech in Lubbock, TX. Before we left Belgium I was contacted by the Inspector General unit of the United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) and asked to become an inspector for the Munitions Maintenance Units. As the Maintenance Supervisor for the MUNSS at Kleine Brogel, I had helped to achieve the best inspection record for any MUNSS in Europe to date. However, I thought it was time to get my family back to the US so the older kids could be settled into one place for their last years of high school. I declined the invitation to go back to Ramstein and off we went to Lubbock, again.

We got to Texas in June and immediately began looking for a house. We decided we wanted to buy a place that was big enough to be comfortable for our family but we didn’t want to live right in the heart of town. We didn’t want to rush into buying a house so an old friend of ours from our first time of living in Lubbock, Steve Huddle, rented us a small house across the street from his house. We used borrowed furniture, a roll-away bed, and air mattresses for a couple of months until we could find a house to buy and have our furniture delivered. We found a house about twelve miles outside Lubbock, just north of Wolfforth,  and began the process to buy it. At the same time I had to go to Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama, for six weeks to attend Academic Instructor Course (AIC) in order to be ready to teach when classes started in August. It was a very hot summer (especially hot for us after living in cool and wet Belgium for the last three years) and the little house we were renting didn’t have central air. The family was pretty uncomfortable there for the six weeks I was away in Alabama.