The Dorm and Beyond

I can't remember if we referred to our housing units at Keelser AFB back in 1973 as "barracks" or "dorms" (it has been 40 years), so I'll just refer to it as the dorm (not that it matters)... And this is probably going to be one of those "dry and not particularly interesting" posts, so - my apologies...

To get started, I've annotated an aerial picture of Keelser as it was back in the day:

 

The building labelled "D" was my dorm (no longer there), "W" is the infamous west gate, "C" was the original Cody Hall (where the radar repair school was) and "A" is Allee Hall (basic electronics school)... Yeah - the march to Allee Hall was a serious pain in the butt (almost 2 miles each way), which was one of the reasons I was so glad they let me take basic electronics self paced. That allowed me to start radar school at Cody Hall (a much shorter distance) a lot sooner than originally scheduled ...

The dorm buildings in the triangle had 3 floors. The "A shift" (6AM to noon) students were on the ground floor, "B shift" (noon to 6PM) on the second, and "C shift" (6PM to midnight) on the top floor, together with some B shift overflow. Each floor was divided into multiple hallways called "bays", each with it's own latrine and 6 (or so?) rooms housing two students each. As I recall, the bays were identified by letters but I'm not sure how many there were per floor (I'm guessing A through G) - and I vaguely remember spending my last few months in 1st floor E bay. (That seems really familiar, and not just because of the online auction site).

The dorms rooms were quite "spartan", although they did come equipped with large fuzzy spiders, cockroaches and assorted other critters (including tree frogs)... Now - I'm not saying the place was teeming with them... It's just that the Mississippi Gulf Coast seems to be a perfect environment for crawly things and it's all but impossible to get rid of them. But I'll save the "vermin stories" for later...

Here's a pictures of one of my (many) roommates from when I was in basic electronics:

 I seem to recall he was Cuban-American - and (as you can see) smoking was allowed in the dorms... The rooms were clearly "institutional". There was a bed on either side with a table in between, and each of us had a (painted wood) locker / closet / drawer thing located on either side of the door - and that was about it... Judging from the view out  the window, we were on the second floor (I was on B shift at the time) on the north side of the building (B or C bay?) .

The electrical system in the dorms was marginal so we were not allowed to have any appliances of any sort in our rooms. That is why the existence of "cheese in a aerosol can" was so incredibly important. The BX had all the available flavors in great quantities (together with a large variety of snack crackers) because that (and beer) was pretty much what we all lived on between meals (you were not allowed to take food from the chow halls).

BTW: There was one notable exception to the "no appliances" rule. A guy on the 1st floor whose dorm room was (intentionally) closest to the TIs' office he had this old "percolator" style electric coffee pot from which he supplied the TIs with their first cup of coffee in the morning... Yeah - that pot was beyond gross. It had never been cleaned, and he never dumped out the leftover coffee. Every morning he simply added fresh grounds, topped it off with water and re-percolated it... I wouldn't touch the stuff, but he couldn't function without it and the TIs loved it. Apparently it did tend to wake you up :-)

I also vaguely recall that there were a number of day rooms scattered throughout the building. One of them had a ping-pong table and others had TVs but I hardly spent any time in them... My only specific memory of watching TV is from a Saturday afternoon when one of the guys in the room was sipping away at a big bottle of cough syrup... His buddies were like "Blood - what the hell are you doing? That sh*t's dangerous! ... You do know that you can afford real booze, right?" ... And he was like "Yeah... But I like this better..." I'm not sure why that particular event stuck in my memory. I guess I'd never encountered anyone with a cough syrup habit before :-)

Historical note: That was back before "blood" was a gang reference... The term was similar to "brother" except it implied something deeper. For example, a white guy could address a black acquaintance as brother, but calling him blood would not have gone over very well...)

It's probably obvious that I'm struggling with how to tell the "Keesler story"... I suspect I'll just end up muddling through it one post at a time (like I've been doing for the the past 3+ years).

And next up will be "marching"...