From Munitions To Microchips (Bruce Davenport)

The draft, Vietnam, a brand-new marriage, and orders that change without warning. Bruce Davenport walks us through a life shaped by service and problem-solving, from growing up in small town Michigan to joining the United States Air Force in 1969 with one clear goal: get solid training and avoid being sent to “pound the ground” in Vietnam. What follows is a candid Air Force veteran story with real-world details about enlistment hurdles, munitions work, and what it feels like to stand out overseas as an American servicemember. 

We talk about starting married life at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, traveling the island, and navigating the uneasy mix of hospitality and resentment that can surround US bases. Bruce also shares the career whiplash of fighting to cross-train into electronics and auto-tracking radar systems, extending his enlistment to qualify, then getting pulled back into munitions and sent on an isolated tour in Thailand. His perspective is honest about sacrifice, especially the cost of time away from family, and clear about respecting those who saw direct combat. 

The second half shifts to the civilian career arc: using the GI Bill, realizing engineering was the wrong fit, and choosing the technician path that matched how he’s wired. That decision leads to 34 years at Xerox, where he witnesses the technology transformation from mechanical copiers to digital systems, early word processing, and storage that shrank from room-sized limitations to the pocket-sized power we take for granted today. We end with retirement, faith, community service, and why he refuses to “rust out.” 

If you care about military transition, the GI Bill, electronics careers, or finding purpose after retirement, you’ll get a lot from this conversation. Subscribe, share with a veteran or a fixer in your life, and leave a review with the lesson that stuck with you most.

Transcript

Meeting Bruce Davenport

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today is Thursday, May 21st, 2026. We're talking with Bruce Davenport, served the United States Air Force. So good morning, Bruce. Good morning. Thanks for having me at your home.

SPEAKER_02 0:10

It's a joy to have you. All right.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Well, I'm excited. So we'll just get started. We'll ask the first question, and that is always when and where were you born?

SPEAKER_02 0:19

I was born in Kalamazoo in 1949, but I was actually raised in the Tawas area. That's where I went to school. That's where I graduated. And uh graduated in 67.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Well, so how old were you when you went from Kalamazoo to Tawas? Under a year. Okay, so you don't remember Kalamazoo at all?

SPEAKER_02 0:41

My father was uh county ag agent, and he took a position in IASCO County. Uh-huh. And that's where how I ended up there. Oh, awesome. Now, do you have brothers and sisters? I have I had an older brother who is now gone. I have an older sister who is uh the spouse of a veteran, and I have a younger brother who lives in Alaska. He was also Army.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Oh, okay. So military in your family, don't you?

SPEAKER_02 1:05

Military in the family. Our father was post-World War II, but he was in the army as

Family Roots And Early Influences

SPEAKER_02 1:10

well.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

Uh, tell me about your mother. My mom was awesome. Just to put up with dad. Um, but mother came also from uh my grandfather was military, and two of her brothers and her brother-in-law were all military. Um, again, my mom was the firstborn of this family, and uh, she was just absolutely wonderful, encouraging individual.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Okay. And was she she was she a stay-at-home mom then, or did she work outside the house?

SPEAKER_02 1:42

For the most part, mother was stay-at-home.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 1:45

But as all of us kids got older, and especially as my older brother and sister, even well, even before my sister left, uh, mother had a part-time job working at the bakery in Tallas. And ultimately, she ended up also working for social services when uh she after my younger brother graduated. Mom moved to Lansing and finished her degree and worked for the Department of Social Services here in Ingham County.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Okay. All right. So she sounds like she kept busy herself.

SPEAKER_02 2:17

All the time, mother was busy. After she retired, the problem was we couldn't keep track of her. Right. She traveled a lot with my sister and brother-in-law still in the Air Force, traveling in Europe and Japan. Mother often would take time after she retired to go and visit them in foreign countries.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Wow. Good for her.

SPEAKER_02 2:40

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Good for her. So talk to me about growing up. What was it like growing up in Taos?

SPEAKER_02 2:45

Taos is a small town. Yeah. And one of those places where you knew everybody pretty much. And we were we had the liberty back then, it was safe. Where my brother, my younger brother and I, uh, we were just a year apart and our friends. Summertime, we'd jump on our bicycles, we'd go down to the uh beach on Tawas Bay, go swimming, or we just ride our bikes out to um the old Army surplus store. Or we traveled all, we just rode around. Everybody knew the lights come on, you go home.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Right, right. That was kind of a thing.

SPEAKER_02 3:27

And so we had that opportunity to do that. And being in a small town the way that we were, there were plenty of things to see and do. But our biggest thing was just playing around home. Uh, I ultimately ended up getting a job at the local theater in uh in Taos, in East Tawas, where why that's where I began my work was when I got my social security number. So, how old how old were you when you started working there? I believe I was 16. Oh, that's exciting. Yeah, but I didn't live there, I worked there for very long, but yeah. Uh then after um after I graduated from high school, I moved from Dallas down to Lansing to go to college. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

And where'd you go to college?

SPEAKER_02 4:11

Went to Lansing Community College for two years, studied to be an auto mechanic, uh-huh, and uh enjoyed the that training, though I did not ultimately pursue that. That was my and it was not wasted. I've enjoyed having that kind of knowledge.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

Yeah. Turn it a wrench, I think, is is therapeutic sometimes.

SPEAKER_02 4:29

Absolutely. I'm so strong in the believing in the trades.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Yeah. So you graduated in 67, went to college for two years. So uh so what happens after your two years of college?

SPEAKER_02 4:41

After my two years of college, I knew I was going to be drafted or I was gonna have to go in. And I will admit two things. Three.

SPEAKER_01 4:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 4:50

One is when I determined to go into the Air Force, I did it for several reasons. One is I was raised in Dallas, just a few miles from Wertzimuth Air Force Base. Maybe I could go home. That didn't work. Right. Second, the Air Force had the easiest basic training, and I will grant you I went I looked at that very seriously. Uh-huh. But thirdly, at the time that um I went into the service, uh, I didn't want to end up necessarily pounding the ground in Vietnam. The war was very much still on. And you got the best training either in the Air Force or in the Navy for jobs outside of the military. All these were considerations for me. And so those were the reasons that I chose to go into the United States Air Force. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

And I did get my training. Yes, of course. So so you uh how long before so you joined the Air Force? Did you ship out right away to basic then?

SPEAKER_02 5:50

Yeah, I had a terrible time trying to get into the Air Force. It took me over a month. Really? I went to the Air Force recruiter in Lansing because I was living in Lansing. They sent me down for my physical

Small Town Freedom In Tawas

SPEAKER_02 6:05

in Detroit. While I was down there, somebody at one point or another sent me to the wrong location and I could not complete enlistment. I came back to Lansing. I'd already gotten rid of my apartment, so I ended up moving down to now. This would have been '69. I ended up going down to where my uh fiance lived in uh Brooklyn, Michigan. And I went into Jackson. I talked to the recruiter there. That he couldn't get me in for some reason or another. I went up to Tawas, I talked to the recruiter there. Ultimately, the Jackson recruiter got me in back through uh school or through my induction, and I was uh off to basic training in November of that same year, 69. Finished basic training, went to uh Denver, Colorado for my initial um training in munitions and weapons. There's something that transfers well into the outside world. Absolutely. Yeah. And after tech school uh in Denver, came back to Michigan in May, got married, and shipped right over to the Philippines, leaving my new bride behind. Okay. She was still in nursing school.

SPEAKER_00 7:29

So, how long have you been married?

SPEAKER_02 7:31

We have been married 56 years this month.

SPEAKER_00 7:33

Congratulations. Thank you. Tell me about how you met your wife.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

That's a joy. We came from different towns. I came from Taos, which is up north. She came from Brooklyn, which is down south of Jackson. But we met at a church camp in 1964. Oh. That same church camp where I have spent many a summer ever since then. That's where we met. And about every other year, because she was a grade behind me, and every other year we would meet up there. And then in uh 68. Now, here's an irony. 68 was our last year there, and that was the year that she talked me out of just going into the military and instead going to college. Well, it would have been 66 that she did that.

SPEAKER_01 8:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:23

And uh so I did. I went to the um Winds College and I contacted her. By then we hadn't seen one another in a while. And let her know, and that's well, let her know that uh I had gone to college rather than gone right in this into the military. And then she uh we got back together again. Uh it's interesting too, uh just a side note. Uh after I went into the Air Force, like I said, November 69, in January or February of 70, my younger brother got his draft notice and my draft notice. Oh. He took my draft notice down to the draft board, threw it on the table, says he'd show it. And they said, Well, why not? Because he's been in the Air Force for three months. Ah, we'll forgive him this time.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

Oh, it's interesting how the paperwork doesn't always catch up, right?

SPEAKER_02 9:19

Exactly right. Yeah, well, and the military and back in the 60s, that was not surprising.

SPEAKER_00 9:25

Oh, yeah. Yep. So you get married and then you ship right to the Philippines.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

We were engaged, like I said, before I went into the service, came home, got married, and 30 days later, I was in the Philippines.

Draft Pressure And Choosing The Air Force

SPEAKER_02 9:40

Three eight months later, after she finished her nursing school, she also came over to the Philippines. The Philippines was a great place for us to start our married life because it was inexpensive. There were places we could travel and enjoy. And so we spent just under two years together uh at Clark Air Force Base and got to travel around some. Here's another little irony. After I got to the Philippines, my younger brother, who had been rafted and trained as a shopper crew chief, you knew where he was headed. Oh, yeah. He got orders from Manila. And he immediately left for Manila before they figured out what they did. And so while we weren't stationed the same place, we were stationed on the same island. We got a chance to see one another during that time that we were there before he got out of the service and came back home.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

Very nice. Very nice.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

It was a very enjoyable time.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Yeah. So uh what were some what were some of the things you did in the Philippines then?

SPEAKER_02 10:46

While we were there, one of the things aside from my work as a in the munitions facility, while we were there, we were able to travel up to Poral Point, where my younger brother uh spent the last part of his assignment. His first part of his assignment was as an honor guard for President Marcos in Manila. So we were able to travel down to Manila. We traveled up to John Hay Air Force Base in Baguio City, which is a beautiful place. It was an RR site for the military. So we were able to do that, basically just traveling around and the other advantages that we had. Like I said, it was an inexpensive place to live.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:28

We bought furniture. This table came from there. Uh and I came back uh from the Philippines. By the time I came back, I was an NCO. And when I came back, we were able to ship our supplies back and all my electronic equipment that I bought and the cameras and all that good stuff. All the stuff that us military guys didn't rovers to use. Yes, the whole thing. Yeah, yeah. I did that. But uh Clark Air Force Base was safe. And I also, while I was there, was able to go down to uh Sue Bay, the naval station, and visit down there. So we traveled around a lot. It was still not a terribly safe place necessarily to just go wandering. Right. Because the Hucks, the local communist in the Philippines, were all over the place, and the government wasn't necessarily very nice. Right. You know, you had to be very cautious in your dealings with the local constables.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

Yeah. Well, and I think people some people don't get it. That no matter what you do, you stick out as an American service. Absolutely. There's no way to to not have that look, I guess, the best way to say it, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:45

And the local cities, they either love you or hate you. Right. They love you because they're making money off you, but they hate you because you're in their country.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

I think I saw a sign one time that said, um, welcome to, and I can't remember where it was, but welcome to whatever, uh, please leave your money and go home.

SPEAKER_02 13:01

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 13:02

Yeah, yeah, I've seen that before. So so you came back, you uh you spent your time in the Philippines, you came back to the States. Where did you end up in the States?

SPEAKER_02 13:11

Before I came back to the United States, all of the guys that I went over to Thailand to the Philippines with um were being involuntarily trained on ammunitions and weapons and going into security police. Now I extended in the Philippines for a year. That's how I spent that much time. But I said, if I'm going to be cross-trained when I come back, I want to cross-train into a field that I have an interest in, electronics. So I applied for and was accepted into auto tracking radar system training. However, I had to extend my enlistment in order to be eligible for a 10-month training. So I did just that. Literally, they canceled my first enlistment and signed me up for another four years, which is how I ended up with six and a half. Um shipped back to the States, went to Biloxi, Mississippi. At KI, I can't remember the name of the base now. But I shipped back to Mississippi, where I spent 10 months

Basic Training To A New Marriage

SPEAKER_02 14:20

in training and auto-tracking radar systems. I got my electronics training that I had always wanted. Uh-huh. From there, my wife and I shipped out to Hawthorne, Nevada. You know where that's at? I do not. Nobody has a clue as to where I was.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

I didn't even know there was a Hawthorne, Nevada.

SPEAKER_02 14:34

It's out in the middle of now place, somewhere between Reno and Las Vegas. It was a literally, it's a Navy munitions storage area, and we had a radar bomb scoring site there. That's where I worked. So I shipped over there. That's where our firstborn was born. And I was there for five months. After 10 months of training, they pulled me out of auto-tracking radar and sent me to Thailand. Put me back in munitions. I never saw another radar bomb scoring site while I was in the service. Wow, all that training. All that training. I had to enlist to get re-enlist in order to get that training, and they pulled me out of the training. Wow. Or out of the scoring. The irony was all the guys that I talked to in RBS says there are only two ways, three ways, to get out of this. One, you get out of the service, two, you go to another branch of the service, or three, you die. And I couldn't stay in there. Uh so I went to Thailand. That was six months after the Vietnam War had ended. Uh-huh. It was still considered combat area, was not a safe place either.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Right.

SPEAKER_02 15:52

And I had to leave my wife and daughter at home because that was an isolated tour. I spent a year in Thailand. I spent a year in Thailand helping to rewire munitions trailers from the Vietnam Warrior vessel. I established the job. I and a Thai local rewired all of the trails, the trailers on that munitions facility. And once I shipped back to the States, the job was all done. Nobody else did it again.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

Well, that's an interesting job.

SPEAKER_02 16:28

I, you know, I enjoyed it. It wasn't uh it wasn't fun being away from my family by any means, but it wasn't a tough job. And again, it kept me out of combat. I have such high respect for combat veterans, uh, but it kept me out of combat. It was a job that really needed to be done. When I left, now I've spent the Philippines, Mississippi in the south in the winter, uh Nevada in the summer, and Thailand. There's a pattern here, it's all warm. Oh, yeah. My last duty station. Two and a half years, or one and a half years, but two winters in Minot, North Dakota.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

You know, I'm gonna tell you something. You were like, I can't tell you how many people I talked to ended up in Minot.

SPEAKER_02 17:22

Why not Minot?

SPEAKER_00 17:24

And that's exactly every single time they say the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 17:28

Absolutely. That's funny. And the day that we arrived, I was driving a pickup truck, towing my car, pregnant wife, little baby. We arrived at Minot, the city, and it was the worst blizzard they'd had in over a hundred years with a wind chill factor 110 degrees below zero. I haven't been cold since. It was three days before I could get from the city out to the base to sign in because of the weather.

SPEAKER_00 18:00

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 18:01

But we spent two winters there. Our youngest, our son, was born there. And then when I got out in June of 76, we moved back and bought this house. And we've been here ever since.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

Yes. So you have two children.

SPEAKER_02 18:17

We have two children. Our oldest, our daughter, has four sons, who are unfortunately all four on the autism spectrum. But uh they live down in Mason. And uh, she and her husband. And our son um became a firefighter. He now works in Alaska.

Building A Life At Clark Air Base

SPEAKER_01 18:40

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 18:41

Uh Wasila, Alaska, where he's an emergency response coordinator for the borough. And so he's got three of my grandchildren up there.

SPEAKER_00 18:50

So was your son the one born in Minot? He was the one born in Minot. And now he's in Alaska.

unknown 18:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:56

And he and his wife, they are outdoorsy people, and where they live in Eagle River, Alaska, is it's just gorgeous and very much an outdoorsy place.

SPEAKER_00 19:09

So they enjoy it. Very nice. Yeah. So you come back to Michigan, uh, you move here to Lansing. Uh funny enough, like this is kind of right down the street from where I grew up. And when I was a teenager, we used to drive our cars up this way at the middle of the night because there's a cemetery just up the road from the room.

SPEAKER_02 19:26

Johnsonville Cemetery.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

Yep. And we used to hang out there and see if we could find ghosts. But anyway, I digress. So you you get back to Michigan and um what do you do after the service?

SPEAKER_02 19:37

One of the reasons that I went into the service was for GI Bill. And I came back to Lansing to go to Michigan State University to study to be an electrical engineer. Now, I did come back. We bought this house because I knew I was going to be four years in college. Yeah. Went out to MSU. I struggled through a year. I'm 27 years old. I'm highly motivated. I've got a family. And I struggled through my first year at MSU, my only year at MSU. I found out I was doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason. I prayed God, what am I, what's going on? He said, What are you doing? And bottom line was I wasn't wired to be an engineer. I was wired to be a technician. I work with my hands. So I dropped out of MSU, went back over to LCC, four-pointed through two years at LCC, and study electronics technology, which is what I've done as my career ever since.

SPEAKER_00 20:38

Well, awesome. So you go to LCC on the GI Bill. That's correct. I'm I'm assuming you used a VA loan to buy your home, or is that a we assumed this a VA loan from the previous owner?

SPEAKER_02 20:51

Oh. That was uh, I think it was six and a half or seven percent at the time. Yeah. But we assumed that loan that he had, that transitioned quite nicely. Uh-huh. And then my wife being the very diligent financer, handle of finances that she is, had the house paid off in seven years.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

Oh, that's beautiful. So it's absolutely beautiful. So, where'd you go to work after you got your degree?

SPEAKER_02 21:15

Ultimately, after I got my degree, I found a job. Well, even yeah, even before I, yeah, I guess I did finish. I worked for Family Life Radio as an announcer for eight years. But I also, that was just a part-time thing.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:34

But I got a job down in Jackson at a place called Spartan Electronics, and they created and made uh sauna buoys for the United States Navy. I was there for about two weeks. Long term job. Long drive, you know. Oh, yes. Before I was offered a position with the Xerox Corporation, uh huh. Which got me back to Lansing and driving down to Jackson. Got me better benefits, got me better pay, got me a company car, and my wife and my mother talked me into taking it. And so I worked there for 34 and a half years.

SPEAKER_00 22:11

Oh my gosh. You know, and the funny thing about Xerox is one of those companies where growing up, uh, anytime you made a copy, you were making a Xerox. Didn't matter what kind of machine it was, right?

SPEAKER_02 22:20

Oh, yeah, we heard about that. Could you go to Xerox this for me? Let me tell you the story. I was working at a retail location. I won't mention the company, but I was working at a retail location. And I was working on a laser printer at the time. There was a fellow in there who was working on the copy machine, which was a Rico. And a lady comes in and says, Sees the guy working on X and I run a Xerox on this. And we both jumped her. That is not you want a copy, you want a photocopy, you can run a photocopy on this Rico machine, or you can run a print on this Xerox printer, but you can't run a Xerox.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

That's right. It doesn't exist, right?

SPEAKER_02 23:06

Copyrights were one of those things that you learned about fairly early on at a company like that.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

Oh, yeah, I can imagine. So you really, if I think about this, you started working for Xerox kind of at the at the beginning of this whole technical revolution, right? So did you see a lot of change happen?

SPEAKER_02 23:26

I saw a huge amount of change in the 34 years that I worked for the company. Yeah. I started out with copy machines and they were very mechanical. Uh the machines evolved and evolved, became very digital. I also had the privilege of working on early on color copy machines. That was one of my specialties. But at the same time, I was trained in other things like the fax machine. Faxsimiles were a big thing with Xerox. And I had the privilege too of going to the what would be called the digital era when Xerox came out with a company with a machine that was a word processor. And we're talking very professional stuff. It is a predecessor to computers. Computers we're all used to now. In fact, they actually came up with a computer. Uh Xerox had a company or had an organization out in Palo Alto, California, Palo Alto Research Center. These were the folks who invented things like icons and the mouse and all of this good stuff, which were ultimately ended up with somebody else because Xerox didn't know how to Marcus that stuff. They put marks on paper. Right. And so they fumbled, there's a book, fumbled

Radar Retraining Then Back To Munitions

SPEAKER_02 24:50

in the future, and they didn't pursue that. But I was trained on that equipment. I worked on that equipment as well. So over the years, I saw the digital transformation from the early electronic typewriters that I worked on that used cassette tapes for recording their documents. They went from cassette tapes and to, in fact, they went from magnetic cards to cassette tapes. They went from cassette tapes, then transitioned the equipment to newer um style stuff like PCs and the 6085, which was a professional workstation. They went to eight-inch hard drives to single-sided, eight-inch double-sided hard drives to eight-inch floppy discs, to four-inch, five and a half-inch floppy discs, to three-inch floppy discs to memory chips. And I I lived through and worked through all of that transition. We now have more we had in our office in the Lansing area, we had three very large memory discs for the entire office and all of these workstations there. And the average Joe now has more memory in his handheld cell phone than we had in that entire office at one time.

SPEAKER_01 26:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:19

So yeah, I've seen the whole transition happen all the way through.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

Well, and you know, a couple of funny things about that when you mentioned the amount of memory in a uh a cell phone is you know, when computers first came out, and you obviously know this because you work in the industry, like the whole concept was there wasn't a lot of memory because because guys at Microsoft and Apple were like, no one's gonna need more than you know 28k of memory or whatever it is that they they were they were giving in computers at that time. And uh, you know, here we are today where you could put a terabyte of memory on a cell phone. Absolutely. Absolutely, that blows my mind.

SPEAKER_02 26:53

It was it was astounding to watch the technology transition, it was astounding to watch the mindset. Like I said, Xerox had all this, that was a gold mine and they blew it.

SPEAKER_01 27:07

Right.

SPEAKER_02 27:07

And then Steve Jobs and and uh comes along and he's the one that ended up take making the mouse really the big and icons the really big thing.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

Right.

SPEAKER_02 27:18

He saw it in a uh, as I understand it, was uh a visit that he made to to park PARC. He saw it and they weren't using it. And so he did. And you see where that got him. Right. And now Xerox is a is a has been. I mean it still exists as I understand it, but it's not doing much. Not near the the company it was when you started working. Oh, it was it was a fun place when I first started working. Yeah. Because they had money. And we had job security, and it I was well trained there. I was trained to serve my customers, and I was trained on good equipment, and I had all kinds of engineering backup. If I ran into problems, I could contact engineers and have that information, all that stuff. And now I think back on this. This comes back to my opportunity and the training that I got in electronics in the military. It was when I went to uh auto tracking radar systems that I was trained on not only old vacuum tubes. Yeah, we use vacuum tubes. Yeah, I was trained on solid-state equipment in the first what you would call a handheld computer in the military. One of the reasons I went in.

SPEAKER_00 28:45

Right. And and the truth is, because I have a similar background, electronics is electronics. Like electricity acts the same way, whether it's on the power lines or whether it's in your computer, the concepts. So if you can get those concepts down, you can work in the industry.

SPEAKER_02 29:01

That's what I wanted to do, that's what I was ultimately able to do. And it served me ultimately until I retired in 2014.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

Wow. So you've been retired for 12 years then, almost. Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about uh being a a dad during this period of time. And um now your wife got her nursing degree. Was she working in nursing?

SPEAKER_02 29:25

When she first went over to the Philippines, she could not work. Civilians could not work in the local. There was a big base in CARC. But uh civilian any civilians that worked there were Filipino civilians, an American civilian could not work there. But when we came back to the States, she worked in Mississippi. Um, weren't you we were not in Nevada long enough, right? But she did work in Mississippi. Um when we went to Minot, North Dakota. Now she had two kids to take care of, and so she really wasn't able to work there.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:00

But when we came back to Lansing, and I went back to school, she went back to work. She was literally between my GI Bill and what my wife was trying, that's what we lived on. Right, right. And she worked uh consistently in the Lansing area at hospitals and doctor's offices uh and specialist um for infantility, infertility is when she retired, she was doing that. And she did that consistently until she did retire. But yes, she she pursued that, absolutely. So you both had pretty good long careers then, really. Yes, we we did. We enjoyed what we were blessed to be able to enjoy what it is that we did do. And now, you know, our kids aren't now able to. Our daughter trained working with uh special needs, uh special kids. She uh went to college for that. She worked for a short while over in she and her husband lived in Grand Rapids for a while. And she worked over there. But when her kids came along and had to deal with the autism, she wasn't able to then continue on in that, but she used that training. Oh, yeah. And our son, he did the same thing I ended up doing. He went to LCC as as an auto mechanic and ended up in another field as ultimately as a as a firefighter, a paramedic, and doing what it is that he now does. Uh he earned his master's in the in uh instruction training from central Michigan. Even though he was in Alaska at the time. Yeah,

Minot Winters And Leaving Service

SPEAKER_02 31:45

yeah. I went to Central the same way. Yeah, and so uh now he's he's loving what he's doing in Alaska.

SPEAKER_01 31:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:52

Absolutely does. So we've been very blessed as far as that goes, and our kids have have as well. We're very pleased with that.

SPEAKER_00 32:00

Well, I think that's our biggest hope, right? Is that our children do better than we did, right? Absolutely, absolutely. Yep, and now you have grandchildren, and uh, that's got to keep you busy as well.

SPEAKER_02 32:10

Yeah. And well, our daughter's four kids are now all in their 20s.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 32:18

And our son's three kids, the oldest will be 14 in October. Uh-huh. And then two, she's the only girl we've got, and then she's got two younger brothers. And so we're looking forward, they are coming back to Michigan for a short period in June, and we're looking forward to seeing them again. Oh, that's very exciting. You know, that far apart, and especially with the economy the way that it is right now. We have been to Alaska. We've gone up and visited, my brother lives up there now. So we've gone up to visit my brother, we've gone up to visit them at least twice in Eagle River. And we just aren't going to be able to do it this year. Yeah. But it's good to have them back. So we don't get to see them anywhere near as much as we would like to. No. But they're doing well. And the other advantage we have with modern technology, at least we can keep in immediate contact with them.

SPEAKER_00 33:13

Yeah. Which we do. Absolutely. Absolutely. So when you retired in 2014, um, you know, it I mean, you pretty much worked since you were 16. What was it? What was it like for you to walk out of the door and know that you're done with this chapter?

SPEAKER_02 33:32

That was just a transition.

SPEAKER_00 33:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:34

Uh I got out in this in June of 2014. I retired. Uh-huh. And my wife says, you can't go anywhere for the next year. There's too much work to be done around here. And she was right. So the next year I stayed at home and did projects that needed to be done. Then in 2015, and this is what I had been wanting to do for some time, I went to work as the head of maintenance for a Christian camp, the same camp where my wife and I met in 1964. Full circle. I went back up there and I worked for nine years as head of maintenance at that camp for the summer. And I, my wife and I have both been very much involved in other things since then. We've been involved in our church continuously and various other ministries like the Gideon's International. And those things all keep us going. We haven't slowed down at all. Uh, my wife and I have never had uh pets because it wouldn't be fair for the pets. We're gone all the time. Right, right. Um, she working with uh in nursing and then ultimately transitioning over to she went through genealogy for a while, still loves doing genealogy, but she now does quotes of valor for veterans. And that's pretty much what's keeping her almost full time busy. She is the chair of the board of trustees for our little church. I happen to be a late pastor at the church as well. And so we stay involved there. I did camp for, like I said, nine years. I retired from that last beginning of before last summer because I I am 76 years old and I simply cannot go 10-hour days, seven days a week for four months anymore.

SPEAKER_00 35:29

No, but when we talk on the phone, you're heading up there for two weeks, right? At the end of this week.

SPEAKER_02 35:34

Friday, my wife and I are headed back up there. Yeah. In fact, I've already been up there. Uh I went up on the 12th and 13th with another retired fella, and we go up and turn the water wells on, bleach the lines, make sure everything's hooked back up. So yeah, I'm still involved in it. We're going up uh in a couple of,

GI Bill Pivot And The Xerox Revolution

SPEAKER_02 35:55

like I said, a couple, well, sir, going up tomorrow morning. Yeah. And we will be helping, it's called work week. We clean the grounds up. It's on Thumb Lake, up just north of Gaylord, and there's a lot of it's out in the woods, on the lake. Yeah, and there's a lot that has to be cleaned up. There are still repairs that have to be done. I've already been talking to the new the new person who is the head of maintenance at the camp to let them know about things so that they have are able to transition and and make things go. But we'll be going up for a week and a half. Uh then we will go back up in the fall. The camp has an adults camp. Basically, it's it's kids, they're families. Yeah. But they have an adult's camp in August, and we've been part of that adults camp for a number of years. And then they'll be closing, and we'll I'll do the work at closing as well.

SPEAKER_00 36:57

Good for you. So uh what's it like for you and your wife to go back to this camp where you first met?

SPEAKER_02 37:04

That's oh, it's a joy.

SPEAKER_00 37:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:07

Not only we met there, that's true. And um in about 1988, I started going back up there as part of what they call the program staff. I would go out for a week or maybe two weeks and work with the kids who are coming up. The camp has facilities, they're old cabins. They were old cabins when I was a kid.

unknown 37:34

Right.

SPEAKER_02 37:34

Um they they have facilities up there and they have different programs for different age groups throughout the summer. And I started as a volunteer working at the camp with these kids. My wife did as well. Um, I can't remember exactly when it was, but she also worked for two years as the camp nurse. Both our daughter and our son have been part of the residence staff up there as they were teenagers and post-high school. And then, like I said, I was part of residence staff for nine years. So I've had a continual, we've had a continual go with the camp since the late 80s.

SPEAKER_01 38:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:16

But then again, my mom first took me to that very same camp in 1952.

unknown 38:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:23

So it's been in your it's been in your life for a few years.

SPEAKER_02 38:27

And it's a gorgeous place. It's beautiful up there, it's quiet. Uh, the camp is not like so many of the other camps around that have all the whistles and bells and high ropes courses and this, that, and the other. It's quiet. Beautiful lake. We have a waterfront, there are things that go on, but it's not hustle bustle all day long.

SPEAKER_00 38:49

It's a true camp in the sense of I remember camp when I was a kid. That sounds a lot like what I did.

SPEAKER_02 38:55

Yeah, that's that's the thing I like about it so much. Um, somebody once interviewed a gal who worked on camp. She says, Why do you keep coming back? She's like, Because it's quiet. It's beautiful, yes. But it's quiet.

SPEAKER_01 39:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:09

And so that's ironically, I go to a quiet place and work myself to death. Right, right. That makes sense. Makes perfect sense to me. But my goal up there as a maintenance man was to make sure the facilities were in perfect running conditions so that people could come up and enjoy it. Right. That was my mission. That's what I did. And that's what I do now when I go up in the spring and in the fall.

SPEAKER_00 39:37

Just in a more limited capacity, right?

SPEAKER_02 39:40

Absolutely. I don't have to do 12 hours, 10 days a week, or seven days a week.

SPEAKER_00 39:44

That's a young man's game. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 39:46

And by young man, probably 50s or 60s, right? My job now is to train somebody else to do what my job was. Right. Right. So as to make their job easier.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

So as you transition from the from that and and other things, um, what do you think the next chapter looks like for you?

SPEAKER_02 40:06

It's still all a go. Um just this last week, I was elected back onto the board uh for the Lansing or the uh Clinton County Gideons International. And I'm on that board. Uh I am on a board of another ministry that I've been involved with since 2010 that's called uh Walk to a Mayus. I am on that. Went back on, I was off that board for a while. I just went back onto that board. I like I said, my wife and I are very much actively involved in art of the church, where I serve as a Sunday school teacher and a lay pastor, so I'm filled the pulpit now and again. She is the chair of the trustees board, which means, of course, that I'm doing trustee stuff, right? She's involved in quotes with valor. There are always lots of things to do, and that's what we do. I'm not really slowing down at all. That's what keeps us alive. It keeps us from ever being bored.

SPEAKER_00 41:13

Well, somebody told me one time, because I retired fairly early, uh, that you better have a plan. Like you can't just retire. So uh how how do you what do you think about that?

SPEAKER_02 41:24

Well, I've heard stories of guys who retired, say, from the Oldsmobile plant. Yeah. They come home, sit down on the rocker, and in two months they're dead.

SPEAKER_01 41:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:35

Or they're bored silly. Or, you know, they're spending all their time at the bar or or whatever. They're looking for things to do, or they're just bored silly. I got things to do. In fact, I'm at the even now at my age, I'm at the point where I'm saying, I can't do that. My wife and I are just a little bit, just a little bit involved in Samaritan's Person Operation Christmas Child. We enjoy doing that. But I have been offered positions there. I can't just can't take on anymore. It's you know too much for an old guy like me. But there's constantly need, there's a perpetual need. And we who have served our country are probably the best qualified to go out and meet those needs. We know how to do that, we know how to work with people, and we need to be involved in

Retirement With Purpose Through Service

SPEAKER_02 42:40

our community, in influencing what's going on. You know, it might be something as small as working at a camp for a week or two. It might be something as big as running for an office and influencing what happens in your community, in your state or in your nation. So there is constantly something for us to do. Um I will not rust out, I will wear out.

SPEAKER_00 43:14

There's a difference. I like that. I I that should be a t-shirt. I will not rust out, I will wear out.

SPEAKER_02 43:20

Uh I I do have a t-shirt. I recently got, in fact, I'll probably be wearing it in the next couple of days. I always wear a red t-shirt on Sun on uh Fridays to uh support our military. But I wear, I just got this t-shirt. My wife says it's okay. That's what I do. I fix stuff and I know things. That's perfect. And I will just keep doing that as long as I am able.

SPEAKER_00 43:50

Well, and I think this is a good segue then. Um uh so we've we've been talking for a while now, and I've really learned a lot about you. Um so I really have Two questions left. The first question is: Is there something that we haven't talked about that you would like to include as part of this uh interview?

SPEAKER_02 44:10

Well, I will get real personal on this. Uh, when I went over to Thailand in 1974, one of the things that happened to me, which has made a huge difference in my life, uh, ironically, in the land of the big golden Buddha, I became an absolute born-again, totally sold-out Christian, which has influenced everything that I've done. It influences my marriage, it influences how I raise my kids, it influences all the various ministries that I'm involved in. I just find it ironic that it was in Bangkok, Thailand, in the land of the big golden Buddha, that I came to accept Christ as my savior. And so uh that's a big thing. And the other thing I like to do, and we you and I have talked about this off-camera, is I like to be involved in supporting. Now, I'm not necessarily involved in either American Legion or VFW, though I do support those kinds of organizations. Right. But I like to be involved in encouraging veterans. We have we have such a need. So many veterans who are coming back, who are lost, suffering from PTSD, feel like they're the only ones. And I want to encourage those veterans to become involved in things. There are so many things that veterans can be involved in that can encourage them and keep them going and give them something to do.

SPEAKER_01 45:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:40

And I really believe that is vitally important for all these guys and gals who are coming back. You know, there are lots of organizations too that are supporting veterans out there. And most of us don't know about them. That information needs to be disseminated as well. So I appreciate those who are doing that particular task.

SPEAKER_00 46:03

Yeah, absolutely. So that really brings me to my final question, and that is if someone is listening to this story a hundred years from now, when you and I are not around, um, what message would you like to leave for people?

SPEAKER_02 46:20

I come from a veteran family. It's a minority. We need to support and defend our country. We can't just let it deteriorate as it presently is, unfortunately. But we need to support and protect this country. There is no place else on the earth like the United States of America. We need to be informed and make good informed decisions when we are, if you're not getting involved actively as part of an as an elected official, be informed and maybe even support elected officials with whom you can, in fact, work. We need to never just throw up our arms and say it's it's

Faith Shift And A Message To Veterans

SPEAKER_02 47:15

there's nothing. We need to be involved. If we see things that are wrong, we don't have to go about killing people. We did enough of that in the military. But we do have to go about help and convince people this country is a good country. It's the best the world has ever seen. It needs to remain the best the world ever will know. Be actively involved. There are lots of things to do.

SPEAKER_00 47:49

There are a lot of needs. All right. Well, thanks, Bruce. I appreciate you taking out the time to talk with me today. My honor, my honor to serve my country, and my honor to encourage my country as well. All right.