Brought Back Memories

Dear Glasgow Folks,

Tonight [June 2], when I saw Glasgow featured on “NBC Nightly News,” I felt a flutter in my heart. You see, after my husband and I graduated from the University of Arkansas (1964), he received his commission as a second lieutenant in the US Air Force, his first orders sent us to Glasgow. As embarrassing as it sounds now, we actually had to check a US map to locate Montana. In addition, all the info. on Glasgow and Montana described the location with lots of forests and mountains. Shortly after we arrived at Glasgow AFB, that summer, bachelor officers told us the joke was “There’s a girl behind every tree.” Ahem! Just find a tree. I think we began to get the drift of our future home once we left North Dakota and saw that the daytime speed limit was “safe and prudent.”

John was assigned to Combat Support and I got my second teaching job at Glasgow High School. That meant I had to commute from the base for two winters until John was sent to Southeast Asia in the early summer of 1966. I remember having to go to survival classes (winter and the daylight problem of the Big Sky Country). The only real snow we had ever seen was on Christmas cards. As kids, we were so desperate for snow ice cream that we made it from the sleet we occasionally got.

I was intrepid then as I look back. I don’t know how we got through the winters. We lived on base housing and I recall that the outer rings of the houses would get snow up to the roofs so kids could ski down. And I only had one problem with the snow, it was when I decided I could drive home just by seeing the barbed wire fence along the highway. All of a sudden my new VW with no gas heater stopped moving because I was high center on a snowdrift across the road. Luckily, the Air Police constantly patrolled the highway and found me. The Airman put me into his truck, towed my VW off the drift, and called John for me. I got home fine without admonishment. I should have stayed with a colleague in Glasgow. I was never so foolish after that.

I’m thinking/hoping that a former student and/or colleague might be one of your readers. At 25, I was only seven years older than my journalism seniors the second year, stellar girls and boys who finished the publication of the yearbook THE SCOTTY because I had to leave when John left for Vietnam. They were the best!

GHS was overcrowded because the base kids attended, so the scheduling was nightmarish, as one might imagine. I remember in winter getting to school in the dark and leaving in the dark.

John and I have wondered how the base was used after it closed. He got his choice of assignment after Vietnam so we chose Dow AFB, Maine, in Bangor. That base closed a year after we were there in 1967-68, and became a U of Maine campus and Bangor International Airport among other things. (Stephen King was still in college in Orono at that time. Who knew?)

John passed away in 2010 after battling two cancers at different times. Before retirement in 1992, he was a mechanical engineer at Eastman Kodak before its demise. I was a career English teacher in the Rochester City School district. We made the very unpopular decision to remain childfree and have lived here since 1968, when he left the military. This is our third harsh winter location but Rochester has been a good place to live.

I’m so glad I caught the News segment tonight. Watching it brought back many memories of the place and the people we loved.

Linda Kennedy Floyd

Rochester, New York