Jeff Wisnia sent email and a picture about his duty at
Operation Dominic.
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000
From: jwisnia@conversent.net
To: pdxavets@aracnet.com
Subject: Any civies allowed?
Hi,
Just got referred to your site when I met another EE my age
and somehow
during the conversation we realized that we were both involved with the
'62 test series. I was on JI for about two months, and he (lucky sod)
was in Hawaii. We both said we couldn't ever erase the words "April
Weather" from our brains. And I'll never forget being a few hundred
feet away from the launcher the nite that a Thor launch was aborted a
few seconds after the much delayed countdown finally reached "zero" and
the range safety guys scattered the warhead all over their end of the
island!
Out of curiosity I posted a message on the
"sci.electronics.design"
newsgroup to see if there were any other old timers who remembered the
words "April Weather"(without disclosing the connection or time frame).
Somebody posted a link to your web site, that's why I'm
writing now.
Is your association limited to military personel or would I
qualify for
membership?
Best regards,
Jeff Wisnia
W1BSV
MIT '57 ee
|
I remembered I'd put away a folder of photos from that
era. Here's one of me as a
"yoot" holding one of the ridiculous looking "jack-in-the-box" type
extender
mechanisms we used to use to hold our sensing equipment away from the
little
sounding rockets that carried them up. I'm the one without the glasses.
The other guy is (was?) a crackerjack mechanical
designer named Roy Downing.
|
Photo from Jeff Wisnia
Click for larger photo
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|
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000
From: jwisnia@conversent.net
To: Keith pdxavets@aracnet.com
Subject: Re: Any civies allowed?
Thanks for the quick reply Keith.
Here's some of what I remember about those halcyon days in
'62. I'd be pleased to
swap "war stories" with other guys who put their time in on JOHNSTON
ISLAND
("JI"). Someday maybe I'll catch up again with that tech from
Geophysics
Corporation of America ("GCA") nicknamed Ziggy who was able to play a
set
of steel
bedsprings like a bass when we made music on whatever "instruments" we
could use to accompany the only guy in the crowd who'd brought a guitar
with
him.
I was an EE three years out of grad school, working for
Comstock & Wescott, a
small applied R&D firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some of our
work was
commercial, and some government contracts supporting scientists at the
Air Force
Cambridge Research Laboratories ("AFCRL") at L.G. Hanscom field in
Bedford,
Massachusetts. My job, and a fun one at that, was to design and build
sounding
rocket and satellite borne instrumentation to measure ion and electron
densities
in the upper atmosphere and near space. The two AFCRL scientists
directing this
work were Rita Sagalyn and Mike Smiddy. I traveled to interesting
places like
Brazil and Hudson's Bay with them for about 8 years gathering
measurements of what
was going on upstairs.
Our involvement with Project Dominic was measuring ion and
electron densities in
the upper atmosphere before and after the nuclear detonations using
instruments
flown on sounding rockets we launched from JI. The electronics in our
instrumentation seem like stone age stuff to me now. I still had to use
vacuum
tubes to build high input impedance electrometer amplifiers because
solid
state stuff
couldn't do such things back then.
|
"State of the art" electronic packaging from the
Dominic era. The smallest
commercially available electronic parts were packed together as closely
as
possible, in a construction style dubbed "cordwood". This little block
contained
a single flip-flop circuit. Now, in the year 2000, millions of
functionally
identical circuits are packed on a single microprocessor chip. I wish I
had
that 1959 "real silver" quarter today!
|
Photo from Jeff Wisnia
Click for larger photo
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|
| Our gear was built from whatever
consumer or industrial stuff we could obtain.
When I needed a perforated spherical stainless steel shell for our
electron
measuring probe I drilled a huge number of holes in the bowls of two
soup ladles
and joined them together. For a telescoping arm needed to move the
probe several
feet from the rocket after it got above most of the atmosphere I used a
magician's
"appearing cane" powered by a silly looking coil spring slipped around
it. All in
all, building our instrumentation was a lot like making the ham radio
stuff I'd
been fooling around with since high school, and the parts we used
didn't cost us
much more than my own stuff did.. (My ham call was W6KAH as a kid in
San
Francisco, then W1BSV in the Boston area). |
Photo from Jeff Wisnia
Click for larger photo
Click "Back" to return
|
| An example of the type of payload we
launched from Johnston Island on Nike-Ajax
rockets. At altitude, the nosecone tip flew off and the spherical
ionization
measuring probe popped out. The fellow holding the nosecone tip is Nick
Guarino,
who worked for Geophysics Corporation of America, makers of the payload
structure and telemetry systems. |
Photo from Jeff Wisnia
Click for larger photo
Click "Back" to return
|
Some of my memories of my two trips to Johnson Island
("JI"), in no particular
order of relevance, are:
The ever-present drone of the diesel driven LOX plant needed
to supply the Thor
with oxidizer.
Those damn loudspeakers everyplace on the island announcing
"April Weather" and
the status of the countdowns, over and over again. Those preface to
those
announcements still come back and rattle around in my head if I'm home
alone doing
a mindless job like rolling paint on the ceiling of a room.
No women on the island. Things got so bad that guys used to
go down to the
"airport" building when the once a week commercial flight with landing
rights on
JI came through, in the hopes that a stewardess or female passenger
might debark
for a breath of air.
Being in our bunker ready to launch our little rocket for
the Bluegill Prime
launch and watching a black and white TV monitor picture of the Thor
when the
launch count finally get to zero after weeks of "hurry up and wait".
Fire emerged around the base of the rocket, and the ten or fifteen guys
in there with
me all
yelled, "Yea", followed about five seconds later by everyone groaning,
"Oh shit!"
as we watched the top of the Thor get blow away. I think we were stuck
in that
bunker for at least eight hours before they let us out.
Snorkeling in crystal clear waters watching the beautiful
fish and the occasional
Manta Ray gliding by serenely, while hoping that the sharks kept to
themselves on
the other side of the island, where we were told the kitchen garbage
was tossed
into the sea.
Sweating out the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis with
insufficient news
reports to let us
know what was going on, while worrying about what terrible things might
happen to
our wives and kids at home.
Convincing the very nice Catholic chaplain on JI to obtain
travel orders for me so
I could attend High Holiday services in Hawaii because there was no
Jewish
chaplain on the island. (What a break!)
Some memorable parties (and hangovers) thanks to the
enormous amount of "free
time" and the $3 per bottle booze at the military store. I remember one
guy, I
think he was another civilian engineer working for GCA, who got in a
boatload of
trouble when he got caught trying to sneak about five cases of liquor
home in
company equipment cases.
Being outside when the Thor launch and detonation finally
came off, and feeling
that heat pulse on the back of my neck when the detonation countdown
reached zero,
followed by "risking one eye" peeking around my dark goggles and seeing
that
awesome green blob and the dark striations running through it.
This paragraph was added after I thought I was done with
these reminiscences. But,
my 64 year old prostate, which now has a mind of its own, led me to
the bathroom
where I was reminded that the cantelope sized chunk of coral which has
been
sitting on the lid of the toilet tank all these years is my only
tangible
souvenir of those boyhood days on Johnston Island.
Jeff Wisnia
Winchester, MA.
jwisnia@conversent.net
Keith Whittle
September 30, 2000
This page originally
appeared on the Keith Whittle's now extinct
"Atomic Veterans History
Project" website
Recaptured via the
"Wayback
Machine", April 26, 2009
