Monday, March 30, 2009

Odebolt story

Researching some of my papers today, I ran across a description of the home I lived in from 1950 until I left for college. I have forwarded the information to my friend, Bonnie Ekse, who, along with her sister, Barbara (The Girvan girls) maintain my hometown website, referenced here. Before sending this off to Bonnie, however, I did a little review of the site as I expected the information was probably already there, and it may be that it is. I was distracted, however, to find information on the Ground Observer Corps. Most of my friends have never heard of the Ground Observer Corps, but I participated as one of the observers back in the mid 1950's. The job consisted of standing in the tower (which is shown at the link at the end of this post) and watching for airplanes. When we saw a plane, we were to call Omaha and tell them what kind of plane it was and where it seemed to be headed - important in case an enemy plane had slipped through our radar at the borders because we did not at that time have the radar capacity to spot low flying planes.

One Sunday I was working the tower with a lady named Gertrude (Gerts for short). Gerts was an amusing lady to know. She tended to be scatter brained, or, as we would say today, flaky. As we were performing our patriotic duty, that is, watching the skies, a plane came into view. Gerts took the phone to call Omaha, and I listened as she answered their questions; however, I don't recall that we ever got beyond the first question, which must have been "What kind of plane is it?". as I heard Gerts exclaim, "it's a great, big shiny one!" Heaven only knows what the poor guy in Omaha thought when he heard that one. I have no recollection of having served a rotation as ground observer after that, and I suspect, neither did Gerts.

For more background and a picture of our "perch" check out http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~iaohms/1950s/goc_tower.html (part of the Odebolt Website constructed and maintained by the Girvan girls)

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