Norman Glover interview by Joe Stevens 1999 September 2.
Recorded on video at the studios of KMXT TV.


NG: My name is Norman Glover.  My connection with Kodiak goes back to the 
construction of the loran transmitting station Spruce Cape. I arrived in 
Alaska  on 11 June 1950 I had graduated as a civil engineering major from 
Columbia University on the 8th of June.  Things were very difficult job-wise 
in the states and I was fortunate enough to pick up an appointment as a 
highway engineer with the Alaska Road Commission.  Very reminiscent of what 
you have seen in Northern Exposure I arrived in Valdez Alaska three days later 
wearing brown tweed jacket, button down blue shirt with a regimental stripe 
tie, gray flannels, penny loafers turning up for my first job out of school.  
They put me on the back of a truck and sent me 187 miles to a little town 
called Paxson which at that time had a population of two.  There were about 18 
Cats all waiting in a row for an engineer to give them some line.  And so, 
still dressed with the tweed jacket I set up a transit in the middle of the 
road and gave them about ten miles of line so they could get started.  

JS: What is line?

NG: Centerline and stakes to build the preliminary road out of Paxson.  This 
was the road plan between Paxson and Cantwell.  Which is now called State 
Route 8, the Denali Highway.  It was kind of fragmentary in it's design and it 
was necessary for me to run most of the preliminary line between Paxson and 
Cantwell, which is just under 140 miles, that summer as well as jumping back 
and forth to give stakes for the road construction.  

Subsequent to that late that summer I was in Juneau for a meeting and at a 
restaurant or bar called wing-dings owned by a man named Irving who had a 
collection of glass eyes that he would wear.  At that time, since we had just 
gotten into the Korean war as of, I think the 27th of June, he was being 
patriotic and was wearing one with an American flag.  He was very very 
patriotic and was buying drinks for all sorts of servicemen.  I had been a 
Naval reserve enlisted man at the end of the second war and being in a "reserved"
[exempt] job with the road commission I was not being called up.  

I got into a discussion with a Coast Guard officer who I later discovered was 
a mustang commander who was the chief Naval engineer for the Seventeenth 
District there in Juneau and I made some derogatory remarks about the Coast 
Guard and he looked at me and said, "If you're so damn smart, why don't you 
come show us how to do it?"

I had just enough whiskey inside of me to where I said, "I'll do that very 
thing."

So the next morning I went down and applied for commission in the Coast Guard. 
They immediately put together a examining board and had me take a very very 
simple test. Three officers sat there and discussed with me what I had been 
doing and my education and what I intended to do with my life and what have 
you.  

The next morning I found that I had been accepted as an applicant for 
commission in the United States Coast Guard as ensign.  One of the problems 
they had of course, they were having airplanes falling out of the sky all over 
the Aleutians and southern Alaska while trying to resupply our forces in Korea 
and they needed to get a loran transmitting station on the line out here in the
Gulf of Alaska and they needed an engineer desperately.  

I had returned to my job, by the time they got the paperwork done, up in 
Glenallen and the interior where we were doing the first paving in the 
interior of Alaska and I got a telegram saying that I had been accepted and 
please report to Juneau for further transfer to officer indoctrination school 
in New London which I thought that was just great so I quit my job with the
ARC and resigned from the Naval Reserve.  

I arrived in Juneau and they lugged me in to see the district commander, he 
was a Rear Admiral named Joe Greenspun.  Because of a very prominent nose 
and a hairless head he was called the Bald Eagle. He informed me that while 
I had orders to go back to officer's indoctrination school to learn which 
knife and fork to use and how to wear a tie, he was not sending me back and 
he was asking me to volunteer to go out to Kodiak and become officer in 
charge of construction out here and since the paperwork hadn't been 
completed on my commission he was going to send me out as a civil service 
employee and then have me sworn in out here which they proceeded to do 
later.  This gave them the advantage that when it was necessary to have a 
civilian civil engineer I was a civilian civil engineer and when absolutely 
necessary to have an officer I became Ensign Glover.
 
I was sworn in on Kodiak by the commander of the air detachment. (It wasn't 
an air station at that time.)  Lt. Cdr. Elmer A. Crock who is a very very 
straightforward, very very methodical officer.  They took me down to the 
ship service store and I bought myself a khaki uniform because all I had at 
that time was a couple of plaid shirts and some working khakis.  Some seaman 
second class proceded to hem the trousers and jacket cuffs and I was in 
uniform.  

Crock was a very methodical and very very meticulous officer and I remember 
about three years later he was executive officer at the air station in 
Salem Mass. and took some photographs of three flying saucers which came over 
at high speed over Salem Mass. It was in all the newspapers and everybody 
thought is was to say the very least a scam if not a delusion but I've always 
said if Elmer Crock said those were flying saucers I believe they were flying 
saucers.

So I went out to the station at Spruce Cape.  We had a contractor out there 
who was running around in circles.  He had incomplete plans and did not know 
what he was coordinating or how he was getting his materials up.  We started 
running like hell to try and get this Gulf of Alaska loran chain on the 
line.  We were going to be one of the stations here at Spruce Cape.   The 
other stations were at Yakutat and the third was on Biorka Island off Sitka 
and they were way ahead of us on schedule.

The other officers in the air detachment were the exec, a Lt. named Don 
Luzius, who I later saw when he was a Lt. Cdr and head of the air detachment 
or air station at San Diego, and a Lt. named  Bill Murphy who I later served 
with when he was commander of the station in Salem Mass.  The other Coast 
Guard units here at that time were a couple of buoy tenders, buoy snatchers 
as we used to call them, WAGL's, Sedge skippered by Lt. Billy Ryan who made 
Lt. Cdr. almost immediately after I arrived here, the second was the 
Bittersweet captained by Lt. Herman Rogall.   I believe the numbers were, 
the Sedge was 402 and the Bittersweet was 389 or 398.  I was at the golden 
plank ceremony of the Bittersweet in Woods Hole Mass about three years ago 
when they celebrated her fiftieth anniversary then they proceeded to turn 
around and give her to the Estonians who renamed her, are still using her to 
this day. I think they kept the numbers but changed the designation from 
WAGL to WLB (or light icebreaker, seagoing).

Along about that time we got our first enlisted men who were going to help put 
the station on the line, and the prospective commanding officer who was Ltjg. 
Herbert J. Lynch (who made full Lt. within a month of so of arriving).  I saw 
Herb in San Francisco about three years ago.  He had retired as a captain.  He 
was captain of the port of San Francisco, and I believe had been chief of 
intelligence for the Coast Guard.

The United States did not have a tremendous defensive force in Alaska at the 
time of the beginning of the Korean War.  There was one under strength 
battalion of infantry somewhere scattered around the territory.  There was a 
group of P-80's, the forerunner of the F-80, the Shooting Star, the first of 
our jet fighters, split between Elmendorf AFB (at Anchorage) and, I think 
Ladd Field.  One of the pilots there was a captain named Doc Blanchard who 
had been an all-american football player (he was enormous).  I was 
privileged to see about six people trying to squeeze him into the cockpit.  
I don't know how he would have gotten out if he'd had a problem and had to 
bail out.

At Kodiak the Navy had one seagoing tug called the Bagaduce, ATA, two 
P-2V's, which were sub hunter planes, and one propeller fighter, an F-4 of 
F-6F Hellcat, I think,  which was the private toy of the captain of the air 
station who was a former fighter jock.  The major air force for western 
Alaska was the Coast Guard's two PBY's.  Flying in them was like flying in a 
beach umbrella. They could do maybe 115 or 117 knots going downhill with the 
wind behind them. They were kind of short on range and altitude for making 
it out very far into the Aleutians.  

I remember later on there was some consideration of lengthening and improving 
the airstrip on Unimak.  They were thinking of having "atom bomb tests" out in 
the Aleutians which many people believed was a cover for getting a nuclear 
capable force up into Alaska in case they had trouble with the Russians or the 
Chinese.  Of course Macarthur was at that time yelling he wanted to nuke 
the Koreans and Chinese.  

I was asked to go out and do a survey and put together a plan for extending 
that airstrip which at that time was able to take the PBY's or the C-47's or 
C-46's that were being used, I think, by Wien or Reeve airlines for cargo.  
I've forgotten which one flew out there, but they would come in periodically 
and they could just barely squeeze into the strip, at least the C-46's 
could.  The C-47's, the old DC-3, could squeeze into almost anything.  The 
problem the PBY's had was they couldn't carry enough fuel to fly around the 
penninsula and they didn't have the ceiling to fly over the mountains, so 
their way of doing it was flying over the "Port Heiden Elevator" at Naknek, a 
glacier which under the right conditions had a big updraft which given the right 
aerology they were able to get a boost of couple a thousand feet and then 
just sort of coast down on in saving fuel.  But it was an interesting trip.

I think about 20 years later I got into a similar plane which is run by 
Antilles Airboats down in St. Croix and I remember looking at the pilot and 
saying you know it's older than you are and the last time I was on one of 
these things she lost her hydraulics and we had to keep bouncing her until 
the wheels flipped down and locked and sure enough it happened and we had to 
land on the water.  Didn't have that opportunity around Unimak that day 
because there was a lot of ice in the water.  In any case, it was a very 
educational experience for a 21 year old at that time being officer in 
charge of construction where your nearest boss was twelve thirteen hundred 
miles away and sort of had to rely on common sense or uncommon sense and 
Marks Mechanical Engineer's Handbook.

JS: What did you build at Spruce Cape?

NG: We were building a loran transmitting station.  I don't know if you know 
what they are.  It's a long range aids to navigation which depends on a series 
of timed electronic signals.  The difference in time between the signals gives 
you a plot with three signals, which gives you a series of hyperbolids around 
the world so that there are only two places on the world where you can get 
this identical signal and if you know which hemisphere you're in, it's fairly 
evident as to which of the two locations you're at.  

This station was composed of a couple of thirty-two foot wide diameter Quonset 
huts, one for quarters building and the other for transmission and power 
building.

JS:  Were they inline with one another?

NG: Not quite, they were in series, but they were slightly out of line.  They 
had a jog which was required by the topography. 

JS:  They joined them later.

NG:  We joined them initially.  That little joint, that jog, bowlegged, 
broken legged, corner there was part of the original construction.  Because 
of the signal we were putting out (which required a three-hundred foot 
diameter buried copper-wire ground system) our signal was one megawatt which 
required a tremendous amount of grounding.  Almost anything that was out, if 
it wasn't grounded or protected, would have been fried.  I've seen somebody drop a 
handful of nails in the ground system during the construction, or left out a 
hammer, and when you would get a megawatt coming out of that station, the 
hammer would get so white hot that the hammer head would explode.  The nails 
exploding was like hearing big firecrackers out there.

JS:  How tall was the tower.

NG:  It wasn't a tower, it was an eighty foot stick.  Eighty foot out of the 
ground. A hundred foot stick.  

JS: Just one?

NG: One.  And we also had another stick for our communications antenna but 
because of the press of time we didn't have time to build a ground system for 
that but we were able to relocate the location of the antenna, that was the 
communications antenna.

JS:  Was this oriented on the north side of the peninsula?

NG:  No, the loran antenna was oriented just about on the south side of the 
peninsula oriented just a little relative to the length of the peninsula 
about 15 degrees to the southeast.  It was generally facing, I don't 
remember the azimuth, but it was pretty close to east-northeast.  Maybe due 
east, or pretty close to it.  The other antenna of course, the 
communications antenna, was oriented toward Anchorage.  That was around the 
cape on the north side.  We didn't have a ground system.  Because we were 
pushed to go on line, I took a coil of wire and threw it in a little pond 
that was at the foot of the antenna.  

We were pushing very hard to get things in. It became apparent, 
unfortunately, when the equipment arrived that someone had done a good thing 
for us.  In order to have a sound signal without injuring the building, 
which was metal, it was necessary to ground every piece of sheet metal and 
every piece of the metal ribs to the foundation by tack welding at two 
points against every adjacent piece of metal then checking the building over 
and over again to see that we did in fact have a totally grounded building. 
And inside that we built a room which was entirely grounded building it with 
2x4's with copper mesh inside and outside then covering that with plywood. 
Theoretically the nails were just short enough so that the nail tips would 
not touch each other and we had a totally grounded room to put the T-137 
transmitter and A-138 amplifier to get this big heavy signal.

It became evident, in either December or January, that someone had done a very 
nice thing for us, somebody had given us the latest equipment rather than that 
which was specified. Unfortunately the equipment was too large to come in 
through the door of the building.  So I found myself in January on Kodiak, 
with a combination of rain and snow with enough wind, which was coming just 
about horizontally across the island, tearing the wall out of the Quonset hut 
and then the wall out of the grounded room, putting the equipment in and then 
trying to get the thing regrounded and on the line. We did it eventually but 
it was interesting.  

Strangely enough about thirty years later, I met an engineer at ITT.  I was 
at that time working for them.  He was at that time assistant director of 
planning, or something.  What a planner.  He was the man who made the 
decision to send us the new equipment rather than the equipment that the 
building was planned for.  He and I had a long rather acrimonious discussion 
on that subject.  Yes.  At the time, I could have torn his head off.

I mentioned before these were built in Quonset huts.  The Quonset hut was 
developed at Quonset Rhode Island which was one of the Navy civil 
engineering corps's major stations. It was from a basic design which was put 
together by a Royal Engineer's officer named Nissen in the First World War.  
This cylindrical design seems to have gone on and on forever.  The Quonset 
hut was put together on light-gauge cold formed metal ribs which formed a 
half cylinder.  The top half of a sewer if you wish.  Then you had nails 
which were to be driven into these sheet metal light-gauge formed ribs. The 
ribs were of two pieces of metal tack welded together, but it had a ripple 
in them.  The two pieces of channel which were put together had a grove 
between them and a ripple in the web so that when you drove the nail or 
screw into it, it would be clinched by the ripple in the web which was a 
very clever way of designing it.  It does very well.  (They later used that 
for nailable steel joists for nailing plywood sub-flooring on in 
construction after the war.)  Then of course, sheet metal was applied to 
that.  If you used nails they normally had a lead head which would spread 
out as they were driven to make the hole comparatively weather tight. We 
would use nails in the valleys of the corrugations.  Connected at the top of 
the corrugation they had a self-tapping screw with a little neoprene or 
rubber washer on it.  You'd have to draw it down on that.  Then of course we 
painted the thing on top of that with portland cement paint. 

I mention the Quonset hut because many of the buildings which still are 
probably in use somewhere around Kodiak which were used in the Second World 
War at Ft. Abercrombie and at the Naval station were Pacific Huts which were 
in the same cylindrical form but they were made out of 2x4 lumber on 
twelve-foot quarter arcs with a piece of particle board on outside and 
inside with a wooden spacer in between and full of fiber insulation and they 
could be hitched together without further framing with a simple strip of 
pressed wood screwed or nailed at the top.  It would be set either on a 
plywood platform or a reinforced concrete platform.  

During the period when we were building we had been doing some studies on 
foundations in permafrost and what have you up farther north with the road 
commission.  We attempted to build foundations just by putting in a four-inch 
slab and digging a trench which we would use for the perimeter, putting in as 
a perimeter form a corrugated piece of cement asbestos and then backfilling 
it.  We found that we were getting as much (Because we were typing to keep the 
frost from getting down under the building and heaving the foundation up) and 
we found with a four foot piece of inch and a half cemesto board that we were 
getting as much resistance or insulation against frost as we could get with a 
twelve-inch concrete block or even an eight-inch concrete wall. That did speed 
up some of the construction, but here we actually went down with footings 
about two feet wide and then a concrete wall about eight inches thick but we 
went down about four and a half feet to keep from getting frost heave under 
that.  

The buildings were heated with number two diesel oil.  We had our own 
engine-generators which provided not only the power for the station but also 
the power for the lighting as well as the signals.

JS:  That was a megawatt transmitter running on a generator?

NG:  A one megawatt transmitter.

JS:  Were the generators in a structure?

NG:  The generators were in one of the two structures.  They were in the same 
structure as the transmitter-amplifier.  The other structure was a quarters 
building.   We also had a two-bay garage which separated the 
transmitter-amplifier section of the building from the engine-generators.  The 
station was supposed to be an eighteen-month station at that time, which 
didn't make the young men who were going to be stationed there very happy.  It 
went on-line as per schedule on the first week of February 1951.

JS:  Today we know that as Loran "A".

NG:  No, that was loran "C".

JS:  It was loran "C" in 1951?  One-hundred kilohertz?

NG:  As I remember it, that's the way it went on-line.  It was loran "C".

JS:  Was there any loran here before that?

NG:  I do not believe so.  I believe the only thing you had here prior to that 
was HF-DF (Huff Duff).  

JS:  The Coast Guard HF-DF operator at Chiniak in '45 said during a snow 
storm they had two guys come in looking for supplies from the loran station at 
Narrow Cape.

NG:  They might have...  there was loran at Cape Sarichef, and I think it was 
at Adak, and up on Murder Point at Attu.

JS:  So you don't know really whether there was one at Narrow Cape or not.

NG:  No I don't know.  If it would it might have been some sort of temporary 
location. You know, during the Korean War, we had mobile stations which were 
put together.

JS:  This was '45.

NG:  No, I don't know if there was one on line there.  There was no loran in 
the Gulf of Alaska in 1950.

JS:  What year was this you built Spruce Cape?

NG:  Spruce Cape went on-line on the first week in '52.... The first week in 
February 1952. It was cold and wet.  And we weren't quite sure whether we 
were winning or loosing the Korean War yet. They had a new commander of the 
air detachment, a man named John McCubbin.  He had some of the pilots out 
there kind of frightened (chuckle) because he had them out practicing 
torpedo runs with these PBY's and these guys would come back, you know, and 
get them in the "O" club and all they could say between drinks was "117 knots 
and doing torpedo runs".  We were sure he was going to make admiral and very 
frankly, I saw him last, I think in '73, and he was in fact a rear admiral 
down at headquarters.  Yes.  A very tough but good man.

JS:  Are you in contact with people today.

NG:  Some of them.

JS:  On the internet?

NG:  No.  I do a bit of traveling still and did a little of consulting work 
and as I say, I visited with Rocky Lynch, Herb Lynch, in Oakland about three 
years ago.  One of our petty officers was a fellow named George Pellozzi.  I 
had remembered that he came out of a little town north of Hartford and I was 
driving through Connecticut several years ago and I picked up a phone and 
asked for an operator to see if she could find somebody and lo and behold I 
caught him and he was up there.  He'd gotten out of the service and gone to 
engineering school to become an electrical engineer for Combustion 
Engineering Co. and he was retired by this time.

I tried retiring about fifteen years ago.  It didn't work.  I have lived and 
worked on six continents, everyplace except Antarctica.  I was going to there 
in '56 but I got married instead.

JS:  In retrospect which would have been the better decision?

NG:  I think I made the right decision.  I'm sorry I missed Antarctica.  An 
old admiral I worked for wanted me to come with him.  He kept writing me at 
Christmas for many years telling me I'd made the mistake and I would have made 
admiral.

JS:  Can you describe the road from Spruce Cape into town back then?

NG:  It was a road on the south side, I guess it's the southeast side, of the 
cape. I noticed today a piece of it still is in service, not in service, but 
it exists. This is the area where just about joins the existing road at a pond 
about 1400 feet in from the tip of the cape.  This pond was our water supply 
system.  We put in a eight-inch cement-asbestos pipe and a filter there.   We 
did not have any water treatment but that was our only water supply system and 
I remember once in the winter of 1951 that it did freeze up and I remember 
getting up to have a glass of water at night and running the water and tasted 
kind of funny, turning on the light and it was chocolate brown, it sure wasn't 
chocolate milk.

JS:  Did Kodiak have telephone service?

NG:  Yes it did, but it was adventurous.  We had no phone out at Spruce Cape 
at that time. Phone meant a drive into town.  I fact one of the men who 
worked part-time on the project was Leif Norman who I understand stayed in 
Kodiak for many years.  I stopped at Normans, he's dead unfortunately.  We 
used to send a great many of our normal routine messages into town, have him 
just call them in.  Otherwise I'd have to trot out to the base with a 
message form or go down if one of the ships was at the town dock.

JS:  Leif's daughter is still here.  Were the phones in town dial or manual?

NG:  You'd dial.  

Interesting thing about the construction... When I'm out at the base I 
noticed you have some of the housing that's on this little sort of a hill 
that's still there.  This was built in 1951 for the Navy. They built a 
hundred and forty some units out there as I remember, and they sent us a 
special projects officer a commander from Washington, his name, I think, was 
Jack McFadden.  While he was here he was transferred onto the permanent 
party at the Naval Station and of course he wanted to bring his family up 
and he was put on the list at the bottom of the list. He refused to approve 
the houses for occupancy until he went to the head of the list and became 
number one.  I remember seeing and talking to him about that about ten years 
later up in Rhode Island at Quonset Point one day.  

This fellow got out of the service certainly within ten years after that, 
put his time in, and went to work as head of construction for a firm called 
Eggars and Higgins, or Eggars partnership, which is a very prestigious designer 
of churches and college type buildings.  Haven't seen him since.  Haven't seen 
too many of the people from Kodiak other than kept in touch with some of them 
in the service.

JS:  He was a Coast Guard officer?

NG:  No he was a naval officer.  CEC.  I'd been navy enlisted man myself in 
the CB's before I went back to college.

JS:  Forty-third CB's built a lot of Kodiak.

NG:  I was with the seventh and the 102nd.  Didn't make it [To Kodiak].

JS:  Do you remember anything about the communications radios you had at 
Spruce Cape?

NG:  Except for comm relay by the cutters or air detachment, most routine 
communications at that time was run by what was basically called ACS, The 
Alaska Communications Service, which was basically Signal Corps enlisted men 
living on the economy.  They did everything from clerking to running the 
signaling keys in the whatever we had for equipment.

JS:  You had ACS personnel at Spruce Cape?

NG:  No.  When we went on line finally, we had our own sideband where we would 
speak to the cutters here and the air detachment, but we were able to also 
speak to Nan Mike Jig which was Coast Guard in Juneau.

JS:  This was on AM, probably, wasn't it?

NG:  Yes.

JS:  Maybe on the 2 meg band?

NG:  Got me.  Long since forgotten if I ever knew it. Nearly fifty years 
sort of dims the memory a little bit.

JS:  The old ACS station is right next door here [to KMXT].  It's still there.
Where we are sitting now is called Signal Hill.

NG:  Probably had a couple of masts and halyards here for signaling.

JS:  A lot more than a couple.  This whole hill was full of rhombics.

NG:  Place has a lot of history.

JS:  Did you get to see NOJ, the Coast Guard Commsta.  It's close to the airport.

NG:  I see the old Coast Guard air detachment hangar is still there.  I 
remember that runway.  We had a lot of enlisted aircraft pilots in those 
days.

JS:  I remember the last one was John Greathouse.

NG:  There was one named Cooper.  He wore the round white hat.  He was 
airplane pilot first class.  I saw him later when they'd made him ensign. 
The Coast Guard was funny, Ensigns carried a bit more clout because they had 
a tendency to take chief petty officers and make them ensigns.  Because they 
had a great deal of restriction on the number of warrant officers they could 
make so they could make temporary ensigns a lot easier. This Cooper would be 
flying as the command pilot with a two-striper lowering the wheels and 
operating the radio for him and that sort of thing.  They were good pilots.  
One of them, Roy Flatt who had just been made up from chief to Ltjg.  He was 
out here at that time.  I had forgotten that.  I saw him later down in the 
eighth district when he was flying out of Keesler AFB and unfortunately he'd 
been with one, bad weather, plane that put a wingtip into the gulf while 
landing, while trying to make a pickup on a rescue and the plane cart 
wheeled and went down like a rock.  He was the only one to get out. He was 
not feeling very happy about flying at the time.

JS:  Do you know where Elizabeth City Coast Guard is?  That's where I come from.

NG:  Yes.  North Carolina.  There used to be a lot of the old coast guard 
families down there, the Midgetts, the Tilletts, the Salters, the Merritts.  We 
finally got a Midgett up here in the seventeenth district and I remember when 
he reported on board, the captain looked at him and said, "You having trouble 
with your family boy?" Evidently he had been playing around with somebody else 
in the family's wife and the family had a council and decided to ship him as 
far away in the coast guard as they could.  

JS:  Did you get around here to do much exploration of the old WWII stuff.

NG:  A little bit, not much, we were pretty much under the gun to get that 
station on the line.  I used to spend a lot of any spare time down on the 
rocks on the southeast side of the cape there.  When I was commissioned, 
they didn't have time to send me to indoctrination school and officer 
candidate school and they figured they weren't going to teach me any more 
about engineering, my degree out of Columbia was pretty sound.  The district 
commander had me in to look at me and to just check and see how many heads I 
had.  In the five or so minutes he spent with me, the only advice he gave me 
was not being too familiar with the troops because I was alone and needed to 
reinforce my authority and putting ten percent of my salary in common stock. 
I should have listened to him more closely.  I'd be a richer man today.  I 
spent a lot of time down on the rocks talking to the seals.  We had a lot of 
them in those days [that] used to hang out there.  Unfortunately towards the 
end of my tour I think the seals were starting to talk back.

JS:  How come those two Quonsets ended up at an angle like that?

NG:  I think it was just the topography.  That was the site.  There was 
going to be some further housing up on the hill.  There is an 18 foot by 40 
foot pad where we had built another Quonset and it burned during 
construction.  And they evidently never sent up a another replacement 
building, it doesn't look like they ever built anything beyond that.  It 
looks like I picked the right year to come, the 32 footer is on the books 
for demolition.

JS and NG then rambled off topic and ended the interview.

[On April 25, 2000, Norman sent in some spelling corrections and other minor 
corrections to this document.  These have been incorporated.]