Murdock Muse January-February 2003 - Part 3


UPDATE RE MOM
Don Schlicke

Though Mom (Lennie) may not read her own mail or cards, they are read to her; as often as she likes. Though she may not be able to make a direct connection between the written words and the writer; the sight of a card on her dresser would warm her with the feeling that someone is thinking of her. The Muse editors have her address.

Mom spends a great deal of her time in the "social area" of the Alzheimer's Unit. Here residents can watch television, gather around a piano for sing-a-longs (which are held often) listen to music, draw, work on crafts or other activities. She is usually called upon at sing-a-long time because she still remembers the words to most of her favorite golden oldies. Most of Mom's day is spent in this large room. One thing she lacks, I believe, is enough exercise. She has gained about 35 pounds since last May - no gardening!

I'm going to relate some thoughts I remember from a short article on Alzheimer's that I read years ago. The article compared our "normal" daily life to walking down a long but familiar street in full daylight, and in the evening as well, aided by street lights. On each trip down our street we are aided by landmarks, houses, street signs and storefronts - everything is familiar. When we walk at night some of the landmarks are no longer visible, but that's fine, we use our minds and memories to fill in the gaps made by the things we can't see. So, we always know right where we are and where we are going and we are not afraid. The Alzheimer's patient, while walking down the street, cannot rely on memory to fill in the gaps made by dark- ness. For the Alzheimer's patient the street lamps begin to go out one by one, street signs are missing or have been swapped around, houses are not there any more as landmarks - and the few other people to be encountered on the street are strangers. At times it must be terrifying. When I visited my mother on Thanks- giving day I realized that I could see a look of fear in her face, it came and went, but I think fear must be with her often.

Dad visits mother daily. He's only missed two days since May; we had a heavy snowstorm on Christmas day that kept most people confined, and Dad had a 24 hour bout with a stomach disorder that made him stay away one other time. Dad's daily routine is organized on a schedule that would please a railroad conductor. I don't really know why his timing is so important, but I will probably run my retirement days similarly. I mention his schedule not just to help describe his current lifestyle, but to indicate to anyone who tries to contact him at 11:45 AM on a weekday and fails on Monday, that Tuesday's attempt will also fail if made at the same time. I believe that the reason for the tight schedule is because the cronies he meets at McDonald's for coffee in the morning and his hometown friends who gather midday at Jeanie's Lunch do the same.


YOU WANT ME TO DO WHAT!
Gene Murdock

When I started out in weather in 1951 it was several generations of technology back. We were still using hydrogen in our small weather balloons and suffered the scare and indignity of having them explode at the slightest provocation. Because this caused burns in our clothing we periodically received a special clothing allowance to replace our fatigues. There was no computer yet, the first computer products were a year or two away, and the first small computer in the weather station was many years away. The first satellites had not yet been launched so we lacked much of the data the weatherman has available today. For long-term data storage, we learned to operate punch-card machines. This was still in the age when weather forecasting leaned heavily on the art of the forecaster rather than the science.

My first assignment was at the Air Force Weather Central at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington D.C. Here I met some of the old time forecasters who “knew all the tricks.” Talking with them, I found that some of them were reluctant or unable to explain just how they did some of the things they were admired for. But by persistent questioning I found that usually I could uncover the steps in the thought process that they went through. My Dad was a master of all trades, and if he didn’t know how to do something, he found a book and taught himself. I adopted this attitude from him and applied it throughout my weather career.

My second assignment was to a smaller weather central in central Germany where I was thrust into management and supervision. I was only 21, had been in the Air Force 2 ½ years, and had absolutely no training in management or supervision, but all of a sudden found myself in charge of 41 people! I had to learn fast, so I read all I could and volunteered to go to the 7th Army NCO Academy, where out of the ten honor graduates, four were Air Force personnel. On one occasion I was selected to go on an inspection tour of another weather station and look at the operation from the point of view of quality control and proper utilization of personnel, material, time and money. Here I learned that there are a series of inspection checklists that guide you thorough every phase of operation of a weather unit. This was the Air Force’s move into the field of human resources, and I was in on the ground floor. Years later both of my sons would get their master’s degrees in this new field of human resources!

Subsequent assignments came at two-year intervals. At each new assignment I studied the operation, read all the operating procedures and went through the inspection check lists to learn what they were doing and to see if they were doing it right. Weather units used to be small self-contained organizations doing all their own administrative functions. Consequently there were additional duties assigned to the senior personnel to oversee functions such as security, administration, finance, training, etc. At each assignment I volunteered for any or all of these additional duties to learn more about the job, and in many cases, rewrote the operating procedures to bring them up to date.

While all this was going on, we were acquiring new technology – Doppler radars, satellite pictures, computerized forecasts, closed circuit television – all that nice stuff that made the job easier.

On a second assignment to Germany I saw the new forecasters struggling with the European weather, wondering why they couldn't forecast it like they did back in the States. I felt I knew why, so I wrote a seminar on European Weather Forecasting that was adopted by many agencies throughout Europe. For one client we had to accurately forecast high cirrus clouds, but very few forecasters had any inkling of how to do it. So I scoured the available literature and edited it into a two page quick reference on how to forecast cirrus clouds. I was learning to write technical material the hard way.

After twenty-plus years of this I was on the Island of Guam waiting for my assignment back to the U.S. At first I received notice that I was to go to Colorado to be Station Chief of the weather station there, a job I looked at with mixed emotions because one of my odd-ball, trouble-prone forecasters had just been sent there. But then I got orders rescinding the Colorado assignment and sending me to Headquarters Air Weather Service (AWS) at Scott Air Force base, Illinois to work in the scientific services division. Wow! I couldn't imagine what I would be doing there, because the section was made up of almost all degreed meteorologists, most with master's degrees and a few with doctorates. I had enough credits for a degree, but not in meteorology, and I had never stayed still long enough to satisfy the state requirements for acquiring the sheepskin.

When I arrived at AWS my new boss greeted me and said, "Welcome aboard, Chief, what we want you to do for us is to write a new book on forecasting."

"You want me to write WHAT?" I was flabbergasted.

What had happened was that the forecasters had gotten so comfortable with all the new technology and relied on it so much that when the power went off and the computers and radars were shut down they didn't know how to make a basic forecast from scratch and there was no single source of information to refer to. My job was to write the equivalent of Weather Forecasting 101, a basic text aimed at the two-year college graduate, which is the level that most of our enlisted forecasters were trained at.

My boss said there was no one to guide or help me, but based on what I had done in the past, I was the most qualified person they could find to do the job. But he warned me that there was a lot of resistance to the project by ranking officers around the world that didn't want to be told what to do as far as basic forecasting in their area went.

I warmed to the task and called in all my experience with writing and thought back to how Dad would do it. It was really quite simple, I just gathered all the similar texts I could find from colleges, Air Force libraries, Navy libraries and Weather Bureau and Federal Aviation Administration sources. From these I made up an outline of what to cover to suit our needs and preceded to borrow, steal and plagiarize all the material into my own opus.

I talked with as many people as I could to determine just what the resistance was to find a way around it. A certain amount of the material was basic and applied to everybody. The rest was more general and had to be modified in certain geographic or political areas. The answer was simple. I would split the material into two parts. The required material would go out as a Regulation, which was binding on everybody, and the rest would go out as a Pamphlet, which was to be used as guidance. But the Pamphlet has the hidden force that if you should deviate from it and have to face an accident board you had better have a solid reason for not following its guidance. This concept was approved by all concerned, and I went to work on it immediately.

Everything in the pamphlet was basic material adopted from other sources, except for two chapters of my own which had never appeared in print before. One was a standardized method of briefing, whether it be briefing an aircrew, briefing a General Staff, or briefing the person or team relieving you at work. I had seen some sloppy briefing done over the years and was glad to be able to put down a logical procedure in print. The other new chapter was called “Single-Station Forecasting” or how to forecast the weather when you have no communications at all and have to rely on only what you can see from looking outside to supplement the last batch of information you received. It mainly entailed a detailed observation of the clouds to determine what changes in the atmosphere were taking place, so you could continue to forecast reasonably accurately for several days.

After about eighteen months of labor I completed the project and handed it in for review and approval. The person who had the job of approval was a pompous Colonel, who much preferred a "position" to a "job," and who resented anything that interfered with his golf schedule. The package set on his desk for weeks. When I was asked how my book was coming I just said I was all done ahead of deadline, and it was in Colonel Bottleneck's office. He was finally prodded by his Colonel to get on it, and get on it he did. He slashed it, smashed, it, red-lined it, and completely rewrote it, blatantly ignoring the careful formatting I had worked out with the publishing section, rewriting articles that were direct quotes from other material, and generally mucking up the whole thing.

When I got it back, I couldn't believe it. I handed it to my boss and told him that was as far as I could go with it, since I had just put in my papers for retirement. I found out later that he gave it to a civilian meteorologist in the office who somehow undid all the Colonel's work and finally got the two documents published. Unfortunately they went out with his name on them, so no one ever knew that it was Gene Murdock who wrote them.

But it was fun.



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