A post card from the ’30’s

My class photo

The Center for Information Dominance Corry Station ( From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

From its beginning  in 1928, Corry Field was an active aviation training complex where advanced fighter plane  techniques were taught.  In 1943, the field was re-designated as Naval Auxiliary Air Station Corry Field, continuing to serve as a training center for aviators through World War II and during the Korean War, until its decommissioning as an active airfield in June 1958.

The site saw its metamorphosis from flight training to technical training in 1960, when the first class of communications technicians (later known as cryptologic technicians) arrived.  Hangars were converted to classrooms…

And in one of those classrooms the thump of fingers finding typewriter keys could be heard in response to the murmuring in two dozen headphones receiving messages coded in morse. My own ears and fingers automatically made this aural buzzing into five character groupings of letters or numbers arranged as it by magic in neat columns on a roll of teletypewriter paper.  Almost unconsciously I would ratchet the carriage return as simultaneously the sounds of dozens of typewriter bells indicated others were doing the same.

The magnetic tape has slowly spooled through the playback heads of the recorder on the instructor’s desk until the message ends with the sound of letter “B” combined with letter “T” sounding like this=  (-…-) Or,  letter “A” combined with letter “R” sounding like this= (.-.-.)  My mind has returned from wandering, dreaming off somewhere and returned to the classroom  Early on I had discovered a curious thing– That the further my mind could drift away from the task at hand the better would be my automatic response to the “dits” and “dahs”  filling my ears, translating to mechanical fingertip movements and finally creating the typewritten characters neatly spaced in five letter groups on the paper roll.

Each week the instructor increased the speed of the tape flowing past the playback heads.  And each week the speed with which I facilitated the aural to the mechanical got better and faster, and the farther afield my mind wandered.

Thus I spent that Summer of 1963 in Pensacola, Florida at Corry Field, my mind elsewhere.    AR