Post by Remey688 on Mar 29, 2005 10:53:37 GMT -8
The Heliograph Story describes the problems inherent in the government providing or doing anything productive.
I first heard The Heliograph Story from the twin brothers. I knew them in the early 1960s. Their father was a medical doctor, and a Full-Bird-O6-Colonel in the Army Medical Corps. He was stationed at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The base was the Army’s Long Term Respiratory Illness Hospital as well as an Army Signal Corps’ Electronic Proving Grounds.
The story concerned the arrival of a new commanding general who assumed the base command in the mid fifties. The general had a driver take him around one Saturday morning shortly after he arrived. He just wanted to put an eyeball on the place. Somewhere in tour, he general spotted a structure on top of a mountain and inquired to the driver, who knew nothing. They drove up, a mountain trail and found two vehicles under the structure. It has a forty foot attached ladder leading to a landing with a small house like structure atop. The general finds two guys and a heliograph here. A window air conditioner, a radio, a small desk stacked with newspapers, and magazines and two wooden bench chairs completed the signal station. The two guys were eating lunch and listening to a Tucson radio station. Both guys had really nice GS ratings; they were communication specialists.
Circa 1913 Poncho Villa and his gang would ride across the Mexican Border between El Paso, Texas and Southern Arizona to rob banks and steal in general. The first thing Villa’s gang would do after crossing the border was to cut the telegraph lines. The field army came up with the ideal for a series of heliograph stations, and forwarded through channels. The project was completed some time after Poncho was dead and buried in Old Mexico. The stations linking Fort Bliss, Texas with Fort Huachuca, Arizona through the Caballo Mountains of the Southern New Mexico Rockies were manned and became operational. The general dropped in unannounced at Terminal Station 47. Forty-Seven stations linked and manned for more than 35 years. The system employed ninety or a hundred some odd people worked overlapping days assuring up to 12 hours of transmission time on summer days, and 9 hours days in the winter if the army needed them. People had retired as Communication Specialists GS8 and GS9’s from this duty. Budget increases enabled higher and higher ratings and salary increases to continue to be spread around. These jobs were highly sought by Army retirees from bases in the Southwest. No authentic messages were ever sent on the heliograph system after it was completed in the early 1920s. Routine station test traffic went on for thirty-five years. People retired with a second government pension check and were replaced with the next generation army retiree–our government in action 1920 to 1955! The government never missed the money it was maybe $10,000,000.00 or less per year in costs to run this emergency communication system in that era. It was like peeing in the ocean to them before the general began the process of closing the system down and reassigning the personnel into more productive endeavors. $10,000,000.00 was nitpicking after all. It wasn’t worth fucking with. It would cost the government too much money to look for shit like that in the system.
I first heard The Heliograph Story from the twin brothers. I knew them in the early 1960s. Their father was a medical doctor, and a Full-Bird-O6-Colonel in the Army Medical Corps. He was stationed at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The base was the Army’s Long Term Respiratory Illness Hospital as well as an Army Signal Corps’ Electronic Proving Grounds.
The story concerned the arrival of a new commanding general who assumed the base command in the mid fifties. The general had a driver take him around one Saturday morning shortly after he arrived. He just wanted to put an eyeball on the place. Somewhere in tour, he general spotted a structure on top of a mountain and inquired to the driver, who knew nothing. They drove up, a mountain trail and found two vehicles under the structure. It has a forty foot attached ladder leading to a landing with a small house like structure atop. The general finds two guys and a heliograph here. A window air conditioner, a radio, a small desk stacked with newspapers, and magazines and two wooden bench chairs completed the signal station. The two guys were eating lunch and listening to a Tucson radio station. Both guys had really nice GS ratings; they were communication specialists.
Circa 1913 Poncho Villa and his gang would ride across the Mexican Border between El Paso, Texas and Southern Arizona to rob banks and steal in general. The first thing Villa’s gang would do after crossing the border was to cut the telegraph lines. The field army came up with the ideal for a series of heliograph stations, and forwarded through channels. The project was completed some time after Poncho was dead and buried in Old Mexico. The stations linking Fort Bliss, Texas with Fort Huachuca, Arizona through the Caballo Mountains of the Southern New Mexico Rockies were manned and became operational. The general dropped in unannounced at Terminal Station 47. Forty-Seven stations linked and manned for more than 35 years. The system employed ninety or a hundred some odd people worked overlapping days assuring up to 12 hours of transmission time on summer days, and 9 hours days in the winter if the army needed them. People had retired as Communication Specialists GS8 and GS9’s from this duty. Budget increases enabled higher and higher ratings and salary increases to continue to be spread around. These jobs were highly sought by Army retirees from bases in the Southwest. No authentic messages were ever sent on the heliograph system after it was completed in the early 1920s. Routine station test traffic went on for thirty-five years. People retired with a second government pension check and were replaced with the next generation army retiree–our government in action 1920 to 1955! The government never missed the money it was maybe $10,000,000.00 or less per year in costs to run this emergency communication system in that era. It was like peeing in the ocean to them before the general began the process of closing the system down and reassigning the personnel into more productive endeavors. $10,000,000.00 was nitpicking after all. It wasn’t worth fucking with. It would cost the government too much money to look for shit like that in the system.