SleepingDawg, I too was at Keesler. Was in NAVAIDS maintaining TACANS and

[BullochDawg]

ILS systems. Returned to Keesler many times for various schools.
A lot of good memories of life in the Triangle; running from SPs and whatnot.

Got caught once in the girls barracks. Lady SP was chasing me through the dark halls. Kept hitting the doors at full speed until I hit one that opened toward me instead of away. I crumpled to the ground in pain. Made it out but she knew who I was from previous encounters. She saw me the next day and saw I was hurting from my collision. She said from the look of the door I must be hurting pretty bad. I just gave her a sheepish look and she patted me on my head. She knew I had been punished enough.

Stayed at the hotel on base on return trips. Pretty pimpdaddy place for a military install.

 

[SleepingDawgLying]

I went back to Keesler one time, TDY for a 5-level school.

I stayed in the VAQ dorms (I think that was what they were). These were kind of like a hotel, actually.

I have a load of old photos taken during my time at Keesler. I arrived there Nov. 1980 and left in June of 1981.

If you were there in 1978, were you there when hurricane Frederick hit? That thing was a monster. It was still powerful enough that when it hit north Georgia it was blowing over humongous, really old oak trees and destroying property. I watched it tear the roof of a screened porch off of my neighbors house and blow it through the air, over the house and into their front yard. I can only imagine how powerful it must have been down at the coast.

 

[BullochDawg]

Don't remember that. Maybe before or after I was there. I remember people

Saying you don't want to be there during a hurricane. They said all base activities ceased and everyone was on cleanup detail; base and in town.

 

[SleepingDawgLying]

Ahh, I had to look it up. Frederic was in 1979.

I do remember being at that student center on one end of the triangle... the place where people would go to study and just relax... that had black and white photos all over the walls, showing some of the history of the base. Part of it had photos from when Camille hit in 1969. I remember a photo of an F-86 Sabre sitting in the front yard of one of the houses in base housing (at least I seem to recall it having been an F-86).

I'm sure that place gets totally destroyed during a major hurricane. Dang, check out this photo of the Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis home which is smack on Hwy. 90, after Hurricane Katrina. So, I am reading, it looks like they did fully restore it. There is a huge cemetery on the property, which are almost exclusively Confederate soldiers, as they made this a veterans' home after Davis passed away in 1889. The Tomb of the Unknown Confederate Soldier is on this property, in fact.

 

[BullochDawg]

Dang. Heard stories about Cammile from some of the locals. One gal said

they found her grandmother's piano in the middle if Main Street with a dead cow on top of it.

 

[SleepingDawgLying]

LOL... I guess somebody had played a mighty fine tune on it...

... before they got there. It did a number on the cow.