By the book

Master Sergeant Jimmy Walker (right), Sgt. Les Jackson (center) and I huddle in a hallway outside the AFTV-22 studio before a live broadcast in late 1968. (USAF photo)

In 1968, the USAF got all serious with us at AFTV-22. That was when Technical Sergeant Ray Santangelo, the station manager we all adored, rotated back to the States and Master Sergeant Jimmy Walker took over.

Walker was old-school, hard-line military and rigid -- what we called a "lifer." The USAF was his career. Formerly a military plumber, Walker had cross-trained to the American Forces Radio and Television Service. We secretly called him the "broadcast plumber."

Ray Santangelo had been a great guy to work for. His philosophy took into account the fact that his troops were all imaginative, intelligent, up-and-coming broadcasters. He never let military BS get in the way of running a television station that served the needs of everybody from the base commanders to their lowliest troops.

Walker ran things differently, and his troops didn't much like it. Some of us were marginally insubordinate. Others of us were openly rebellious.

Walker instituted GI parties. We'd all have to come in on our off-duty time on a weekend morning to strip, wax, polish and buff the studio and office floors. Most of us hadn't done that since basic training. Sometimes this involved using razor blades to scrape built-up wax from the floors by hand. (The station did employ a putzfrau, a charwoman, who kept the place clean -- but not clean enough for Walker.) He insisted that we wear our on-air blazers only in the studio. Otherwise, we had to be in the military uniform of the day. He insisted that we answer the phones by the book: "American Forces Television, Sergeant Dale, how may I help you, Sir!"

We didn't accept all of Walker's edicts gracefully, to say the least. Chuck Minx reminded me recently of one GI party in particular. While we were scraping wax from the studio floor with razor blades, we began singing a parody Chuck came up with of the official Air Force song, the one that begins "Off we go, into the wild blue yonder..." The standard lyrics end with the line, "Nothing can stop the U.S. Air Force!" Chuck's parody ended with "The floor's the limit in the Air Force!" As Chuck tells the story, "While lustily singing this song I looked up to see Jimmy the Plumber standing in the doorway, a look of consternation on his face, with three or four of his cronies standing behind him, laughing. He must have brought them over to see his rebellious crew being taken down a peg and was chagrined to find them desecrating one of his sacred hymns."

We were not little angels in blue. Oh, no. AFTV-22 and the base library shared a building and bathrooms. It was shortly after Walker's arrival that graffiti began to appear on the walls. Considering the bathroom's clientele -- librarians and TV people -- the graffiti had an intellectual aspect as well as an irreverent enlisted-man flair. I remember the week a list of names began to appear on the wall. At first I didn't see what they had in common: James A. Garfield, Charles Darwin, Yosemite Sam ....

But then I got it: They all had facial hair. In the Air Force, that was verboten. So I, too, began to add to the list. Within a month, there were hundreds and hundreds of names scrawled on the wall, and the list kept growing.

Walker's most outrageous onslaught against his staff followed a prank executed by an airman whose identity to this day remains a secret -- mostly. Walker had taken great pride in creating an array of photographs of us AFTV-22 personalities on a wall near the station's entrance. A picture of one of our more inept staff members, a career NCO, was among them.

Young Airman X decided to re-caption the picture. Below it, he placed a new label: "Norman, the Friendly Drelb." (It was a nonsense phrase that announcer Gary Owens used on "Laugh In.") Walker eventually noticed the new caption and took it to be it to be an insult to all NCOs everywhere. He demanded to know who did it.

It was on the day that Neil Armstrong took "one giant step for mankind" that Walker lined us all up at attention in the studio and told us he'd drop plans for a nonjudicial Article 15 punishment if one of us would confess. Being the fairly slack military outfit that we were, our first formation wasn't up to military standards. Walker suggested we use a line created by linoleum tiles on the floor as our guide. Then he walked down the line asking each of us to tell him who had "desecrated" the photograph. We all knew -- or thought we knew -- the answer, but nobody talked. Walker held us at attention for a good half hour before he finally accepted the fact that nobody was going to squeal. It wasn't that our loyalty to Airman X was so strong. It was that Walker himself was disliked by so many. He finally gave up and dismissed the formation.

For the next 18 months, our new station manager did his best to whip this unruly band of airmen into something resembling a military unit.

For the most part, he failed.