If you like our blogs, please consider a FB Fundraiser to help the museum
Posted: July 23, 2019 Filed under: Military Family Museum, Museum of the American Military Family Leave a comment
Apollo 11 Crew in Guam
Posted: June 20, 2019 Filed under: Asia, Brats, History, Memories Leave a commentNow, as we near the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, I discovered another Apollo 11-related gem…
Before my family & I moved on base we lived in the town of Tamuning for nine months, and while there I used to babysit the three sons of NASA’s director of the Guam tracking station for the Apollo lunar landings, Charles Force, and his wife on several occasions when she’d have to work at the local tv station. One of their sons, Greg, would become instrumental in helping the Apollo 11 crew return safely from their mission:
Flight Plan, page 3-119.
This is Apollo Control at 169 hours, 28 minutes. Apollo 11 is 118,542 nautical miles [219,540 km] from Earth; approaching at a velocity of 5,225 feet per second [1,593 m/s]. Crew is still asleep. Performance of all systems continues to be normal. Midcourse Correction number 6, which was scheduled for an elapsed time of 172 hours, has been canceled. The trajectory is such that it will not be required. From the Manned Space Flight Network we have a report of a contribution to the Apollo 11 mission from a 10-year-old boy in Guam. The Guam tracking station is receiving telemetry from this mission. Had a problem with one if its antennas – a bearing. The bearing was replaced with the assistance of a 10-year-old boy named Greg Force who had arms small enough that he could work through a 2½ inch diameter hole to pack the new bearing. We’re now showing Entry Interface with the Earth’s atmosphere; 25 hours, 33 minutes, 30 seconds from now; and the Green Team of flight controllers led by Cliff Charlesworth is now taking over from Glynn Lunney and his Black Team of flight controllers. This is Mission Control, Houston.
(Greg’s father Charles Force was Director of the Tracking Station on the island of Guam. At about 10pm on July 23rd he recalls his father had him picked up from his home, where he was with his mother and brothers, and brought to the station. A stuck bearing meant the antenna could not move. Greg did not actually replace the bearing, but he greased it through a narrow hole where an adult arm could not reach. That was sufficient to allow the antennae to move again and continue tracking Apollo 11. Greg later met Neil Armstrong, who thanked him in person.) https://history.nasa.gov/afj/ap11fj/24day8-news-checks.html
See also:
http://www.cnn.com/…/T…/space/07/20/apollo11.irpt/index.html
My family who were there: Charles Maack, Mike Maack, Mark Maack
And my friends on NAS: Suzanne Davis, Diane O’Neil, Patti O’Neil, Ira Pador
If you want to purchase something from our Amazon wishlist, we’d love it!
Posted: May 20, 2019 Filed under: Museum of the American Military Family Leave a commentPeople ask how they can help the museum, and so we have created a “wish list” for purchases of things we wish we could have. If you want to buy something from it, we’d be very appreciative.
https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/ITFL9TAZDHZS
The Museum of the American Military Family presents: Schooling With Uncle Sam, an exhibit about the history of DODEA
Posted: April 24, 2019 Filed under: Brats, DDESS, DODDS Atlantic, DODDS Europe, DODDS Pacific, DODEA, Europe, History, Military Family Museum, Museum of the American Military Family, School Stories, Schooling With Uncle Sam Leave a commentby Allen Dale Olson, former DoDDS Liaison to Headquarters, U.S. Army, Europe
Where is a great place to experience the thoughts and memories of those who have been teachers or students in a world-wide school system operated by the United States Department of Defense?
…In a special gallery at the Museum of the American Military Family & Learning Center in Tijeras, New Mexico, a scant seven miles east of Albuquerque on exit 175 off of I-40 and Old Route 66.
Dedicated to preserving the history and stories of DODEA (Department of Defense Education Agency), the DODEA Gallery reaches back to the close of World War II for quotes, documents, and artifacts related to the establishment of a school system the War Department determined would be necessary to support families accompanying the Occupation military personnel coming to Germany and Japan for the purpose of demonstrating to the defeated populations the effectiveness of American communities, a free press, and judicial and education systems.
MAMF is a unique museum that collects and preserves the stories, photos, documents, and artifacts of the parents, spouses, and children of those who serve and have served in the U.S. military.
In the DODEA Gallery, visitors can travel with teacher Dorothy Cox through twenty-plus years of collecting tools, instruments, garments, paintings, and oddities from Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, the Orient, and England, along with the reflections and personal effects of many other teachers, including some who actually started the school system in October 1946.
Today there are millions of adults who once attended DoD schools, and several hundred of them have shared with the museum their feelings about what their schools meant to them. In an adjoining gallery, the museum also presents another permanent exhibit depicting the life of a military kid, –an exhibit dedicated to the many Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Brats.
Collectively, their memories recall when their school was run by the armed services, when the schools in Europe were assigned to the Army, in the Pacific to the Air Force, and in the Atlantic to the Navy. The museum’s collections trace that history of Congressional and Defense Department mergers and consolidations of the school system, including the era when schools on military installations in the States joined in. A letter from General Colin Powell explains that one of his most difficult jobs in the military was chairing a local school advisory board.
In the back garden, MAMF displays a selection of Brat-generated statements about the Core Values of Brat culture.
Civilian visitors to MAMF find it interesting to learn that some high schoolers had their proms in a Bavarian castle; graduation ceremonies in a Roman amphitheater. They see letter jackets from Tachikawa and Okinawa, Heidelberg and Mannheim, and are impressed that football teams from Berlin played games against London, Madrid against Brussels, that American high school bands and choirs performed in ancient abbeys, monasteries, and chapels, examples of which they see in the exhibit’s displays.
Want to know what it’s like to have your family assigned to a Navy Base in Scotland but you have to spend your sophomore year in the school dormitory on the air base in Lakenheath? Or your family gets reassigned just about the time you expect to make the varsity basketball team? Or when you’ve just fallen in love with your first grade teacher in Frankfurt when you transfer to Mississippi?
This exhibit describes what those kids thought about such frequent moves and how they feel those moves affected them now that they are adults.
In short, it’s fairly easy to get hard data about the DoD school system on DODEA and military web sites, but only in the museum’s galleries you can feel the heart and soul of those who teach and have taught, who attend and have attended, this remarkable far-flung school system.
Other museum exhibits focus on the life of a military spouse, of the sacrifices and service of military families, on issues related to addiction and recovery, loss and letting go, and of the satisfactions of service to country.
The Museum of the American Military Family & Learning Center is at 546B State Highway 333 (Old Route 66), Tijeras, NM 87059. Open 10:30 – 5:00 Saturdays through Wednesdays or by appointment. Tel: (505) 504-6830. militaryfamilymuseum@comcast.net.www.militaryfamilymuseum.org
Military Kids’ Lives—a New Exhibit at the Museum of the American Military Family in Tijeras, New Mexico
Posted: March 25, 2019 Filed under: Brats, Events, School Stories, Schooling With Uncle Sam Leave a commentBy Allen Dale Olson
We are not defined by ethnicity, religion, geography, or race. You cannot spot us in a crowd. But we, the children of warriors, have been shaped by a culture so powerful we are forever different, forever proud, and forever linked to one another. -Mary Edwards Wertsch, Reflections on an Invisible Nation
Have you ever wondered what it would have been like if you had attended five or six different schools enroute to high school graduation? Or if you had lived in a foreign country by the time you reached third grade? Or during any of your elementary or junior or senior school years?
At the Museum of the American Military, as a civilian, you can live that kind of life vicariously because of a new exhibit – Military Kid’s Lives– or as a former military kid, you can reminisce about those memories of packing up every two or three years to move to schools in another state or another country. You can recapture the childhood pride you once had (and still have) in being a Brat or learn what it’s like to be a child growing up in a military family by reading exhibit panels including the stories of kids from the 1930s to the present.
The exhibit is a permanent part of the Museum’s collections, and contrasts and compares the experiences of Hudson Philips, a Brat in the 1930s and 40s with those of author Bernard Lee (1950s and 60s) and Dwayne Dunn (1980s and 90s) and the more recent reflections of Janine Boldrin.
The museum is in Tijeras, New Mexico, on Old Route 66 just seven miles east of Albuquerque and is collecting and preserving the stories, documents, photos, and artifacts of the parents, spouses, and children of those who serve and have served in America’s military. It is also home to a special gallery focusing on the history of the Defense Department world-wide school system for military children with commentary by teachers and students going back to the 1946 founding of the system.
Military Kids’ Lives, the story of what it’s like to be a military kid, is a compilation of information not only from those who grew up military, but also from some of the nation’s leading researchers on military kid life: Marc Curtis, founder of Military Brats Registry; Mary Edwards Wertsch, author of “Military Brats: Life inside the Fortress”; Donna Musil, producer of the documentary film, “Brats – Our Journey Home”; and the museum’s artist-in-residence, Lora Beldon, founder of Military Kid Art Project.
Elva Resa Publishing House and Military Kids Lives Magazine are also featured on panels discussing their military child-centric publications. Visitors will see artifacts, clothing, and books donated by people who grew up in military families – from Thailand to Texas, Norway to Libya, all over Europe, the USA, and the Far East. They can read first-hand stories of people who spent much of their lives in service to their country.
The exhibit was sponsored, in part, by Home Depot, Daisy BB guns, GCC, Rio Grande Credit Union and Chameleon Kids.
MAMF is at 546B State Route 333, Tijeras, NM 87059, right next to Molly’s famous bar at the interchange of I-40 and SR 14, exit 175 (the Turquoise Trail National Scenic Byway).
Telephone (505) 504-6830. www.militaryfamilymuseum.org.
The exhibit opens April 14 and the museum is open every day except Thursday and Friday, 10:30 – 5:00. Admission is free and donations are gladly accepted.
