Paul List

The Navy sent me to ET school for nine months right after boot camp. ET school was a focused, but general, theory and practice of electronics. After ET school I received orders to a very nice duty station at Cape Canaveral. This was NOTU, the Naval Ordnance Test Unit. It was a small Naval facility attached to a large Air Force base, Patrick Air Force Base. This was in turn "attached" to the NASA facility at Cape Canaveral. I worked for and with navy and air force personnel, and civilian contractors. The first four months at Cape Canaveral was also School, but specialized in scope to what the mission was; missile test instrumentation for the Polaris submarines as new submarines came into the fleet. This was the basis for much of the technical knowledge that I have used and built on for the rest of my life.

After four years in the Navy, I went to work for the Dow Corning Hyper-Pure Silicon plant in Hemlock Michigan. This was another opportunity to pick up some good knowledge and skills, especially in extremely high vacuum systems. It was an extremely good place to work if you can reconcile yourself to going to the same factory every day, but when the Motorola shop asked me to come back, I decided to go back to radio service work even though that meant a slight pay cut. Good move! I now was servicing an area and really getting taught by having enrolled in the "school of hard knocks".

During this time I also went back to night school to take math courses. This, dear reader, is where my job with the State of Michigan really came into being. At the Motorola shop, I became acquainted with many technicians and salesmen from around a fairly large area in mid Michigan. Most of them had a pocket protector in their shirt pocket with the big Motorola symbol on it, red at that time (blue came a bit later). I noted that one of the night school students had a Motorola pocket protector. I talked to him after one class and said something to the effect of "I thought I knew all the Motorola techs around" and we exchanged introductions. It was Shep (Lloyd Schoeppach) and he said, "I work for the State Police". It turned out that he worked at SP30, Third District Headquarters at Bay City. SP31, the Bay City post was also located in the same building. Shep then told me that there were two openings, and gave me information on how to check about a job. I called, was offered a job before the statewide testing had been given, but was also told that I would need to take and pass the test. I opted to wait until after the test was offered, whereupon I passed it. If I remember correctly, there were openings in the Highway department and the Department of State Police. I was inclined to take a job with the Highway department, but at that time the only jobs were in Southeast Michigan, and I did not think I wanted to go there.

So I applied to, and was hired by, MSP and went to my first duty site at the Sixth District Headquarters, Rockford, SP60. It is interesting that Fred Skalski hired in on the same day that I did, April 20, 1970. We were civil service 07 techs. The "07" was a civil service designator meaning junior tech, or tech trainee, or something like that. The senior level tech was designated 09. During that era, the junior tech, 07, had to split work between the shop and the dispatch desk. I was not then, and still am not, very well suited to "paper work" and radio dispatching is paperwork in my categorization of activity. To compound the difficulty, I was not a skilled typist, and the radio dispatch had to run queries on the old "green machine" LEIN machine. You did not "easily" correct the paper tapes, so that meant that I was *VERY* slow at that job. I went home with severe headaches after duty on the radio desk. The 09 tech at Rockford was Barney Hunt, a wonderful guy. He went to bat for me in Lansing, and arranged for a short-term solution for relief for me.

They sent me to the UP for two months of vacation relief. That was wonderful, long stretches of highway, remote sites, slow pace as far as policing went, and lots of time with veteran troubleshooters and "cobblers" John Wilson and Stub Folstad. Stub and I became good friends, and our paths crossed in a variety of ways in the following years.

After the stint of vacation relief, I only had a few more sessions on the radio desk. Barney had been pounding on desks in Lansing and was able to have the dispatch desk part of the 07 job eliminated. So I now was full time in the shop. Sweet bliss! The Rockford post, SP61, was a good, but short-lived situation. Not long after I arrived at Rockford, an opening occurred at Detroit, SP20. I think that was when Jerry transferred to Paw Paw, SP51. I elected to not go to Detroit, even though it was a promotion and pay raise. I think that was when Fred went to Detroit. Soon after, there was another opening in Detroit. I can't remember for sure, but I think that was when Paul Calvert went to Marquette, which was probably Negaunee by then; SP80. It was becoming clearer to me that everyone had to take a promotion by passing through Detroit, so that is the decision that I made.

I don't recall exactly when the promotion and move to Detroit happened, but from what I do recall, it can be more or less fixed at late September or early October of 1970. So in a period of five or six months, I started at Rockford, got the family moved to Rockford, spent two months in the UP, returned to Rockford for a few weeks, and wound up in Detroit. The family moved to Detroit at Thanksgiving, 1970. Meanwhile, I had been living with Fred, who allowed me to share his bachelor pad for no rent, and sharing only groceries. Money was tight, and the quarters were deeply appreciated.

I worked in Detroit (SP20) at the bench and did a lot of I-squad work. Very few installs, but a lot of experimentation in trying to get two radios working into one antenna, with nothing really properly matched. The low band MSP radio had to share an "eight-ball" standard auto radio antenna with a high band I-squad radio. It was during this time that the first switching boxes were introduced. Denelcor was the company that designed and built this custom equipment. It had a trunk mounted box which controlled the functions of both radios, brought the control functions up front to a miniature control head, and used antenna relays to isolate the radios from each other during transmit. This was a big improvement from the practice of placing both radios on the mismatched antenna through a TEE. Approximately two and a half years later, I was once again in the UP for vacation relief. This was kind of an annual summer practice rotating a vacation relief tech from the lower peninsula to the UP, because there were only two techs in the whole UP, and both had a lot of vacation time because of their longevity. While there, I learned of a vacancy with the DNR as a result of the death of the Newberry DNR tech. I called my wife, Ruth, and asked if she was able to take one more move. That was a difficult sell, as we had been through nine moves in ten years. Her answer was something like "One more time!" in an exasperated tone. The end result was that we moved to Newberry in September 1973, and I was now a DNR radio tech working out of Region 4.

That seemed to be the way it would be, but destiny has curves built into the road. In 1975, I received a call from the MSP wondering if I might want to return, since there was an opening in the MSP as a result of the death of Paul Calvert, the same tech that I replaced at Detroit. I did not think much about it and told the Lansing office (I think this was still George Dodge doing the calling) that my family was settled in at Newberry, and I was not interested in another move, so I had to say no, even though I did enjoy the MSP job. I thought that was the end of it. A day or so later, I received another call, and the question had changed to "Would I be interested in transferring back to MSP if the job would be located in Newberry?" I thought about it for a day, called back to George, and accepted that proposition. On May 5, 1975, I once again worked for the MSP out of the Newberry post, SP82. Time passed, and this resulted in lots of history, which I am trying to collect. Later I retired from the MSP in 1997, still in Newberry. (SP82 janitor now, 2005 to present. 2009 at this writing.)

Paul List (February 19, 2009)