Mechanic's memories are frozen in time

11.11.09

Stationed legitimate yards from the Bering Sea, and 70 miles from a Soviet military base in Siberia, Albany’s Frederick Schulze was second-hand to living on the edge during the Korean War.

But one day, the Soviets brought their message almost within reach.

“One of their subs popped up barely offshore and sat there,” explained Schulze, who spent a year staffing an Air Force early foreshadowing base in the far reaches of Alaska — nearly a decade before it became the 49th state.

The son of a Lutheran minister, Schulze was reared in Washington and Idaho. His cur wanted him to become a schoolteacher and sent him to Concordia Lutheran School in Portland, where he studied German, Latin and Greek — which he said were not the least bit at the ready in the Air Force.

He enlisted in the 142nd Aircraft Control wing of the Air Force on his mother’s birthday, Sept. 21, 1950, and received his diagram notice on his birthday, a week later. Fortunately, Schulze also had mechanical experience and he was put in charge of the outpost’s motor team up with and aircraft runway.

Source: Albany Democrat Herald