Coffee with All4Cure - Gordy (2/3)

I grew up south of Buffalo, New York in a little town called Franklinville. I left there when I was 18, went to college for a year, and then left to go into military service. I did four years in the Air Force. People are often surprised when they ask about my time in the Air Force and I tell them that I was a Russian linguist. When I left college in 1968 I went right down to the recruiter’s office to take all the tests. They said I could do anything I wanted since I scored so high on my tests. After about three weeks of basic training, I was chosen to go to a Chinese class. They gave us a language test and the top 100 were taken to learn Mandarin while the rest of us got to choose which language we wanted to take. I heard that they taught Russian in Syracuse, New York which was close to my home. I was able to learn Russian and hitchhike home on the weekends if I wanted to. I was there for nine months learning Russian for six hours a day. We learned about 50 vocabulary words a day including the Russian names for all military vehicles and aircraft. After more training and radio school, I was sent to Berlin, Germany which at the time was partly in the Eastern Bloc countries. We would go into this windowless building with tape recorders and radios to listen and record the Russian air traffic. I got three days off every week and was able to travel a lot on the British, French, or US military trains for free. I did about 15 months overseas in Germany, another 7 months in Japan and then I was out. I took a year to get used to normal life again before ending up in Arizona where I would eventually start my family.