Recently, I was explaining to a leading citizen why I thought I was qualified to be a City Councilman. He said my background sounded like the American Dream, and urged me to tell the story. This is that story.
An American Dream
I was raised on a small farm, one of nine children. None ever went to college, except me. My parents and two oldest brothers did not even go to high school. We did not have electricity until 1949. There was no running water; only an out-house. I studied by a kerosene lamp, even through part of high school. Sometimes we had gas lamps, but they were more expensive and harder to maintain. We would not have received electricity in 1949 if it had not been for the Rural Electrification Administration started by President Roosevelt. Despite the large family and difficult conditions, I never heard my parents ever say a harsh word to each other. My mother died when I was a senior in high school; she was sick for three years, and taught me to be the family cook.
I received a very poor, public high school education. There were only five members of my senior class, 25 students in the entire school. After high school, I experienced good education, and I know the difference.
After graduation from high school, at 17, I went to work for a railroad, became a union member, and joined the Naval Reserve as a Seaman Recruit. Active duty called; I was assigned to Moffett Field in the Bay area; I became an aviation electronics technician, petty officer, even though the Navy did not send me to electronics school. Jim Lovell, the Apollo 13 astronaut (a young Naval Officer at the time) helped me obtain a Fleet Appointment to the Naval Academy, and I was reassigned to the Naval Academy Preparatory School. I wanted to fly, however, and thought my chances were better at the new Air Force Academy which had just accepted its first class. So I looked up the name of my home state's Congressman in the Farmers' Almanac, and wrote him a letter asking for an appointment. I was one of 80 nominees from the state; four were selected for the second entering class at the Air Force Academy; and I was the only one who graduated. When I entered the Air Force Academy, I still had an inadequate math/science background; I had never had chemistry; and I did not know how to swim. Despite those troubles, I uncovered some natural strengths. I was number one in my class, in military studies, for nearly the entire four years. When I took the graduate record exams, I was in the 99th percentile in the areas of economics, government, and history.
We graduated from the Academy with Air Force Navigator wings, and then most went to flying school. I became a pilot with a fighter-pilot specialty code and obtained an FAA commercial, instrument, and instructor rating. I flew over much of the world for 25 years, including about 1000 landings under Kennedy Approach Control (New York City), with no accidents. Indeed, I never blew out a tire. Most of my flying was aeromedical evacuation and generals' aircraft. I taught my son to fly over Los Angeles.
Quickly, I was selected for staff work in exercise, contingency, and war plans in France and England for an Airlift Division; the entire nuclear inventory list for the European area was in my safe; it was our job to move them if any were in danger. I personally wrote the first employment manual for Top Secret technology, called Bamboo Tree, to ensure access to Berlin; and followed up to train aircrews and ground facilities in its usage. Then I went to policy and advanced programming at the headquarters of the Military Airlift Command, with about 130,000 personnel, and a four-star general commander. During that assignment, I briefed the commander 24 times on issues ranging from structuring the world-wide DC-9 and C-141 aeromedical evacuation fleet to capital improvements in Osan, Korea, and the plan to close Ramey AFB in Puerto Rico. Included was a decision on whether or not to let the command musical group purchase Stradivarius violins, which required a waiver from the buy-American policy. They got their violins. During this assignment, I was the Baseball Little League Commissioner with 400 kids participating.
I was selected for and graduated from the Air Command and Staff College, and assigned to the Vietnamese Joint General Staff in Saigon to coordinate U.S. support for the Vietnamese. As such, I was all over Vietnam, and coordinated a mixed-force, helicopter lightship-gunship, nighttime capability for Saigon during the 1972 U.S. presidential elections. There was fear that the Viet Cong might try to influence our elections. When the truce in Vietnam arrived, my job was one of the 200 allowed for the U.S., to remain, to support the South. Everyone seemed to want my job; I wanted to go home; so they sent me to Nakom Phanom, Thailand with the U.S. Vietnam Headquarters. In Thailand, we carried on the war in Laos until a truce there, and supported Cambodia.
When the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, was about to be overrun, the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Command, gave us 72 hours to develop a plan for the evacuation of the U.S. embassy, the military assistance group, and associated personnel. I personally wrote the evacuation plan, nicknamed "Eagle Pull", in 12 consecutive hours on yellow legal pad. About 1300 personnel were successfully withdrawn from Phnom Penh with no evacuee hurt. The evacuation was realistically portrayed in the movie, "Killing Fields". I was in Phnom Penh three times and walked the primary helicopter landing zone, a soccer field.
Back in the U.S., I was sent to UCLA for a Master's degree in Business. To utilize that education, the Air Force assigned me to Comptroller duties at the Space and Missile Organization in Los Angeles. I did cost analysis, cost/schedule accounting, management information system work, budget committee, and assistant Comptroller work on a budget of about 1.5 billion 1978 dollars. After four years of that work, I managed to switch to the technical side, Research and Development (R&D) program management. As Chief of Advanced Concepts, on my initiative, we raised $12 million, and completed a conceptual phase on a ballistic version of the Navy's Cruise Missile. McDonald-Douglas and General Dynamics won the major contracts. Now, 26 years later, the Navy wants to build such a missile. Then I was promoted to Director of Advanced Space Technology with 105 engineers/scientists and an annual budget of about 80 million 1980-82 dollars. We had about 30 aerospace firms under contract continuously, including General Dynamics and SAIC in San Diego. On the program management side, we had to sell our programs, obtain funding, justify our budgets to the Comptroller/Commander/higher headquarters, issue Requests for Proposals (RFPs), obtain Environmental Impact Statements, award both competitive and non-competitive contracts, and manage those contracts with technical direction, and cost/schedule information. My group produced the first military payload for the Space Shuttle, and the Internet, in its infancy, was under my jurisdiction for three years. The Space and Missile Organization was formed in response to Sputnik. It consisted of about 3000 Air Force personnel (nearly all officers, due to the nature of the work) supported by a Federal Contract Research Corporation (FCRC) of 3000 scientists and engineers. Half of my staff was FCRC and my last office was in their buildings. At that time, I was the Congressional General Accounting Office (GAO) point of contact for monitoring FCRC independent research programs. During my nearly eight years at this assignment, the Global Position System was developed. Colonel Brock Strom from the first Air Force Academy class and MIT played a huge role in its development. An interesting note, affordable housing was a serious problem for the military personnel; it is worse now. The military finally had to build some government housing at San Pedro. During these eight years, I also was Assistant Scoutmaster, Boy Scouts of America, and my son became an Eagle Scout. We never discriminated against anyone.
Back to flying, I closed out my career as Chief of Command and Control for an F-111 Wing in England, part of this nations cold war posture. This was the most demanding job of my career. The Wing had five squadrons of F-111s, including one squadron of EF-111s, electronic countermeasure aircraft (jammers). The aircraft were dual-capable (conventional and nuclear weapons), in hardened aircraft shelters, and we had part on quick reaction nuclear alert. And we coordinated air refueling support from a nearby base, also with an alert capability. The hardened Command Center, also protected from chemical/biological attack, was a lightning rod for all possible problems, including relations with the British owners of the base, and British public. We did a good job; the Wing Commander was promoted to General at the completion of my tour.
My wife and I bought a house in Woodstock, England which included an art gallery in the front. I did the bookkeeping, with Value-Added Tax, and my wife ran the gallery selling mostly locally produced water-colors. During this time, I went to Russia during the height of Communist power. I saw the Kirov ballet in St. Petersburg and the Bolshoi ballet in the Palace of Congress in the Kremlin. And I saw for myself what a communist/socialistic system had created. Simply put, the shelves were bare. If you really think about it, they had a defined benefits plan and it was unsustainable.
At the point of my retirement, including my four years at the Air Force Academy, I had served for 34 years. No one that I ever served with, or directed, was hurt.. About 1/3rd of those 34 years were spent in various schools.
I retired to La Jolla, but missed the action. I went back to my state of birth, and ran for U.S. Congress. I won the Republican nomination with, I believe, about 2/3rds of the vote. Senators Kassebaum and Dole were big supporters; I was counseled by President Reagan in the Blue Room of the White House. Unfortunately, I did not unseat the incumbent.
After two years in Washington, D.C., my wife and I went to the Alliance Francaise in Paris to study French for six-weeks. We didn't improve our French a lot, but lived with a French lady in the Monmarte District and thoroughly explored Paris and its environs.
We returned to Seattle where I went to work for METLIFE selling personal/business fixed and variable products. I bought into their defined contribution pension and medical plans, even though I already had those benefits from military retirement. The medical coverage was extremely helpful when my wife got Ovarian Cancer. I gave up the job and returned to La Jolla where she died.
Seeking out and taking advantage of opportunities, I have received a world-class leadership/management/accounting/business education, and applied my education and training in incredibly responsible jobs. During many of the international crises of our times, I was there in various roles, some small and some large. I was a Korean War era Veteran and qualified for the Korean G.I. Bill. During the Cuban Missile crisis, I was flying out of Key West and Homestead AFB (Miami). In 1965, I flew the General's aircraft, as we visited four bases in one day, including Belgium Headquarters, to assemble the rescue forces for the hostages in the Congo. For security reasons, the entire operation was put together by word-of-mouth. No messages were sent. All of the U.S. airlift capability in Europe was used, and 1200-1400 hostages were saved. This was followed by our Division's evacuation of U.S. personnel in the Indian-Pakistani War, and humanitarian airlift during the 1967 Israeli War with Egypt. Then there were Berlin access problems with the Russians. When the West German Bundestag met for the first time in Berlin, the Russians put on an air show over Berlin and flew head-on with our aircraft in the Berlin corridors. I was in East Berlin before, during, and after the Berlin Wall. Returning to the U.S., during the Viet Cong's TET 1968 offensive, I flew as many as four round trips, daily, between Andrews AFB (Washington, D.C.) and New York City with full loads of wounded. Some still had their Vietnam combat boots on. When the truce with North Vietnam was signed and the prisoners were released, all of the C-141s which picked them up in Hanoi had aeromedical crews on board. Seventy percent of those crews were Reserve Associate members. During my time at the Military Airlift Command, I had thought of the idea, proposed it, and created the units. In essence, they were civilian nurses and medical technicians that flew, on their days off, with our active duty forces, all over the world. We had enough capability to support a major war. The evacuation of Phnom Penh, Cambodia was my last association with military operations until our F-111 Wing in England participated in the strike on Libya. We provided the electronic countermeasure aircraft and coordinated refueling support as the F-111 force flew all night on the arduous course around France, Spain, and east over the Mediterrean.
I have seen much of the world from the cockpit of an airplane, lived in many states and countries, stayed in the finest hotels, eaten in the world's best restaurants, drank the world's best wine, seen the best plays in London and New York, been to performances in nearly all of the world's great opera houses, and drove the best cars. At the same time in my various world assignments, I marveled as I took the time-machine back to very austere conditions. I never cared who got the credit for improvements as I left every place better than I found it. I have lived in California for about 22 years, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Del Mar, La Jolla and downtown San Diego. I have returned to the San Diego Area three times and lived here for 11 years with the last three years in downtown San Diego. Whereas I was the only member of my family to go to college, thanks to California Real Estate, my two children graduated from USC. They went from middle school through high school in Tarzana.
So what does all this have to do with the San Diego City Council? San Diego has some weaknesses. I know I can help. I doubt that there is anything the City Council does that I have not already experienced. Piece of cake! "Piece of cake" was initially a British fighter pilot's expression (prominent in the Battle of Britain), reflecting a can-do attitude. It means something like, "nearly impossible, but I can do it".
One of my favorite cities in the world is Sydney, Australia. Sydney, again for about the last eight years, just won all the travel industry awards as the best city to visit, primarily because it has no weaknesses. When the current city financial woes are corrected, traffic at Lindbergh is relieved, and infrastructure improvements are made, San Diego will be back on track to becoming the Sydney of America. We must continue the quest for excellence!
pHIL MEINHARDT 9/1/05
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