That Sad Little Peyton Place

My second home away from home was Blytheville AFB, Arkansas.  I’m not counting Alaska since I was only there one year.  Blytheville (pronounced Bli-vul, and affectionately called Hooterville) is in the northeast corner of the state, just below the Missouri boot heel.   An hour and a half south is Memphis and a couple of hours north is St. Louis, but in between, and especially around Blytheville, there wasn’t very much to do or see.  I’m being a little optimistic with that assessment, because actually, there was nothing to do or see.

The first few months I was there, I was getting over issues of my own.  Things fell apart marriage wise, so I found myself alone again.  Then, after about 6 months, I went off to forecasting school in Illinois.  After I came back to Blytheville, my oldest son came to live with me.  He was not quite six years old.  It was the only assignment of my career where I lived on base.  The Air Force worked on a first come, first serve basis so since the only thing open was a 4 bedroom condo type place, that’s what the two of us moved into.

There was a lake nearby where you could fish, but it was a wooded lake so there was no swimming or boating; just fishing.  That’s usually fine with me since I like to fish, but not exclusively.

The county was dry and the base wasn’t, which irritated the county a lot.  They didn’t like it that GIs could buy booze on base and take it to their home off base.   ABC Sports had a roast for Fred Akers, a former University of Texas football coach and Blytheville native, but had to have it on base because no businesses in town served alcohol.

So, what did the folks there do to entertain themselves?  There was a lot of fooling around, that’s what.  At one point, the Wing Commander was caught with the Base Commander’s wife, or was it the other way around?  So everybody was doing it.  It seemed like everywhere you looked someone was doing someone else’s someone.  Friends of mine, people in my neighborhood, folks I worked with; it was almost like a competition. 

 

All that aside, I also encountered the saddest story in my career.  It didn’t happen to me, but to a guy I worked with.  He and his wife were in Germany when they had a little baby.  The baby was still an infant and was sick enough one evening that they took it to the hospital.  The doctors looked the baby over and couldn’t find anything wrong so they sent them back home.  The next morning the baby was dead.

That was bad enough, but then Uncle Sam misplaced the baby’s coffin before it could be shipped back to the states and it took quite some time to find it.  By then the couple of was very distraught and who could blame them?  Long story short, they ended up being reassigned to Blytheville.  I can’t remember where she was from, but he was from Halls, TN, near Knoxville and he worked with me.

Over time, they had another little one, just about the time their marriage was going belly up from all the pent up pain and frustration from losing the first one.  He messed up and smacked her around a couple of times and the powers that be on base split them up.  She got their house and he, after getting permission, moved in with me and Doug, since he was eventually going back to Germany anyway.

She played him like an instrument after that.  She would call and invite him to go to church with her and the baby and then turn around and call the cops because he wasn’t supposed to be there without someone else being there, so the cops arrived there just after he did and wound up throwing him in jail for a few hours.

One night I was at work (Doug was at the sitter’s) when I got a call that said he had barricaded himself in my place and wouldn’t come out.  The cops said he was armed and they wanted me to come try to talk him out, to which I said that sounds more like your job than mine.  They won the argument and by the time I got there he was in the Police car. 

 

They put him in jail after that and only let him out when he was supervised.  One day our boss had gotten him out of jail to go back to my place and get some clean clothes.  While there, he came up with a gun from somewhere and took my boss hostage.  He took him to his wife’s house on base where he let my boss go and held the baby and the sitter hostage until his wife came home.  He then let the sitter go and held his wife and baby.

We were all over the news by this point.  The local Air Force police had no idea how to handle a hostage situation like that, so they were calling LA and New York to get advice from SWAT teams and hostage negotiators.

He eventually gave himself up again and they threw him back in jail.  At the trial they declared him mentally unbalanced and discharged him from the Air Force.  In the late 90s I noticed in the Knoxville paper where he had passed away.  I hope he finally got the peace he deserved.

But that was Hooterville, where you had to take your excitement however you could get it.