PennSilverTaco's "Perfect 5-Lug Regular Cab" Build, Aspergers, and General BS MegaThread!

@ColoradoTJ
@wilcam47

 

@ColoradoTJ
@wilcam47

 

@ColoradoTJ
@wilcam47

P-3 simulator; I've actually "flown" one of these before!

 

@ColoradoTJ
@wilcam47

A complete, but not exactly airworthy, P-3!

 

@ColoradoTJ
@wilcam47

 

@ColoradoTJ
@wilcam47

The other two hangars; My dad has worked in all three at one time or another!

 

@ColoradoTJ
@wilcam47

In the 1980s, during his time in VP-47, one of my dad's subordinates was a Petty Officer Third Class by the name of Stanley Burrell. Name doesn't sound familiar? He's better known as MC Hammer...

My dad says that Hammer was a good guy, but one time in about 1986 he showed up in a brand new red Mercedes convertible and parked in one of the spaces reserved for officers (Hammer was enlisted)...



My dad (a commissioned officer) told him that for obvious reasons, he could not park there, and he moved the car without incident. As stated above, MC Hammer was a decent guy, but even then my dad said he was always talking about successful he was going to become.

 

The US military worked out a deal with McDonald's and Burger King, where McDonald's would be allowed to open locations on various Navy bases...

I don't know if you knew this, but according to my dad the Burger Kings were constructed on Air Force bases, @wilcam47...

This Mickey D's was less than a mile from the on-base housing where we lived from 1997 to 1998, and my mom took me here at least once a week for a Happy Meal. She had a 1990 Toyota Camry LE V6, Super White with a blue a cloth interior and loaded; I loved that car, and I loved the memories made in that car and at this McDonald's even more!

I have no idea when this place ceased to be a McDonald's, but signage on the building indicates that it was repurposed as some NASA-owned restaurant a while ago, and I have no idea how long that NASA place has been closed. The fluorescent lights were on inside, so it does have electricity, but like a good chunk of the base it has fallen into disrepair...

 

The commissary, where my parents did almost all of their grocery shopping, since everything sold there was tax-free...

 

Most AF bases had a burgerking, some had popeyes in food court at BX area

 

i rarely shopped at commissary, veggies were wilted, and meat was awful looking

 

One of the great things about living on a military base is that it doesn't get much safer. MY parents thought nothing of letting me spend a whole day riding around on my bike, and my mom thought nothing of leaving in the aforementioned 1990 Camry LE with the engine running so I could listen to the radio and have the A/C on while she conducted business at the bank or the post office. Here, we see the base office; I have no idea if it is still in use...

 

@shakerhood

My parents may have gone off base for meat and veggies, but I never had a problem with the commissary as a whole. The commissary was staffed by civilians, and one time in 1997 while my mom were checking out, I got into a conversation with a cashier who was impressed with my knowledge and passion for cars. I believe he owned a Fox Body Mustang, and at 8 years old, I was obsessed with anything that had wheels and an engine. He had a Mustang magazine, and he ended up just giving it to me right there on the spot! I have so many great memories of living on this base!

 

The base is probably bigger than Doylestown Borough, and in theory, military families could live a functional and productive life even if they only left the base to bring the kids to school. The base had a post office and a grocery store, as seen above. It also had a bank, a pool, a gym, tennis courts, a gas station with a full service garage, the Navy Exchange, a church, and numerous residences. We had a 1990 Toyota Camry and a 1996 Nissan Pathfinder at the time, and my dad never bothered going to a dealership even though the Pathfinder was basically brand new and still under warranty at the time, instead getting both vehicles serviced on base. One benefit of being active duty military is that you don't have register your vehicles in the state in which you are stationed. Obviously, keeping the Camry and the Pathfinder registered in Pennsylvania was less of a pain in the ass than registering them in California for numerous reasons, so we didn't have to worry about getting either vehicle smogged. My dad's 1997 Yamaha Virago (which he bought in California in late 1996) was registered in California, but to this day motorcycles and scooters are exempt from smog testing regardless of what year they are.

 

My dad's rank/paygrade entitled him to a very nice house on the base, but all of the nicest houses were taken and there was a waiting list. For the first six months or so of my dad's second tour of duty, we were relegated to a WII-era 2-bedroom shitbox that was maybe 700 square feet. The house was so undersized and below my dad's paygrade that the Navy gave him a second house in the same building to store all of our furniture and other belongings that wouldn't fit in the house we were actually living in. Keep in my mind that in Pennsylvania, the house my parents actually owned from 1990 to 1996 had four bedrooms and almost 2,800 square feet, with an unfinished basement to store stuff.

There were probably twenty of these WII-era multifamily buildings, consisting of two to six houses each, located just off base but still owned by the US Navy and thus still a very safe place to live. The houses of the type we lived in had all been built in the 1940s, during WWII. A large number of larger townhouse-style dwellings and apartment blocks had been built in that off-base neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s. We were originally supposed to be in a slightly larger and more open 1-story ranch-style plan, on Orange Avenue. These 1940s houses had probably been vacant since the height of the Cold War and were in various stages of disrepair, and when we arrived in California in August 1996 after driving across the country, we were dismayed to find that renovations on the house we had been promised had not even started yet. The window on one of the exterior doors was smashed, the water wasn't on (I distinctly remember that there were spiderwebs in the toilet), and I'm pretty sure the electricity wasn't on. These houses did not have air-conditioning or even central heat, but rather a single wall-mounted electric forced air heating unit in the living room; I distinctly remember that the heater in the Orange Avenue rancher was missing the vent/panel, and the heater itself had more spiderwebs in it than the toilet. These houses were built as quickly and cheaply as possible to house soldiers and their families during WWII, and since they were in an area with a very mild year-round climate, I would not be surprised if the houses did not originally have built-in heat. The electric heaters they were equipped with when we moved in were probably installed in the 1960s or 1970s...?

Anyway, I would be starting school in less than a month, and none of us wanted to be stuck in a hotel for several months even if the Navy did pay for it. My parents liked the layout of the ranch-style house better, but it would have taken weeks or even months to make the one on Orange Avenue habitable. They a freshly renovated 2-story attached home just down the street, at 478 Stevens Road, ready to go. When I say ready to go, I mean that everything was new, but the house had been renovated on a government budget. It was freshly painted, with new carpet and kitchen appliances, but it was a total shitbox compared to the fairly new colonial in Pennsylvania we'd just moved out of. We moved in before I started school, but our furniture and other belongings didn't arrive until after I'd been in 2nd grade for a few days...

We had driven the new Pathfinder across the country, and the Navy paid to have the Camry shipped, conveniently having it dropped off right at our front door. One of the less annoying things about the Stevens Road house was the lack of off-street parking. The Pathfinder, the Camry, and the motorcycle my dad ended up buying all had to be parked in spaces in front of our house. From our front porch, you could look straight down Orange Avenue, and most of those houses were occupied. This kid named Braden, who would eventually end up becoming my best friend for the two years we lived there, lived at the end of Orange Avenue on the right in a house that was identical to ours. All of these WWII-era houses had just two bedrooms and only one bathroom, and I thought I had it bad, but Braden had to share a single bathroom with two parents and an older sister! Since the houses were only two bedrooms, Braden had to share a bedroom with his older sister!



Braden and I both had it easy compared to my dad, though...

When my dad was a kid, he had to share a 3-bedroom/1-bathroom house with both parents, an older brother, a younger brother, and a younger sister!

 

We moved out of the Stevens Road house in March 1997 and moved back across the country to Virginia Beach in the summer of 1998, and the whole neighborhood still existed then. For Christmas in 2001, we drove down to California from Washington (where my dad was stationed at the time) to visit family in Monterey. We stopped at Moffett before driving back up to Washington, and back then it was still a functioning military base. We were dismayed to see that 478 Stevens Road, along with all of the WWII-era houses, had all been demolished without a trace. That was in December 2001, and we have no idea when they were torn down, but they were still there and occupied in 1998. The newer stucco homes and apartment buildings were still there and in use in December 2001, and all of the streets except Orange Avenue were still there; Orange Avenue had been totally ripped up and had an open field in its place, with a playground serving as the only landmark of where Orange Avenue had been.

 

The on-base house we moved into in March 1997 was a hell of a lot nicer than the Stevens Road house, but still a shitbox compared to pretty much every other house I've ever lived in. It was a 3-bedroom stucco house, probably built in the 1960s and located at the end of 4-unit building, and we lived there from March 1997 until June 1998. This house was located in the last of three courts on a long road called Wescoat Court. Our court was the smallest of the three. All of these houses were still there and still being lived in when we went back to visit the base in December 2001, but when I went there with my dad and uncle in March 2009, they had been torn down as well and replaced...

Their replacements were larger and much nicer townhomes that actual garages and central air! Those houses are still there as of August 2022, but I don't know who lives there; Google bought up a large amount of former government land and decontaminated it, then built a huge campus there, but I don't think any civilians live in these houses. Moffett is no longer a Navy base and is largely used by NASA; I believe that these homes are used by a combination of NASA, Air Force, and Air National Guard employees. The large number of vehicles with out-of-state license plates parked in front of these houses were an obvious sign of military residents.

The nine houses on Berry Drive (also on-base), probably built in the 1940s or 1950s, are still there and still in use as of August 2022. They have been renovated at least once since we were there in the 1990s, and have central air (these are nice houses, and I wouldn't be surprised if they had central air back in the 1990s). My dad was of a high enough rank that he qualified for a house on Berry Drive, but these were all spoken for, and the wait to get one extended well beyond when we moved back East in 1998; I thought these houses were mansions back in the day, but I was small and a little underweight back then. Roughly a quarter of a century later, I am huge now, and the houses look a lot less imposing. They are beautiful houses and plenty big, but they look smaller than the house I currently live in, and a search on Zillow confirms that they are still government-owned so I cannot get any info about them...

 

@ABA180
@ColoradoTJ
@Plain Jane Taco
@shakerhood
@Squatting Pigeon
@steelcity2
@Taco critter
@TnShooter
@wilcam47

In December 2001, all of the streets except Orange Avenue were still in existence and paved, and the newer residences were still there and in use. In March 2009, I don't remember if the 1960s duplexes and apartments were still there, but the paved streets including Stevens Road were still there. Just last Friday, I felt like I was in Centralia! That gravel road, as seen through the windshield of our rented Surburban, is all that remains of Stevens Road...