MY MEMORIES

Charles Glenn Petersen

Hopedale (continued)

There really wasn’t that much to do as long as everything was working and there was no preventive maintenance to perform. We had befriended two of the guys on the swing shift, Benny Dotson and Bob Proal. After they got off at midnight, they had their meal, went to the midnight movie, and then came to visit us in the maintenance room. Ed and I taught them to play bridge so many a night into the very few hours of the morning, the four of us played bridge.

An aside on playing bridge. A couple of the officers learned that a couple of Airman played bridge. Eventually there was a challenge match set up between these two officers and Ed and I. As airmen we were not allowed to go to the Officer’s Club and they wouldn’t be caught dead in the Airman’s Club so we met in the library to play bridge. I don’t remember who won the matches but we played a few times and they realized that we were not your average low life airman and we were invited to play with them in the Officer’s Club.

At the top of the stairs coming up from our wing of airmen’s rooms there was the latrine, a rec room, and across the hall was the Airman’s Club. Basically a place to drink beer and socialize. In our rec room there was a ping pong table and we became rather good at playing the game. At the top of the other stairway, the rec room had a pool table and across the hall was the NCO Club. We occasionally played pool but not often maybe it was because we could not go in the NCO Club.

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