To Hell and Almost Back

Book excerpt: These are the memoirs of a Wisconsin farm boy that grew up during the Great Depression accompanied by a great drought where many of the lakes dried up and much of the Midwests farmland simply blew away. The Depression ended abruptly the year I graduated from high school when WW II was declared and I was drafted into military service where I spent 3-1/2 years. I was critically wounded and spent the first 30 hours in a morgue followed by almost 1-1/2 years in military hospitals before I was discharged as a permanently disabled veteran. Because of my disabilities, I could never be a farmer and had to go somewhere else and develop new skills so I would be able to support my family. Jobs were hard to get because at the end of the war in Europe, 12 million healthy veterans had just been discharged and the economy was in limbo while industry was converting from wartime to peacetime economy. The story deals with how I started out as an apprentice electronic technician, became an engineer through home study, worked and lived on all continents and finally became Chief of the Navigation Engineering Branch at the Federal Aviation Administration Headquarters in Washington DC. It is a story of how I dealt with serious wartime disabilities and managed to develop a productive career at the same time