Freedom 7 Elementary School circa 1962
New Mexico
My father, Edward ‘Ed’ Horton Tubridy, was a pioneer in the space program. He started in the early 50s as a second lieutenant in the Air Force stationed at White Sands Missile Range. He was a steely-eyed spaceman! Hollomon Air Force Base and Alamogordo were at the south end of White Sands.
Five years earlier, the first atomic bomb was detonated at the Trinity Site in the northern part of White Sands. A bit further north is Los Alamos – the birthplace of this fantastic device.
Hand in hand with the development of the atomic bomb was the development of rocketsβthe perfect way to deliver these nasty bombs without getting any on you.
The Germans led rocket development. At the end of World War II, the US government had brought some of the unused V2 rockets the Germans launched during the war – plus a bunch of the German scientists and engineers that made it possible – to Holloman Air Force Base and a sleepy little railroad town Alamogordo. It was called Operation Paperclip.
Dad’s job as a second lieutenant in the Air Force was to test these rockets. They would launch them north from Holloman into the test range. Dad would help find them.
On one of these trips, he arrived at the Trinity Site and collected some Trinitite. Trinitite, or Atomsite or Alamogordo glass, is the glassy residue left on the desert floor after the plutonium-based Trinity nuclear bomb test. He used to keep it in his sock drawer. As a child, I would bring it out and look at it occasionally.
Later on, atomic energy would lead me very briefly into nuclear engineering. Who would have known? Maybe it was in my DNA. Or irradiated!
He left the service after two short years and immediately started working for Goodyear Aircraft. Goodyear had gotten into the aircraft business in the 1920s, building blimps. He lived in Dayton, Ohio, for a while, but ultimately, his job would return him to White Sands. He would return to test the Matador Rocket, a cruise missile type of rocket that somehow employed Goodyear technology.
At the same time, he met my mother, Betty Kovac. My grandfather was a mining Engineer in West Virginia. My mother’s brother-in-law, Edward Shaw, was the superintendent at that mine. Shaw invited my grandfather and father to watch a football game on their new television. This was in the 1953 time frame. They got married on July 31, 1954. I was born one year and one week later. After getting married, my mother moved to Alamogordo, where I was born.
Alamogordo was an old railroad town that is now home to scientists and engineers worldwide. Later, when I was working for Hewlett-Packard, I met the only other person born there – A german whose father was part of Operation Paperclip. Dad’s career with Goodyear did not last long before he switched employers to General Dynamics. This would set the course for the rest of his professional life.
San Diego
When my Dad took a new job, we moved from Alamogordo to San Diego, California. General Dynamics had recently purchased Convair. Convairβs Atlas rocket was initially developed in 1957 as an ICBM for the U.S. Air Force. The Atlas rocket transitioned into a civilian launch vehicle and was used for the first orbital manned U.S. space flights during Project Mercury in 1962 and 1963. They were built in San Diego but launched from Cape Canaveral.
My brother Rick was born while we were living in San Diego. From what I remember hearing, we could see the ocean from our house, and a lemon tree was in the backyard. I was fond of eating the lemons that had fallen off the tree. We had birds when I was younger.
Cocoa Beach
In early 1958, we moved from San Diego to the little town of Cocoa Beach, Florida. Cocoa Beach was just south of Cape Canaveral. The United States government has used the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station since 1949 when President Harry S. Truman established the Joint Long Range Proving Grounds at Cape Canaveral to test missiles. The location was among the best in the continental United States for this purpose as it allowed for launches out over the Atlantic Ocean, and it was closer to the equator than most other parts of the United States, allowing rockets to get a boost from the Earth’s rotation.
As the space program ramped up, thousands of highly skilled workers were relocated to Cocoa Beach and other nearby towns such as Titusville and Merritt Island. Historically, the first non-native settlement in the area was by a family of formerly enslaved people following the American Civil War. In 1888, a group of men from Cocoa bought the entire tract of land, which went undeveloped until it was bought out in 1923 by a member of the groupβGus Edwards, Cocoa’s city attorney.
Previously known as Oceanus, The Town of Cocoa Beach was established on June 5, 1925, with Gus Edwards as the first mayor. In 1955, the city prepared to house the people who were involved in launching missiles from what is now Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Dredges were brought to do this, and βfinger canalsβ were created. The dredged-up sand was then used to build the new houses. Most of the new homes that were built backed up onto canals. In 1958, Mom & Dad bought a three-bedroom house on a canal at the end of one of the streets β Blakey Boulevard β in a sub-division called Convair Cove for the company whose workers lived there. Blakey was a big wig at Convair at the time!
Our house was at the mouth of one of these canals and overlooked the Thousand Islands. The Thousand Islands are a group of natural, modified, and ‘spoils’ islands in the Banana River Lagoon, Cocoa Beach, in Brevard County, Florida. Spoil islands are created by dredging.
In the late 1950s, many narrow channels were dredged in the islands. This helped to control the mosquito population by draining standing water and allowing the fish to eat the larvae before they hatch. For us growing up, it meant lots of ways to explore in our boats!
The photo above shows our house across the canal at the end of the two roads. It has our sailboat in the back. If you zoom in on our house, you can see us in the side yard. Off the picture to the right are the Thousand Islands. The big house with the screened porch belonged to McNabb, who was in charge of Convair’s operations at the cape.
They eventually built homes on the vacant lots to the right of our house. McNabb Park is at the far end. My friend John and I got a drawing of our proposal for the park in the local paper. Needless to say, it was a little more elaborate than what was built. It was built on the site the original sewer used to sit on before they moved to the end of Minuteman Causeway.
Dad was frequently in Cocoa Beach even before they moved here. He was involved in the early Atlas launches. He told my brother Rick they would fly from out west in military planes to Havanna for some R&R before coming to the Cape!
There were many failures in the beginning. I remember, as a young child, watching one blow up.
My brother Dave was born in 1959. My first solid memory was looking at him lying in his crib after arriving home from the hospital. I learned later that Mom had a miscarriage before Dave was born. That’s why he was a bit further apart in age than my brother Rick and me. Mom was working hard to be a good Catholic!
Sometime after Dave’s birth, Mom was hospitalized for what I believe would be called Postpartum Depression today. I remember visiting her there. When she came home, everything changed between my parents. She began seeing a Freudian Psychiatrist who convinced her IMHO that the church was one of the roots of her problems. Boy, howdy that that changes everything!
Dad took an interest in boating right away. We had a small sailboat when we first moved to Cocoa Beach. At one point, Dad and his friends got together and built motorboats. I remember my mom and dad water skiing behind the motorboat at a young age.
The motorboat was soon replaced by a bigger sailboat, Argo. Dad started racing the boat at Patrick Air Force Base, just south of Cocoa Beach and further south in Melbourne.
I have fond memories of taking the sailboat out overnight to race the next day around age 6 or 7. We would have breakfast out of those little cereal boxes you could open up with a knife and use as a bowl.
I also remember Dad reading us tales from Greek Mythology β particularly the story of Jason and the Argonauts, after which the sailboat was named. However, I was not particularly fond of sailing when I was young. I constantly feared that the boat would tip over and found it boring.
Growing up in Cocoa Beach was interesting. First, I lived in a place most of the US considered a vacation spot. In the early days, you could drive on the beach. We spent hours there β a real treat was on Sunday afternoon when we would go to Fourth Street South and grill hamburgers and eat Momβs potato salad. Once, we parked on the beach only to return later and find it in the surf!
Second β of course β was the space program. After President Kennedy declared that we would land on the moon by the end of the decade, Cocoa Beach exploded with families moving into the area, nightclubs where the space workers could blow off steam on the weekends, and regular parades featuring the astronauts. In Elementary School, we walked single file down to the beach, watched the spots, and returned to class. I remember watching the launches β the coolest were the couple of times they had to destroy the rocket β once at night watching it blow up. Awesome!
My Brush With Death
One rainy winter afternoon in early 1962, my brothers and I were coming home with Mom from some forgotten activity. It was rush hour and raining hard. Mom pulled right out in front of another car crossing Orlando at 3rd Street North, only several blocks from home. Sitting in the passenger seat, I took the brunt of the impact. Our car was pushed into our mailman’s car parked outside the dinner that has always been there.
When I woke up, I remember very vividly looking around the car. Mom was slumped over the steering wheel, bleeding from her head. My brother Rick in the backseat was nowhere to be found (he had slipped into the wheel well and cut his hand badly). Finally, I turned behind me at my brother Dave. He was sitting in the seat, eyes as big as saucers, as if nothing happened.
The doctor on our street was on the scene and told them I was severely hurt. I remember sitting on the lap of one of the medics as they took me to the newly opened hospital about a mile away. I remember telling him I was thirsty. It turns out I was bleeding internally from the impact of the car hitting me (through the door).
At the hospital, they quickly got me into surgery. I vividly remember the mask coming down over my head and them telling me to count backward from 100. The next thing I knew, I woke up in my hospital bed and threw up.
I stayed in the hospital for a while before coming home. I remember they had a party for me at School before I returned some weeks later. I found out later in life how close I had come to bleeding out that evening. I was fortunate the hospital was so close.
I went to kindergarten at Royalton and then to Cocoa Beach Elementary School. After they built the new high School, it was renamed Freedom 7 Elementary School in honor of the Mercury-Redstone 3, or Freedom 7, the first United States human spaceflight, on 5 May 1961, piloted by astronaut Alan Shepard. I remember in the cafeteria, there was a US Flag on display that was carried into space on the launch.
Growing up, my two buddies at an early age were two older boys β John McCary and Rudy Wells. Johnβs Dad was a lawyer, and Rudyβs Dad was a doctor; both were prominent in the community. Rudy had a pool that we would spend hours in. John would go on later to become a flamboyant character, most noted for getting expelled from School in his senior year in high school for carrying a purse. He was also the class president!
Our house was a short boat ride – or swim – from the Thousand Islands. We spent much time in the lagoon in our swim trunks and explored the islands. Mom told me many years later she was always worried she would find us face down in the water someday – I never knew! The city built an Olympic-sized swimming pool at the newly opened golf course at the end of Minuteman Causeway. We spent many summers there when I was in Elementary School. I loved to dive – especially on the high board π.
We had two dogs growing up. The first was a black Daschund named Pepper. He died pretty young from heartworms – a malady that mainly affected dogs in Florida due to the mosquitos. I don’t remember him.
Our second dog was a Beagle named Spot. He loved swimming to the islands and hunting rabbits or finding dead fish. He would roll in it until he stuck to high heaven! He reminded me of the dog in My Dog Skip – he wandered Cocoa Beach, and everybody knew him. After following us there, he would burst into one of our classrooms at school. We would have to keep him locked up in the janitor’s closet until it was time to go home. He had heartworms twice – the second time did him in at age 9 or 10.
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
At some point, when I was around 7 or 8, my teachers told my parents that I was having trouble seeing at School. Sure enough, I needed glasses!
Shortly after getting the glasses, Mom took me to the old movie theater in Cocoa to see the movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I vividly remember watching the film in total awe – I had no idea this was what the world could look like! I convinced myself I had superpowers and could see through walls!
Dad was always a DIY kind of guy. In addition to building the boat, Dad did many hands-on things like maintaining the cars, working on the house and boats, and tinkering with stuff. Dad could pretty much fix anything, and that wore off on me.
At an early age, I would build stuff in the garage and work on the many bikes I had growing up. I was interested in technology β especially aircraft. I remember making my jet fighter cockpit using wood scraps from a nearby construction project. The masterpiece was the single toggle switch I mounted in the center next to all the gauges I had marked on the wood. I was also big into erector sets, Lincoln logs, chemistry sets, blowing us stuff with firecrackers, taking stuff apart, making stuff out of wood, and helping Dad fix things. Once, Mom drove the Buick we had with a broken oil pump and froze the engine. We rebuilt it in our garage without taking the engine out of the car! The bottom line is that I picked up this wonderful gift my father gave me and carried it on as I grew up interested in DIY, maintenance and repair, and woodworking.
Dad was strict about homework and bedtime when we were growing up. We were not allowed to watch TV at night other than on the weekends. Instead, he would have me write reports. One of the many things I am glad he made me do. I enjoyed reading the encyclopedia and learning about stuff. I was fascinated by the natural world, science, engineering, and the military.
I was not so interested in sports, but we did love to play baseball in the street! The Houston Astros’ spring camp was in Cocoa, and we would watch a game from time to time. I listened to their games late at night in my bed when the AM reception was good. Sometimes I would listen to other radio stations from places like Chicago.
My Troubled Childhood
Meanwhile, it was not a happy home at 489 Blakey Blvd. Mom and Dad had been at each other’s throats for some time now since her hospitalization.
We stopped going to church. Mom and Dad would argue, sometimes violently. I remember a hole in one of the doors where Dad threw something at her. She took his gun and threw it in the canal. Dad then enlisted our help to drag the bottom of the canal to find it. How fucked up is that? We came in from backyard camping to find a cop talking to them at the end of the hallway.
Serious shit for a 4th grader to deal with. By the time I was in 6th grade, my father and teachers were calling me a fuck-up at a parent-teacher conference. No thought to what the fuck was happening behind closed doors. I dealt with it by creating my world to live in. I certainly didn’t have much self-confidence or self-esteem. Later I discovered drugs, music, and the intellectual counter-culture – it became my teenage identity. It gave me the confidence I needed.
Eventually, things would mellow out some – at least they had established some truce. Dad began drinking more. Mom acted in a manner they used to call neurotically. They acted like they hated each other. They stayed together, though – sometimes I wonder how things would have been different for me if they had not. Hard to say.
I was a Cub Scout in Elementary School. Mom was a den leader for a while, and then we moved up into Boy Scouts. I used to dread the campouts because of the bugs. We would sit up all night with mosquito coils burning, sweltering in the heat.
I did dig going to Boy Scout camp when I got older. For three or four years, I went to Camp La-No-Che. I have fond memories of swimming and boating, doing crafts, and most significantly, the neophyte initiations where we would smear goo like peanut butter and toothpaste all over the initiates and parade them through the camp in their swimsuit (or was it underwear?).
Our Boy Scout leader was Bob Walker – the coolest old guy I knew. Rode a BMW motorcycle and taught as a professor after a career at the cape. When I was going to camp, I also got interested in the drums β he nicknamed me βSkins.β Our troop was the Wombats!
Another thing happened to me at summer camp when I was 13 years old. I was introduced to my demon πΉ. One of the older boys had a bottle of Boone’s Farm wine. We drank it one night. My head was spinning, but the effect would become an obsession later. It seems like it was in my DNA.
When I was in Junior High, my Mom decided that Rick & I needed to learn how to play an instrument. We went down to a music shop that used to be near Ann Lea Gift Shop. The guy asked me what I wanted to play, and I enthusiastically said, βThe Drums.β He then told my Mom that the drums were not a good instrument because you canβt play them yourself (what?).
So I learned to play the guitar β maybe two lessons before I quit. In maybe 8th grade, I bugged my parents to buy a set of drums from the Sears catalog! Yes, the Sears catalog back then was used to sell drums!
I got them for Christmas and ruined the cymbals within several hours of playing them! But the drums held up, and it started my short-lived career as a rock βn roll drummer!
At about the same time, I made friends with a guy from school who had a little speedboat. His name was Bill, and he taught me how to water ski. I learned to ski on one ski from the beginning and only a few times did it with two π. I also had started delivering papers – back in the day of paperboys with bicycles! We would provide our papers, head out in the boat for some early morning waterskiing, and then go to school.
When I started attending Junior High, my dad learned to fly. For the next three years or so, we did a lot of flying and took several trips with the family β once to visit my grandmother and other relatives up north and once across the water to the Bahamas. I enjoyed doing it and thought about getting a glider pilot license when Dad stopped flying abruptly. He was diagnosed with diabetes and grounded until he could get medical clearance. Even though he controlled it, he never returned to flying after that.
I fondly remember several trips where he and I would fly several hours to an airport somewhere in Florida, eat lunch, and fly home. Or the time I went with him when he did a night flight with an instructor. Although I never did learn to fly, I did a couple of years at Boeing after graduate school and did a lot of flight testing.
Towards the end of junior high, I discovered (in no particular order) music and marijuana. My buddy Bill got me high the first time in the woods that used to be next to the elementary School on the water.
I was high for a week. I had bought some oddball albums at an earlier age (for example, the themes to the James Bond movies), but I bought my first LP album in 1968 by Blue Cheer titled Vincebus Eruptum. Since it has been heralded as the first βHeavy Metalβ band. With my drumming, I had found the three perfect ingredients for my teenage years.
Around the same time, I started hanging out with neighborhood kids interested in music. We formed a band and called ourselves the Dead Peach. Through the end of high school, we played together either jamming or in our senior year as members of the high school jazz band. We had a ‘studio’ at an old motel on the beach – Terrace Dunes – where we would jam on weekends.
Our names changed from Second Childhood (my favorite) to Dark Star (also excellent). We had many different friends drop in and out over that time, but it was the center of my teen years.
At first, I was primarily interested in rock music. Like many of my generation, I cut my teeth on Hendrix, The Beatles, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Cream, the Allman Brothers, Steppenwolf, Alice Cooper, Frank Zappa, and anybody else who played at Woodstock. I remember in 1969, dressed in my flowery shirt and bell-bottom pants, wishing I could be there.
In high school, my musical tastes started to expand, and in my senior year, we were asked to join the stage band as the rhythm section. (I later discovered it was because the guys they wanted declined π€£). I became interested in Jazz and jazz-influenced rock β soon to be coined (Jazz Rock) Fusion. Artists like Miles Davis, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Chick Corea. Our stage band did a lot of Maynard Ferguson and Chicago. I remember seeing the Count Basie Orchestra play live and was blown away by how good they were. I was absolutely gob-smacked at what Zappa was doing with the Grand Wazoo stuff. The feather in my high school band is when our band (called Dark Star by that point) won the senior high school talent contest for an Allman Brothers cover.
I tried surfing for a while until I about drowned trying to surf in a hurricane! I became interested in building electronics and lighting equipment for our band. I tried building an amplifier based on a Heathkit design. I even made my own printed circuit board! Unfortunately, it only worked briefly before shorting out! And that was after my friend Bill’s father had some Cape engineers work on it π€£.
I started dating Holly, a girl I had had a crush on for several years. We used to make out on her parent’s couch after School! Little did I know how she would shape my life later on!
Medicated Goo – My First Love π
I first met Holly in 8th grade. We were in some class together, and I remember being admitted by her. I used to plagiarize Jim Morrison’s lyrics and give them to her as poems. I remember getting up the nerve to call her once. All I remember is that we talked about Gilligan’s Island.
We met up again in high school. I can’t remember the circumstances, but I remember hanging out with her at a football game. She was hanging around with some older girl. We went to her car and talked about who knows what. All I remember is that she had a contact cold medicine capsule. She told me that if you sort the different colors of the little tiny beads inside the capsule, certain colors would get you high! I was in love!
Eventually, we got together at the beginning of eleventh grade and went steady through the rest of high school. She told me about going to a Monkey’s concert in Miami and screaming her head off for the whole show. She turned me on to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and the famous song Room to Move. She also had a Traffic album with Steve Winwood smoking a joint on the back cover! Medicated Goo, indeed!
We did the deed for the first time in a tent at Jetty Park. A cop found us and amazingly let us go despite finding her panties jammed into her purse and a bottle of Southern Comfort. I was scared witless!
We ended up being together through a move to California. She dumped me there after her parents convinced her I was not good for her (I wasn’t). It got me out of Florida and on my own, where, interestingly enough, it started coming together for me. At least for a while!
I graduated from High School and spent part of the summer in Boston, living with my high school best friend Bill. Partway through my stay there, she told me her parents were moving to Califonia. I moved back right away. She convinced her parents to let her stay and go to Brevard Community College (now Florida Eastern University), where her Mom worked as a librarian. She had got a job at the Mongomery Wards in Cocoa.
I got a job at Shakeyβs Pizza Parlor in Cocoa Beach. Florida lowered the drinking age to 18 in response to protests on the war in Vietnam. Old enough to be killed but not buy a beer? Anyway, this enabled me to work there as I needed to be able to serve beer. The owner, Sharon, was a good-looking older woman with a boy my age. It was a distraction, and she was very liberal about her business practices. We would smoke pot out back, drink beer from our keg in the cooler, and smoke cigarettes while we made pizzas.
My music days more or less abruptly came to a halt after everybody except me moved off to go to college. I had applied and even been accepted at Florida State, but I was fucking clueless about what I would do next. I spent the next two years getting an Associate of Arts degree at BCC, focusing on math and science because I was pretty good at that.
Holly’s parents moved around the end of September. They had rented her an apartment in Cocoa, a short walk from where she worked. They bought her a 1963 Plymouth Valient to commute to school. Before they left, I took their cat to live at our house. The day after she left, I moved in and left the cat with my parents. I was terrified of what my father would say and successfully avoided confronting him for about six months. When I finally saw him months later, he told me: I thought I had traded my son for a cat! Interestingly enough, after that, our relationship started improving!
Two events happened to me during the next two years that would have a lasting impact on my life. The first was that I was certified as a Scuba Diver. I took several courses offered by the Community College and got a basic and advanced open-water dive certificate. Bill Meyer taught the classes. I also made some trips with Bill and other students or those who knew Bill. Bill was also a cave diver back when this was starting up and was very dangerous β many people were dying in the caves, getting lost, and running out of air. Bill would often help find these people! Yikes! I heard later that he ultimately met his demise in an airplane accident in South America. Supposedly, he was involved in drug smuggling at that point.
The next thing that happened had to do with my girlfriend and the community college. Holly graduated at the end of the first semester in 1974. I was on track to do the same, and we both were going to move to California and go to college together.
I was taking my first physics class that semester and was so lost that I had to drop the course and retake it the second semester. Holly moved to California, and I moved back in with my parents. I remember I made my brother Dave move out of his bedroom and sleep with Rick. I wasn’t about to share a bedroom again!
I ended up re-taking the class from a different instructor, the first teacher I ever really remember taking the time to care if the students understood what was being taught (or so it seemed). I also remember running my very first ever computer program (on paper tape) during that class. The gift this guy gave me later became a lifelong passion for design, engineering, and working with computers. Who knew?
In the spring of 1975, right before graduating and moving to California, I took a trip to the Florida Keys with a group from the Community college. I borrowed a Nikonos II underwater camera and took pictures on the dives. This started a lifelong interest in photography, especially underwater photography. As an aside, somebody else stole the camera on the trip but eventually returned it to me with the film!
In May 1975, I finally graduated from Brevard Community College with an Associate of Arts Degree. A colleague of my girlfriend’s father was transferred to Santa Maria and took some boxes of my stuffβmostly my stereo, records, and a few tools. I had sold my drums earlier that Winter to an old schoolmate of my brother Rick. I was sad to see them go, but I had convinced myself my drumming days were over.
I always regretted that decision – my only true regret in life – at least, I would like to think!
Sometime in the beginning of July, I flew from Orlando to Los Angeles and then caught a smaller plane to Santa Maria, California. I remember looking at the coastline as we flew north out of Los Angeles. It had rained a lot that Winter, but the scenery was stunningβI had never seen anything like it, with the mountains meeting the ocean.
My adventure had begun. If I only knew!
Next – West Coast ~ California and Washington