Suzanne Rice

My expensive, modern vacuum cleaner quit working a short time before guests were arriving to celebrate Christmas, 2016. What to do now – no time for repairs; it was just about time to leave for the airport. There is another, old vacuum cleaner in the back of the closet. I should just get it out to see if it still worked. Instead, I ran to the airport without vacuuming at all! This incident reminded me how we got the old vacuum cleaner.
In 1973, Bill (now an Army Captain) and I had just returned to the United States from Camp Stanley, South Korea, arriving at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma so that Bill could attend the Field Artillery Advanced Course. Along with many of his West Point classmates and their families, we were assigned to live on Snow Road in Artillery Village and surrounded by old friends from earlier assignments. It was a great place to be. Until that move, I was a skeptical, new Army wife. In our two years of married life, we have already moved three times. I asked how it was possible to survive when we would just make friends and then must leave them. Would that be our fate forever? It was at Ft. Sill that I learned that the Army is just a large family – we could keep up with those we had left behind but could also make new friends. It was at Ft. Sill that some old friends from earlier assignments started to re-appear again and it was wonderful to see them and renew our friendships. This reminded me of the old Girl Scout adage: “Make new friends but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.” All precious.
Most married students attending the Field Artillery Advanced Course lived in Artillery Village. The single officers lived in many different off-post apartment complexes. At the time, it was easy to get onto Ft. Sill – there was no ID check or manned guard post. Just slow down and then sail through to Snow Road which was close to one of the Main Gates.

It may have been necessary for salesmen to register at the Post Headquarters, but it was very easy for them to contact those living on post. Artillery Village was a convenient place to live during the nine-month course; the men could carpool (refer to George Coan’s Diary of a Carpool – https://thedaysforward.com/the-diary-of-a-car-pool/) to class and the wives only had to walk next door or down the street to find an old friend or make a new one. Perhaps, like officers attending other branch Advanced Courses (Infantry, Engineer, Armor, etc.), we received many invitations to events from financial planners and other vendors. As 20-somethings, many with young children or newly married, we were the perfect demographic for many of these companies and salesmen. Many of the students had been either in Vietnam, Germany or Korea and were glad to be back in the U.S. and needed furniture, home goods and advice! Some of these presentations included a nice dinner to attract us and some even wanted entrepreneurs/investors to work alongside the salesmen – maybe, they were trying to recruit some of the officers who could leave the Army in a year or two. Bill and I attended several of these presentations, but didn’t make any purchases, though we did listen to the financial planners and retirement experts and met with them personally at our home after the group presentations. Once, we received an invitation to go to a local hotel to meet with vendors that offered us great deals (!) on furniture, pots and pans, fine china and other household goods. They tempted us with claims of unbreakable china (such ugly patterns) and guarantees for lifetime use for some the goods. We often wondered if others went to that spectacle and if anyone purchased. We were a bit proud of ourselves for not falling prey to the high-powered sales pitches – after all, we needed a lot of the items offered for sale!
One day, a knock came on our duplex door. It was a man who wanted to show us his wares – he was a vacuum cleaner salesman. We didn’t have a good vacuum cleaner yet, since we had spent the first years of our marriage out of the country – first in Germany (with different electric current and electric plugs those appliances were left in Germany) and then, in Korea where we lived in a Korean home that came with a maid to take care of all the necessary cleaning. “Sure, why don’t you come in?” The salesman gave his most compelling pitch (“It is a wet and dry vacuum, has a floor polishing attachment, very powerful engine, large capacity cannister, double filtration system” and on and on.) and we were impressed.

It would be a large purchase, but it was one that we thought we might be able to afford – after all, he said it would last a lifetime. What a good investment! But, we needed to think about it.
In a day or two, when the salesman came back for a follow-up visit, he chatted with us. It seems the company headquarters was in St. Louis, Missouri, Bill’s hometown. That made us more comfortable with the idea of that large purchase – still, so expensive…Then, the salesman mentioned that his training was done in St. Louis where he met the President of the company. Bill couldn’t believe his ears. The owner of the company was the father of one of his high school classmates at Southwest High School. In fact, he and a friend spent one summer doing yard work at that very man’s St. Louis County mansion. When he was the lawn-boy that summer, Bill knew that the man was well-to-do – he paid two of them to work there all summer, but he had no idea he had worked for the man behind the FAIRFAX vacuum cleaner we were thinking of buying (who cared about vacuum cleaners at fifteen years old??). Well, that settled the deal – SOLD; we were buying this expensive vacuum from a friend! I am not sure if we were the only gullible couple that fell for the sales pitch, but the salesman was right – it has lasted a lifetime. The FAIRFAX still works after 43 years, lasting about 25 years longer than the other modern, and, also very expensive and, now useless, vacuum cleaner – even if it has been stuck in the back of the closet for many years!
Time to sweep the carpet.
(Follow-up: The ancient vacuum cleaner, pulled from the back of the closet, still worked perfectly more than 40 years later. In fact, it cleaned better than the expensive, modern vacuum. Why had I stopped using it? It is heavy, awkward and unwieldy to pull all around the house and up the stairs. Our children called it the “spaceship”. No matter its appearance, it worked beautifully and continues to work so many years later. Maybe, it wasn’t such a bad purchase after all!)

I met my sister bright and early at 8 a.m. at Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport for our first ever Sister’s Week in Georgia. She left Southern Illinois, her

husband and two sons at 5 a.m. and we were setting out on a fun adventure together. We planned to drive directly from the Atlanta airport to Savannah to sightsee a bit and to visit the Mighty 8th Air Force Museum to try to figure out what our father had done when he served in the 8th Air Force during WWII. The normally quick trip (4 hours) turned into a 6-hour trip since we were behind a gigantic traffic jam that delayed our plan to get to Savannah for a lunch on the beach! We grabbed a very late lunch but had no time for sightseeing. We had a dinner invitation with Sally and Eric Robyn (https://thedaysforward.com/colonel-eric-robyn/  and  https://thedaysforward.com/sally-robyn/ )  which was the highlight for that day.

The next morning, we set out for Tybee Island for a quick sunrise walk on the beach which offered special surprises for us – being alone on the beach, we found lots of shells, some amazingly colorful seaweed (orange and pink – we first thought it was tangled electrical wire trashed on the seashore) and a gigantic horseshoe crab shell. She would take these jewels of the sea back to Illinois to show her students in the Fall.

We brushed off the sand and headed to the Museum. We went directly to the Museum Research Library to which I had been before looking for information. I knew that our Dad had been in Africa and ultimately stationed at Hethel Air Field in Norwich, England – I had even taken a trip to England as a graduation present to myself in 1969 to see where my father had been and to try to find some of the English people that had been so kind to him. He had put me to sleep as a small child with stories of some of his adventures in England and Scotland, but he never told me what his job was – was it still secret?
The staff at the Research Library is always delighted when family members come to share stories or memorabilia, so we had a wonderful visit with them and they brought out books and did some research for us. They directed us back downstairs into the museum to read and look over some displays that might help us figure out what our Dad did. Our uncle and our brother had differing ideas about what Tech Sergeant Smith had been doing at Hethel in the 389th Bomb Group, “The Sky Scorpions” – besides the fact that our Dad said he stowed away on an Air Force plane that made 5 flights over the over France on D-Day; he wanted to be a part of the epic invasion. Was that possible?
We made a second trip back up to the Research Library to try to make sense of what we had seen in the museum. We were in the midst of that conversation when a man in a flowered Hawaiian shirt came strolling into the library. My sister and I assumed he was just another tourist like us. Instead, the research librarian whispered to my sister that he had been POW in Iran in 1979 and was a volunteer historian at the museum – perhaps, he could answer some of our questions. She called him over to introduce us. Memories came flooding back to my mind.

As soon as the introductions between us and Bill Daugherty were done, I blurted out that his first step back on U. S. soil was at Stewart Army Air Field on 26 January 1981. Surprised, he agreed. I, then, said that he had taken a bus drive to West Point. Again, he agreed.

By this time, he was wondering about me – I had been there. He was, then, delighted (or so it seemed) to hear the rest of my story.
Like all Americans, the Rice family had been watching the Iran hostage crisis since November 1979 and praying for the hostages. It was with the same delight as all Americans that we learned the news that the hostages had been released on January 20, 1981 and were coming home! We were more delighted when we learned that West Point had been selected as the place to which the hostages and their families would come for a week of reunions and recuperation. Bill was a “P” (teacher at West Point) in the Math Department at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Could we get a glimpse of them?

West Point is 50 miles from New York City, even so, somewhat isolated in the Hudson Highlands of Orange County. This is one of the reasons that West Point was chosen for the family reunions and privacy the hostages needed. They would be flown into Stewart Field in Newburgh, board buses to cross Storm King Mountain and arrive at West Point where they could rest and relax in the quiet of the beauty of West Point. The local community wanted to do something to welcome them, so crowds of people lined the streets with signs, flags and banners.

The Rice family took off from our quarters in Grey Ghost on the morning of their return to find the best place to see the buses as they drove past. We were looking for a place where we could have room and safety for our four-year-old and sixteen-month-old daughters. As we drove 9W across the mountain, we saw people everywhere with flags, large and small, and signs of welcome, but no place likely to keep the girls occupied or safe on a cold, but sunny January day. Instead, we drove back to Highland Falls to find a place on the street where we could duck into a shop or restaurant if the girls got cold or the hostages were late.

It was exciting to get a glimpse of the buses when the hostages arrived in Highland Falls, but it was over in a second! It was still an amazing experience to be a tiny part of that historical event for our Country. And even more amazing to meet one of the brave hostages so many years later. What an honor.

And later…
We never did figure out exactly what our Dad did in Hethel – he had been trained as an Air Force radio operator, but when it was discovered that he could type, he was whisked into a different position, maybe a cryptographer. We didn’t figure out if it was even possible for him to have stowed away on D-Day (From the information we learned from Bill Daugherty, we believe he may have been on board, not officially on a roster, but not a secret from the pilot and crew). Little did we know that the Sister Week held more surprises for us. After a few days with me in Peachtree City, my sister was to go to see our brother in Marietta. She did just that, but on the first day of their visit, she got a call from home – her husband, a carpenter, was at work that Monday when he fell off the roof he was working on and had been life-flighted to the hospital in St. Louis. He might have broken his neck, head injuries, other broken bones???? How fast could we get there? We worried the whole time we were driving, but by the time we got to St. Louis University Hospital, all the worst of the outcomes had been ruled out. He had a broken pelvis and 5 broken ribs and would recover – he was home recovering for over six months, but he is now back to work – avoiding roofs as much as possible. Thank the good Lord.

In 1981, we were so delighted with our little brush with history that Bill wanted to preserve the flags that the girls waved on January 26 at West Point, so he attached them together and they have been hanging in our home ever since.

If you would like to know more about Bill Daugherty, Third Secretary of the U. S. Mission in Iran (CIA officer), you can check out his book: In the Shadow of the Ayatollah: A CIA Hostage in Iran.

This story is directly connected to “Birth of the Night Stalkers”. Click the button to read that story.

Night Stalkers