We even had a phone for shipmates to call in requests. The station equipment included two turntables to play LPs ( Long Play records) and two eight-track tape players to play commercials, not that we had that many. It took me a little while to get the hang of it, but I was a natural. My radio personality name (i.e., my “call sign”) was Country Chet Adkins. BW took me down to the station, introduced me to the station manager and a few days later, they put me on the air. I thought that was cool, so I asked if I could do country. The Country Chet Adkins Showīig Willie was also a DJ on the KSOL (soul) station and had a two-hour spot in the late afternoon. So, if anybody needed any money (before payday), Big Willie was the man to see. He’d been around a while and knew that the FNGs were always short of cash right before we hit port. He always watched out for us peons, but he also had an agenda. Everybody called him Big Willie because… well, he was a big guy. ![]() He always had a cool head, even during flight deck emergencies. “Big Willie” was an ABH2 and the Assistant Crash LPO. How did I become a DJ, you ask? I know you want to know, so stay with me here… ![]() I couldn’t play guitar like my namesake, Chet Atkins, but at least I could spell my name right. I played guitar and sang country music and since my last name was Adkins… well, John thought that was appropriate. “Chet” was my Navy nickname, “assigned” to me by John Melcher, a fellow Crash & Rescue crewman I served with while stationed at NAS Agana, Guam. My DJ “Journey”īut besides working the flight deck, I had my own radio spot: 6a–8a, the Country Chet Adkins show. After the Bremerton Shipyardsperiod, I transferred to a Yellow Shirt flight deck director. When I first arrived onboard, I was assigned to Crash & Salvage and made the Westpac ’75 cruise with Crash. I was an ABH ( Aviation Boatswains Mate-Handler) and worked on the flight deck in V-1 Division. It’s been so long, I don’t remember the names of the DJ shipmates in the pictures. The photos below are from the Westpac ’75 cruise book. There are exceptions (aren’t there always?), but that’s TMI for this blog post. Stations west of the Mississippi start with a “K.” I believe this started back in the 1920s when radio & TV first began broadcasting. These were 24-hour stations, and the DJs were sailors from all different walks of life, each with a 2-hour time slot.īTW, a little side note, just in case you were wondering… In the United States, radio & TV stations east of the Mississippi River start with a “W” designation, like WKRP & WDVH. Kitty Hawk also had three onboard radio stations: KROC (rock), KSOL (soul), and KRAL (country). I don’t know if anyone ever bet on this, but I’d “heard” scuttlebutt that some crew members would place bets to see if a landing aircraft caught a wire (i.e., recovered) or “bolted,” meaning they missed catching any of the arresting gear cables and took off again. You have to always keep your head on a swivel, a habit that’s stayed with me my entire life. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: the flight deck is one of the most dangerous places to work. Not great for Saturday night movies, but when I look back on it, these training films taught us to constantly stay alert. Many were horrific crashes that I really don’t care to watch again, but at the time, they did help us learn what to watch for (like an aircraft coming in too low or a pitching deck or an aircraft catching a wire, but applying full throttle and full elevator only to slam down onto the deck). Most of the training films we watched were from the PLAT and flight deck cameras. The PLAT providing a view to watch recovering aircraft. The other camera was the PLAT (Pilot Landing Aid Television), a camera located in the flight deck, smack dab in the middle of the recovery area. If memory serves, there were two “views:” one view captured aircraft launching off the bow cats (Cat1 and Cat2) and the waist cats (Cat3 and Cat4). Real-time Flight Ops on TV?Īnother Kitty Hawk TV channel displayed real-time flight deck operations. Television shows included live daily news updates, movies, and periodic “events,” broadcast on the closed-circuit televisions, located in all the main compartments. Back in the mid-70s (’75-77 to be more precise), USS Kitty Hawk had several entertainment “options” while at sea.
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