Nostalgia Attack

In today’s Bleat…a tip o’ the hat to the late, great, gone— but most certainly NOT forgotten— Strategic Air Command:

They're having a big Peace Prize assembly in a week, and asked if any parents would like to design the T-Shirts. I volunteered.

Alas, My domestic associates nixed the first design:

Hey, peace is their profession! Oh, all right. (grumble.) So I came up with the generic Earth with the word PEACE in Copperplate, since that’s the typeface the school uses for all its newsletters, but it looked rather stark, and seemed to imply OR ELSE. I did not use a peace sign, which has too many irritating connotations.

I liked James’ first draft better than the final design, which you can see at the link. And the "Peace is their profession" bit? Comes from the old SAC motto: "Peace is Our Profession." And it most certainly was. Moscow lived in absolute frickin' fear of SAC's heavy bombers and ICBMs, back in the day.

Has it really been 15 years since SAC absorbed its sister command, TAC, and morphed into Air Combat Command? Why, yes. Yes, it has been that long. And actually, if truth be told, TAC did the acquiring, not SAC—the proof is in the ACC organization coat of arms, which is nothing more than the old TAC patch with “Air Combat Command” in lieu of “Tactical Air Command.” The ascension of the Fighter Mafia, and all that. And I won’t even mention ADC, since they were essentially non-players in the grand scheme of things, what with being folded into TAC in the late ‘70s. (Note: I use “Fighter Mafia” not in this sense, but in the context of fighter pilots who became senior USAF officers and prevailed in the budgetary wars, as opposed to the generals in the manned bomber/ICBM community. Money equals power, ergo TAC won out over SAC. Just keepin’ things clear, ya know.) (Further parenthetical nonsense: if you chase the ADC link, you’ll learn something about where I spent the greatest part of my military career. But not near enough. The many radar sites I was assigned to during my career were…ahem…under the radar, for the most part. Most people in the Air Force, let alone the population at large, were unaware of their existence. I toiled in obscurity…)

{sigh} I’ve turned into an old man, waxing nostalgic for what once was. Sometimes it bees like that.