Sam Wright Jr Obituary (1948 - 2008)

Stephen Norbrey '66 said:

In today’s world the trend is to label everyone in some way. Some labels are okay, (We are the Baby Boomers) and some aren’t (The ME generation). Out of all of the labels I could assign to Sam, the one that means the most to me is simply that of “Brother”. No, he wasn’t my biological brother, but he was my spiritual brother and if I may use a phrase I didn’t coin, “My Brother from another Mother”. When I look back over my life I can only think of one other friend I’ve known longer than Sam that he also knew, William Dulaney (2nd grade) that’s still amongst us.
Some how there were too many of us Boomers and we ended up in High School for the 9th grade, that’s when I met Sam. But it wasn’t until the 10th grade when we were part of the same High School ROTC Company that we began to hang out along with others that made up the Spingarn Drill Team. We perfected marching until we could do routines with our eyes closed with silent commands guiding us. In the 11th grade Sam and I along with Sidney Young managed our way into a competition between our company and the 12th grade company to go to the annual Company Competition held at Eastern HS that year. Usually the 12th grade team automatically represented the school, but that year we proved to be the best and came in 3rd overall at the competition at Eastern, what a feat that was! My next door neighbor, Odie who was in that 12th grade company, was hot with me for quite a while. The 12th grade saw me with a company, Sam on the Battalion Staff and Sidney as the Regimental Commander. During HS Sam managed to also be on the baseball team to round out his time.
But as our senior year moved on Sam and I realized that we weren’t going to go to college, but we didn’t want to be drafted by the Army or the Marines, so in the spring of our senior year we visited the Air Force Recruiter downtown and signed up together for a delayed enlistment. We had to get social security numbers to enlist and needless to say his last digit is one more than mine. And, since we enlisted together, our military ID numbers were one apart. When June came and everyone began to go their way, my father took Sam and me over to Ft. Holabird, MD to be inducted into the USAF together. We were then shipped out to Keesler AFB, TX for basic training. We were separated after training because I had to go to RADAR Maintenance School in Biloxi, MS, while he went to England AFB, LA. When I finished, I got orders for Havre, Montana, while Sam managed to get assigned to the USAF Presidential Honor Guard at no less than Bolling AFB, DC! I tried to get reassigned there to no avail. While on that team, Sam had the Honor of being on the detail that was assigned to the funeral of former President Eisenhower. Over the next few years, we chit-chatted and just as I came home from my enlistment and began settling in, Sam went from DC Police to FAA as a controller at the Washington ARTCC in Leesburg, VA. Not long after that I was hired by FAA and assigned to the same facility and trained as a computer technician. Seems we couldn’t get out of each others life for too long. He moved to Sterling, VA and about 2 years later I moved to the same area. We dibble-dabbled together from 1975 until I got a job in FAA Headquarters in DC in 1990 and moved to DC and later to Maryland.