Bill Marvel

Shawnee Mission East High School

Class of 1964

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Bill Marvel - Class of 1964 - Shawnee Mission East High School

First Name	Bill
Last Name	Marvel
Graduation Year	Class of 1964
Gender	Male
City	N/A
State/Province	CO
Country	United States
Occupation	Retired
Married	Yes
About Me	I wrote this for an organization that requested it and wondered if it would even fit here -- it did! See if you can wade through even one page of this stuff before falling asleep… Life threw me a left-handed curve ball senior year in 1964 when I did not win an appointment to the USAF Academy in Colorado. In retrospect, it was probably the best thing that could have happened because instead, I received a scholarship to the Millard prep school in Oregon for the next year. The scholarship was funded by an organization of retired Air Force officers who monitored service academy applicants and thought I was a good candidate. The 54 of us at the Millard School included some very talented and dedicated fellow students. Don Yeager, son of Chuck Yeager of sound barrier fame, was one. Two would later become Air Force generals, one a Navy admiral and one the commander of the USAF Thunderbirds. Tragically, one Millard classmate, my roommate, was lost over North Viet Nam during the 1972 Christmas raids. His photo is in my Classmates album on this site. In the end, I was fortunate to receive an appointment a year later to the USAFA Class of 1969. I did not have 20/20 vision, so knew from the start that my goal of being an Air Force pilot would be tenuous at best. At the Academy, I pursued my major in astronautical engineering – spacecraft systems – hoping for a shot at flight school but creating a backup opportunity if it did not pan out. I did well there, graduating number 30 in a class of almost 700 but only because I studied a lot. It helped that we could not have cars until we were seniors… 1063 of us had entered in July 1965 but only 695 remained four years later. No part of cadet life was intended to be easy. But as to flying in the Air Force, it was ultimately no luck. My vision was correctable to 20/20, but outside their arbitrary waiver limits. I earned my private pilot certificate for civilian flying in the aero club in 1967, so there wasn’t any question I could fly, but rules were rules in the military. Later that same year I became infamous for a rare double parachute malfunction in Georgia during a summer training program with the Army. Fortunately, one of my two parachutes had deployed just enough to slow my descent to a speed I could survive but I was still the first guy on the ground after being last to leave the C-130 on our jump run. The medics on site were amazed that I did not have two shattered hips when they saw the impact. All I had were some strained ligaments in one ankle, so they taped it up and I made my 4th jump the same afternoon. The pain was too much to continue to the fifth and final one so I ended up doing that a couple months later at the Academy to win my paratrooper wings. I continued sport parachuting for several more years as this incident was a fluke that was not like to occur again. After being suited up with a walking cast, it was off to Europe with a classmate at $5 a day (literally) for three weeks. Did England, Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain but on our budget, life wasn’t lavish and I didn't gain any weight! The trip was a hoot. Did a lot of hitchhiking (the cast helped!) and even slept on a park bench one night in Athens. And for you SME ’64 types, I ran into classmate Bob McLaughlin in Germany when we were walking in opposite directions on a street in downtown Munich! What are the odds? After four intense years in the rarefied air of Colorado, including three weeks at an air base in Thailand in 1968, I threw my white parade hat into the air on June 4, 1969. It was an exciting day, as I received my diploma from President Nixon with 50,000 people in attendance. Most of my classmates had 60 days off before heading to pilot training, but I did so well in Astro that I was sent to Purdue University for an accelerated masters degree program that began two weeks after graduation. What a transition that was – four years of spit and polish, uniforms, military precision and discipline were followed two weeks later as a new USAF second lieutenant by shorts, t-shirts, sandals and the “Joe College” social life I had missed. Well, not exactly. That coed university with sororities, fraternities and a renown Aero/Astro program resulted in exactly zero females in all of my Purdue classes combined. Rocket propulsion, strap down gyros and inertial navigation were not yet in the domain of women. And because it was an accelerated program for about 20 USAFA graduates, we were busy studying again. On July 20, just a month and a half after graduation in Colorado, I sat on the floor of our apartment with my three USAFA roommates and watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Little did I know that twenty-two years later I would go to Florida to watch one of those same roommates fly the space shuttle into orbit on a spectacular night launch where it seemed we could see it halfway to Africa. I eventually met a young woman at Purdue who lived in the same apartment building. We spent a lot of time together and at one point talked about marriage. But it did not take long for me to realize I needed to experience the ways of the world I had missed and decided taking that big step at age 23 was too far, too soon. She later visited me in California and ultimately married a great guy she met later. They had two daughters who earned nursing degrees and one of them is a PhD assistant professor at a major university in the Midwest. Bright lady. She’s a grandmother now and we still communicate by email occasionally. It was at Purdue when the realities of being a new Air Force officer hit home. It started in September 1969 when one of my Millard and USAFA classmates was killed in Arizona in a midair collision in pilot training. Six months later, in March 1970, I finished my degree and headed to California for my next assignment to Vandenberg AFB, where reconnaissance satellites are launched into polar orbits. That’s when I learned of another classmate’s fatal pilot training aircraft accident which had just occurred in Texas. Since I had introduced him to his fiancée our senior year, this one was harder to take. Many more followed once our class finished flight school and went into the operational Air Force. My former Millard roommate was lost over Hanoi when his B-52 was shot down during the 1972 Christmas raids. My best USAFA friend vanished over Laos in September 1971 and you SME ’64 grads likely know our high school classmate Fred Sutter also disappeared over Laos New Year’s Eve 1971. Neither airplane has ever been found. SME '64 classmate Jim Latham survived his aircraft loss over North Viet Nam, was captured and spent the last six months of the war as a POW in Hanoi. (Latham ultimately retired as a Brigadier General after having flown as commander of the USAF Thunderbirds, one of the most prestigious positions a pilot can have). Years later, two of my USAFA/Purdue classmates died in high performance fighter aircraft - one outside of Las Vegas and the other in New Mexico. It became pretty clear that not being in the military flying business might have actually been very good fortune after all. Nonetheless, it remains my life’s biggest disappointment and I definitely wanted airplanes to be in my future. After the all-male years at the prep school and Academy, followed by my limited contact with women in grad school, the social world began to look brighter since the beaches of California loomed. Then I learned another reality – although Vandenberg was on the beautiful coast of central California near Santa Barbara, it had lots of fog, cold weather and cold ocean. I became certified for ocean scuba diving right away and did a lot of that on weekends. But in those days, even the secretaries at Vandenberg were typically men due to the apparent belief that women were security risks in the spook stuff that went on out there. We mainly dated school teachers, many of whom were just out of college and on their first jobs. But there were lots of us and few of them, so the arid social situation continued. That changed abruptly in late 1971 when I was assigned to a USAF organization in Los Angeles near LAX. My background in orbit mechanics was what they needed and away I went. That’s when the social world finally opened up. Because of my interest in aviation, I dated mostly airline stewardesses (they were called that then), hoping their job indicated an interest in airplanes. Aside from that, as a group they were invariably attractive and personable, definite pluses. In Manhattan Beach, where a roommate and I lived a few miles from our offices, they were everywhere. I occasionally look back at that and think how strange life and circumstances can be. Some 58,000 Americans died in the Viet Nam war but others in the same armed forces never got near it. Because of my job in the Air Force, one year of active duty was at Purdue University in Indiana and the next six were never more than a couple of miles from the ocean in California. Fast forward, I turned 26 in mid-1972 and had the so-called 15 minutes of fame when promoted to captain. Captain Marvel put me in the national news media for a few days and on The Dating Game and I’ve Got A Secret TV shows in Hollywood. Look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DV-qFbYw30 to see an interesting show! About that same time, I met Marti Strandberg. She was a year younger, had graduated from the University of Massachusetts, was flying internationally with Pan Am and lived in Santa Monica. Her dad had owned small airplanes since she was a little girl and aside from her physical charms, she liked airplanes and flying in them. Marti and I continued to see each other and date others for the next two years, but over time it became apparent to both of us we were a good match with many common interests and compatible personalities. In the process, we talked about all the necessary subjects – religion, children, finances, politics and the like. We were in agreement on all of them. We decided that being married for two years before having children was a good plan to confirm the marriage was sound. As it turned out, at 29 and 28 we were already a bit older than most when we married. Two years later we realized our life styles and interest in world travel were such that raising children as Job One wasn’t a good fit, so we made that choice. Marti and I were married on October 4, 1975 in California and I resigned from the USAF the following June. Had I not done so, a transfer was likely and probably to the east coast but neither of us wanted to leave the L.A. area. Without flying, the Air Force space business just did not hold my interest. It was like being one tooth of a gear in a huge machine. In a strange quirk of fate, I had lasik surgery on my eyes in 1999 and in about twenty minutes had perfect vision that would easily have put me into pilot training had I been 23 again. But at 53? No way! I had a former USAFA roommate who was already a retired three-star general at that age. Marti continued flying and I expanded my involvement with several friends, starting in 1973, buying and renovating apartment buildings in the L.A. area. We lived on her income and continued to reinvest proceeds from real estate into acquiring more property. We bought our first airplane in 1977, have owned one or more of them continually ever since and have made flying a major part of our lives. Again fast forward, she took an opportunity to go with Delta Air Lines before Pan Am shut down in 1991 and eventually retired from Delta in 2005. Our investments were such that I was able to retire at 58 when we sold all of the California property in 2004 and did tax deferred exchanges with co-owners into 15 different buildings in 9 different states. More about that in a moment. When 9/11 occurred, we were sound asleep in a hotel in remote Alice Springs, Australia, right in the center of that country. We and two other couples were touring Australia and flying airplanes we had rented in Brisbane. The phone rang with a call from an Aussie friend up working late (it was 2 AM) and he told us to turn on the TV. We did and saw what everyone else saw. Once back in the U.S. a week later, I realized what the “new normal” at airports entailed and took my final airline flight the night of December 26, 2001. I have not been on one since as we travel in our own airplane, which avoids jumping through airline security hoops. Marti has lifetime free passes for both of us on Delta, and she occasionally flies on the airlines but I do not and never will again. At some point after the tax deferred exchanges were complete, we looked at each other and said, “we don’t have to live here anymore.” We had a nice home overlooking the ocean but had become disenchanted with the politics and economic trends, not to mention taxes and regulations, expanding crime, graffiti and crowds of California. We’d lived there for 36 years and although many aspects of the state are wonderful, we decided it was time to leave. We eliminated anything east of the Rockies as too humid, the southwest as too hot, the northern tier as too cold and the Pacific Northwest as too wet. Long story short, we bought a home and aircraft hangar in Grand Junction, Colorado in June, 2006 but knew no one here at the time. We had visited Grand Junction twice before and just wanted to look again, but everything on that day magically fell into place. Our home in California sold quickly so we headed to Colorado in August 2006 and are still here today. Things went sideways in 2008 when the Idaho real estate company through which we did the exchanges got into financial trouble and morphed from a rock solid 26-year business into a Ponzi scheme that cost us and thousands of others a great deal of money. Their bankruptcy and 1% ownership of each of our properties pulled every property into the mess. The resulting slow train wreck lasted 8 years. In the ensuing federal criminal trial, I was picked by the U.S. attorney in Boise as the lead off prosecution witness. Eventually, all four defendants were convicted and sent to prison for a wide variety of financial crimes. But of course, we never received any of the money we lost. In a tragic and shocking twist, the young female FBI agent who was assigned to drive me from the hotel to the trial and back for my two days of testimony was accused of perjury on the witness stand a week later, went home and committed suicide. These days, I remain involved with aviation related activities, especially the Colorado Pilots Association, and continue to fly nearly 200 hours a year. I’ve got over 9000 flying hours total, mostly in our own airplanes, and have never been paid to fly. 9/11 also put a stop to the ferry flying I was doing off and on for about 17 years with a friend, moving airplanes all over the world and across the Atlantic and Pacific. From Greenland to South Africa and from Pakistan to Australia, we delivered airplanes, some new and some old, some props and some jets, some single engine and some twins. I did not accept any payment for this as it was just great (but risky) adventure for me and he covered all of my expenses. You have no concept of how large the oceans are until you have flown across them in a single or twin-engine airplane surrounded by ferry fuel tanks in the cockpit. And yes, at 11,000 feet all by yourself over the middle of the Atlantic headed for South Africa, you do feel great admiration for Charles Lindbergh. I’m still at the same height and weight I was senior year in high school and at 75, don’t feel much different from when I was 25. But my hair is definitely not the same color! I go camping with several friends, but we no longer back pack and now drive Jeeps into remote areas and set up camp nearby. Marti, never a camper, is very active singing and helping to manage the Sweet Adelines Chorus here, participates in book club and volunteers with a hospice store downtown. She loves to cook and just about every night we have a new recipe that arrived on one of her internet cooking sites. We both travel in the airplane to many destinations throughout the country every year and except in winter, explore the countless 4-wheeling trails here in Colorado and in neighboring Utah, where some of the scenery is so unique it can only be described as looking like Mars. And for years, we’ve both managed to hit the gym three times a week aside from a few-month break when it was closed due to Covid. I’m almost certain no one but a proof reader is going to get even this far, so it is a good time to wrap it up. In thinking back over the decades, I realize how fortunate Marti and I were to have all the opportunities we did, to have had great parents, to have met each other in the first place and so far, to have dodged some of the medical bullets encountered by several of our friends. There have certainly been the usual ups and downs of life and a few missteps along the way, but we’ve managed all of them. Although we clearly have far more days behind us than ahead, we look forward to each and every one. (Epilogue -- On March 15, 2022 my friend Denny Craig, with whom I ferried airplanes all those years, was killed in the Italian Alps while returning an aircraft to the U.S. from South Africa. He gave me flying opportunities most could only dream of but knew an...(read more)