Sig05

When going through a box of pictures, I ran across this one. I knew I had it, and there should be negatives of a few more of them, although this was the best of the bunch. This was in the '80s, of course, on one of the occasions when the President would go to his Santa Barbara ranch and AF-1 would land at NAS Point Mugu, Oxnard, CA, where I worked. Usually, he would just come in and then the string of limos would come and go, or, as in this case, it was Marine One. This time he stopped to give a brief speech, thanked us at the Pacific Missile Test Center for our service, and then he headed out. He was among his own, and very relaxed, as you can tell from where I was standing. There was just one Navy photographer in front of me, between me and the First Couple. At the time I was in airborne weapons test and evaluation and part of the F/A-18/AIM-120 AMRAAM integration program and also a 'weekend warrior', being P-3 aircrew with VP-65, the Tridents, just across the field. Those were the days, for me as well as for the country.