Managing Editor
In the days before digital, newspaper articles were written on a typewriter and much harder to produce.
Back in January 1980, I was new to my duty assignment with the 2044th Communications Group at The Pentagon in Washington, D.C., where I was serving as a Public Affairs representative in the Air Force. That meant I was reporting on the activities and airmen who were also assigned to the unit.
I would compose articles and then drop them off in person or mail them to weekly military newspapers that my commanding officer thought would be interested in publishing them.
My duties had me cover everything from special events being hosted by the 2044th Communication Group to welcoming new personnel. If I wasn’t out of the office interviewing someone, or typing stories up at my desk, I could be found taking photographs at The Pentagon or discussing potential articles with the editors of several nearby military papers on the phone.
In just my second week of duty at The Pentagon, a Senior Master Sergeant who supervised the 2044th radio section stopped by my office and asked if I would write an article about a young airman who had passed a proficiency test for radio repair with a perfect score. I agreed and called to arrange a time to do that.
Three days later, I met the young airman at his office workstation and started asking him questions about the test.
His name was Airman First Class Billy Catalina, and he grew up as an only child of a family in Queens, New York. He told me that he used to watch airplanes taking off and landing at LaGuardia Airport as a boy and wanted to become a pilot someday.
Billy’s father had died when he was 8 and his mother struggled to put food on the table for her son. As Billy got older, he paid less attention to school and spent more time with neighborhood friends. He got a part-time job in the evenings at a warehouse and dropped out of school with failing grades when he was a sophomore in high school.
His mother pleaded with Billy to return to school and to please her, he signed up to attend night adult education classes at a nearby high school for several years trying to earn his diploma. When his boss at work changed his hours, Billy had to give up night classes but he then spent almost a year on Saturday mornings studying and he eventually took the high school equivalency test and earned his GED diploma.
That was his ticket to enlisting in the U.S. Air Force where Billy trained as radio repairman and was assigned to the 2044th Communications Group. The test he took was to advance from an apprentice-level to a proficient-level in his job and consisted of tough technical questions.
He said he was a bit apprehensive and not very confident prior to taking the test since he was such a poor student in school. But he dedicated himself to reviewing the radio repair manual in advance of the test and was the first person in the examination room to finish the test.
Several weeks later, Billy received notification in the mail that not only had he passed the proficiency test, but that he had achieved a 100 percent perfect score.
I wrote a small 400-word article about Billly’s accomplishment, and it appeared several weeks later in the Air Force Communications Command’s newspaper. Billy stopped by my office a few days later to pick up a few copies of the newspaper and to thank me in person for taking the time to interview him.
Less than a year later, I was reassigned to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona for duty as editor of the base newspaper. By the time I had completed four years of duty there, I had written hundreds of stories and was preparing to return to civilian life and restart my career as a newspaper reporter.
At Christmastime in 1990, I was shopping at the Winrock Mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was a man pushing a baby stroller and holding the hand of another small child under the age of 5. He asked me if my name was Ed and if I remembered him.
To be honest, his face looked familiar, but I didn’t recall his name. He said he was Billy Catalina and reached into his wallet and retrieved a faded yellow article that I had written years before about him.
He told me that his mother had died of cancer not long after it had been published. In cleaning out her house, Billy found a clipped copy of the article in her bedside nightstand, and another one tacked up on her refrigerator. He hugged me and thanked me for making his mother so proud of him.
I try to keep that in mind with each article I write and hope they impact lives positively like the one about Billy Catalina did. <
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