Frank Warner, Fort Huachuca Army brat
05/25/2025
ARRIVAL AT THE NEW POST, 1960
Due north of Fort Huachuca, we moved down one last, long road, a highway that cut straight through eight miles of next to nothing. The sky was dark, with a bluish hint of dawn. On the roadside, every mile or so, we saw dark, coiled, ribbon-like figures, maybe three or four feet long. Mom gasped.
“Is this desert full of snakes?” she asked. “What a place to bring children.”
At dawn, a military policeman – an MP – stopped our car at the fort’s East Gate guardhouse. He was a young man in crisp khaki shirt and pants, white hat, the MP armband, and a cross strap to his holstered pistol.
“How can I help you?” he asked my father.
“I’m reporting on orders,” Dad said, handing the MP his Army identification card. “We’re moving in. Can you give me directions to headquarters?”
“Well, Master Sergeant Warner, that would be Greely Hall. You go a mile and a half down this road, turn right at Irwin, go another mile and turn left on Arizona. Greely Hall is there, on your left. But I don’t think the offices are open yet.”
“We’ll just take a look,” Dad said. “Thanks!”
The MP saluted as we left. Soon we were winding our way past soldiers’ barracks and other official buildings. I couldn’t take my eyes off the Huachuca Mountains to the south. As the sun rose, their rounded peaks and mysterious folds were an imposing sight. This was a lot different from our last post in Heidelberg, West Germany.
Dad tapped the car’s odometer. “Since we left Pennsylvania, we’ve come 2,582 miles,” he said. He drove us past Greely Hall and accidentally wandered onto Grierson Avenue, past the thirteen homes reserved for the fort’s top officers. These were two-story mansions with gabled roofs, screened porches, and lots of chimneys.
Warner family and their '60 Chevy Biscayne, with roof rack
Once out of the Old Post, we rode east through the fort’s other neighborhoods and out the Main Gate to the neighboring town of Sierra Vista. Here we checked into the El Coronado Motel, a two-story turquoise lodge on Sierra Vista’s main street, Fry Boulevard. The motel room was small but comfortable, with a kitchenette just big enough to make a sandwich.
Dad showered, shaved, and put on his uniform. He drove back to the fort to report for duty at headquarters for the Army Electronic Proving Ground.
Mom walked the rest of us across Fry Boulevard to the post office, where she mailed a handful of letters. Then she led us next door to the offices of the Huachuca Herald, the weekly newspaper. At the front counter, Betty Wolle, the Herald’s receptionist, was folding newspapers and stuffing them with comics.
When we filed in, she immediately recognized us – most of us. She looked at little George, sitting in a stroller. “Where did he come from?”
It had been three years since the Warners, Mrs. Wolle, and her husband, Sergeant Bill Wolle, had picnicked together at the New Jersey shore. That day on the beach, the grownups laughed as Carl, Mark, and I shoveled piles of sand into the back seat of our old car. We wanted the beach to come home with us. Dad had to stop us.
At that time, we Warners and the Wolles were stationed in Fort Monmouth. Dad had known Sergeant Wolle since the early 1950s, when the two of them were Army recruiters in Allentown, Pennsylvania. When my family left Fort Monmouth for France in 1958, the Wolles transferred to Fort Huachuca. Now Sergeant Wolle was away in South Korea for a year, and while he was there, Mrs. Wolle stayed in Arizona.
She stood up. “Welcome to Sour Vista!” That was the nickname some of the locals had for Sierra Vista. The town had about 3,000 residents and only a few regular houses in what appeared to be a collection of tossed-together neighborhoods.
Mrs. Wolle took us to her shiny silver mobile home. She lived in the trailer park behind the A.J. Bayless’s supermarket and the El Rancho Roller Rink. Her trailer was made by Spartan, a company that once manufactured airplane fuselages, and it had an aluminum-and-rivets airplane look about it.
Mobile homes seemed a great idea to me. We were moving all the time, everywhere loading and unloading boxes, beds, bureaus, and that china cabinet. Why not take the whole house?
“A trailer home makes sense,” Mrs. Wolle said as she led us inside. “Why gamble your money on a real house in Sierra Vista? No one knows if this town has a future.”
Mrs. Wolle started a burner for coffee on her small stove. She opened her small cabinet for cups, and took a bottle of orange juice from her compact refrigerator. Soon we all had something to drink. As she and Mom chatted, we boys snooped into the trailer’s tiny bedroom and bathroom.
“Mrs. Wolle must sleep with her knees bent,” Mark whispered.
“Bent into her chin,” Carl said.
“The civilians are here for Fort Huachuca’s jobs,” Mrs. Wolle told Mom, “but if the fort goes, the jobs will go, and the people will go too,” she said.
“But the fort’s not going anywhere, is it?” Mom asked.
“Hard to tell. The fort already has shut down twice since World War II. The Electronic Proving Ground has been open since ’54, but it could close again whenever the Army decides. For right now, though, the place is hoppin’.”
Fort Huachuca, about fifteen miles square and stretching south to within seven miles of the Mexican border, now had 10,000 residents. These were the soldiers with their families, sent here for a variety of jobs.
Mrs. Wolle said the drones were the fort’s biggest new project. Other soldiers were testing new mobile communications equipment. Still others were trying to improve weather forecasting for battle. The fort was busy and getting busier.
When Dad came back to our motel room that evening, Mom set Mark’s birthday cake on the kitchenette counter. She’d bought it at A.J. Bayless’s.
George’s eyes followed Dad’s cigarette lighter as it stopped at each candle, and we sang “Happy Birthday.”
Six candles burned bright.
“Mark, make a wish,” Carl said.
“Don’t tell us what it is,” I said.
Mom cut the cake. “Thank God we all got here safely,” she said.
“Amen,” said Dad.
Mark blew out the flames, and after a short party we all fell asleep.
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From "Tumbleweed Forts: Adventures of an Army Brat," 2022