I read this, and thought of Bill and Ted…and then thought of Kansas.
Do you think DB Cooper survived his jump?
I saw him live at a comedy club years before I’d ever seen his standup special. I’m pretty sure I saw him before he was big-time. Anyway, I went with my parents, who laughed their asses off at the first three comics but were pretty 
:dubious: :rolleyes: at his act. He got heckled, too - suburban North Dallas (I think the club’s in Addison) is no place for a guy like him. I know he did his “cockroaches/koala infestation” bit, just like on his flamey-background Comedy Central special.
One a much smaller scale…
In a few weeks I will be revisiting the old CFB Lahr military base; I lived there for three years in the early 90s. I’m very excited about it, but also somewhat apprehensive, because it’s going to be a very emotional time.
In talking to my mom, we were wondering why those three years have such strong emotions attached to them; why we are more homesick for a place we called home for 3 years than we are for any other former place we’ve ever lived in (for example, I don’t have such a strong attachment to Hamilton, Ontario, despite having been there for 6 years, having gone through school and gotten married while living there, etc.)
And it comes down to the fact that CFB Lahr no longer exists. Some of the old buildings are there and are being re-used. The airfield is being used, as are the PMQs and schools in the village. But many of the buildings on-base and on the Kaserne are abandoned and condemned, having not been used since August 1994, when the Canadian government withdrew it’s last troops from Europe. Much of the Kaserne has been razed, to make room for new condos and houses. The grocery store no longer exists. The department store, the bowling alley, the library, the dentist’s, the gas station no longer exist. The Arrowhead ice rink burned down a few years back, and there’s nothing of it left anymore. The movie theatre is now a heavy metal dance club! The old hospital was replaced with a furniture store. The Officer’s Mess is a school.
Sometimes I wonder if it was all a dream. I’ve lost track of a lot of people that I knew back then, though Facebook helps keep tenuous links. We were all kids back then, though - there’s not much to keep us together as adults. My husband and best friend will be coming with me on this trip - I know they are excited to finally see this “mythical” place, but I also know they can’t relate. I’m a little scared of breaking down and bawling the whole time!
So I’m going “home” to a home that isn’t there. All that’s left are memories, old photos and military records; the experience of Lahr for Canadians *will *never be the same again, and *can *never be the same again. No one else will ever experience what those of us who were there between 1967 and 1994 experienced. It’s just gone, and can never be rebuilt, and that scares me a little. 
A closed Air Force base… ugh. The last year of my first job was spent on the local base that had already been closed. We were doing a lot of environmental work related to its closure and conversion to the new airport for the city.
It was a pretty unhappy time, actually. I was crammed into a tiny workspace in one of the rooms in former officer housing. Unnecessarily, too- the USAF told us we could have as many houses as we wanted for office space, and our idiot project supervisor told them two would be fine. He was a pure construction-industry guy who had a low opinion of those “college boys” like the technical staff, despite the fact that we were the only reason we had the project in the first place. He just thought it was funny when we complained. It wasn’t so much that it was all that much of a hardship, it was that it was completely unnecessary hardship. We could have had three or four houses with a decent workspace for everybody just by telling the USAF folks. But no.
I had to drive all the way across town to get to the base instead of a nice, shorter drive to our old office. And, while we were there, the company declined to renew our lease on the old office space or lease a new one, so it was pretty clear that when the project on the base was complete, the office was going to shut down. Just generally kind of a sucky time.
I eventually found a job with a new company and spent the first three months just absolutely giddy about my good fortune. That was in 1996. The awesome people who hired me left to start a new company in 1999 and hired me on as their first employee eight months later. I’m still working for them today.