Eugene Arner

  General Notes:

Please excuse any redundancy between the attached bio and what follows. I'm providing way more information than you're likely to be interested in having; share as much or as little of it with your Mother as you think appropriate.
I graduated from Brown in 1964 with a degree in English lit and went to work as a reporter for the Providence Journal & Bulletin, working first in the Newport office and later covering the Superior and Supreme Courts of Rhode Island (in Providence). When the draft came calling in late 1966, I volunteered for the Air Force, completed basic training and Officer Training School at Lackland AFB, Texas, and was commissioned a 2^nd Lieutenant in May 1967. I was assigned stateside to Minuteman missiles at Minot AFB, ND, where I ultimately met Mary Witte, a student nurse from a small town in eastern Montana, and married her in April 1971. We went on to Vandenberg AFB, CA, where I was in the missile test launch business before becoming the officer aide-de-camp to the two-star commander there, starting what was to be a seven-year stint as aide or executive officer to a series of general officers at Vandenberg, the Inter-American Defense College in DC, and 17^th Air Force Headquarters at Sembach Air Base, Germany. (While in DC awaiting the transfer to 17AF, I had a nine-month assignment to the Studies, Analysis & Gaming Agency of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, which plans and carries out war-gaming exercises involving Cabinet-level participants \endash truly fascinating!). From Germany (where our son Nicholas was born in 1977), we went to Los Angeles, where I was Director of Operations for the Air Force's Space Division. Space Division was comprised of the various program offices responsible for developing, launching and operating all military satellites (as well as their rocket launch vehicles). My job mostly involved running the Command Post and providing satellite tracking data to the Commander. Much more interesting, however, was my additional responsibility for military flight operations at Los Angeles International Airport. That primarily involved shipping satellites via cargo aircraft to Vandenberg or the Kennedy Space Center. However, it was the Reagan years and the President or First Lady passed through LAX at least once a month en route to and from their California ranch up the coast. So I spent a lot of time tending to Air Force One and the White House communications team. I have many vivid recollections of driving a "FOLLOW ME" truck down the taxiways at LAX with the Presidential aircraft behind me!
Our daughter Katherine was born at Long Beach Naval Hospital in November 1982 three months before we moved to England, where I returned to the missile business in the Ground-Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM) system at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, about 70 miles west of London. I was director of field training, which was done at a British range on the Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge. For most of my time there we had a resident encampment of peace protester "ladies" at the RAF Greenham Common gates, so our excursions to and from Salisbury with the missile equipment had to be executed with great secrecy and surprise, because of the political sensitivity. I had to go to London to brief the Ministry of Defence before each outing! We loved England. We rented a house in a village in Oxfordshire about 16 miles southeast of Oxford and six miles from Reading, where there were fast trains every half hour to Paddington Station in London. After 18 months there (far too short) \endash during which I was promoted to my highest rank, lieutenant colonel \endash I was assigned to the Air Force's European Headquarters at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, as the American representative for NATO tactical evaluations (war games) of all the GLCM bases in Europe (Belgium, Germany and Sicily, besides the UK). I was, in effect, the "defense lawyer" for the American unit being evaluated by NATO. After a year in that job I moved over to the Office of the Inspector General at the European Headquarters as team chief for GLCM unit inspections and evaluations.
That was my last Air Force assignment. I became eligible for retirement in 1987 (20 years), about the same time the GLCM system was being withdrawn from Europe per the INF treaty with the Soviet Union. It was the beginning of a major restructuring of the U.S. military, and I concluded that it was a good time to transition to my post-military career before my children reached college age. (As we left Germany for the last time, it occurred to me that our children had spent most of their lives abroad.) I'd had a lifelong interest in architecture and urban planning, so I enrolled at the University of Virginia after we returned to the States and got my Master of Planning degree in January 1990. I worked in long-range planning for the Town of Leesburg, VA, for five years and the City of Annapolis, MD, for three years; my major work in both places was the long, public process of developing a new community master plan. In 1998 I followed my Annapolis boss to Santa Cruz, CA, where I initially managed the city's affordable housing programs and federal Community Development Block Grant funds. She (the boss) left in 2000 and I (at that point Assistant Director) succeeded her as Director of Planning and Community Development. Santa Cruz was truly a challenge. It's home to the most radicalized campus of the University of California system (even more so than Berkeley); the politics were "progressive" to the extreme, and the anti-development, anti-business sentiment caused a continuing erosion of the tax base and, thus, an ongoing city budget crisis. Not a great environment to be running a public agency! After five years I felt burned out and elected to retire in November 2005.
We decided to move to Boise, Idaho, as our prospective retirement home. We'd visited many times \endash Mary's brother has been a doctor here for many years and their late father lived here for 10 years after their mother died. (Since coming here, I've also discovered that I have two long-lost Arner cousins \endash Warren's daughters \endash living in the immediate area.) We've enjoyed life here \endash Boise is an "All-American" type city that has provided a welcome antidote to the rarified, self-focused atmosphere of Santa Cruz. I worked briefly for a local planning firm last year, helping them get a planned community application through some of the government approvals. Mostly, though, I've been enjoying a retired lifestyle and have dedicated most of my energies to the Boise Philharmonic, which is an excellent "second tier" orchestra. Mary and I were much involved in the orchestra's annual fund-raising "gala" in April, and I've been tapped to run the affair next year. Mary has worked as a registered nurse, either full- or part-time, since we were married (except for the years abroad). She's currently working half-time on the medical-surgical unit of a hospital near our home. Our children are young adults and still single. Nicholas graduated from San Jose State University with an accounting degree and moved to Boise when we did; he's working in customer relations at DirecTV here and last year finally moved out of the house to an apartment with a friend. Katherine graduated from the University of Wisconsin (history and German major) in 2005 and then spent two years in Austria (Innsbruck and Salzburg) teaching high school English before starting a doctorate program in the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore last fall. She has a full fellowship, so we don't care how long she stays in school!
My Dad died of congestive heart failure in August 1997 at the age of 83 after several months in a nursing home. Mom maintained on her own pretty well for a few years; Joan and her husband lived nearby, and Carolyn and her husband were two hours away in Inverness, FL. Kenneth and his wife, like Mary and me, always lived pretty far away. Mom seemed to have medical emergencies of one kind or another about once a quarter, which became a real problem for us after Joan and her husband moved to Charlotte, NC. In 2002 we persuaded Mom to sell the house and move to an independent living facility in California near where I lived. She adjusted to that pretty well, though she always missed being "mistress of the house" and doing the cooking that had been her life's work. I was able to manage her affairs and increasing need for medical care. In her last year in California she began to show signs of dementia. She moved with us to Boise, initially to an independent living facility. Within six months, however, it was clear she needed assisted living, so we moved her to another facility very close to our house. A month later, she developed a MRSA infection and had to be admitted to a nursing home. Her physical and mental condition deteriorated pretty rapidly over the next five months and she died of a severe pulmonary infection after a day in the hospital in January 2007 at the age of 93. We buried her ashes next to Dad's in Sylvan Abbey Memorial Park in Clearwater.
So here I am at age 65, increasingly aware that I'm part of the senior generation but still interested in my planning profession and entertaining notions of somehow staying involved with it. Mary would prefer to stay active in nursing but in an environment that's less hectic and stressful than a hospital. Our principal enjoyment is our occasional travels. We spent a couple weeks in London in the spring of 2005 and visited Austria in 2006 while Katherine was there. For the past two years we've spent a week in November in Washington, DC, taking in concerts, museums, and galleries; we'll go again this year with a side trip to Baltimore. I use the annual National Planning Conference as an excuse to visit various cities \endash New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia, Providence, Las Vegas \endash and Mary joins me for a few days at the end. It's been about eight years since we were last in Boston (college shopping with Katherine) \endash my strongest memory of that trip is that the Big Dig made it hard to get around.
You asked if I still play the piano. Yes, and I still have the family's 1927 Krakauer grand piano. It's been refinished three times and has traveled the world almost as much as I have. Over the years I've played cocktail music at my generals' receptions, played in the band in a couple of amateur musical reviews, and accompanied the occasional singer or instrumental soloist. I play now mostly for my own enjoyment \endash my repertoire diminishes for lack of exercise. I also took up the organ when I was in high school and through the years I have served as principal organist for churches most everywhere we've lived, in addition to my regular jobs. The most memorable was the 12^th century St. Leonard's Church in Woodcote, our English village. It was unheated \endash I had to wear those "fingerless" gloves to play in wintertime! Sad to say, I mostly play the organ now at funerals of family and friends.