Jeff Wisnia sent email and a picture about his duty at Operation Dominic.
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000
From: jwisnia@conversent.net
To: pdxavets@aracnet.com
Subject: Any civies allowed?
Hi,
Just got referred to your site when I met another EE my age and somehow
during the conversation we realized that we were both involved with the
'62 test series. I was on JI for about two months, and he (lucky sod)
was in Hawaii. We both said we couldn't ever erase the words "April
Weather" from our brains. And I'll never forget being a few hundred
feet away from the launcher the nite that a Thor launch was aborted a
few seconds after the much delayed countdown finally reached "zero" and
the range safety guys scattered the warhead all over their end of the
island!
Out of curiosity I posted a message on the "sci.electronics.design"
newsgroup to see if there were any other old timers who remembered the
words "April Weather"(without disclosing the connection or time frame).
Somebody posted a link to your web site, that's why I'm writing now.
Is your association limited to military personel or would I qualify for
membership?
Best regards,
Jeff Wisnia
W1BSV
MIT '57 ee
I remembered I'd put away a folder of photos from that era. Here's one of me as a
"yoot" holding one of the ridiculous looking "jack-in-the-box" type extender
mechanisms we used to use to hold our sensing equipment away from the little
sounding rockets that carried them up. I'm the one without the glasses. The other guy is (was?) a crackerjack mechanical
designer named Roy Downing. | 
Photo from Jeff Wisnia.
Click on the picture for a larger view. |
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000
From: jwisnia@conversent.net
To: Keith pdxavets@aracnet.com
Subject: Re: Any civies allowed?
Thanks for the quick reply Keith.
Here's some of what I remember about those halcyon days in '62. I'd be pleased to
swap "war stories" with other guys who put their time in on JOHNSTON ISLAND
("JI"). Someday maybe I'll catch up again with that tech from Geophysics
Corporation of America ("GCA") named Ziggy who was able to play a set of steel
bedsprings like a bass when we made music on whatever "instruments" we could
create to accompany the only guy in our crowd who brought a guitar with him.
I was an EE three years out of grad school, working for Comstock & Wescott, a
small applied R&D firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some of our work was
commercial, and some government contracts supporting scientists at the Air Force
Cambridge Research Laboratories ("AFCRL") at L.G. Hanscom field in Bedford,
Massachusetts. My job, and a fun one at that, was to design and build sounding
rocket and satellite borne instrumentation to measure ion and electron densities
in the upper atmosphere and near space. The two AFCRL scientists directing this
work were Rita Sagalyn and Mike Smiddy. I traveled to interesting places like
Brazil and Hudson's Bay with them for about 8 years gathering measurements of what
was going on upstairs.
Our involvement with Project Dominic was measuring ion and electron densities in
the upper atmosphere before and after the nuclear detonations using instruments
flown on sounding rockets we launched from JI. The electronics in our
instrumentation seem like stone age stuff to me now. I still had to use vacuum
tubes to make high impedance electrometer amplifiers because solid state stuff
couldn't do such things back then.
"State of the art" electronic packaging from the Dominic era. The smallest
commercially available electronic parts were packed together as closely as
possible, in a construction style dubbed "cordwood". This little block contained
a single flip-flop circuit. Now, in the year 2000, millions of functionally
identical circuits are packed on a single microprocessor chip. I wish I had
that 1959 "real silver" quarter today! | 
Photo from Jeff Wisnia.
Click on the picture for a larger view. |
| Our gear was built from whatever consumer or industrial stuff we could obtain.
When I needed a perforated spherical stainless steel shell for our electron
measuring probe I drilled a huge number of holes in the bowls of two soup ladles
and joined them together. For a telescoping arm needed to move the probe several
feet from the rocket after it got above most of the atmosphere I used a magician's
"appearing cane" powered by a silly looking coil spring slipped around it. All in
all, building our instrumentation was a lot like making the ham radio stuff I'd
been fooling around with since high school, and the parts we used didn't cost us
much more than my own stuff did.. (My ham call was W6KAH as a kid in San
Francisco, then W1BSV in the Boston area). | 
Photo from Jeff Wisnia.
Click on the picture for a larger view. |
| An example of the type of payload we launched from Johnston Island on Nike-Ajax
rockets. At altitude, the nosecone tip flew off and the spherical ionization
measuring probe popped out. The fellow holding the nosecone tip is Nick Guarino,
who worked for Geophysics Corporation of America, makers of the payload
structure and telemetry systems. | 
Photo from Jeff Wisnia.
Click on the picture for a larger view. |
Some of my memories of my two trips to Johnson Island ("JI"), in no particular
order of relevance, are:
The ever-present drone of the diesel driven LOX plant needed to supply the Thor
with oxidizer.
Those damn loudspeakers everyplace on the island announcing "April Weather" and
the status of the countdowns, over and over again. Those preface to those
announcements still come back and rattle around in my head if I'm home alone doing
a mindless job like rolling paint on the ceiling of a room.
No women on the island. Things got so bad that guys used to go down to the
"airport" building when the once a week commercial flight with landing rights on
JI came through, in the hopes that a stewardess or female passenger might debark
for a breath of air.
Being in our bunker ready to launch our little rocket for the Bluegill Prime
launch and watching a black and white TV monitor picture of the Thor when the
launch count finally get to zero after weeks of "hurry up and wait". Smoke emerged
from the base of the rocket, and the ten or fifteen guys in there with me all
yelled, "Yea", followed about five seconds later by everyone groaning, "Oh shit!"
as we watched the top of the Thor get blow away. I think we were stuck in that
bunker for at least eight hours before they let us out.
Snorkeling in crystal clear waters watching the beautiful fish and the occasional
Manta Ray gliding by serenely, while hoping that the sharks kept to themselves on
the other side of the island, where we were told the kitchen garbage was tossed
into the sea.
Sweating out the Cuban Missile Crisis with insufficient news reports to let us
know what was going on, while worrying about what terrible things could happen to
our wives and kids at home.
Convincing the very nice Catholic chaplain on JI to obtain travel orders for me so
I could attend High Holiday services in Hawaii because there was no Jewish
chaplain on the island. (What a break!)
Some memorable parties (and hangovers) thanks to the enormous amount of "free
time" and the $3 per bottle booze at the military store. I remember one guy, I
think he was another civilian engineer working for GCA, who got in a boatload of
trouble when he got caught trying to sneak about five cases of liquor home in
company equipment cases.
Being outside when the Thor launch and detonation finally came off, and feeling
that heat pulse on the back of my neck when the detonation countdown reached zero,
followed by "risking one eye" peeking around my dark goggles and seeing that
awesome green blob and the dark striations running through it.
This paragraph was added after I thought I was done with these reminiscences. But,
my 64 year old prostrate, which now has a mind of its own, led me to the bathroom
where I was reminded that the cantelope sized chunk of coral which has been
sitting on the lid of the toilet tank all these years is the only tangible
souvenir of those boyhood days on Johnston Island.
Jeff Wisnia
Winchester, MA.
781/721-2718
jwisnia@conversent.net
Keith Whittle
September 30, 2000
[ Operation Dominic ]
