Daniel Wayne Lockard
March 28, 1938 ~ June 29, 2023
Daniel Wayne Lockard was born on March 28, 1938, at St. Johns Hospital in Salina, Kansas. His parents were Wayne Lockard and Marjorie (McCall) Lockard.
His Mom and Dad liked to take him for a ride in the car on evenings when it was difficult to get him to go to sleep. The movement of the car always put him to sleep. On one drive Dan said “Horsey”. When they looked at him, He was looking out of the window up into the sky. They said “Horses don’t fly.” He said “Red horses do”. (The trademark for the Citco Oil Company was a flying red horse with wings). His mother always thought that was funny.
The first house that Dan lived in was at 936 South Santa Fe Avenue. Santa Fe was the main street in town. It was about six blocks from the house to downtown. They lived in rooms on the second floor of a large two-story house where they had a separate outside entrance. When Dan’s sister Sharon was born in 1939, they moved to one side of a duplex on Park Place. Park Place was one block long and was only one block from the main entrance to Oakdale Park. Mom would often take the kids to the park on nice days. It was only about five blocks to downtown. When Carol Sue was born in 1940, they moved to 812 Sheridan Street. It was a two-bedroom house, and was about four blocks from Sunset Park. They lived there for about two years.
During these years, Dad worked at the Western Star flour mill. Most of his work had to do with loading and unloading railroad box cars that carried wheat into and bags of flour out of the mill. It wasn’t very healthy, working around all of that dust. He didn’t like the work, but the owner, John J. Vanier, one of the richest men in town, paid for the medical expenses for all of his employees. That’s why Dad worked there as long as he did. He got all of the medical expenses paid for his children being born.
After Carol Sue was born, Mom and Dad decided not to have anymore kids, and that they wouldn’t have so many medical expenses any more, so Dad quit the flour mill and got a job working for the Union Pacific Railroad. He was a fireman and his job was to keep the firebox filled with coal to keep the engine running. This wasn’t very healthy, either. He was always around coal dust and always came home covered with the coal dust from head to foot.
They moved to 230 Des Moines Avenue, on the east side of Salina, in 1942. It was a bigger house with two bedrooms larger than the ones in the house on Sheridan. Mom and Dad slept in one bedroom and the three kids slept in two beds in the other bedroom.
When Dan was about six or seven, it was decided that it was a bad idea for him to share a bedroom with his sisters, so he was moved to the basement. It was fun. He could lay at night with a flashlight and read, and no one knew about it. After a year or two of his sleeping in the basement, Dad enlarged the house, building onto the rear. They built a bedroom for Dan, just about doubled the size of the kitchen and added an enclosed porch on the rear that was big enough to hold an electric washer and dryer. The kitchen was now large enough for a chrome dinette set where the whole family could sit in the kitchen to eat their meals. It also was large enough for about three times as many cabinets and counter tops. Mom got a new stove, refrigerator and a new sink. She also got a new washer and dryer to put on the porch. Mom and Dad lived in this house until 1971, when they moved to 626 Albert Street in the south end of Salina.
In about 1945, Dad quit his job on the railroad and got a job working at the Waring Grocery store located in the 100 block of North Fifth Street. It wasn’t a very high paying job. He worked in the store, and when a customer called in an order, he would deliver the groceries to their house. The kids liked him working at the grocery store. They could go into the store and the owner Francis Waring would give them a cookie. It was a tough decision. The cookies were in little bins along one wall of the store. Each bin had a different kind of cookie in it. You made your choice opened the door and took out the cookie you wanted. Also, they could call Dad at the store shortly before he would be getting off work, and say “Dad, how about bringing home some ice cream”. He always did.
Every August, we had the McCall reunion. It was a picnic that was always held in the same location near the swinging bridge in Oakdale Park. The McCall family consisted of the families of Newton Grant McCall, Dan’s grandfather, and all of his siblings. He had seven brothers and sisters. All of them except for two, lived in the Salina area. One brother had died in the Philippine Islands during the Spanish-American War, and one sister had moved to California after she married. The others all lived in the Salina area, most on farms. Someone was responsible for going over early on the designated Sunday morning and pull together enough picnic tables and park benches for everyone and sit on them until the picnic began, so that no one else would take them. That was the way you reserved your picnic spot. Shortly, before noon, everyone began to arrive. They brought all kinds of food. Fried chicken, salads, pies, cakes, ice tea, watermelon; all kinds of other things. When everyone got there, they would eat. After lunch the old folks would sit around and talk. The kids had the run of the park. They would play on the playground equipment, go swimming, watch people play tennis, croquet and ping pong. Many times, before the day was over, some of the fathers would take the kids for a ride in a motor boat. The boat dock was just across a pedestrian bridge from their picnic area. You could rent a motor boat for a dollar or two an hour. That was always fun. During the afternoon, a lot of people who grew up with the McCall family would come to visit. Dan’s Grandma and Grandpa Lockard would always come, and a lot of other relatives who weren’t really McCall’s would come. All of these people had lived in the farming community in Elm Creek Township where Dan’s parents had grown up, gone to school and got married.
The McCall family was pretty close. Dan’s mother had five brothers and two sisters. All but Uncle Clair and Uncle Harold had two or three children. So, as Dan was growing up, there were fifteen McCall cousins. Besides the annual McCall picnic, they saw each other often. Dan’s family would go visit the other families or they would come to Dan’s house and the kids would play with each other. The ones Dan enjoyed playing with the most was Uncle Bill’s sons, Melvin and Larry. They were one and two years younger than Dan and they always had a lot of fun. They all liked to play baseball and football. Dan also enjoyed spending time with Marvin, Uncle Vernon’s son. He was three years older than Dan. They lived on a farm that was next door to Grandpa McCall’s farm. He didn’t have any friends in the neighborhood, so in the summertime, he would invite Dan to come spend a few days with him on the farm. They had a good time. Dan was allowed to help do the chores. Feed the chickens, milk the cows, things like that. He wasn’t very good at milking a cow. He just didn’t have the right touch. One time, when he was about seven or eight, Marvin and Dan were out on Babe, riding around the pasture. Babe was an old mare that they had owned all Dan’s life. Dan thought she was huge. Marvin was in front in the saddle and Dan was sitting behind him with his arms around Marvin’s waist. They came to a gate in the fence, and Marvin said to sit still, and he dismounted and went over to open the gate. While he was off the horse, he had Dan hold on to the reins. Then, Babe started to move and Dan got frightened and tightened the reins. This was the wrong thing to do, because he had pulled so tight on the reins that Babe had reared up on her hind legs, and Dan was hanging on for dear life. Marvin saw what was going on and yelled at Dan to let go of the reins. He did and Babe settled down on all four legs and stood there like nothing had happened. Dan rode Babe through the gate, Marvin got on and they rode off like everything was fine.
Almost every Sunday, Dan’s family would go visit our Grandparents at the farm. They would go to the Lockard farm one Sunday and to the McCall farm the next Sunday. When They went to the Lockard farm, it was just them, Grandma and Grandpa Lockard and Uncle Joe, except for the three years that he was in the Army Air Force during World War II. When they went to the McCall farm, besides Grandma and Grandpa McCall, there were usually other people. Uncle Clair had not yet married Bernice, so he was usually there. Also, there were usually one or two of the other uncles or aunts and their families. In any case, the dinner usually consisted of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, some vegetables and dessert. In the summer, usually someone would bring a block of ice from the ice plant on the corner of Fifth and Elm Streets on the way from Salina, and they would make homemade ice cream. Usually, it was Dan’s father, because he drove right by the ice house on the way out of town. Dan and his cousins would get to help turn the crank on the freezer, but one of the adults took over when it got too stiff for the kids to turn it any more. It was always a good meal. The chicken was one that had just been caught and butchered only an hour or so before it was fried, and the vegetables were fresh right out of the garden, or out of a jar that Grandma had canned the previous summer.
Another thing Dan’s family did in the summer was go with the McClanahan family to the Ottawa State Lake near Bennington, Kansas. John McClanahan was Dan’s best friend growing up. They did everything together, until they got into Junior High School. Then John got into art class and began running around with the other art students and Dan began running around with other people.
One of Dan’s best friends in Junior High School and High School was Keith Lindburg. They did a lot together. One year Keith talked Dan into playing baseball on his team. They were the Lions, because the Salina Lions Club sponsored the team. Keith had played baseball for a number of years, but this was Dan’s first and last time. They were a good team. Dan wasn’t very good and was one of the substitutes. But, he got into several games. He got a few hits and one game He drove in the winning run. Dan thought the coach wanted to substitute for him, but he didn’t have anyone else on the bench. Dan got into more games after that. Anyway, they won the league championship which qualified them to go to the district tournament. We won that too, and went on to win the state tournament that was played at Blue Jay Stadium in Salina.
One of things that Dan liked to do was go to the Blue Jay Stadium and watch the Salina Blue Jays play baseball. He remembers that at the beginning of each game they didn’t play “The Star-Spangled Banner” like they do today. They played a recording of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America”. The Blue Jays were a Class D farm team of the Philadelphia Phillies. Class D was at the bottom of the professional baseball ladder. Some of the Blue Jays made it to the majors, but not many. One of the players playing for the Joplin Miners was Mickey Mantle. He started the 1951 season with the Joplin team, but after a couple of months they moved him to the Kansas City Blues, which was the top team in the New York Yankees farm system. He was in New York, playing for the Yankees before the season was over. The rest, as they say, is history. Dan saw him play once or twice. He was always hitting home runs in Blue Jay stadium. The fences were not very far out.
When Dan was five, in 1943, he started to kindergarten at Oakdale Grade School, located on East Iron Street. It was about four short blocks from our house. Dan walked to school, until he was old enough to ride a bike which he got while in third grade. All of Dan’s teachers seemed to like him and he didn’t get into any trouble. The only thing that Dan remembers about grade school was that when he was in fifth grade, he played clarinet in the school band. He played clarinet until he was finished with ninth grade. He wasn’t very good because he hated to practice. He had fun playing in concerts at the Memorial Hall every year and marching in a parade about once a year.
When Dan was about six or seven, Dad quit the grocery store and went to work for the Sullivan-Johnson Chevrolet dealer. At first, he was an apprentice and learned to do the job and then became their body and fender guy. He was the Body Shop staff. Damaged cars would be brought in, and he would hammer out the dents, sand them smooth with an electric sander, replace parts that were too damaged to repair and then when it was ready, he painted the car. He did this until Dan was in high school, first, with Sullivan-Johnson and then with the Boyer Nash dealer. While with Sullivan-Johnson he owned Chevrolets, and while with Boyer’s he owned Nashes. Also, during those years he played on the company softball team in the summer and bowling team in the winter. He would always take the kids to all of the games. Dan even went to softball practices with him. But, the body and fender jobs weren’t very healthy for him either. He was always breathing the paint and acetylene fumes. That, in addition to the flour dust at the flour mill and the coal dust on the railroad, and his heavy cigarette smoking, must have been the reason for his respiratory problems. It undoubtedly shortened his life by several years.
After all three kids had started to school, Dan’s mom told his dad that she wanted to get a job. He asked where she was going to work. She said that she saw an advertisement in the window at the Palace Clothing Store. They wanted someone to do alterations. The boss, Spence Johnson, asked if she had any experience. She said, “I altered my own clothes”. She told him that she could only work from 9 to 4, because she had to be home after school let out and the kids came home. The next day he called and asked if she could be there at 9:00. She said, “No, I had laundry to finish and two pies in the oven.” He said, “After the laundry was finished and the pies were baked to bring one of the pies and come to work”. She took one pie and went to work. She worked every day Monday through Friday from 9 to 4. During holidays, she didn’t work. He began paying her to pay a baby sitter. She paid Anna Richter (a neighbor who lived on Ash Street) to watch the kids after school. After the kids were in Junior High School, she worked full time, six days a week including all summer.
The Palace Clothing Store closed in 1953. Merck Ruhl, who had quit The Palace earlier was working at Hines-Roth Men’s Wear at the Kraft Manor Shopping Center. He called Dan’s mom and asked her to apply there. They hired her and she only worked when there was work to do. She retired when she was 62, in 1975. They rehired her to work only two days a week so that she could keep her Social Security benefits. After three years, they built a new store on South Ohio Street. They increased her salary and she worked full time. She worked four and a half days a week and gave up her Social Security benefits. She finally quit for good in 1985, when she was 72 years old.
During the years that she worked in the clothing stores, she bought all of Dan’s clothes there, because she got a pretty good employee discount. Dan always had nice clothes to wear to school and jobs that he got later.
When a doctor told him to quit the car painting work, Dad went to work as a carpenter. He worked all over the state of Kansas. Some jobs took him far enough away that he was away all week and just came home on weekends. During this time, he was elected president of the local carpenter’s union. He was working on the construction of the new Westinghouse plant building when he had a perforated ulcer attack. It put him in the hospital. He had to quit the carpenter work and became the business agent for the local carpenter’s union. He was elected as a Saline County Commissioner in 1972. He served eight years (two terms) until 1980. He died February 18, 1986, from Emphysema.
In the fall of 1950, Dan started seventh grade in Roosevelt Junior High School. In seventh grade, he found out that he liked mathematics. Besides Math, he also took English, Band, General Science, Geography, Woodworking Shop and Physical Education (Gym). In shop, he made a few things like a lamp made out of cedar and a little table with a drawer. They supposedly learned to use all of the power equipment in the shop as well as a lot of hand tools. The power equipment included lathes, band saws, table saws and sanders.
In eighth grade, he took English, Mathematics, Band, History, Penmanship, Metal Working Shop, and Gym. He doesn’t remember too much about the eighth grade. The Metal Working Shop teacher was Mr. William Hail. The students all liked him very much. He was younger than most of the teachers.
When Dan was eight years old, he joined the cub scouts. His dad was an Assistant Pack Master. The Pack Master was George Adams. The Den Mother was Chloe McClanahan, John’s mother. The pack was sponsored by the Oakdale PTA; the pack meetings were held at the school. They had den meetings at the McClanahan house. They worked really hard to earn arrows to put underneath their wolf, bear and lion badges. When Dan was eleven, He joined the Boy Scouts. They had the troop meetings at the school, also. They went on a lot of campouts. The Boy Scouts didn’t work as hard to earn badges as they did in the cub scouts. After one year, Dan got tired of scouts and quit. That was when He got the paper route.
When you were twelve, you could get a paper route, delivering the Salina Journal. Dan had 82 customers. Every weekday afternoon and early Sunday morning, the Journal truck would arrive in front of Dan’s house. They would drop off a bundle of Salina Journal newspapers. Dan would cut the wire that held the bundle together, put the papers in his white Salina Journal bag that he slung over his shoulder and started walking down the street. As he walked from one customer’s house to the next, he would fold each newspaper into a special shape that made it easy to throw. He would throw the paper onto the customer’s porch and then proceed to fold the paper for the next house. If he happened to miss the porch and throw the paper into a bush or something, he would have to go get it and put it on the porch. Once a week, Dan would have to go collect money from each customer. He had a ring on which there was a card for each customer. Each customer had a duplicate of his card. They would pay him the 60 cents and he would use his hole punch to punch out the appropriate week on both his card and their card. Dan was very prompt and got the papers delivered immediately after they arrived on his curb.
Dan’s father liked to travel. He took the family on several vacation trips. They had three trips to Colorado to drive around in the mountains. Dad liked to fish, so they spent quite a bit of those vacations going trout fishing. On one of the trips, they took Uncle Harold and Aunt Ruby with us. Aunt Ruby had a good friend that had married a Colorado miner and lived in Leadville, Colorado. It was a small mining town way up in the mountains. The Lockard’s stayed with them for about a week. The trout fishing was really good, too. Dan went with his father and Uncle Harold every day and they caught fish every day. One evening they had a tour of the lead refinery. This was where they crushed the ore and separated the various minerals for further processing. They displayed little grains of gold and silver that were part of the metals being processed. Dan thought that was impressive.
On another vacation they took a trip that took them first to Aledo, Illinois, where they visited relatives for a couple of days. Then they went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, for a tour of the Nash assembly plant. Dad was working for the Boyer Nash dealer, and he wanted to see how the Nash automobiles were made. That tour was on a tram that they rode all the way through the plant. The kids really liked the ride. Dan doesn’t really remember much about the manufacturing of the cars. After that they drove to Walker, Minnesota, and stayed several days in a one room cabin on the shore of Leach Lake. They swam in the lake every day. The water was pretty cold, but they had fun anyway. The water was full of leaches, little black flat worms that are about an inch or two long. They would latch onto you and try to suck your blood out through your skin. When the kids came out of the water, Mom would check us over and pull off any leaches that we brought out with us. One day, Dad and Dan rented a motor boat and went clear out toward the middle of the lake to fish. They caught quite a few fish before it started to get dark. Dad looked at the sky and said that they had better head for shore. Before they got there, it started to rain. They both got soaked to the bone before they got back to the dock. The one room cabin had a wood burning stove which they used to heat the cabin and to cook the food. Every morning it was cold when they got up, because the fire had gone out during the night. Mom fried the fish that they caught and they ate fish all the time they were there. After that, they drove into Canada to Winnipeg. In Winnipeg, we went into a department store and Dan rode on his first escalator. While in Canada, they took a tour of a paper mill. Then, they drove back to Kansas through North Dakota and Nebraska. They got home as quickly as they could.
On another vacation, they drove to South Dakota, where they saw the Badlands, a large desert area, and the Black Hills, where they saw Mount Rushmore, the mountain that was carved with busts of Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. From there, they drove into Wyoming and stopped to see Devil’s Tower, a large granite extrusion that just sticks up out of the desert. It was featured many years later in the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. After that we headed in the direction of Yellowstone National Park. But, after driving for about half a day and seeing nothing but prairie, Mom said that she was tired of seeing nothing and didn’t want to go to Yellowstone. So, at the next highway going south, they headed in that direction. Boy, that highway was really nothing. There wasn’t a tree in sight for about a hundred miles. Finally, they found civilization and after a couple of more days they were finally home. It was a long trip with a lot of driving with few stops. They were really tired after that trip.
On Christmas Day, 1952, Grandpa McCall died at the age of 83. It wasn’t a very happy Christmas, but a couple of days later after the funeral, they had a family dinner at Grandma’s house on Ellsworth Street. All of Mom’s seven brothers and sisters and their families were there. After the dinner, Marvin, Melvin, Larry, and Dan decided to go over to the Kansas Wesleyan Gym and play basketball. The college was only about four blocks from Grandma’s house. When they got there, they found that the doors to the Gym were locked, because it was the Christmas holidays and all of the students had gone home for a couple of weeks and they had closed up the college. We wandered around checking all of the doors. In the back there was a bin that they stored coal in for the furnace that heated the gym. They found that the door from the coal bin to the furnace was unlocked. So, they crawled over the pile of coal and through that door to get into the gym. They played basketball for a couple of hours and then had to go back to the house to explain how they got coal dust on their good clothes.
J. S. Dillons & Sons was a grocery store chain with headquarters in Hutchinson, Kansas. They had stores all over the Hutchinson/Wichita area and had one store in Salina on East Iron. Dan’s parents shopped there after the Waring store closed on North Fifth. Dillons had a lot to do for running them out of business, along with several other Mom and Pop stores in town. In 1952, they opened another store on South Ninth Street. Dan went out before the store opened and applied for a job. They hired him as a sack boy at fifty cents an hour. He worked every day during the summer, and after school and on Saturdays during school times. The store manager was Sonny Eliot. His daughter, Janice, was in Dan’s class in school. His job was to put groceries into paper sacks and then carry them to the customer’s car after they paid for them. Sack boys weren’t supposed to take tips unless the customer was very insistent. After they declined a tip, if the customer insisted, they could take the tip. Usually, it was a dime, but sometimes it was a quarter. Virginia Madsen was the head checker. She was responsible for the operation of the check stands. She scheduled the work for all of the checkers and sack boys. It was a fun job and we were always busy.
During times when they weren’t busy, they would send sack boys out onto the floor to stock shelves. Twice a week, they received a truckload of groceries from the warehouse in Hutchinson. Quite often, in the summer, they would schedule Dan to help unload the truck, stamp prices on the merchandise with rubber stamps, and restock the shelves with the new merchandise. This was done early in the morning before the store opened. Dan also worked a few times in the produce department helping to keep the fruits and vegetable tables filled. He worked in all parts of the store except the meat market. That was separate from the rest of the store and even had a separate manager.
In the fall of 1953, Dan began high school as a sophomore (The freshman class was considered to be in Junior High School). As a sophomore, Dan took Gym, Algebra, English, Study Hall, US History, Geography and Mechanical Drawing. Dan doesn’t remember much about his education in high school. Besides going to class, he worked at Dillons after school and all-day Saturdays. Dan and his friends went to football and basketball games on Friday night if the team was home that day. They went to a few out-of-town games also, if they were in towns nearby such as McPherson or Abilene. Dan did well in high school but his memories are scant. He took the usual classes of English, some math course, a social science class such as history, geography or civics, physical education and he took Architectural Drawing every year. He was planning to be an Architect when he was older.
After a few years as a sack boy, Dillons decided that Dan knew enough to be a checker. He liked that job, also. As groceries came down a conveyor belt to the cash register, Dan would read the price on the item and key it into the cash register. He took the money from the customer and if there was no sack boy handy he would have to sack the groceries, too. He was a checker until he graduated from high school. After a while, he was also a cashier. He would sit in an office and answer the phone and cash payroll checks that people brought in. It was kind of a supervisor job, because he would tell employees which check stand that they were to work at when they came to work, and he would keep the break schedule and tell people when they were to take rest and lunch breaks. Virginia Madsen liked him quite a bit and scheduled him to work as much as he wanted.
In the fall of 1955, when he was a junior in high school, Dan joined the Air National Guard. They had weekly drills, and each summer they went to Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri, for two weeks of Summer Camp. They did a lot of marching and went a couple of times a year to Camp Philips which was near Salina for rifle training. It was an engineer battalion. At Summer Camp, they built a bridge, some latrines and other construction projects. Dan didn’t like it very much.
Dan graduated from High School in May, 1956. In September, 1956, Dan began his college career at Kansas State College in Manhattan, Kansas. he lived in a dormitory that had been built under the stands of the football stadium. Keith Lindburg was his roommate. There were four in each room. The other two roommates were Clinton Young and Jay Windsor. They had been friends and had just graduated from high school in Laurel, Delaware. Keith and Dan were both majoring in Architecture. They had enjoyed their drafting classes in high school, so, they thought they were going to be architects. At Kansas State, their only architecture classes were a course in Architecture History and a course in charcoal drawing. Dan enjoyed the history class but hated the drawing class. It was pure art, and he never was very good at drawing or painting. Dan discovered that architecture students took a lot of art, and he began to wonder if he was in the right curriculum.
The other thing that they did at K-State was play games. They played pool and table tennis in the Student Union building. They ate a lot of their meals there also, because the dorm didn’t have a dining room. They also ate meals in restaurants in Aggieville, a small business district just off campus. They also attended all of the football and basketball games. K-State had a good basketball team, but it wasn’t quite as good as Kansas University’s because KU had Wilt Chamberlain. KSC had a very poor football team. While Dan was in school, they lost 21 straight games, which at that time was a national major college record. It may still be a record.
While at K-State, Dan was expected to attend National Guard meetings at the armory, which was out of town at the municipal airport. He probably attended about half of the ones that he was supposed to during the year. At the end of the year, they told Dan that he had been delinquent in his duties, and therefore the National Guard was discharging him and reporting him to the Draft Board. Then in July, Dan got a letter of greetings from President Eisenhower, inviting him to report to his draft board for induction into the United States Army. He was given a bus ticket to Kansas City where he was given some medical tests and some aptitude tests during a two-day orientation. Then they put him and about thirty other inductees on a bus and took them to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. They went to an induction center where they were issued clothing and given GI haircuts. After two days, they were shipped to their basic training company. For the first week, they gave out busywork cleaning up the company area, washing windows, mopping floors and jobs like that. Every day, more new people were assigned to the company. After the first week, they were at full strength, because the next week began their eight-week Army Basic Training Course. They spent eight weeks going to classes in a theatre and in the field. They learned how to march, shoot a rifle, make up their cot so a quarter would bounce six inches high when dropped on it, hang their clothes in a locker so that they would pass inspection, and a lot of things that Dan can’t remember anymore. During the fifth week, their squad leader was demoted because some sergeant thought that he wasn’t doing a good job. They promoted Dan to squad leader because of his National Guard experience. After the sixth week, Dan got the flu and spent a week in the Post Hospital. Then he was transferred to another company that was beginning the seventh week of training, so that he wouldn’t miss any training. The seventh week was called bivouac week. They marched out into the desert, and spent a week sleeping in tents, drinking from a canteen, eating sitting on the ground and getting more training. That training consisted of throwing hand grenades, firing rifle grenades, crawling through an infiltration course under rows of barbed wire while someone was firing machine guns with live ammunition above their heads and setting off explosions in nearby sandbag pits. They did this once during the day and once at night so they could see the tracer bullets, which were on fire, going over their heads. It was pretty frightening.
After finishing the eight-week Army Basic Training Course, they sent Dan and a lot of the other guys that he was with to the Basic Army Administration Course. This was popularly known as Clerk Typist School. This was another school at Fort Chaffee where they taught how to type and how to fill in about 200 standard army forms. They really taught you that you didn’t want to be an army clerk typist. At the end of the eight weeks, Dan was given orders to report to Fort Ord, California. They told him that he would probably be processed there for shipment to Korea. He really wasn’t looking forward to going to Korea. They had just finished a war and the United States and North Korea still weren’t very friendly. Dan was also given two weeks leave to spend the Christmas holidays at home. So, he took a bus home to Salina for two weeks.
After Christmas, Dan took a train from Salina to San Francisco and a bus from there to Monterrey, California. There, he got an Army bus to Fort Ord. At the Fort Ord processing center, he found that the U. S. Congress had passed a law that required that anyone going to Korea had to have a minimum of two years left on their tour of duty. Since Dan only had 19 months left, he would be assigned to duty right there at Fort Ord. He was assigned to a company that provided Basic Army Training to California Army Reserve soldiers. Dan spent the next eight months in the basic training company. he wasn’t the company clerk. He was the number two clerk in the company. He was the mail clerk, training clerk, supply clerk and, when needed, drove the company commander around in his jeep. One of the best things they did was send him to a Film Projectionist School. This was a week learning to operate various slide and movie projectors. At first, Dan thought that it was just going to get him more work, because he would have to operate the projector for any training class that they had for the trainees. But it turned out to be the thing that got him out of Fort Ord.
One day, Dan was sent to an interview that was held to select soldiers to transfer to the Sixth US Honor Guard Company located at Presidio of San Francisco in San Francisco. During the interview, they found out that Dan was trained to be a projectionist. They asked him if he would like to go to San Francisco. He didn’t know much about what the Sixth US Honor Guard Company did, but he said that he would and they said that he would probably be going. A week later, Dan had orders transferring him to San Francisco. He spent the next eight months in San Francisco. The barracks was located on the part of Presidio of San Francisco known as Fort Funston. It is on a hill that overlooks San Francisco Bay with the Golden Gate bridge about two hundred yards to the left. Every morning at formation in front of the building the company looked directly over the bay toward Alcatraz Island, where the federal penitentiary was located. Their biggest duty was to perform at military burials. The San Francisco area had a lot of Old Soldier Homes, and a lot of them were dying every day. The Honor Guard Company provided a pallbearer squad and a rifle squad. The pallbearers carried the casket from the hearse to the grave and held an American flag over the casket during the graveside service. The rifle squad would fire a volley of three shots, and a bugler from the Army band would play “Taps”. Then the pallbearers would fold the flag into a triangle and the leader would present the flag to the next-of-kin. Then the squad would march off to the site of the next burial. They did as many as twenty burials a day, four days a week at the San Bruno National Cemetery, a few miles south of San Francisco. They also performed burials at a small cemetery located at the Presidio. Only high-level army officers were buried there. Other duties included work details cleaning up and landscaping the grounds of the Post. They also marched in parades on Columbus Day, Independence Day and other celebrations that included a parade down Market Street in downtown San Francisco.
After about eight months, Dan was released from Army duty and went home to Kansas. He had applied for an early release in time to attend summer school at Kansas State University. It had changed from a “College” to a “University” while Dan was in the army. He went back to school and enrolled in the School of Architecture again. After a week of classes, he found that he didn’t want to be an architect, so he transferred to Mathematics. Dan also got back his job at Dillons. Melvin McCall, his cousin, was also going to summer school, and he was working weekends at the Dillons store on East Iron. So, they drove from Manhattan to Salina on Friday afternoons after class, worked Saturdays and Sundays at Dillons, and then drove back to Manhattan on Sunday evenings.
The first Friday evening that Dan reported for work at Dillons, he was told to relieve one of the checkers who was just getting off for the day. She was a cute young thing, and Dan introduced himself to her, telling her that she could now go home, or something to that effect. She smiled, told him that she was Janet Keeler and left. Dan told Melvin about her while they were going back to Manhattan on Sunday, saying that he was going to ask her out. The next week, Dan asked her to go to a movie with him. She did and they saw quite a few movies that summer. She had just graduated from Salina High School (Class of 1959) and was going to attend Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas, on an art scholarship beginning in September. So, during the summer of 1959, Dan spent weekends driving with Melvin between Salina and Manhattan, going to classes during the week and working at Dillons on the weekends and trying to spend as much time with Janet as he could.
When September arrived, Melvin and I continued to spend Sunday night through Friday afternoon in Manhattan and Friday night through Sunday night in Salina, working at Dillons. Janet decided that she was just going to enjoy the college life so Dan didn’t see her as much as he wanted to. But he wrote letters to her about every day. After a few months, she gave in and Dan began driving to Salina on Friday evenings and then to Lindsborg. He would pick Janet up at the college and bring her to Salina. Dan didn’t work at Dillons on Saturday, but both Janet and Dan worked a half-day on Sundays. On Sunday evening, he would take her back to Lindsborg and after saying goodbye, he would drive to Manhattan. They did this for the next three years. Dan’s college life was pretty uneventful. He just went to class and studied enough to get by. he got pretty good grades, probably a B average with some A’s and some C’s but mostly B’s. He went to most of the K-State home football and basketball games. Often, when there was a home game on a Saturday, Dan would pick Janet up at Bethany College on Friday night. They would go to movie or something that night. On Saturday, they would drive to Manhattan for the game and then back to Salina. They would work at Dillons on Sunday, and then Dan would drive Janet back to Lindsborg and then to Manhattan. He put a lot of miles on his 1955 Chevrolet. During his last year in college, Dan bought a ring and asked Janet to marry him. She said “Yes!!” He graduated in May, 1962, with a Bachelor of Science degree.
During his last semester of college, Dan was interviewing for job positions after he graduated. He had a lot of interviews including one trip to New York to interview at IBM. But the only job offer Dan got was from the United States Air Force Aeronautical Chart and Information Center (ACIC) located in St. Louis, Missouri. So, during the last week of June, Dan said goodbye to Janet and drove his 1955 Chevy to St. Louis. He reported to the Personnel Office at ACIC on the afternoon that he arrived. They told him to find a place to live and report for work on Monday morning. They suggested the YMCA, so that is where Dan lived for the first few days.
On Monday morning, Dan met some other guys that were just starting to work at ACIC. Four of them decided to look for an apartment that they could share. They found two apartments on Waterman Boulevard in the west end of St. Louis. It was only a few blocks from Forest Park. Ken Brace and Dan shared a room on the second floor. It had a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a bath room. The house was not air conditioned and they had to leave the windows open all night. The street traffic was really noisy, so, Ken and Dan decided to find another home. They found one in Clayton, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. They teamed up with the other two friends that they had met on their first day at ACIC and rented an apartment in the Hanley Arms Apartments on Lee Ave. in Clayton. Ken and I had long careers at ACIC and later the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA).
The first six months of that career was in The Cartographic Training School. Employees were assembled in classes of 12 students. Those 12 stayed together for the entire six months attending classes all day. They had one or two classes of 12 students beginning the training program every two weeks. Dan’s class was a pretty good one. Another class started the same time as Dan’s class and the two classes spent a lot of time with each other socializing on weekends. That class only graduated five of the 12 who started.
Dan’s first assignment after Cartographic Training School was in the Lunar Mapping Office. It used photographs of the moon that were taken with a telescope from an observatory in Arizona. The employees would measure the length of shadows that were cast by the sun on the surface of the moon. Then these shadow measurements were put into a computer that calculated the depths of craters and heights of ridges and other objects on the moon. This all went into the drafting of charts of the moon. Dan never did think that it was very accurate, but the charts were supposedly used by NASA in planning the missions of the Lunar Satellite programs.
About this time, Janet was graduating from Bethany, and they planned the wedding for June 9, 1963, at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Salina. After the wedding, Dan and Janet took off for St. Louis. That first night, they stopped at the Dreamliner, a motel on Interstate 70 in Junction City, Kansas. This is the same motel that, years later, one of the bombers of the Murray Building in Oklahoma City had used on his way to Oklahoma City. They finally got to the duplex that Dan had rented a few weeks earlier in Berkeley, Missouri. It was only a block to Airport Elementary School, where Janet had been hired to teach second grade. So, they settled down to a life in the St. Louis area.
After about six months in the Lunar Mapping Office, Dan got his Top-Secret Security Clearance that allowed him to work in the Missile Support Division. This is the organization that he had originally been hired to work in. They used photography, maps and documents to compile Aeronautical Charts and other products to support the US Air Force pilots in future combat. One of the main products in the Missile Support Division was Air Target Charts. They provided target information to pilots of B-52s of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha, Nebraska in planning future missions that they might have over the Soviet Union. It also developed the capability to provide target coordinates for targets that SAC required in their planning. Dan was assigned to the Analytical Branch Techniques Office during his time in the Missile Support Division. The Analytical Branch was responsible for doing the triangulation of aerial photographs into geodetically controlled mosaics that could be used to compile the target charts. The techniques office was responsible for developing the techniques and computer software required to accomplish this mission. It was all highly classified and required a top-secret clearance.
In 1965, ACIC decided that they needed some employees with Graduate School training. Dan was one of seven that was sent to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia to study Astronomy for a year. While he was studying astronomy, Janet enrolled in the Elementary Education program and earned a Masters Degree before they left. During the final week of the Spring Semester, Janet got sick in class. She went to the University Hospital and while being examined by the doctor, he said, “You aren’t married, are you? She said that “Yes, she was”. He said “Good, because you are pregnant. Dan and Janet had a very nice time in Charlottesville, finishing the year in August and moving back to St. Louis and planning to become a family. They rented a house on Germania St. in South St. Louis. Brentley Wayne Lockard was born on January 10, 1967. After a year in that house, we had a new house built in South St. Louis County on Stanhope Drive. We moved in on July 1, 1967. Cameron Ross Lockard was born on May 7, 1970 and Aaron William Lockard was born on February 6, 1973. Our time in our new house on Stanhope Drive was pretty uneventful. Dan worked every day, and Janet was a substitute teacher at several elementary schools near where they lived. When she was called to substitute, she had a sitter who would take care of the boys. On weekends, Dan and Janet would do chores around the house, go to parties hosted by the guys that Dan worked with and their wives. They became a pretty close-knit group and did a lot of things together. Janet liked to go to garage sales which were normally on Fridays. Some were on Saturdays, so she could drag Dan to them. They lived in a sub-division with a lot of families who had teenagers. So, they had a wide choice of baby sitters for the boys. The only sporting event that they attended was a St. Louis Cardinal baseball game about ten times a year. Dan got to see Stan Musial play during his last year or two.
After being in the Techniques Office from 1963 until 1972, Dan was assigned to the Requirements Directorate at ACIC. This office had the responsibility to coordinate with the military users of the charts and digital data that ACIC provided and develop new products or revise existing products to satisfy the changing requirements. This involved a lot of travel to the Air Force bases around the country. Dan traveled to SAC in Omaha, Nebraska, several times, Langley AFB in Virginia, Eglin AFB in Florida and Hanscom AFB in Massachusetts. It was a very interesting job.
In 1972, ACIC was reorganized, along with the Army Map Service, located in Brookmont, Maryland and the Navy Hydrographic Office, located in Suitland, Maryland, as the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA). The DMA Headquarters was to be located at the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, and the other three organizations known as Production Centers would remain at their current locations. In September, 1973, Dan was reassigned to HQ, DMA in the Aeronautical Division. He travelled to Washington and spent two weeks working at the HQ. Then He went back to St. Louis to move Janet and the boys to Vienna, Va. He worked as the Program Manager for digital data requirements for the US Air Force from 1973 until 1980. In 1980, He was transferred to the Hydrographic/Topographic Center which had been reorganized in Montgomery County, Maryland. He was a Section Chief in an office that managed the production of mapping products within that facility. In 1985, he was transferred back to Headquarters, which was now located in Merrifield, VA, a ten-minute drive from his home in Vienna. He worked in the Production Directorate which involved solving problems at the production centers as they occurred.
In January, 1993, Janet was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had one breast removed with surgery and underwent six months of chemotherapy. At the end of that, she was declared cancer free. In 1994, DMA received a budget reduction, and they decided to reduce the manpower level. One of the solutions was to offer early retirement to employees who had worked 30 years and were at least 50 years old. A bonus of $25,000 was an incentive to do it. With his Army time, Dan had worked 34 years and he was 56 years old. With Janet’s health problems, Dan decided to take the offer and retire. His retirement date was September 30, 1994.
After retirement, Dan didn’t do very much. He worked around the house cleaning things up and he took care of Janet with what she needed.
During these times, Dan and Janet’s sons were growing up. Brentley graduated from High School in 1985, Cameron in 1988 and Aaron in 1991. Aaron went to college at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, graduating in 1995. Brent got married to Alane Berkebile in 1997. They had two sons. Nicholas Wayne was born in 1999 and Ryan Anthony was born in 2003. Brent and Alane divorced in 2005, and Brent left the boys with Alane and moved into an apartment with a couple of his friends. Cameron got married to Michelle Stone in 2002. They were divorced in 2005. Aaron married Joann Clark in 1997. They had three daughters. Caitlin Brianna was born in 2001, Alexandra Elizabeth was born in 2003 and Virginia Grace was born in 2007. Joann had studied Political Science in college and joined the U.S. Department of State. Her first assignment was Kazakhstan, a former Soviet Union Republic. While there, Aaron became a Department of State employee also, involved in computer technology. Subsequent assignments were in El Salvador, Burkina Faso, Uganda, the Netherlands, Czech Republic and Ivory Coast, as well as some assignments at HQ in Washington, D.C.
While working, Dan and Janet liked to take trips when they could. While living in St. Louis they made several trips around the mid-west including several trips to Salina. They made one trip to California in 1971. After moving to Vienna, VA, they traveled up and down the east coast visiting very state on the coast. They also made several trips to Kansas, a trip to California and a two-week trip to England in 1988. After retirement, they were invited to go on a trip to Italy in 1995 with Bob and Joann Bingham. The Bingham’s had been friends since the early 1970s. Janet and Dan had met them at a garage sale in Vienna. They became great friends after that. After the trip to Italy, they made many more foreign trips with the Bingham’s. In 1998, they took a cruise on the Adriatic Sea, with stops in Athens, Greece, Rhodes, Cyprus, Israel, Crete, Ephesus and Istanbul, Turkey. In 2000, they took a cruise on the Baltic Sea. It made stops in France, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, St. Petersburg, Russia, Finland and Sweden. in 2002, they took a European train trip that made stops in Germany and Austria. In 2003, they took another cruise, this time on the western Mediteranean Sea. It made stops in Italy, Croatia, France and Spain. In 2005, they took a train trip through Eastern Europe. It made stops in Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Austria. In 2008, they took a trip to Egypt and Jordan. In addition, Dan and Janet made trips to El Salvador in 2003 to visit their son, Aaron and his family, to California in 2006 to attend their niece, Sara Wright’s wedding and to Ougadougou, Burkina Faso in Africa, in 2008 to visit Aaron and Joann at that assignment. After Janet died in 2012, Dan traveled to The Hague in the Netherlands in 2013 to visit Aaron and his family, a cruise in 2015 with Aaron and his family from Venice, Italy to Istanbul, Turkey, and to Prague, Czech Republic in 2017 to visit Aaron and his family. So, Dan has been to Europe, Africa, Asia, Central America as well as North America.
In 2017, Dan was having trouble urinating. We went to see an urologist and had treatments and surgeries until 2021, when he was diagnosed with bladder cancer. This progressed into prostrate cancer and then liver cancer. He was told that there was no good treatments for liver cancer and that most people died in about six months. He was assigned to a Hospice Nurse organization for treatments and care.
Dan will be cremated and have a service at the Money and King Funeral Home in Vienna for his friends and neighbors in Virginia. The service will be held on Thursday, July 6, 2023 at 11:00am. His ashes will then be transported to the Roseland Memorial Park in Salina, Kansas. There will be a service at the Memorial Park and then Dan will be buried along side of Janet in the park.
Dan leaves the following descendants: His three sons, Brentley, Cameron, and Aaron, his grand-sons, Nicholas and Ryan and his grand-daughters, Caitlin, Alexandra and Virginia. He leaves his sisters, Sheri Becker and her daughters, Carrie and her son Jason and daughter Danielle, and Sheri’s other daughters Tonya and Kristine, and Susan Wright and her daughters Dawn and her daughter Erin, and Susan’s other daughters Sara and Samantha.
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Service: July 6, 2023 11:00 am
Money and King Funeral Home
171 W. Maple Ave.
Vienna, VA 22180
703-938-7440
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