[Coco] The Best quote I've seen in a while

[richec]

On Thu, 6 Feb 2020 17:58:23 -0500
Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net> wrote:

<snip>

> Few Jim.  Story time.
> 
> I got a job, good for a year after the titan one turnkey around RCSD,
> or more precisely EAFB. Maintaining the portal door cameras at the
> sites.
> 
> Nearly 6 months into it, the guy who had the contract, I was just
> hired help, and who only showed up on payday, announced he had a new
> job and was leaving but he would keep on paying. Mentioned in passing
> that the contract also included teaching 4 flaps how to do it when I
> was gone.
> 
> So he went to the major and arranged 4 flaps to be at my disposal for
> the remainding 6 months.  I thought, great and spent the next 4 days
> or so writing up a multiple choice test designed to find out what
> these kids knew, so I at least had an idea where to start,
> 
> Passed it out the next Monday morning when they arrived. 125
> questions that reached all the way to the then state of the art. One
> of the kids was black, the other 3 were lighter. He was done it about
> an hour, the other 3 never got past 40 or 50 and they were obviously
> just guessing.
> 
> The black boy missed one!
> 
> About a week later, while I had the other 3 figure eighting a
> thousand feet of 1" diameter camera cable in the van as they were
> going to do a dummy launch at one of the sites the next day, I asked
> why he was playing sax at the nco club every night instead of putting
> his obvious talent to work as an E.T. Playing the sax, and he was
> good, anything Boots Randolph could do, he could do better. He said
> "that is what I want to do". I didn't argue with him. This was '61,
> and colored were still 2nd class critters to the other 90% of the
> population.
> 
> Moral? Don't ever judge anyone by the color of his suit. But then
> that's how I was taught 80+ years ago.
> 
> When I was doing the ET scene at Rays House of Hifi a year later, one
> of his drinking buddy's was admiring a new color tv just starting to
> ship, and Ray, already half lit at 11am, was demoing the hue control.
> His buddy was about as black as they come, and when Ray said to
> adjust the hue for best face tones, the guy said you'd have a
> hellovatime with my face, with a chuckle. I didn't know it then, but
> to a tv camera, watching its output on a vectorscope in the station
> control room, there is NO difference between a black face and a white
> face, they are quite precisely the same color on the vectorscope.
> They aren't as bright, but the color vector is identical. Getting
> into tv broadcasting another year later, I've had to demo that fact
> to a lot of folks who got nervous near a Negro.
> 
<snip>

Great story Gene.