| Aerial Photos of Coco Solo High School courtesy of Vince Gutowski | |||
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| My dear wife Pam's father
was the principal at the High School in Coco Solo. We were going through
some of his old files and found some aerial photos of the High School
area. Some include the "old" barracks and the "new"
barracks. In the nearly vertical photo, you can see the old base headquarters/barracks,
the tri-winged structure to the upper right of the high school. There
is even a bus parked in the old parking space just below the barracks.
I think I see a person with a white hat standing in the grass by a
palm tree.......or it is a speck of dust on the photo!! This building
was the first place I operated out of in 1967. It had a chow hall
on the second floor of one wing, and it was my favorite room in the
building. Sometime later(67-68) the base ops. and barracks was moved to the large building up the street from the high school....it is in the lower right corner of the photo that is looking over the high school, out towards the Breakers Club. The other photo I believe is oriented out towards Galeta Point where the antenna array and the "bahia" at the lagoon were located; I can't make out the antenna. One time we (I believe Mark Simon was with me) took a base canoe and put in at a drainage ditch by France (sp.) Field (the landing strip across the road). We paddled for an extremely long time, had numerous aquatic creatures bump the bottom of the canoe (adrenaline rushes followed each bump) and ended up in the ocean near the antenna.....lots of large spider webs across the ditches. Some of the spiders were hand size. Anytime the brush was disturbed, we were sure it was a black panther...I believe they were called jaguarondis, or something like that. I never did another canoe trip, but there was a time when the CO asked a bunch of "volunteers" to wade the ditches out near the lagoon, to harvest palm leaves and sticks to rebuild the "bahia" pavilion at the swimming area near the lagoon. The volunteers said it was quite tense while wading through the ditches filled with caiman (the little, or not so little local crocks). I recall that anytime you got the local mud on your skin, it would cause quite a rash...I would have red legs after practice or playing football in the mud.....the guys that walked the muddy drainage ditches got a heavy dose of mud rash on their legs, etc. As they say "those were the days". I hope you can all open the photos. Vince Gutowski |
