HHS
1965
Greg Kelso
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Bio
I did a lot of traveling during my tour in the Navy and during the first few years on the job down here in Texas. Besides the usual ports in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, the Navy took me to such exotic places as Bombay, India; Karachi, Pakistan; Mombassa, Kenya; Massawa, Ethiopia (now Eritrea) and a little place called Port Lewis on the island of Mauritius. Mauritius is off the east coast of Madagascar and about as far away from Holdrege Nebraska as you can get without leaving the face of the earth.
When I first went to work for General Dynamics Corporation down in Fort Worth, they had just been awarded a contract to produce the F-16 fighter jet for the U.S. Air Force and the air forces of Belgium, Holland, Norway, and Denmark. The entire "fleet" consisted of two prototype aircraft. My entire professional career was devoted to making the F-16 into one of the most effective combat aircraft in the world. After about a year and a half of pretty dull paper work, the job took a turn for the better when I was sent out to Edwards Air Force Base in California to support flight test of the weapons systems first on a prototype and then on what were known in the trade as the Full Scale Development Aircraft. From Flight test in California I moved on to support the first production deliveries of the F-16 at Hill Air Force Base in Ogden, Utah, and then at a Belgian Air Force base about 20 miles east of Brussels.
It was in Brussels that I met my future wife, Sue. She is from Penrith, a small town in the Lake District of northwest England and had run off to Brussels to seek her fortune in the big city. It was almost two weeks later that I realized we had met on the Fourth of July. It was just another Tuesday night in Belgium. We will be celebrating our 35th wedding anniversary in December.
Sue and I have one daughter, Linda, who I am embarrassed to admit brought shame to the good Kelso name. In spite of my best efforts at raising her right, the kid graduated from high school and immediately ran off to Austin to become a Longhorn. She is now working at Chase Bank in Dallas and to make matters even worse is married to an "Okie" and he's a big Sooner fan. Football season isn't as interesting around here since the "Big Red" moved to the Big 10. Football season was a lot more fun in the Big 12 with Longhorn and Sooner fans in the family.
Our Family also includes four four-footed members. Heidi and Krystal are our Dobermans and Treat and Francine are our cats. We had a cat named Trick (Treats brother) as well but he did not come home one day after a trip into the woods across the street from the house in Lakeside. In case you are wondering why anyone would call their cats Trick and Treat, it's because Sue and Amy (one of out previous Dobermans) found them while on a walk down by the lake on Halloween night back in 1999. Sue is into obedience training, Heidi has retired from the show circuit so now she takes Krystal to dog shows around the countryside. Heidi and I like to go on leisurely "walks" around the lake when I am in Texas. "Walks" because I usually ride my bicycle with Heidi on the leash out in front. Over the years I have learned to let go of the leash if a squirrel or rabbit takes off in front of us. It sure beats flying over the handlebars.
When my Mom died suddenly on Valentines Day of '04, I found myself half owner of a house in Holdrege and seriously considered retiring and moving back to small town life. Sue even agreed to it, but I am not too sure how long she would survive away from city life and how well she would deal with the "cool" Nebraska winters. My sister and I ended up selling the house that we had always though of as "home" since 1960.
I finally did retire at the end of September of 2007 after a little over 32 years on the job. I reached 60 and figured it was time to make way for a younger engineer that may need the job.
I finally became a grandpa at the tender age of 64. Sue could not stand being 53 miles away from our new grandaughter, Lily, so she packed me up and moved me into the turmoil that is Dallas. I went from living within a few yards of wide open spaces into living within a block of a middle school with over 1.100 students and the associated school buses and parents driving the kids to school that go with it. They turn the street in front of our house into a one-way in the mornings and afternoons to handle all the traffic. Becoming a grandpa for the second time did not take as long as the first. My grandson, Matt, arrived in August, and we now live 0.517 miles from the grandkids. My Schwinn has an odometer that measures in thousandths.
My sister, Annette, and her husband, Rod, live in Kearney, as do my niece, Shannon, her husband, Reggie, and my two great-nephews, William and Benjamin so I get back to Nebraska once in a while.