In 1967, when 20-year-old Richard Pillsbury stepped on a train for the first time in his native Houston, he started a journey that would take him to all of the continents and some of the most remote places on the planet over the next five decades.
“I had joined the Navy and was sent to San Diego for boot camp along with other recruits. Three days on a train. We tried to get a drink in the bar car, but none of us were 21,” he said.
The arrival in San Diego was pleasant.
“But I was naïve,” he admits. “Not exposed to the world. When we arrived on the base I somehow missed getting a haircut and was immediately chewed out.”
That went on for the next few weeks.
“I thought, ‘What have I done?’”
Because he was a journeyman millwright when he joined the Navy, Richard was assigned to a Seabees unit working on gas and steam turbines and sent to Da Nang in Vietnam as part of a public works department working on the base, piers, docks and warehouses. After 13 months he’d had enough.
“It was a closed city, but there was no safe place,” he recalls.
He volunteered for his next assignment in an unlikely place: Antarctica.
After a battery of physical and psychological tests, Richard was on his way to the South Pole, to Byrd Station, for the winter.
“They even replaced the fillings in my teeth,” he laughs.
“The location was 650 nautical miles north of the South Pole and there was 7,100 feet of ice under us.”
The station was buried in the Antarctic ice.
“They dug a deep trench, put in the building modules and covered them over.”
There were 16 Navy personnel supporting five civilian scientists studying radio noise, weather and ice movement – and once in place, they were trapped for the winter. Richard’s job included maintaining the oil-fired heating system for the station. System failure would mean freezing to death.
When it came time to leave the station, Richard’s replacement was not on the incoming flight.
“They said it would be three days before he arrived. Then the weather closed in and I spent another three weeks there before they could get an airplane in.”
His next assignment was warmer and less rigorous. At the HQ base in New Zealand, Richard handled the movement of aircraft, material and personnel to and from the ice of Antarctica.
“Once in a while I would escort a visiting VIP around the facility,” he says.
Six months later Richard finished his tour of duty, returned to the States and joined Ingersoll Rand as a field service representative for their turbo products including pumps and compressors, primarily in the gas and oil industry and often on deep sea drilling platforms.
He was sent to Venezuela – “I hated the machines they had there,” – and then to Saudi Arabia, which he enjoyed more. “I lived in a western compound and one of our hobbies was making wine,” although alcohol is forbidden in the kingdom. “Some of the residents even had stills.”
Athens, Greece was the next stop and eventually he was posted to London, England for eight years. “At one point I rented a 23-room house in Surry with a proper English rose garden including a gardener, tennis courts and huge garage.” The house was owned by author Alastair MacLean who wrote Ice Station Zebra and The Guns of Navarone, among other books. Known as Heron Lodge, the house still had MacLean’s work desk in the study.
Eventually Richard tired of the “service and support” life.
“It was three weeks on an oil platform in the North Sea or somewhere and then a week off.” He returned to San Diego and spent part of a year teaching SCUBA diving on Catalina Island.
“I enjoyed it, but it didn’t pay much,” he says.
He ended up back in the “service and support” business, this time in India. “I also did some working trips in places like Korea, Alaska, Brazil and Egypt. I was in Iraq when the war started with Iran.”
Then he met Cathy Hale and his life changed.
They were ‘live-aboard’ neighbors on their individual boats in San Diego and worked together on Coast Guard Auxiliary projects. When Richard was traveling to far flung oil drilling platforms in Africa and other places, they corresponded using signal flags. “Instead of writing characters, we drew signal flags,” Cathy says. “Richard was simple and sophisticated at the same time,” she says. “He could talk about opera one minute and cowboy stuff the next. He’s a great dancer.”
A travel agent, Cathy had won a trip on the Concorde to London. Richard made arrangements to propose to her during the flight.
“After dinner the Chief Purser came by and said the Captain would like to meet us on the flight deck. I had arranged for champagne and to have a ring for Cathy in her glass.”
He was on his knee and proposing, but Cathy didn’t notice the ring until the Captain turned and pointed it out. “How long do I have to make a decision?” she asked. “We don’t have much extra fuel, so you should make a decision soon,” the Captain remarked.
“We were engaged at 58,500 feet going Mach 2,” says Richard. Musician and artist Yoko Ono, who was on board the flight, was one of the first to congratulate the couple. They were married on Friday, Feb. 13, 2004.
“It’s the anniversary of our first date, a very good day for us,” Cathy says.
The couple now divide their time between the Village of La Zamora and San Diego. While Cathy still pursues her travel agent career remotely, Richard devotes most of his time to charity and veteran’s missions. He is working on achieving more than 3,000 volunteer hours at the USS Midway Museum and is a member of American Legion China Post 1, the Forty & Eight veteran’s organization, V.F.W. 1774 and the Old Antarctic Explorers Association. On March 17 he will be participating in the Friendly Sons of St Patrick parade in San Diego.
Cathy is planning a trip to Africa in May and together they are looking forward to a Queen Mary 2 cruise and a European riverboat tour. Richard’s service dog, Greda, is their enthusiastic traveling companion.
“It’s been an exciting life,” Richard concedes. “I spent the first five years learning my work and the next 30 years enjoying it.”
John W Prince is a writer and Villages resident. Learn more at www.GoMyStory.com.
