Douglas Reid Cook
Memories told by his daughter Catherine Adele Cook in 2008-2009
When Dad was young, he used to have fun blowing up cherry bombs in the sand under the shallow water of a pond near his home. He built a wind-powered sail car. He started working during high school as an auto mechanic. He used his money to buy a car. He used to take groups of friends out dancing. He remembers a lot of friends in high school. He was in the audio-visual club, running the lights and sound systems during performances at the school.
Dad Joined Air Force in October 1965. He was in Air Force 1965-1969, the Utah Air National Guard 1975-1982, and the Air Force Reserve, during the Vietnam War, which was 1964-1973. He was a radar technician.
Dad told me that in 1965, he went to enlist in the Air Force. They offered free education, and he decided to get as much as he could. When it came time to choose a program, he asked what the longest one was. There were two that tied - Computers and Radar. He asked, "What are computers?" The man, who was about his age, said, "I don't know." Dad said, "I guess I'll take radar." Then he went on to serve in California as a radar technician.
He was a Goldstone NASA Telemetry technician March 1968 through September 1970 in Barstow, California. He worked on STADAN: Satellite Tracking and Data Acquisition Network during the first landing on the moon.
He joined the Salt Lake City Fire Department in August 1972. I used to visit Dad at the fire station when I was a little kid. At one point there was another fireman who would set the thermostat at a crazy temperature (I think it was too cold). Eventually Dad rewired the thermostats so that another area of the fire station would be controlled by that thermostat, and the area where the firefighters were would have a normal temperature. He retired from the fire department in June 1996 after 25 years.
After Dad retired from the fire station, he worked for a short time at the community college teaching computers. At another time he worked with a computer to program traffic signal systems. He really enjoyed that job. He had a radio room downstairs in the West Jordan house in the 1980s. He had all sorts of clocks and gauges all over the room. When I went to his apartment in 2007, he still had some of those. He likes to read about astronomy. We used to go to the Hansen Planetarium at least once a year as a family. He briefly attended the University of Utah.
One time Dad and I (and Max, our golden retriever) were taking a scenic drive up a mountain in his Blazer. In a tight curve going into the mountain, a pickup coming down the winding road lost control and swerved into our lane. Dad quickly swerved to the right toward the mountain, driving a little off the road and up the mountain, brushing bushes with the side of the truck. We barely and miraculously missed the pickup. When he got back into the road, and Max picked himself up off the floor in the back and got back in his seat, Dad said that he had been trained in the fire department to get the fire engine going 45 mph, then make a sharp 90 degree turn. He had practiced that many times.