Unidentified flying objects -- Sightings and encounters -- New Mexico -- Roswell
A: Oh, yeah. I was in the funeral business 33 years.
Q: All the time with Ballard?
A: Oh no, I had my own funeral home over in Las Cruces [N.M.], and one
in Socorro [N.M.].
Q: Oh, okay.
Speaking of that, do you know Norman Todd or his family?
A: His dad and I took the state board together. He was at Clovis
[N.M.]. Norman’s his son isn’t it?
Q: Yeah. He’s a lawyer over in Las Cruces [N.M.]. His...
A: Wasn’t his dad the funeral director in Clovis [N.M.]?
Q: I think so. The reason I know him is because Mike Cook, who is Steve
Schiff’s press secretary, and he have been friends ever since they were
in kindergarten together. It turns out that Iris Todd, I guess his
stepmother, is the niece of Loretta Proctor. So talk about small world.
You got these calls from the mortuary officer who was asking you all
these questions. We don’t have to go back through all of this. Then at
some point you decided to go out to the base. What took you to the base?
A: At some point I didn’t decide, that’s not correct. Somebody wrote
that, but I don’t think it’s right. The way I ended up out at the base
later, we had the ambulance service. The way I got it, the ambulance
service, I got a call, was an airman that was hurt. I took him to the
base. The best I remember, he wasn’t on a stretcher or anything because
we walked up the ramp and he sat up in the front seat with me. So he
weren’t real bad and weren’t dying. Anyway... This guy walked in, I
walked him in. Where I usually park the ambulance, there was a field
ambulance there. I had to go back up to the front. The airman and I
walked up the ramps. That’s why I went to the base.
Q: The hospital in those days was apparently a complex of buildings,
right?
A: Yeah. Kind of like Bob [Shirkey] said, like the officer’s club.
They’re all wooden barrack types.
Q: So the building that’s out there now, the rehab center is a
completely new building and had nothing to do with that.
A2 [Bob Shirkey]: No. Think of a long walkway, like a tunnel, attached
to the front of a series of...
Q: I know just what you’re talking about.
A: ...with a little of breezeway between each building, the best I
remember it. Isn’t that right. Bob?
A2 [Bob Shirkey]: Yeah. Here was the building and you came out the
front door and you went down this walkway, which I just said, like a
tunnel. You could see from one end to the other, but all these separate
buildings which were different wings of the hospital.
Q: This was the infirmary where you took the airman, right?
A: There were some ramps there, I think the old ramp’s still there. It
was. Anyway, that’s the kind of buildings they were. You don’t see it
today, no.
Q: I knew that the building, most of it, was new, but I wasn’t sure if
they’d built onto it...
A: That had been worked over two or three times.
Q: When you look at it looks like it’s been one of these things where
they’ve added things to it.
So you pulled around behind the infirmary, basically.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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