Penny Dieryck
Era: Global War on Terror
Military Branch: Air Force
DIERYCK, Penny
Ms. Dieryck has served in the U.S. Air Force during the Global War on Terror. On November 11th 2008, her rank was Colonel.
She was featured on a July 2021 edition of Woman's Today magazine. Her 'Hermantown Story' bio and her Oral History are as follows:
Source: “Veterans Day: Honoring Our Heroes,” Hermantown Star, November 13, 2008 (see article, below)
U.S. Air Force Col. Penny Dieryck asked Hermantown Middle School students to stand up if they had a family member in the military. A vast majority of the students stood up.
With more local service men and women being called to active duty, many of the students will likely not have some of their loved ones home for the holidays this year.
Armistice Day was originally started in honor of the end of World War I in 1918. Fighting officially stopped on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of that year. Since that time it has been changed to Veterans Day and the day is honored by many throughout the country.
Col. Dieryck spoke to the students Tuesday morning about Veterans Day and why it is important in this country. She spoke about the fact that if we did not have our freedom we could not text message our friends or use Facebook without others watching over us. If they wanted to protest something their government was doing in some countries, they would be thrown in jail.
“Remember your freedom,” Dieryck said. “Thank God for our forefathers (who fought for us).”
An Iraqi War veteran, Col. Dieryck has served her country twice in that region. She told the students we are doing good things in that country, which was once ruled by a dictator. She shared some of her stories about serving there, including a visit by country music singer Toby Keith. She added that she was proud to serve her country while in Iraq.
“You do not always hear about the good things happening there,” she said.
Col. Dieryck spoke a little bit about her background and her call to service. A Morgan Park and UMD graduate, she has worked her way up the chain of command with the Air Force. Her husband and son also serve in the military.
90 YEARS ago the war to end all wars was finally over, but since that time AMERICANS have been involved in conflicts all over the world to preserve our basic rights at home and to spread FREEDOM throughout the world.
Story by Wade Petrich
Oral History
Veterans Memorial Hall Oral History Program
Interview with Penny Dieryck
at Penny’s home in Duluth, Minnesota
September 14, 2017
Jeanne Filiatrault Laine, Interviewer
PD: Penny Dieryck
JFL: Jeanne Filiatrault Laine
Track 1
00:00
JFL: The following interview is being conducted with Penny Dieryck for the Veterans Memorial Hall Oral History Program. It’s being recorded on September 14, 2017, at Penny’s home in Duluth, Minnesota. The interviewer is Jeanne Filiatrault Laine. Ok, Penny, would you please say your full name and afterward spell your last name and give your birthdate.
PD: Penny Jane Dieryck, D-i-e-r-y-c-k. Birthdate: December 3, 1961.
JFL: Great. Ok, Penny, let’s start with some background information. Can you talk about where you were born, when you were born, grew up, and your family situation and your childhood school experiences?
PD: I was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. My parents at the time lived in Meadowlands, Minnesota. When I was three, they moved to Duluth and my mother worked at, now it’s US Bank but back then it was Northern City National Bank and then First Bank and then US Bank. My dad, initially when we moved to Duluth, worked on the railroad and really wanted to be a truck driver his whole life. So he got hired at Transport Incorporated in Esko, Minnesota. When I was five, we moved to Gary-New Duluth. I grew up, went to elementary school at Stowe School and attended high school at Morgan Park. I graduated from Morgan Park in 1980. (I) spent a lot of my summers as a child up in Meadowlands with my grandparents. Worked a couple summers on my uncle’s dairy farm. And then I got involved in sports: a lot of softball, playing at the park.
About the time I was 12, sixth grade, decided to stay home for the summers and delivered papers. I delivered papers in the neighborhood up through college. It was a great part-time job early in the morning. You could get it done before you went to school and played sports. So I loved it. In high school, seventh grade through 12th
PD: (continuing) grade at Morgan Park – at the time you were seventh to 12th grade – there was no middle school. The entire time I was at Morgan Park, I was involved with student council, honor society when I got into high school. I played sports: broomball, softball, high school basketball, ran cross country for a couple years and really got into running when I got out of high school.
Decided to stay local to go to college. It was cheaper to live at home and drive to UMD, so I started UMD in the fall of 1980 and finished in the fall of 1985 with my undergraduate degree. Then I decided to go back and get my master’s degree in 1989 and got my master’s in business administration and I graduated in 1994.
JFL: Let’s talk about your military experiences. Were you enlisted? Did you make a decision to join the military and when was that and why was that?
PD: The reason I joined the military, as a teenager, I was doing a lot of babysitting out in the neighborhood of Gary and Morgan Park and three of the main people I babysat for were in the Minnesota Air National Guard: Bill McEwen, Dick Richie and Bill Ion. When I’d go to their houses, I’d say, “Where are you guys going now?”
“We’re going to Las Vegas.”
“Where are you going now?”
“We’re going to Key West.”
“Where are you going now?”
I come from a family of five girls. We didn’t get to travel a lot growing up so when I’d see the pictures and they would tell me the stories about the trips they were able to go on… The clincher for me was in 1979, they went to Germany, outside of Munich and got to spend, I think six weeks they went over there. So I knew, as a high school senior, at that point in time women were now being allowed to join the military and I was going to do that. So I went up to the International Guard Base, took the entrance examination and the physical all on the same day – you could do it all on the same day – and enlisted. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t tell my parents, I didn’t tell my boyfriend, I didn’t tell anyone because I knew if I told them, someone would try to talk me out of it and I wasn’t going to get talked out of enlisting.
So I was enlisted from 1980, I left in June of 1980 for basic training. My first career in the Minnesota Air National Guard was “nondestructive inspection.” Basically, that is going and testing different components of the airplanes to make sure they’re safe for flight. I was the first female in, then it was called “field maintenance.”
Track 1
5:06
PD: (continuing) So I was the first female who actually worked on the airplanes and wasn’t in an office/administrative type job. I did that until 1984. I was finishing my degree at UMD and I really wanted to be an officer. I saw the opportunity, being kind of a born leader or a leader all through high school, I knew I just didn’t want to be enlisted and not be responsible for others. So I went back and asked if I could get my commission. They told me to finish my degree. I finished my degree, went back, “Can I get my commission?”
“Well, you have to find an officer job.”
Went and found an officer job. So, in December of 1986, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Minnesota Air National Guard. Excuse me, December of 1984; it was the year before we got married.
JFL: Same boyfriend?
PD: Same boyfriend, who, by the way, joined the Air Guard six months after I did.
JFL: Aha, wasn’t such a bad idea.
PD: No.
JFL: How did you juggle going to school and being enlisted and all the responsibilities that went with both of those things?
PD: At the time, I was a traditional Guard member, so that meant it was one weekend a month you’d go up to the Guard base and perform your duties. So going to school and doing our Guard drill wasn’t bad at all. I also had a job at UMD, working for recreational sports the last two years of college, so it really fit nice. I could work there and still do my Guard duty one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer do the annual field training. So, it worked out great.
JFL: It did work out great. So, you were really able to have home experience and school experience and Guard duty and do it all at once.
PD: Correct. Right.
JFL: In the same place.
PD: In the same place.
Track 1
7:01
JFL: It was a pretty good deal.
PD: Yeah.
JFL: Can you talk a little bit about military experiences that you had, like the most significant? Any combat duty or non-combat, which you’ve already talked about a bit.
PD: There are three or four that really hit home. I think one of the biggest ones was, we lost an F-16 in Panama in 1991. The individual flying the airplane was Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Dennis and the individual in the back seat – it was a two seater – was a young man named Staff Sergeant Chris Ford from Cloquet, who was just getting an incentive ride, and they disappeared. It is now September 14, 2017, and they’ve never, ever found one little thing from that airplane. I got asked to go down shortly after it disappeared and spend two weeks helping with search and rescue efforts, being a coordinator, things like that.
Another significant one for me was Major Peter Woodbury crashed his airplane on January 7, 1997. I remember going to the funeral and taking care of all the arrangements for that funeral. The hard part was… Then his wife, that happened in January, she kind of disappeared for the summer. She wanted to go to Germany and visit with her brother and hadn’t laid Peter’s remains to rest. She showed up in my office – I was the director of personnel at the time – and said, “I got a letter from Peter’s grandmother this summer and I really want to bury his remains next to his grandfather in Vermont next week. Can you make that happen?
In five days, the wonderful people in personnel, we got the orders, we got the remains prepared, we got her an escort, we got a shadowbox put together, all of a sudden, in five days. She was in Vermont and had his remains laid to rest. That was pretty important to me.
Some of the other bigger ones were being on alert in Germany. In 1987, Ramstein Air Force Base had F-4s and they were converting to the F-16s for the military. That was right on the gap between the east and the west, NATO and the communist countries at the time. We got to go over there on full alert. I was in charge of a couple hundred people for the maintenance side of the house. You have to go to the Ramstein Air Force Base and brief the general, sitting in front of the general. At the time, I was a second lieutenant. I was very young, but the chief master sergeants who were there working for me from the Duluth Air National Guard base were superior mentors and taught me a lot and taught me how to take care of the people. That was one of the first lessons I learned: if I take care of the worker bees, when I need them to do a little bit more, they’ll take care of me.
Track 1
10:13
PD: (continuing) One incident… My husband was there working at the time and I had to correct him and stand up for another guy because my husband was in the wrong. I saw the gentleman 15 years later and he said, “Do you remember me? Because I remember when you stood up for me and not for your husband.”
I said, “Well, you were in the right and he was in the wrong and we had to make the right decision, so…”
The other big (incident), I went to Iraq in 2005 and I thought, I don’t think any one of us, first time in combat for the 148th Fighter Wing, truly in combat, was prepared for what we met when we got there. We had been told all the stuff was being taken care of and we would get there and we’d be able to go right to work. We got there and it was a mess. The active duty base – the active duty people that were there in front of us – promised us this would be done and that would be done and nothing that they promised us was done.
Again, to watch the 148th people come together, we built a facility by hand with wood. We prepped the tents in order to take care of the people so that they would take care of the airplanes. The first night we were there, there was a group of us that was what we call, “the advance package,” or “advance party.” We were living in tents, and we weren’t there an hour and the first mortars hit. So now, you’re up, trying to find everyone and make sure everyone’s OK. It’s 2:00 in the morning. You’ve been traveling for two days, you’re dead tired, but you’ve gotta find everyone and make sure they’re all OK.
I didn’t understand why we were there until the lady we worked for – she was the maintenance group commander at Balad Air Force Base for the active duty Air Force – brought me in and said, “Don’t you get it? You’re here to protect the troops in contact. We’re here to protect those Army guys on the ground with your F-16s.” And once she explained it to me, and kind of got in my business a little bit, I got it. And it was when the Iraqi people were being able to vote for the first time. So we would see them going to the voting lines with the little purple dot on their finger where they would put it on the paper. That’s how they were voting. It really hit home and you knew you were there for a purpose and a mission and to give other people the right for freedom.
JFL: And that they really needed you to be there.
PD: They really needed us to be there.
JFL: What had you been told about why you were going there?
Track 1
12:55
PD: We really weren’t told much because it was all so classified and no one wanted to talk. I guess we really weren’t prepared to talk classified stuff over the phone. The pilots were prepared, much more than the maintenance and enlisted people.
JFL: In Iraq you were part of maintenance so that’s kind of been your job area throughout the years – maintenance?
PD: I was in maintenance until 2008, when I became the Mission Support Group Commander.
JFL: And what did the Mission Support Group Commander mean, or entail?
PD: Mission support group… So, in the active duty or in the Guard, there are three different big components of a base. There’s the operations group, which are the pilots and the people who support the pilots. Then there’s the maintenance group, which is basically on or off aircraft work. And then there’s the missions support group, and missions support group is civil engineering, logistics, which is readiness and supplies, transportation, personnel, services. Services does everything from feed you to make sure you have a nice bed to sleep in, to bury you, because that’s where mortuary affairs is entailed.
So, mission support group is basically everything outside of flying or taking care of the airplanes. And then the fourth group is the medical group, the doctors and nurses who take care of the people of the Wing. So in ’08, I became the Mission Support Group Commander.
JFL: Oh! That’s a huge job!
PD: Yeah. I loved it.
JFL: You loved it.
PD: Yeah.
JFL: Why did you love it?
PD: Because it was working with the community. The 148th Fighter Wing is here because the community has always stood beside it and supported it and made it stay here when it could have closed, more than once.
We landed in Iraq… As a matter of fact, the airplanes landed in Iraq on the Friday, May 13, 2005, our first getting ready to go into combat. We got the announcement as the jets were landing that the 148th Fighter Wing was scheduled to close due to...
Track 1
15:18
PD: (continuing) what was called the “base realignment and closure committee.” We were picked to be one of the bases to close. That’s how you remember those dates. You’re standing on the flight…
JFL: …and you’re just arriving there to be there to function there.
PD: Yes, to go to war. And everyone’s thinking, Oh my God, we may go home and not have full time jobs – those people who are full time at the Air Guard Base and were on the deployment – and what is my family going to do? That same year on August 26, with the help of the community and General Ray Klosowski and a lot of pushing at Washington D.C., Senator Amy Klobuchar, at the time Senator (Paul) Wellstone… August 26, 2005, we were back home and the announcement was made that the 148th would be saved.
JFL: Wow. Talk about being jerked around.
PD: Mmhmm. I remember on September 11, 2001, when the terrorist attack took place on our country, I clearly remember where I was: I was at Grand Mason Studios, getting my picture taken for Leadership Duluth by Tim Slattergren, who has now passed on. At 9:10 or 9:20 or whatever in the morning – I think the Pentagon had just gotten hit. And there I was getting this picture taken for Leadership Duluth. I rushed back to work, called my mom, “Can you take care of the kids tonight because Dennis and I won’t be home. We gotta get the jets ready; something’s going on.”
As a matter of fact, my husband was in Saudi Arabia for the base on 911. Yup. And my sister was in Finland. So, all these family members couldn’t get back to our country because all the planes were shut down – the airports were shut down.
JFL: Sure, everything – all the airports.
PD: Yeah.
JFL: So where did you go at that point?
PD: We got the jets ready right here at Duluth because the mission then was to get them loaded with missiles and overfly Minneapolis and protect Minneapolis. So, the 148th Fighter Wing, we were on 24-7 for seven days. Every four hours, two more jets would take off and take the place of the two that were in Minneapolis. And those two would come home. I think it was three or four days, there were no planes in the sky except the fighter jets and people from Duluth would say, “When we hear them taking off, we know we’re safe, we know we’re OK.” So I would work 12-hour shifts and then come home and rest and go back again.
Track 1
17:55
JFL: Wow. That was quite a time period in our… And that’s what started the whole… I mean, there was Iraq stuff before that.
PD: Correct.
JFL: …in the ’90s, there was the Gulf War.
PD: Correct.
JFL: And then it started all over in a different way after 911.
PD: Right.
JFL: Is that the part that they call Iraqi Freedom?
PD: Correct. So the first Gulf War was called Desert Shield/Desert Storm. And the Army reserve unit from Duluth went over for that – the Army National Guard unit. But the Air National Guard did not get called out for that one. So then we went for Iraqi Freedom, then it became Enduring Freedom under President Obama, and it was Iraqi Freedom and… Gosh! And I could be wrong… Enduring Freedom might have been for over Afghanistan, (According to the internet, Enduring Freedom started October 7, 2001, with airstrikes over Afghanistan under George W. Bush in response to 911 and lasted 10 years.) because each military operation has a new name.
And then New Dawn was towards the end because I know the Wing – since I retired in 2016 – has gone to South Korea and done missions but it wasn’t combat related, it was just to support the military over there.
JFL: Interesting. I never realized that all of those… that there are official names for those different periods of time. And when you say them, they’re all familiar. But I didn’t know that it really designated to such a clear distinction of jobs.
PD: It’s interesting because people don’t realize, during the entire President Bill Clinton administration, every year over the holidays, the military was on an operation somewhere. It was Somalia, it was Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was Panama, it was… But if you go back and look, history-wise, from the time he was elected President to the time he was done, his eight years, every year, and it was almost always right before Thanksgiving.
JFL: And were you involved in any of those?
PD: No, because at the time the 148th Fighter Wing was on alert here in Duluth and in Panama City, Florida. So, we had jets… Actually, we weren’t even on alert in Duluth
Track 1
20:20
PD: (continuing) for the longest time, we were just on alert in Panama City, Florida, at Tyndall Air Force Base.
JFL: Interesting. The term “Cold War” is an interesting one because when I hear “Cold War” I think back to the ’50s and ’60s when I was in high school and college and hearing these things. That was a totally different timeframe and different kind of Cold War then probably the Cold War that you refer to as being involved. You’re in Cold War in Iraqi Freedom.
PD: Correct. The Cold War from 1980 when I joined, and it was President Reagan who really built up the military until the end of the Berlin Wall, the communist country in 1991, was basically the United States against Russia. That was the big thing. So when we were on alert in Germany, it was to prevent the Russians from a sudden attack over the European continent. We did get to travel to Berlin in our military uniforms, and that was another interesting trip because Berlin is way inside. Now it’s part of the German country but back then it was part of East Germany so you had to stop at the border, show your credentials, your military ID and things, and the Russians would look at it and then you had to stop. So three times you had to stop, from checkpoint Alpha, then a checkpoint Bravo and then a checkpoint Charlie was to actually get into East Berlin. It was interesting that they would tell you from Alpha to Bravo you have to drive this speed. If you go too fast, the East Germans will stop you and if you go too slow…
They gave you this little paddle, and it had German writing on it, or Russian writing and we couldn’t understand. But, basically, they said if a German officer stops you, show him this paddle and it will say that you want a Russian to come and support you. Because the East Germans were harsher to the military people than the Russians were. I do have pictures of us standing on the then wall. We had to wear our uniforms to go into East Berlin. They would come around the car, check everyone’s rank, and write it all down.
But the economic factor… Things in West Berlin, they had the exact same item in East Berlin because… The example I’ll give you is there were nice binoculars. One brother ended up in West Berlin when the wall went up in 1961 and the other one ended up in East Berlin. The binoculars in West Berlin were 450 American dollars and the same binoculars in East Berlin were $50. So we got money from a bunch of our friends and brought back 10 pairs of binoculars from East Berlin because everyone wanted (them). I still have them today. It was just amazing.
JFL: So the Russians were the ones who were checking people at the checkpoints. So the Russians and the East Berliners were working together.
PD: Correct.
Track 1
23:34
JFL: Ok. I should know all that better. That was the Cold War phase of….
PD: Correct. And in 1987, we also got an opportunity at Loring Air Force Base in the northern part of Maine. It was the edge of the earth, I think I saw it from there. But there was one group of active duty jets that were there, and their mission was to take off and follow... The Russians would fly from Russia, they’d follow along the East Coast of the United States and land in Cuba. So as they entered American airspace, or the edge of it, the American fighters would take off and escort them. We were there because the active duty fighters that were there were going to be given to the Air National Guard in Massachusetts who had to learn how to fly them. So while they were converting all that over, we were on alert with our F-4s.
In 1987, we had to launch the airplanes because the Russians were coming to go along the coast to go to Cuba. Then, ironically, in 2014 – maybe not quite that late – I was in Alaska, doing the same mission because the active duty F-15s had had a major incident and they grounded the entire fleet and they couldn’t pull alert, again for the same reason, for the Russians on the Alaskan airspace. So it’s 30…well, 27-some years later and I said, “I’m the only one standing in this room who remembers what it was like when they’d come down the East Coast because they hadn’t done it since 1991. And now I’m on alert in Alaska, doing the same mission but everyone around me is young, new, active duty or Guard people who… There were a few of us who had been at Loring who remember, but the majority were like, “Wow! We’re gonna intercept the Russians!” I was like, “We did this in 1987 and it’s now… I’m pretty sure it was 2008. That’s when it was, before I went to Mission Support Group.
JFL: It’s part of being a veteran.
PD: Yeah. You get to do it both ways!
JFL: In many ways. You had a family during that period of time when you were enlisted and your husband was also in the Guards.
PD: Correct.
JFL: What kind of challenges did you have with both of you having to be gone and kids and…?
PD: My husband and I, because we were both in the Air National Guard, worked hard to try to take deployments where one of us would stay home with the children and one would go. That worked out very well most of our careers. A lot of times, if I was going to a two-week school for the Guard, I would take the kids with me. And then my mom retired; she was 50 years old, and then she started coming with. So she and the kids would go with me.
Track 1
26:30
JFL: Perfect.
PD: Yeah. I went to Air Command and Staff College, 1995, started in the fall of ‘95 until ‘96. I asked my mom to go with me. We’d live on the base and we’d take the kids with and my son could then – he was in first grade – go to the DOD, Department of Defense, elementary school on base. So we lived on base and my mom went with and took the two kids with and my husband would come down about every other month and spend… He was working at Tyndall Air Force Base at the time, but he would come up on the weekends. For one year, we got to be “damn Yankees” in the deep South. That’s what they call us when you move down there. And we learned about the War of Northern Aggression. I had never heard the Civil War called the War of Northern Aggression until I went to Alabama.
JFL: I haven’t either. Only people in the south would refer to the north as being Northern Aggression.
PD: Correct.
JFL: And it was all about them being aggressive.
PD: Right.
JFL: Wow. Interesting.
PD: So then we did our two tours to Iraq in ’05 and ’07. My family stepped up. My kids were much older then. Our son was graduating from high school in ’07 and our daughter was (in) ninth grade. My dad and my sisters, my mom all helped us with the kids while we were gone.
JFL: A real family affair.
PD: Yup.
JFL: It provided a lot of interesting life experiences for your kids.
PD: I really wanted them to have that opportunity to travel that I (didn’t). Not that my parents didn’t want to travel, it was just that back in the ’60s, people didn’t have the means or the money.
Track 1
28:21
JFL: No.
PD: My children have been to Texas, to Curacao in the Caribbean Islands, New Mexico, Florida. And our son joined the Minnesota Air National Guard when he was a senior in high school.
JFL: Ok, here’s a different kind of challenge. Surely, there were challenges for women when you first got into the Guards. How do you see that changing? Hopefully, it changed throughout the years, so how is it different from the beginning to now that you’re retired, and at the end?
PD: The interesting thing for me in the beginning was, at times you had to be “one of the guys” even if you didn’t want to be “one of the guys.” Because if you set yourself apart too far, they wouldn’t have faith in you. I had one of the guys tell me one time, I was going to go up to the base and work for a year full time as one of the officers in charge of maintenance because the gentleman whose place I was taking was going away to Air Command and Staff College for a year. The crew chiefs told me, “Boy, I don’t know. You’re a woman, what are you gonna do to help us?”
When the man came back to work – it was 1986 – and I was going back to work at the Duluth police department, they came up and thanked me for the job I did and they really didn’t want to see me leave. So I knew I had made it. If I could make the crew chiefs happy, who were a bunch of stubborn old guys [laughing], I knew I had made it. Now, my niece who is in the Minnesota Air National Guard, just became… She is now at the highest rank in the Air Guard as an enlisted female. I see lots of women have the opportunity to be squadron commanders and hopefully another group commander someday. I was the first female squadron commander in 1999.
JFL: You paved the way.
PD: It was tough. And then in 2008, the first female group commander. Sometimes there were a lot of tears, but well worth every minute of it. After I joined in (19)80 and then my husband – he was then my boyfriend – joined in (19)81, we’ve had 17 family members join the Minnesota Air National Guard in some way, shape or form.
JFL: Wow. You set a good example then.
PD: It was the reason to work hard, keep that base open for those people, too.
JFL: And really something for young people to look up to.
PD: Exactly.
Track 1
31:18
JFL: You were mentoring and you didn’t even know it.
PD: Exactly. I guess you didn’t call it that back then. You just hoped people would follow your lead.
JFL: You just were doing what you thought was right and the best thing to do.
PD: Yup.
JFL: So by the end of your career, you see women being a lot more accepted and given their due respect.
PD: Yes. Now there’s a female general in the Minnesota Air National Guard and a female general in the Minnesota Army National Guard and, boy, when I first started, I would never have thought I’d see that day.
JFL: Yeah. That’s great. That’s wonderful. How was the camaraderie throughout your military service? Because it had to have been – most of the time – guys.
PD: It was. I think the unique thing about the Air Guard, sometimes the good part and sometimes the bad part: it’s more of a family. So, everyone strives to work together to take care of “the family.” Of course you’ll always have those one or two or ten percent that… But, from what I saw… And in some ways that can be bad, because some ways the active duty has it where, you get tired of somebody there, you know they’re gonna go away in a couple years. Where, in the Guard, they’re there forever.
But, all in all, that’s the thing I liked about it. And the experience level in the Guard, compared to the active duty… You’ve got people who’ve been doing their jobs for 10, 15, 20 years. So you know the job’s getting done right. You know that airplane is safe to fly. Where, I wouldn’t always say that with the active duty. I saw some real things that made me stand back and… Just because of the youth and nobody’s watching them.
One of the saddest things to me is society – not just in the military, but in society – is social media and cell phones and people are forgetting how to pay attention and do things without having a phone in their hand or sitting at a computer and reading email.
JFL: Well, they’re forgetting even how to have a conversation with someone.
PD: Yes, exactly.
JFL: They don’t know how to write. That’s another one.
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33:40
PD: Yeah.
JFL: That’s another one.
PD: Yeah.
JFL: But maybe the pendulum will swing back.
PD: We can only hope.
JFL: We can only hope. So, life after military service has been good?
PD: Life after military service has been great. I’m the board chair for the Northern Minnesota Chapter of the American Red Cross. I try to help with teaching classes for them, being involved when they have fundraisers. Holiday Meal for Heroes is really a fun project to get involved with, where they actually get people to sign Christmas cards and we get them to veterans for the holidays. (We’re) doing a lot of remodeling. I had four horses but I’m down to three now and I try to ride every day or at least every other day – get outside, even in the winter time I’ll go and jump on a horse. That’s kind of my therapy – take the dogs with and off I go, into the wild blue yonder.
JFL: I think I saw in a newspaper article a few years ago that you won an award.
PD: In 2016, I was given the honor of being the Minnesota Female Veteran of the Year.
JFL: What was that like for you to receive that?
PD: The highlight of it was I got invited to go to a Minnesota Lynx basketball game and go out on the midcourt and get a basketball signed by all the players. It wasn’t even the highlight for me as far as getting recognized, it was the little kids who came up afterwards and said, “Can I take a picture of you with your basketball?” I was in my uniform. Yeah. It was really cool.
JFL: That’s a pretty special role model.
PD: Yup. And the other one I received was the first year The Woman Today magazine did an award and two of the gals from the base put me in for one of the leadership awards for women in the area. This last year, though, I got to help somebody else. Nancy Rogers, who’s the administrative assistant at the Red Cross, I wrote her up and submitted her name and she got ‘Volunteer of the Year’ award for the area women. She doesn’t ever ask for anything.
JFL: I didn’t know that. Oh, I’m happy.
Track 1
36:00
PD: Yes.
JFL: Thank you for doing this.
PD: You’re welcome.
JFL: Very much.
End of recording
36:06
Transcribed by Mary Beth Frost
