I went to Thule, Greenland in November, 1958. I next saw the sun the following spring! I had a good dorm room in officer’s barracks, officer’s club privileges, and good food in a cafeteria. I had a team of technicians to do all the work.
That winter we experienced severs ‘phases’ – wind storms that could get o150 miles per hour, and piled up snow driven for hundreds of miles across the arctic..
While I was in Graduate School, RCA won a huge (one billion dollars was a lot in those days) contract to build the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS). This was a system designed to detect missiles launched from Russia against the United States and the United Kingdom. Three sites were to be built – Thule Greenland, Clear Alaska, and Fylingdales, England (close to the Scotland border). If you went to Thule, you worked 7 days a week, 10 hours a day. You were paid 40 hours straight time, 20 hours time and a half, and 10 hours double time, and a 30% bonus on top. That amounted to something like 2.8 times your base pay. Sounded good to me, so when I finished grad school, I joined the BMEWS project. And if you stay out of the U.S. for 18 months, it was tax-free. Too good to resist.
In November 1959 I left Penny in Haddonfield and went to Thule as the leader, Tactical Displays.
After about 9 months, Penny was so unhappy that I decided to forgo the tax-free benefit, and transfer to the Clear Alaska site to do the same job there, taking Penny with me.