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Barracks 930 Bachelors Enlisted Quarters (BEQ )  Aug 1971-      (it did have a hall name also Benford Hall?)
South end of 930 Building behind it wasn't there in 1971
I arrived at SFO and took a bus to the San Francisco Greyhound station at 7th and Mission. From there a milk run took me through every little place between there and Vallejo. Pinole, Hercules,Rodeo and Crocket included. From the Vallejo Greyhound station at Sonoma and York I took a cab to the Schools Command on Mare Island. I remember being impressed by the old yellow cab which had a huge space between the back seat and the front. Easily accommodating several sailors and sea bags.      After checking in at the quarterdeck in H-1 on a weekend evening I was assigned to BEQ 930. Originally and open cubicle on the upper deck north end of the building. The first night someone left their school books on thge floor and a rat chewed off the bindings. I was assigned to a working party until my Fire Control Technician Basic Electricity and Electronics Program (BEEP School) started a few days latter. There was a head at the north end near my open cubicle and during that period I went to use it and found someone in bare feet standing on the edge of a urinal while rats ran around without fear on the floor below him. BEEP was 5 or 6 weeks over at the north FT side of the old hospital (H-72 I believe). I only remember two names from that school Pospischel and BM1 Hill. Hill had been captured as a deck ape by the North Koreans with the Pueblo. I believe he may have been as seaman at the time but was promoted to first class after his release and given a choice of any school the navy had to offer. He chose the advanced electronics field of FT but I'm not sure if he passed BEEP. He had a desire but didn't seem to have the aptitude. They may have moved him on in the system because of the ordeal he had suffered.      Somewhere during the period of BEEP - A1 phase I moved downstairs near the north entrance. I shared a two man cubical with Dave Wilkinson whom latter would be become my best friend at school. Our A-1 instructor DS2 Michael Terry had a private room not far from our area. We may have been his last class as he was getting out and taking a job with a company called Measurex. Periodically the class would end up over at the Owen's Center gym/pool area for JFKs as they were called at the time. The other side of the Owen's complex was the Cryto School. Mike Terry was similar to a boot camp company commander who lived  in the barracks and directed our lives more than would be if he had lived in town or another barracks. Class was held in cinder block buildings behind the barracks so it was hard to manage to be late, although wee had a few that could. The instructor would send somebody from class back over to the BEQ to wake them up. Latter in the 18 week A-1 phase we had other instructors besides Mike, a Coulson comes to mind but I know there was a third. After successfully completing A-1 phase you tacked on your crow. Data Systems Technician Petty Officer Third Class. I believe somewhere during the A-1 Phase we were allowed to move to one of the more modern four man room barracks, either BEQ1294 or BEQ1296. I moved next door to 1296 with my roommate Dave Wilkinson, Tom Flor and Louie Smith.
	Cinder block buildings behind BEQ 930 which contained our A-1 classroom. Our class used the one on the right. (Building in the left corner of the picture wasn't there in 1971)  After more basics such as tube & transistor theory and applications, oscillators, synchro, servos, motor generators, Boolean algebra and digital basics we finally got to work with digital computers. The first computer we worked on was the Univac Digital Trainer (UDT) They were housed in these buildings and each student got their own to program and troubleshoot hardware problems the instuctor would insert. Radar from the ships going up and down the nearby Mare Island Strait would occasionally cause you to lose the program you had loaded into the core memory.
When I first arrived at BEQ 930 there was no beer available in the barracks. Not long after my arrival they installed a beer vending machine but the only beer in it was Olympia. I had never drank Oly but I did my best to get used to it by drinking large quantities, especially when playing cards in the rec room. Latter they added other brands such as Schlitz and Budweiser. I had been a Schlitz drinker back in New York and picked it up again as my beer of choice. Typically drinking copious amounts every evening caused Mike Terry to label me a Schlizaholic. My drinking never impaired my schooling and I was always number one in my class in grades. Dave Wilkinson was number two. Several of the people I remember from the barracks didn't make the grade and dropped out. If you flunked out they dropped the required two year extension for the training and you did four years instead of six in another rating. Mayo McCray and black kid from Harlem flunked out and when I asked him what he was going to do when he got out of the Navy he told me "go back to Harlem". I thought his having seen other places in the Navy he wouldn't do that but that was where his family was and where he had grown up. Latter in life I saw the same thing with the Iranians I had been teaching for Hughes Aircraft. After the revolution they still chose to go home because that was were their life was. I believe they weren't in good favor with the new regime. A good friend Bob Mullins (Wabbit) also flunked out. Wabbit and I had rented camping gear from Special Services and hiked across Dan Foley Park, the golf course and out to the Sulfur Mountains to camp out on what turned out to be the Borges Ranch. I remember a Matt Hoffman whom I heard from  30 years latter but unfortunately die soon after.
	I didn't see a lot of rats after the first couple incidents when I first arrived. Months latter I remember vacuuming the window jams in the rec room. A board came loose and floods of roaches came streaming out. I just sucked them up with the vacuum. Sometime years latter the building was condemned but the Submarine sailors took it over and it was still there in 2005 when these pictures were taken. Looked like the area was being used by the Seabees.
The building between BEQ 930 and Barracks 1296 was a fire station back in the 70s
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