WEBVTT

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(graceful guitar music)

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- Tech Sergeant Bob Zacharias, a weather forecaster.

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^My age now is, I waited 85 years for my last birthday.

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I joined the Air Force because I didn't want to get drafted,

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and then I joined the Air Force and went to weather school,

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and got stationed at all the exotic places in the world,

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none of which were in the war.

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I've been painting ever since I was a little kid.

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One of my assignments was Orly Field, France, that's Paris,

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back in the mid-50s, and the weather station,

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the commander wanted to decorate his weather station,

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make it pretty, so he asked me to figure out

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what to put on the walls.

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So I thought about it, and since our field of operations

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was the Atlantic Ocean, so I made up a frontal system

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going across the Atlantic.

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I painted the Europe and the America on the wall,

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and I connected them with this front.

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I developed a talent to do local area drawings,

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and made prints of them and sold them in the BX,

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which anyone that's been here a long time knows me,

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because I've been doing this for 30 years,

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and I sold at bazaars, I sold in the gift shop,

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all the gift shops in Italy, Brindisi, Darby, Aviano,

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Vicenza, my stuff was in there.

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Two bazaars at Aviano, then I retired,

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after Vicenza, there was Darby,

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and after that, people said, why don't you go to Naples,

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so I did the Naples bazaar for a couple of times.

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Then, why don't you go to Brindisi,

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so I went to Brindisi,

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then why don't you go to Germany,

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so I went to Germany and did

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seven or eight bazaars there, including Ramstein.

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I got out of service in 1975,

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but I was a staunch supporter of the Air Force,

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looked upon my years as I was extremely satisfied with.

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(plucky guitar music)