Have you ever had a place that you are somehow repeatedly drawn to? Not like you choose to be there, or actively seek it out, but like you somehow just wind up there without even trying?
For me, it is a decommissioned Air Force base on the south side of town.
You could say my ties to the base are ancestral. My grandfather was an airplane mechanic there in the 1940s. However, this history was unknown to me until I worked on base—the first time.
When I moved to the city for college, I thought I was the only person in the family to have lived here. My grandfather died long before I was born, and I do not know much about him. I knew he had been in the military and had been stationed in Japan. I only learned of his time in this city and his role as an airplane mechanic on base here when I graduated and started my first job.
Why did my first job cause my family to reveal that bit of trivia about him? It was because I was working as a research assistant on the base.
I’d never intended to be a research assistant or to work on an Air Force base. A week before college graduation I ran into my favorite biology professor in the stairwell. He asked about my post-college plans. He needed a research assistant, and I was graduating in a week with no job lined up. I sent him my resume later that day, and I had the job before I walked the stage.
I spent the next two years surrounded by “space age” machines, rats, microscopes, test tubes, and in a small, secluded building behind a barbed wire fence. Looking back, I probably should have asked more questions about why my specific building deep inside a guarded air force base needed to be surrounded by barbed wire and have a separate security protocol.
I left the job to go to medical school the same year the base was officially selected for closure.
Since that time, the base and I have undergone major evolutions. The city’s development authority bought the base and sold it off for retail development bit by bit. My old building is now either an apartment or a parking lot. But the main core of the base still stands and is now a medical school.
While the base was evolving, I finished medical school, residency, fellowships, and moved back to the city to work in a different medical school. That job brought me to the base to teach several times. One of those times, my son sat in the back of a classroom building a space capsule out of Legos while I talked. The fourth generation since our family became involved in the base. Now I am faculty “on base” and my relationship with the land is deepening.
You would think my history with the base would have prompted me to learn its history at some point. Nope. I never really thought about it. Not until last week when I got spooked and wanted to read more about the history of one of the buildings.
What happened that spooked me?
Well, the academic in me is going to chalk it up to electrical interference in an old building and a lack of sleep. But I may be persuaded to write a spooky season post describing the incident embellished with fanciful ghostly speculation.
In an attempt to explain the spooky away, I tried to learn what the building had been used for in the past. I knew it had been a research base, and I thought maybe there were weird wiring or acoustic properties built into the place.
Did you know you can access information about places like this in the Historic American Buildings Survey? I found descriptions of each building with details like doors, windows, air handling, plumbing—but also—information about the founding and operations of the School of Aerospace Medicine that once stood here.
How had I not known that school had been here? It was operational when I worked on base years ago as a research assistant. A research assistant who was applying to medical school. How did I not know I was working next to the School of Aerospace Medicine?
Well. It wasn’t a full medical school. It provided specialized medical training to flight surgeons and other military medical personnel.
The more I read about the base and the school’s past, the more I wanted to read. It was like watching a car crash in slow motion. I couldn’t look away.
Now—I’m not a historian, so I may get some details wrong, but I’m going to do my best to convey the things I have learned.
The airfield opened in 1917. It started as a flight school and primary training site for pilots. One of its most famous students—Charles Lindbergh.
My grandfather worked on the airfield in the 1940s, and during that time it continued to be a site for flight training and cutting-edge flight technologies. In the early 1940s it was a prime training site for B-25 bomber crews. I’m guessing my grandfather had his work cut out for him keeping the planes tuned up and ready to fly.
In 1948 it transitioned from an airfield to a full Air Force Base. Then in 1959, the base transitioned from flight to spaceflight and became the Air Force’s hub for medical and aerospace research. The focus was on bioastronautics (optimizing human function for flight), and one of its main goals was to support NASA. Research focused on how the human body reacts to extreme environments like low pressure, high altitude, cold, high oxygen, radiation, and other inhospitable environments that could be found in space.
Think about what that may mean for research protocols. Think about what that may mean for architecture too. Remember I started this line of reading to learn more about physical buildings. Thick walls, not a lot of windows, room for all kinds of electrical equipment, separate air handlers and exhaust.
While research was a primary mission of the base, it also needed people who could translate its cutting-edge research knowledge into the care of people going into space. So, the United States Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine (USAFSAM) relocated to the base.
On November 21, 1963, the day before he was assassinated, President John F. Kennedy was on base dedicating the school and the new buildings that housed it. The complex of buildings he dedicated is now called “Kennedy Hill,” and it is the majority of what remains of the old base.
The only building I had ever gone into on Kennedy Hill during my time as a research assistant housed the veterinary pathology department. In my reading I learned that building also had a radiation “hot wing” and a vivarium. It is where Miss Sam, one of the space monkeys lived out her days. A building on the base is said to have inspired the movie Project X, and I’m guessing that was it.
The base primarily studied how the human body performs in inhospitable environments, like low pressure, cold, radiation…if any of this is giving you the heebie-jeebies and making you think Nazi medical research, well…there is a reason for that.
Several leaders of the bioastronautics research and school of aerospace medicine were scientists in Germany during WWII. They were some of the 1,600 scientists brought to the US in a program called “Operation Paperclip.” The US wanted to reap the benefit of the extensive research undertaken by Germany during the war. Experts in rocketry, space medicine, chemical warfare, biological warfare, etc were recruited to work in the US in agencies and on military bases across the country.
Hubertus Strughold, called The Father of Aerospace Medicine, was one of these “paperclip” scientists. He had been the Director of the Luftwaffe Institute for Aviation Medicine. The infamous pressure and cold studies on inmates at Dachau were performed by his colleagues, including his former research assistant. About 500 prisoners were subjected to these experiments; very few survived the experiments and the war. Strughold was present at a meeting where the cold study data was reported, and he is quoted in the meeting minutes. His own institute later ran oxygen deprivation studies on epileptic children. He was not a defendant in the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, but he was a participant who gave statements on behalf of the defendants. The depth of his knowledge and involvement in the atrocities remains unclear.
As information about his past came to light after his death in 1986, his honors started to be stripped. The library on base that had been named for him was renamed in 1995. In 2012 a Wall Street Journal article came out detailing his connections to Nazi medical research leading to the Space Medicine Association award named for him being retired in 2013.
As I read more, I became even more shocked that I knew none of this in the early 2000s when I worked on base. But this was during a time when the base was transitioning away from the military and toward city ownership, and I was not with a military group.
Back then, the main core of the base was made up of the USAFSAM buildings on Kennedy Hill and the old hangars from the flight school. I wasn’t cool or important enough to work in one of those buildings. I didn’t even drive by them on a regular basis. My route from base entrance to my office was along a rural-appearing road that skirted the outside of the base and led to an isolated small building hidden toward the back. My work wasn’t directly related to the bioastronautics themes of the base.
Now, decades later, I’m back on base. The building where I once worked is long gone, as is the airfield where my grandfather worked, and as is most of the rest of the base. Only the core buildings remain.
I now find myself asking why I am continually called back to the location, especially now that I know more of its history.
You know what I think it is? A call for reinvention and resilience.
The base has reinvented itself from flight school, to space medicine hub, to closure, and now a medical school. Some dark things happened there in its space medicine era. It was officially decommissioned and could have just sat there as abandoned buildings. If y’all know me, you know I’ve been through some shit too and I had the option of just sitting and doing nothing afterwards.
But the base and I didn’t just sit there and decay. We pivoted. We are becoming a better version of our former selves.
The old USAFSAM buildings weren’t just research labs. They had classrooms. The classrooms have been renovated and are now educating the next generation of doctors. The emphasis has changed. The focus of the place is no longer research and education about just how far bodies can be pushed in pursuit of cutting-edge technology and advancement. The focus is now on how to heal. Specifically not just how to heal bodies but how to heal people.
And it is this healing that drew me back. Healing for myself and training people to heal exponentially more people than I ever could on my own.
I never went looking for this place. Somehow, it kept finding me. I think my home base has much more to teach me.
The content on Crone Powers is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice. I am a doctor, but I AM NOT YOUR DOCTOR. Always consult your medical and mental health professionals before ADDING—NEVER SUBSTITUTING—spiritual modalities to your care. Remember, woo only works when you do the work.
The views and opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my employer or any institution with which I am affiliated.