Charles Harry Rich
Charles Harry Rich, 74, of Murphy, Texas, died on Nov. 7, 2018, in Plano, Texas.
He was born on May 16, 1944, the son of Robert Rich and Pauline Rich, in Anna.
He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1967 to 1971 as a captain/missile maintenance officer.
He married Nancy McClure on July 18, 1970, at Whiteman Air Force Base in Knob Noster, Mo.
He worked in the insurance industry for many years.
He loved his family and friends. He loved a good joke and a good martini.
Chuck loved reading Model Railroader and anything pertaining to history. He especially loved planning and attending his military reunions, where he loved getting together with his fellow officers at Whiteman Air Force Base.
He was an alumni of Southern Illinois University, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in the school of business.
He is survived by his wife, Nancy, of Murphy, Texas; sons Matt Rich of Addison, Texas, and his son, Destin O’Neal; and Brandon Rich and wife, Julie of Friendswood, Texas, and their children, Emerson, Easton and Ensley; and a brother, Robert Rich of Miami, Fla.
Restland Funeral Home in Dallas, Texas, was in charge of arrangements.
Charles H. Rich
16 May 1944 - 7 November 2018
(Editor’s note: the following tribute to Charles H. Rich, who was a member of the Anna-Jonesboro Community High School class of 1962) was written by an Air Force friend and shared with the paper.)
Anna, Illinois is a SMALL town (fewer than 4,500 residents in the 2010 census) and better known for its close proximity to Jonesboro. Indeed, it is not far from the “Boot Heel” of Missouri and Cape Girardeau, whose most famous son is probably Rush Limbaugh.
Still on 16 May 1944 a boy was born who changed the lives and emailing habits of hundreds of other boys as we grew older.
Charles H. Rich (far better known as “Chuck”) was and remained a skeptical, irreverent son-of-a gun – almost more of a “Show Me” from Missouri, than a log splitter from Illinois.
After getting his degree in business administration from that school in Carbondale, Illinois, Southern Illinois University, whose students are known as Salukis, Chuck decided to seek adventure above the plains.
He entered the Air Force, planning on becoming a pilot. The Air Force in its inscrutable wisdom saw the aptness of enlisting both Chuck’s skills and irreverence in the service of his country in ways he had never imagined.
So, the Air Force told Chuck that he would be a “pilot” – the most important “pilot” of all in the 1960’s and 70’s with the Vietnam War raging against the ever-present background of The Cold War.
The Air Force would make Chuck a targeting officer of Minuteman II Modified Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. These multi-stage, solid fuel beasts carried multiple reentry vehicles of hydrogen bombs. Able to strike thousands of miles away and to annihilate civilizations (properties and people) these were weapons with but a single purpose – destruction. And Chuck would implement the systems needed to steer the missiles to pre-selected targets. (The missile launch officers simply inserted a prechosen target identified by number. They never knew what they were “shooting at”.)
In those days there were 6 Minuteman missile bases: two in North Dakota, one each in Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming AND one in Missouri. Whiteman Air Force Base was and is a Federal enclave located just outside the fourth class “City” of Knob Noster, Missouri. That prior sentence reads like one of Chuck’s irreverent assertions about military efficiency and planning.
Originally purchased and built as a glider training base in World War II, it was named the Sedalia Arny Air Force Base, after Sedalia, the original capital of the State of Missouri. It had and has the third longest runway in the continental United States.
It was renamed after George Whiteman, the first Missouri airman killed in action in the Second War. And of course, we all remember that the Cold War was “Christened” by Winston Churchill in the Iron Curtain Speech given at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. So, with an existential sense of irony, Chuck was sent to Whiteman in the Fall of 1968 and assigned to the 351st Strategic Missile Wing Missile Maintenance Squadron (“MMS”) as a Targeting Officer.
He followed right on the heels of Robert Gates, later U.S. Secretary of Defense under Presidents Bush and Obama. Secretary Gates, in an interview in The Wall Street Journal, identified Whiteman as “being in the banana belt of the strategic missile bases”. It was a rather surreal place with its above-ground heating pipes (in case permafrost came to West Central Missouri?), its endless expanse of runway and its aircraft complement of two helicopters and the military version of a DC-3.
Chuck was immediately assigned to housing in the “elegant” Bachelor Officers Quarters. There he could “relax” on his off-duty hours, and not focus on what would happen if the order to launch were ever given. Even a well-adjusted soul might have found this a bit of a strain. Chuck was 24.
He and other young officers frequently used the four lanes of US Highway 50 to travel the 70 miles to and from Kansas City seeking something more “real”. Then, on November 7, 1968, a college student seeking her first teaching job in a district outside Kansas City was introduced to Lt. Rich. Within eight months, Nancy and he were married in the Whiteman Chapel and Chuck was “freed” from the Bachelor Officers Quarters.
By 1971 Chuck’s Air Force experience was over. He returned to civilian life and a career in insurance. He and Nancy had two sons and eventually settled in Murphy (this is not a pun about “Murphy’s Law”), Texas.
But the experience at Whiteman, the friendship with other young men, the daily tension among the technical requirements of his job, the frequent absurdity of military bureaucracy, the potential consequence of an order to launch and the love of family and country – never left him. In the late 1990’s Chuck decided to do something about it – intuiting that the Whiteman experience must have affected others as it had him.
So, he began to organize a “reunion group” – the “Whiteman Survivors”. The name itself speaks volumes. He called and emailed and asked everyone he reached to do the same, and so we came from all over, from all kinds of careers and lives. We came back to Knob Noster and the place that changed each of us in ways that most of us cannot fully describe, let alone explain.
Without Chuck, there would be no Whiteman Survivors. And part of the best of humankind – of our fraternity, dedication and service – would have been lost, or only haphazardly recalled and inadequately celebrated.
Thanks to Chuck, we are all more and better than we might have ever been.
“Peace IS our Profession”.
Peter D. Hutcheon, 351 CSG (JA), 1 June 1970 - 31 May 1974