Los Angeles Times: Base Folds Wings After 85 Years

http://latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-000057753jul14.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dnation

DISPATCH FROM SAN ANTONIO
Base Folds Wings After 85 Years
Community: The closing of Kelly Air Force Base, which gave birth to a Latino
middle class, leaves many without a livelihood.
MEGAN K. STACK
TIMES STAFF WRITER

July 14 2001

SAN ANTONIO -- It was just a little Spanish phrase, followed by a slug of beer,
born on some forgotten day in the icehouses and taquerias on the western edge of
town.

Que no se acabe Kelly. Roughly, it expresses the hope "that Kelly never goes
away." For years the words were a mantra for prosperity in these intimate,
scrappy neighborhoods, a superstition akin to tapping wood or clutching a
rabbit's paw.

In fact, nobody thought Kelly Air Force Base was going anywhere. The vast, gated
compound was an institution. It was bread and a roof and tuition money for
thousands of families. It gave birth to a Latino middle class in this old Texas
city. But the 85-year-old aviation base is no more. In a sticky Friday afternoon
ceremony, in a flurry of speeches and flyovers and salutes, the American flag
was hauled down one last time. It was the somber end to six painful years: Kelly
was ordered closed in 1995 and has been folding up and shutting down ever since.

"It's tough, to say the least. Kelly was everybody's provider in the community,"
said Janie Mora, 57, sipping coffee in her airy Mexican eatery. She and her
husband opened Salsa Mora's with savings tucked aside during Frank's three
decades as a machinist at the base.

"We were loyal to the military, very patriotic. So when they said, 'We're going
to close what puts food on the table,' it felt like a betrayal," she said.

Mora was 3 years old when her mother died. An uncle took her in and raised her
on wages from his job at the air base. Later, when Mora fell in love, walked out
of high school, got married and had the first of seven babies, she stretched
Frank's paychecks from Kelly into a thrifty household budget.

And so it went in hundreds of bright, cramped westside homes: The base eroded
cycles of menial labor and scant educational access. Mora's children studied in
college. She and Frank bought a house. Politicians, professors and lawyers trek
to Salsa Mora's for pungent platters of mole and enchiladas.

"Kelly made it possible to have a middle-class life," said former Mayor Henry G.
Cisneros. "In household after household, children were able to enjoy a path to
college because of that good, solid wage."

Just as Midwestern blacks found stability in the automotive plants of Detroit,
Cisneros argues, San Antonio's Latinos flourished because Kelly Air Force Base
provided blue-collar jobs, relatively high wages and government benefits.
Families found a foothold, slowly and painstakingly. Generations scraped

prosperity from graveyard shifts, paychecks and night classes.

For much of the 20th century, the Air Force compound was San Antonio's biggest
employer. At times, its payrolls included more Latinos than any other workplace
in the nation. In 1995, nearly half the Latinos employed by the Air Force were
at Kelly.

It is an ugly scab of land: 4,600 acres of cement and scrubby grass under a
yawning Texas sky. But from the west side of town it was a heady vision: the
bustle and roar of people and machines; the concrete and steel incarnation of
industry, progress and motion.

It was romantic, exhilarating: Generations of kids parked their first cars as
close as they could get to the airstrip to watch the great metal birds tremble
off into the heavens.

Kelly represented vacations and immunizations. It was a tidy retirement plan
beckoning after decades of toil. It was a payday treat: a Technicolor movie,
dinner in a restaurant, a ride on the roller coaster at the old Playland Park.

"It was getting up and going to work, it was the smell of coffee and bacon,
making tacos for your husband to take," Mora said. She spread her fingers and
shrugged. "It was life. It meant everything."

But now the base is a sea of empty parking lots, barren cement walls and
cavernous, desolate buildings.

"There used to be so many people here. You couldn't even find a parking space,"
said Irma Blancas, driving her Chevy through the guarded gate onto the scorched,
silent streets of the air base on a recent afternoon. "All these buildings were
full."

Her cellular phone rang.

"Hello? . . . No, we're not part of that. . . . No, we're not. . . . No. . . .
Thank you."

She hung up.

"People are looking for jobs," she said. "What can you do? We had somebody walk
in this morning. I tell them, 'We're not hiring.' "

Kelly jobs always surged and ebbed as America passed through periods of war and
peace. It was the dark times--world wars, the Cold War--that spilled prosperity
into town.

At its peak, in 1917, 39,000 civilian and military workers drew Kelly salaries.
In 1995, when Kelly's death knell sounded, there were 17,000 jobs on the base.

Blancas was among them--and when word of the closure spread, the 35-year-old
software programmer moved fast. She used her decade of training to open a
computer networking firm in an old Air Force morgue on the base.

The establishment of tiny Pathway Enterprises Inc. was a proud coup for the
Blancas family--Irma's parents never earned high school diplomas. They were
migrants and the children of migrants, a couple that chased the harvests up and
down Interstate 35, picking and planting their youth away in the hot fields from

Texas to Michigan.

"Kelly meant that you made enough that you didn't have to go down to work in the
fields," Blancas said.

It's no wonder that news of the base closure was such a blow to this
neighborhood. Catholic congregations murmured prayers for Kelly's redemption.
Distraught families drew up signs and stickers: "Viva Kelly!" "Keep Kelly open,"
begged T-shirts.

In the last six years of layoffs and transfers, families have been divided. Men
and women followed their jobs to other military facilities in Georgia, Oklahoma,
Utah and New Mexico to work out their retirement--a tough exile for families
rooted in these tight, ramshackle neighborhoods.

A city agency is rushing to convert the base into a distribution park. Some 37
companies have already set up shop, but there's a long way to go: The site now
has fewer than 4,000 jobs--not even a quarter of the city's goal of 21,000. The
facility is old, and environmental cleanup could take decades.

Still, Kelly did its job. It sprinkled the old American dream over the westside,
gave families education and hope--things that can't be erased or snatched back.

San Antonio Mayor Ed Garza told military and civic leaders at Friday's ceremony
that his grandfather worked at Kelly; his father was the first in the family to
go to college.

"I stand here with personal gratitude," Garza said. "Today is a bittersweet
day."

Copyright 2001, Los Angeles Times

damn clinton, that bastard!!!!
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i'm still mad..

Why are you mad at me?  We can just rely on the UN to help us out if we get into too much trouble.  One little air force base isn't going to make a difference anyway.  I did it for the children...  [smoke]

I hate to see any base get closed. But jeez these people act if its the end of the world.
There are 3 other Air Force bases in San Antonio and some army bases near by too. If they cant find a job O well.

I was stationed at Kelly for 2 years.
They had the best chow hall I ever ate in, since it was civilian staffed. No KP either.