Chris Smith: After five decades, Santa Rosa veterans return to Point Arena radar station for visit

Before the Air Force shipped them in 1968 to the vast and expanding war in Vietnam, Jim Sartain and his brother-in-law served two years just outside of nowhere: at a radar station carved from the woods up a dizzying road from a Mendocino Coast municipality the size of your thumb.

They dug it.

“We had a swimming pool,” recalls Sartain, now a 71-year-old Santa Rosa commercial real estate broker. “We had a two-lane bowling alley up there. We had a gym.

“It was great. The town was a friendly little town. The only downside was that it was pretty remote.”

The tucked-away military installation that prior to joining the war served as a home to Sartain and his brother-in-law, Mike Lynch, now 72 and a retired Sears manager in Santa Rosa, was the 776th Radar Squadron.

It was 3.7 miles as the crow flies, or 11 miles as the car rocks and rolls up Eureka Hill, from Point Arena, population roughly 450.

At the technological heart of the station was the great, spinning, state-of-the-art Cold War radar antenna that scanned the skies for Soviet bombers.

“It was on top of an 85-foot tower and it weighed 80 tons,” said Sartain, who grew up in Redwood City and Cupertino and felt the draft breathing down his neck when he enlisted in the Air Force in 1966 at age 19.

Before the end of ’66 he was trained and working as a radar operator at the Point Arena station, part of the Air Force General Surveillance Radar division. It included outposts atop Marin County’s Mount Tamalpais and Santa Clara County’s Mount Umunhum, as well as near Red Bluff and Tonopah, Nevada.

Many nights at the station 2,100 feet above Point Arena, Sartain and Lynch drank coffee with the graveyard shift’s computer technician while monitoring radar screens inside the windowless operations room.

“It was kind of boring, for the most part,” Sartain allowed.

Rarely, a blip on the screen of the FPS-24 radar system would announce the appearance of an aircraft that couldn’t immediately be identified. Most likely, it was a commercial airliner whose pilots weren’t entirely on the ball and didn’t identify themselves.

But if that couldn’t be determined, 776th Radar Squadron personnel would notify Hamilton Air Force base near Novato and fighter jets would scramble.

“That happened occasionally,” Sartain said.

Opened in 1951, the largely self-contained Mendocino County station was a treasured neighbor and economic contributor to Point Arena. With its 100 or so Air Force personnel, their families and several dozen civil servants, the station’s population was the greater Point Arena’s largest employer.

Kids in the Air Force families rode buses down to Arena Elementary and Point Arena High. The station’s service members and civilians regularly drove regularly down winding Eureka Hill Road to shop or have a meal in Point Arena, Anchor Bay, Gualala or in the hamlet that was Greenwood before it became Elk.

Sartain and Lynch enjoyed the station and its sweeping views, camaraderie, good-enough mess hall, basketball court, pool, pingpong tables, commissary, barracks, rifle range and other amenities until new orders in 1968 sent them packing for the expanding Vietnam War.

Both radar operators reported to the 620th Tactical Control Squadron at a sprawling Dong Ha base in northernmost South Vietnam. It seemed a million miles from the quiet, remote Point Arena station. Battle blasts rumbled as Sartain and Lynch helped to direct and keep safe distances between the U.S. aircraft that flew constant combat missions against North Vietnam.

“We lost 12 planes a day,” Sartain said.

“I tell people that was the fastest year of my life, in Vietnam.”

Both he and Lynch - his wife Patricia’s brother - were honorably discharged in 1969.

Today both are active members of the Pacific Coast Air Museum at the Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport. Now and then over the past 50 years, they’d talk about returning to the Point Arena Radar Station, which was rendered obsolete by satellite surveillance and was decommissioned in 1998.

Finally, one day in May, they made the drive.

They arrived to find a locked gate and, behind it, the largely dilapidated remains of the former home of the 776th Radar Squadron. A sign on the fence directed inquiries to the Air Force’s 9th Engineering Group at Beale Air Force base near Marysville.

Sartain phoned. He was told that Air Force personnel hardly ever go to the defunct station, but the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office has keys to the gate and sometimes uses the place for training.

Sartain did some research and came up with contact information for Sheriff’s Lt. Greg Stefani, commander of the department’s coastal division. They spoke, and Stefani said he’d be pleased on a day off to take Sartain and Lynch back onto the radar station for a tour.

One day in July, the Santa Rosans drove to Point Arena and met Stefani and his wife, Jeannie, and their dog. And for the first time since 1968, Sartain and Lynch walked onto the radar station.

“It kind of all came back,” Sartain said.

Though the huge rotating satellite antenna, the barracks and other buildings are gone and trees have grown to obscure the view, the former radarman found that the former post still feels familiar.

The foursome stood before the great, concrete base that once supported the radar dish. Stefani believes the 85-foot structure is to this day the tallest in Mendocino County.

Stefani directed Sartain and Lynch to another building, and asked the veterans what it had been.

“It kind of gave us goosebumps to walk into that building,” Sartain said.

Shaking their heads at the memories, he and Lynch told the Stefanis it was the perpetually darkened operations building in which they’d spend the night watching the radar scopes, at the end of their shift shield their eyes as they opened the door and stepped into the blinding morning sunlight.

Sartain said the sheriff’s lieutenant made clear that this was a special occasion, that the former radar station is off limits.

It’s conceivable the land atop Eureka Hill could be put to another use by the federal government, or sold and developed. A few possibilities have been floated over the past two decades.

Members of the Manchester-Point Arena Band of Pomo Indians, who have for two years been allowed to hold their fall Acorn Festival at the ruins of the base, have proposed the property be deeded to them for tribal housing. So far, no idea for the land has taken hold, and the former home of the 776th Radar Squadron has simply continued to deteriorate.

Among the most imposing challenges to repurposing and repopulating the site are its remoteness and the potentially astronomical costs involved in mitigating the environmental toxins that resulted from nearly a half century of military use.

When the private, old-times’ sake tour ended for veterans Sartain and Lynch, they started back down that narrow, crazy snake of a road to Point Arena. The pair estimates during their two years at the radar station, they took on that road about 200 times.

Bittersweetly, they figure they’re unlikely ever to drive it again.

You can reach Staff Columnist Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 or chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.