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This section is under construction........
In this section is a brief summary of most of the professional positions I have been privileged to have had during my working career. I will include some photos that are applicable to various areas of my work history. Additional pages later on in this web site will include a lot more of the photos of interest as well as more detailed words explaining my various positions.
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Richard (Dick) Holt was born and raised in Panama. He maintains dual citizenship in both the U.S. and Panama. He is fluent in both Spanish and English.
Dick's father was first a tugboat Captain and then a Pilot on the Panama Canal affording Dick the opportunity to grow up around this waterway and transit the Canal innumerable times on every type ship with his father. Dick is considered an expert on the Panama Canal.
His mother’s family were early settlers in Panama in the 1500’s coming from Galicia, Spain. His maternal grandfather was from Germany, an Electrical Engineer, and one of the original engineers that came to Panama and built the Panama Canal. He met and married Dick’s grandmother in Panama.
Dick has traveled extensively and lived and worked in many parts of Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Europe.
Dick is a Physicist, a graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois. During his collegiate career he played varsity football and was the co-captain and most valuable player on the team in his senior year. He was subsequently named to the All-America team after his senior year. He participated in the Army ROTC program at Wheaton, and was the Brigade Commander of the 600 man ROTC Brigade in his senior year. He graduated as a Distinguished Military Graduate and accepted a Regular Army commission as a Second Lieutenant at the conclusion of his collegiate years.
As a Regular Army Officer, Dick served in the Army Surface-to-Air Missile Command where he commanded a Nike Ajax Surface-to-Air Missile Battery of some 250 officers and enlisted personnel. He also was qualified as an Army Ranger and Paratrooper and used these skills in the civil war in Guatemala where more than 350,000 Maya Indians were slaughtered by government troops. His job in that war was to train the Mayas on how to defend themselves. He lived with the Indians in the mountains during those assignments.
Dick became fascinated with the oceans when he was just a child in Panama. In his growing years, he spent considerable time in the water, becoming one of the first of the SCUBA diving community in California during the mid-1950's when diving was just coming into its own.
He has been a certified SCUBA diving instructor for almost 50 years opening up the wonders of the ocean to thousands of diving students. Dick was one of the founders of NAUI, the Nat’l Assoc of Underwater Instructors. Many of his classes were right on the Naval bases where he worked, Point Mugu or Port Hueneme, California where he put hundreds of Naval personnel through the training for being able to use SCUBA in the ocean.
Later he was to become a member of the Underwater Board of Directors for the SCUBA training program of the Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation Department, the leader in the U.S. for SCUBA training.
Since his retirement, Dick has been pursuing his avocation of story telling about cultures and peoples, especially those of Latin America where he has lived much of his life. He also has exciting lectures on Oceanography, the Space Program and on Aviation based on his personal experiences. This is his seventh year lecturing on cruise ships. He served on Regent Seven Seas ships for five years. He is now under contract to Holland America as a guest speaker on their beautiful fleet of ships.
During these retirement years he has also found time to serve as a member of the Sanctuary Advisory Council for the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, appointed to this position by the Administrator of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Both Dick and his wife Cheryl are musical instrumentalists and have been members of the Ventura County Concert Band which is composed of some 85 musicians from all around the area. Cheryl plays the French Horn and Dick the Clarinet and Saxophone. The Concert Band plays to a packed auditorium at Ventura High School four concerts a year plus playing at many other civil events that take place during the year.
Dick is a rated Commercial Airplane Pilot with instrument and multi-engine ratings, with more than 6,000 hours of Pilot-in-Command time in his log book.
Extracurricular activities have included breeding and showing quarter horses. He has had a ranch in Southwestern Idaho for many years where he not only raised his horses, but was also in the cattle business. Later on, after some years of successful farming and ranching, he turned his attention to land development and has successfully developed individual homes and subdivisions on his property. He is still involved in that business to this day.
Dick also takes on speaking engagements in Southern California for schools, service clubs, travel organizations, military groups and others that want to learn about the many subjects on which he lectures, especially the Panama Canal. He especially enjoys telling school children about the dolphin and his days of working with them.
Dick is married to the former Cheryl Albers, a retired college Professor. They have one daughter, an elementary school teacher, and two beautiful grandsons, 10 and 12, who live near their home base in Ventura, California. Their son-in-law is a Navy Chief assigned to Naval Aviation, stationed at Point Mugu, California. This is where Dick started his civilian technical career. Steve is responsible for maintaining a fleet of C-130 aircraft that are sent all over the world on support missions for outlying Naval bases and ships. He just returned from an assignment in Italy.
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Naval Missile Center, Point Mugu, CA
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| Navy's Eagle Air-to-Air Missile |
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When his military obligation was completed, he accepted a position as a Physicist/Electronic Engineer in the Electronic Warfare Division at the Naval Missile Center, Point Mugu, California. His first duty was as the Project Engineer for the countermeasures test and evaluation of the Eagle air-to-air missile. This was an exciting assignment for Dick requiring him to fly in different types of Navy aircraft almost daily. He was required to study the weapons systems employed by the Russians and know them well enough to plan for the compromise of these systems by our own. The Eagle system had a large missile to be launched from a Navy aircraft and be guided by a radar on board that aircraft. If the enemy turned on a jamming device, the missile was to switch to an on-board tracking radar and complete the flight to the target.
Dick's assignment included the evaluation of both the missile and its systems to those system elements on the launch aircraft.
The Eagle system failed to meet the Navy's requirements and Dick was instrumental in this finding. He received commendations for his work as well as a large cash award for a classified technique that determined the launch window for missiles. He was promoted twice during his time in this organization.
During his second year in this position, the Department of the Navy made a decision to begin a brand new program, The Navy Dolphin Program, at Point Mugu, the Study of Dolphins as a possible help to the Navy in under-sea Naval Warfare. They wanted the dolphin's SONAR system studied, how the dolphin was able to stay under water for so long even though they were a mammal and had to return to the surface for air. They wanted the communications system explored to see if there was any way this could be used as a countermeasure device between ships and subs. Many other scientific facts were to be sought in this study.
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| A3D Fighter Bombers assigned to the Electronic Warfare DIvision at Point Mugu were to be used as the test-bed aircraft for the launching of the Eagle air-to-air missile. Dick had many hours flying in these aircraft. |
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Navy Dolphin Program, Naval Air Station, Point Mugu, CA
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| Navy SEALS being trained to handle the dolphins, and to let the dolphins get used to them. |
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Over a period of some two years prior to this time, Dick had hundreds of Navy personnel in his diving classes at Point Mugu and Port Hueneme, another Naval base nearby. He was well known to management of both locations for his expertise in the water with SCUBA. Because of his SCUBA diving experience, Dick was chosen as one of six Navy scientists/divers to begin this program. So Dick became a member of the original Special Warfare study group for the Navy in the study of Dolphins and their application to Naval Warfare. No one in the United States was studying dolphins, there were no "dolphin shows" as we know them now, and no one had knowledge of the innards of the dolphin. There were no books about dolphins either. The only other people that were working with dolphins were the Russians.
Prior to taking on this new assignment, Dick and three of his fellow Navy divers chosen for this program were sent to Coronado Island in San Diego to go through a Diver Certification course that was offered by the Navy UDT/SEAL Special Warfare training facility. Included in Dick's class were about a dozen Army Special Forces officers who were chosen to begin a diving training program for Army Special Ops people to qualify them in the water. This class, unlike the usual class going through the SEAL training was to be a non-numbered and un-documented class since they were not going to be members of a Navy SEAL team but going on to other assignments. They were required to go through all the same training as any other SEAL candidate.
When deployed in combat situations later on, the dolphins were to be handled by Navy SEALS, and Dick and his fellow dolphin scientists were required by the Commanding Admirals at Point Mugu and China Lake Naval Air Facility which had the responsibility for the dolphin program to go through the SEAL training to be fully aware of the SEAL program and how its people operated and prepared for combat. They felt that this realistic training was necesary before the dolphin training was to begin. Navy SEALS that were to become dolphin handlers in combat situations in the future were to be trained by this cadre of researchers, and these trainers had to be qualified SEALS in order to carry out this mission. The four from Pt. Mugu successfully passed the SEAL training program at Coronado and were authorized to wear the SEAL badge, and their records reflected this qualification.
After all these years since the onset of the program, Navy SEALS are today being transported all over the world with their dolphins to perform special missions. The SEALS are trained at the dolphin facility at the SPAWAR (Space and Naval Warfare Systems) command in San Diego where the dolphins are housed. The SEALS and their dolphins are transported to their assignments in Navy C-130 aircraft based right at Point Mugu where Dick was formerly employed in the Dolphin Program. An additional unlikely circumstance is that Dick's son-in-law is a Navy Chief and is responsible for the maintenance of the squadron of C-130 aircraft that do the hauling of the Navy SEALS and their dolphins to their assignments.
This dolphin pioneering effort was the beginning of the study of dolphin by either military or civilian organizations, so every move was carefully documented for future use. The program operated very successfully at Point Mugu for two years and then ran into serious environmental difficulties, in that the ocean water that was used for the training on the beachfront at Point Mugu was severely polluted. Almost all of the dolphins brought to Point Mugu for the program perished, and the program came to a halt after two years. Navy planners were not sure of the future of the dolphin research and application to special warfare.
And by the way, the dolphin program was restarted after a year or so of decision making by Navy Brass. It was moved to Hawaii, and after a few years took up its permanent home at the Navy's Space and Special Warfare Center in San Diego. It now houses all the dolphins, their trainers, and the Navy SEALS that are being trained to take these animals out on missions all over the world.
Through a series of unique circumstances at Point Mugu that ensued in the following months, DIck was offered an opportunity to go to graduate school at Texas A&M and pursue the goal of getting his doctorate in Physical Oceanography at Navy expense, hopefully to return to his dolphin research assignment at Pt. Mugu.
On his way to school in Bryan, Texas, he stopped in Houston to meet with his former Navy boss at Point Mugu, who introduced Dick into the world of the "man in space" program. Because of his skills learned in the Army of ground tracking systems and then at Point Mugu in avionics and air to air missiles and all the instrumentation that was used for the testing, he was offered a position of some importance in this program in Houston.
Network Operations Manager, NASA Manned Spacecraft Center. Dick was named the first civilian Network Controller for the entire ground tracking system including aircraft and ships that was spread world-wide for the space missions. So late in 1962, instead of going to school, he became a member of NASA, one of the original team that established the Manned Space Center in Houston, Texas.
ome base in Ventura, California.
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NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, TX
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| Mercury spacecraft atop an Air Force modified Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile blasting off at Cape Canaveral |
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NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, Texas. Throughout the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo Moon Programs, Dick managed the Mission Control Center and the World-wide Manned Space Flight Tracking Network and sat at the console in the Mission Control Room just to the right of the Flight Director.
The world-wide tracking system of NASA's consisted of 17+ tracking stations situated all over the world, and in addition, there were tracking ships deployed to different positions where land based stations were not located. A fleet of tracking and data relay aircraft were also deployed for each mission. Dick's job was to manange the operational readiness of this extensive tracking network and to report to the Flight Director the status of each.
Prior to each mission, Dick was required to become intimately involved in all the intricacies of each data link so as to be sure that the ground stations around the world would be compatible with those data transmission requirements. He also had to ensure that the communications systems were fully operational so as to transmit the data back to the Mission Control Center from the network stations.
Flight Controllers/Astronauts from Houston were sent to the tracking stations to do the control functions from those stations when the spacecraft passed over them. In order to do this, the operating consoles and all the data collection and display systems had to be employed at those stations to meet this requirement. Dick was responsible for seeing that the requirements sent to the Goddard Space Flight Center and to the Department of Defense, the owners of the tracking stations had been fully met and implemented at each of the tracking stations.
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NASA/Cal Tech Jet Propulsion Labs, Pasadena, CA
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| Deep Space Operations Center at the Cal Tech Jet Propulsion Labs |
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Following Apollo, Dick spent two years at NASA/Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Labs rebuilding their control center and massive computing facility preparing that Center for the control of spacecraft for the unmanned space programs of the future. More to come in this section as well as those that follow......
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Dick went on from the Jet Propulsion Labs after two years and took a position with TRW Space Systems Division in Redondo Beach, California. He was involved in developing large command and control facilities for the military which took advantage of all his past experience in both the military and with NASA/JPL. He was selected as the Program Director for TRW's effort to develop and manage the largest military command and control system ever attempted, the Worldwide Military Command and Control System, described as follows on Wilkipedia on the Internet:
"The Worldwide Military Command and Control System (or WWMCCS) was a military command and control system implemented for the command and control of the U.S. military forces around the world. It was created in the days following the Cuban missile crisis. WWMCCS (pronounced "wimex") was a system of systems that encompassed the elements of warning, communications, data collection and processing, executive decision making tools and supporting facilities.
Background
The worldwide deployment of U.S. forces required extensive long-range communications systems that can maintain contact with all of those forces at all times. To enable national command authorities to exercise effective command and control of their widely dispersed forces, a communications system was established to enable those authorities to disseminate their decisions to all subordinate units, under any conditions, within minutes.
Such a command and control system, WWMCCS, was created by Department of Defense Directive S-5100.30, titled "Concept of Operations of the Worldwide Military Command and Control System," which set the overall policies for the integration of the various command and control elements that were rapidly coming into being in the early 1960s.
As initially established, WWMCCS was an arrangement of personnel, equipment (including Automated Data Processing equipment and hardware), communications, facilities, and procedures employed in planning, directing, coordinating, and controlling the operational activities of U.S. military forces.
This system was intended to provide the means to receive warning and intelligence information, assign military missions, provide direction to the unified and specified commands, and support the Joint Chiefs of Staff in carrying out their responsibilities. "
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Dick was asked by the White House in the early 70’s to transfer to the National Cancer Institute as an Assistant to the Director. He was chosen for this position because of his experience and expertise in running major government programs. His role was to assist in the planning for a major thrust by the biomedical world in a fight against that dreaded disease. He traveled extensively helping develop major cancer centers in this country and abroad and developing the technical systems necessary to develop information flow between researchers and treatment specialists all over the world.
He left this challenging position after four years and returned to his familiar role as a Program Director in the Aerospace business sector. He retired from TRW Space Systems in the year 2000.
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