Charlie Brink - life in a chicken coop Published June 11, 2009 By Jim Eckles White Sands Historical Foundation and the White Sands Pioneer Group WHITE SANDS, N.M. -- After Charles Brink was shown chicken houses as the only available apartments in two different New Mexico towns during World War II, he knew it was time to settle down. That moment came on Aug. 21, 1945 when he was assigned to the newly created White Sands Proving Ground. It turned out to be a good move for Brink because he became a White Sands pioneer who had a very successful career highlighted by his creativity. When World War II started Brink was working for the New Mexico Highway Dept. He had started in 1939 on a survey gang and quickly learned the profession. In Feb. 1942, because of the war, the state couldn't find materials to build roads so they laid off many employees, Brink included. Brink and the rest of his gang were hired the next day to do survey work for the Army Corps of Engineers. New installations were springing up all over the sparsely populated Southwest and the Corps needed experienced surveyors to sight roads, runways, aprons, and buildings. Typically, Brink would spend a few months at a site and then receive orders for a new place. On one assignment to Marfa, Texas, he met Ruth Black and married her on June 6, 1943. In addition to meeting his wife in Marfa, he and everyone else worked very, very hard. He said they arrived on the Mitchell ranch in May 1942 and had four sections of ranch land to turn into an air base. In February 1943, the base graduated 200 cadets to fly twin-engine airplanes. While everyone worked hard the civilian employees like Brink often endured a stark existence. At first he said they were not allowed to eat at the bases they were building and the towns they were living in simply did not have the facilities or goods to take care of them. He remembered his suppers being peanuts or bacon and eggs, if he was lucky. Housing was almost non-existent. Brink recalled going to look at one chicken house that had cardboard on the walls for wallpaper. There was no bathroom -- the outhouse was nearby -- and the only water in the coop was from a faucet in the middle of the floor. His wife was not amused when the owner suggested she get a washtub for bathing. In 1944, Brink was assigned to the Alamogordo Army Air Field, now Holloman. Late in the year he was given a mysterious assignment. The reason for the work did not become clear until August 1945. He was told to go north through Mockingbird Gap and he would meet a group of engineers north of the pass. When Brink got there he did surveying work for roads, a few small structures, shelters and a tower that everyone thought would be a radio tower. Details were sketchy and no one knew exactly why they were doing the work. After the work, the engineers were reassigned elsewhere. Brink went to Santa Fe to work on a hospital and then to Fort Wingate to work on outdoor storage facilities for ordnance. One morning in July -- the 16th to be exact -- Brink and others in Gallup heard and felt the shockwave caused by some huge explosion. The personnel all thought a storage igloo at Wingate had exploded. When the workers arrived that morning they asked the guard where the accident had taken place. They did not believe his response that there had been none so they drove around checking every igloo. Later, of course, Brink learned of the first atomic bomb test at Trinity Site on the morning of July 16 and that he had helped survey the test site. Brink moved to White Sands from Fort Wingate. He and his wife were glad to settle down in Las Cruces and in 1946 Brink transferred from the Corps to White Sands for a permanent job offered by Col. Turner with the old Technical Operations division. Brink remembers WSPG Brink missed being a native of the Southwest by less than a year. He was born Nov. 13, 1905 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His family moved to Tucson a year later when his father developed tuberculosis. His father died when Charlie was eight and his mother eventually remarried. The family ended up in Taos where they ran the Grandview Hotel. From Taos, Brink went to work for the highway department. When Brink drove onto White Sands for the first time it wasn't much more than a camp. The access road left Highway 70 near the pass and wound around down past the Cox ranch. There were a few old wooden CCC barracks buildings, a number of tents and a missile hanger. The Army blockhouse was under construction and Brink worked laying out lines from water wells at Condron Field, power lines, the new main access road to Highway 70 and Nike Blvd. He says it was a hot and dirty place and you had to be careful of the rattlesnakes. The mess hall was a tent with Italian prisoners of war doing the cooking. He remembers for a couple of days there was a rack of dead rattlesnakes at the entrance to the mess hall and you could pick your snake and have the cooks fry it for you. Prisoners of war were also used elsewhere in the area. Brink distinctly remembers prisoners picking cotton in the Mesilla Valley. Eventually, Brink's work took him uprange as a good road was needed for recovering rockets that impacted north of Highway 70. At first the plan was to run directly north out of Army Launch #1 (LC-33). Brink says two bulldozers sinking completely out of sight under the muck of Lake Lucero changed that idea. As far as he knows the machinery is still under the lakebed. Initially Range Road 7 was a dirt road that made for miserable travel. The proving ground requested money to blacktop the road and the Pentagon sent a Col. Wilson out to look it over. Brink and Herb Karsch took Wilson all the way to North Oscura Peak and then into Carrizozo for the night. Brink said Wilson, an Easterner, loved it. He couldn't believe how far he could see from the top of the Oscuras and he claimed the steakhouse in Carrizozo served the best steak he had ever eaten. The money came through for the road. In addition to surveying and engineering facilities, Brink was an inventive employee. During early missile firings he and other technicians would haul heavy and expensive surveying instruments to observation areas. Their job was to watch for the smoke of the rocket hitting the ground and call in the azimuth angle (north is 0 degrees, east is 90 degrees, south is 180 degrees, etc.) so the impact point could be plotted on a map for the recovery crew. Brink and two co-workers, Huffmeyer and Trujillo, devised a very simple and inexpensive sighting device that could be permanently mounted at each observation point. Anyone could go out and use the devices. Later he showed his inventiveness again when he suggested a better way to plot the locations of submunitions when dispensed from a missile. Originally, the range built a grid on the ground using stakes and string. After every mission they had to go out and measure each projectile in relation to the grid. Brink says it was a time consuming and wasteful to rig the grid each time and do the measurements. He suggested they put in a single survey point in the target area and simply survey the impact spots and plot them on maps later. This was adopted and is still used today. Brink retired from White Sands in 1972. He said he enjoyed being known as one of the first employees at White Sands. He liked his work, made many friends and didn't have to live in a chicken coop. Brink and his wife lived in Las Cruces in the house they built in the early 1950s "out in a cotton field." Now it is part of an older and very shady, very comfortable neighborhood.