John Yantis

Pre-A&M

I was born and mostly raised in Brownwood, Texas, which is 16 miles north of the geographic center of the state. I was the first member of the fourth generation of both my father's and my mother's families in Brownwood -- there is a fifth generation there now. My father's family was in banking and ranching, and my mother's family was in insurance, so I spent about a third of my free time in an office, a third out in the country, and the other third in various parts of the Boy Scout program.

If it could be done in Boy Scouts, I did it -- Eagle with Bronze Palm, Explorer Post President, Order of the Arrow, National Jamboree (1964), Pan-American Jamboree (Rio de Janeiro), World Jamboree (1967), Philmont, Charles L. Sommers Canoe Base, summer at Camp Billy Gibbons every year, and weekend campouts almost every month. I graduated as Valedictorian of Brownwood High School, participating on the golf team, photographer for the annual, President of the National Honor Society, and recipient of BHS's first Oscar (lead actor in "Our Town").

When I contemplated college, I had a hard time deciding. One grandfather graduated from Rice, the valedictorian the year before me was at Rice and was recruiting me, and I had been accepted there, but after a visit to the campus, I realized that I'd have to study 25 hours a day to make a C average. I had a cousin at Texas Tech, and he was able to party close to 25 hours a day and keep an A average, even though he was a mediocre student in high school. My father is an Aggie (class of 1944), but he never pressured me to pick A&M.

I guess what made the decision for me was that I'd become interested in the field of Engineering, and fascinated by Atomic Energy (I had earned the first Boy Scout Atomic Energy Merit Badge awarded in the state). Although there was a strong program at tu (which I had visited during their "high school science days"), A&M had the only undergraduate Nuclear Engineering program in the nation. At that point, I decided that if I went to A&M, I could study half as much as I'd have to at Rice, party half as much as I could at Tech, and come out with decent grades.

Oh, well, what do you expect from an 18-year-old?!

Once the decision was made to attend A&M, the Corps was pretty much an automatic. I remember standing in a line in a classroom on campus waiting to sign up for the Corps -- I knew that I needed to be in an engineering outfit, and I thought I might want to fly (since my father was in the Army during WWII, I knew enough to pick the Air Force!), but I had no idea what outfit I wanted to join.

Fortunately for me, the guy in line ahead of me was Eddie McCann -- he already had an Air Force Scholarship, was going to major in engineering, was convinced that Squadron 11 was the best engineering/USAF outfit, and had no problem convincing me to be in that
outfit, too.

Military

I graduated with our class in December of 1972, and by the middle of January I was in Air Force Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT) at Shepherd Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas. It was like "old home week" -- Wayne and Bobbie were already there (he graduated on time), Captain Rusty Boggess was the Student Squadron Commander, and Bill Moore was a T-38 Instructor. In addition, Jimmy Sims, Jim Summers, and Larry Talafuse from '72 were in my class.

We had 12 Americans and 8 Germans in the class -- it was actually a Luftwaffe program, and USAF filled any slots that the Germans couldn't. Most of my instructors were Luftwaffe pilots. I finished second in the class, and picked an F-4 to Luke AFB, Arizona (I would have finished third but Talafuse got sick and didn't finish). At that time, USAF sent a "block" of aircraft assignments down to each graduating UPT class, and the class members, in descending order, got to pick their assignment -- the guy who finished first got his choice out of the entire block, the guy who finished second then got his choice, and so on until the guy who finished last got his "choice" of the only assignment remaining.

Since the blocks had a mixture of fighter, trainer, transport, tanker, and bomber aircraft, and since the culture dictated that flying fighters was more desirable than flying trainers, transports, or tankers, and that anything was better than flying bombers, the assignments went pretty much in that order. That meant that the USAF organization that owned the bombers and the tankers, Strategic Air Command (SAC), had mostly been getting pilots that graduated near the bottom of their UPT classes (except for weirdos like Lutz, who actually requested a bomber!).

In January of 1974, SAC convinced USAF to change the UPT assignment process to one of random selection, and all the assignments for my class were cancelled. Our new assignments were picked out of a hat. I drew a KC-135 tanker, and Rusty stepped in and declared that if I had to be in SAC, that he'd work things so I got a good location -- there were several tankers in our block, and he made sure that mine was the one at Travis AFB, California (versus Minot, North Dakota, or someplace equally as undesirable to me).

I heard that the guy who drew "my" F-4 ended up being washed out of training at Luke -- everybody knew that he couldn't handle formation flying, but everybody also knew that he'd finish far enough down in the class that he couldn't possibly end up in fighters... That was my first experience with the thought processes of the U.S. Government, and in the succeeding 30-something years, I've never seen anything from it that I'd consider even slightly more intelligent.

But, as they say, you try to make lemonade from the lemons life hands you. I had a great time flying tankers all over the world, getting paid for doing things that most people would pay to do, and seeing things that most people would pay to see. And being stationed at Travis AFB, half-way between San Francisco and Sacramento, on a base owned by the Military Airlift Command, made being in SAC bearable, if not enjoyable. I went to night school and got my Masters in Systems Management from the University of Southern California (used my GRE scores to get into Mensa), and I partied a lot with all the single pilots and nurses at Travis.

I even convinced one of those nurses to be my wife. Mary Ann and I were married in 1976 in Brownwood when we both could get leave. We didn't honeymoon for a couple of months, until we could get some more leave. I bailed out of the Air Force in May of 1979 because the war was over, I was spending more time behind a desk than in the cockpit, and the airlines were hiring.

Out of the Military

I got my civilian flight instructor's license, and taught flying at the local aero club while I went to schools on the GI Bill for my Airline Transport Pilot and Turbojet Flight Engineer licenses. Our daughter, Robyn, was born at Travis in September of 1979, and Mary Ann got out of the service at the end of the year.

I was offered a Flight Engineer job with Continental Airlines, based in Los Angeles, early in 1980, but then the Arab oil embargo caused them to withdraw the offer. In fact, most of my peers who had been recently hired on with the airlines immediately turned into real estate and insurance agents. Oh, well, time to make more lemonade.

As a member of SAC, I had had the opportunity to ensure the security of North America by sitting in a hole in the ground about one week a month, so I had decided to use the time prductively. After I finished my Masters, I decided to teach myself something about the emerging field of hobby computers, and being a few miles from what was to become Silicon Valley, I had a lot of resources.

I bought my first Apple from Steve Wozniak (one of the company's founders), and I became active in the San Francisco Apple Corps. There I was able to hob-nob with virtually all the people that started the personal computer revolution. I had several articles published in the hobbyist magazines of the time, and had one commercial piece of software in distribution: the very first database management program for the Apple ][. Mary Ann is originally from rural northeast Louisiana, and we both decided that California in the early 1980s wasn't the place we wanted to raise our children.

So I said yes when Texas Instruments offered me employment as a programmer in Lubbock, Texas. I started there in November of 1980, but as soon as the management of the Home Computer Division became aware of my background and contacts in the personal computer field, they decided that they could get more software if they put me to work convincing all the commercial programmers I knew to convert their existing programs to the TI Home Computer.

Within a year, I was Manager of Third Party Software, then moved up to Manager of Advanced Development and Strategy the next year. Once again, I was being paid to do things most people would pay to do, going places most people would pay to go, and associating with people that most other people would pay just to see (remember all those TI Home Computer TV commercials featuring Bill Cosby? I was the TI technical adviser for them, and got to spend a lot of time with the Cos.). We stayed in Lubbock 3 years, and our son, Thomas, was born there in 1981.

But, alas, in 1983 the business went sour, and TI pulled out of Lubbock. Time for more lemonade.

From Lubbock to Lewisville

After I found jobs for my 53 people, and turned out the lights in Lubbock, I decided to try business development for the TI Defense Business. Talk about culture shock! We moved to Lewisville, Texas (half-way between Dallas and Denton) in 1984.

I learned how the US Government buys military hardware, software, and services, and I spent a lot more time in the Pentagon as a contractor than I ever had as a serviceman. TI had 8 plant sites in the area between Dallas, Denton, and McKinney, and I ended up working in 5 of them over the next 15 years (some more than once!). Eventually, I was in charge of all competitive proposals to the US Government from TI Defense. Our kids grew up and finished high school, Mary Ann earned her Masters and PhD degrees, and became a professor of nursing, first at Tarrant County Junior College, then at TCU, and finally at Baylor University School of Nursing in Dallas.

I became active in local government, and was a City Councilman, and Chairman of the Planning and Zoning Commission for 6 years. When Thomas started Boy Scouts, I left City government to associate with people who had some chance of actually growing up. I was a Scoutmaster for a 53-boy troop for almost 10 years, then moved on to the District level, where I have served as the trainer for the adult leaders of over 30 troops for 5 years. Mary Ann and I helped start a new Methodist Church, which has grown from meeting in an elementary school cafeteria in 1984 to serving over 3,500 members in a multi-building campus in Flower Mound, Texas.

We both have taught Sunday School, I sang in the choir, ushered, ran the audio and lighting systems for services, and served on the Administrative Board. Life was good, so it must be time for more lemons.

Raytheon

There was consolidation going on in the Defense Contractor environment, and TI decided to put all their eggs in the semiconductor basket. So they sold off the Defense business to Raytheon in 1995. That didn't mean much to me -- the only thing that changed was my business card and the name on the building.

That is, until Raytheon bought Hughes Defense, and decided in October of 1998 that 16,000 people had to go. So, 18 months short of being eligible for retirement, I found myself unemployed with one child at TCU ($$$) and one a year away from college. The good news is that the stock market was roaring, and my investments were, too.

I decided that I didn't have to have much income to declare myself semi-retired. A friend of Mary Ann's family had gone into stock market day trading full time, and I'd always wanted to see what that was about, so I spent a week with him in Louisiana checking it out. I knew I had a lot to learn, but it looked like I could make a decent living doing that.

I used the education stipend Raytheon gave me as part of my severance package to go to a day-trading school, and then went full time in May of 1999. Our son, Thomas, graduated High School that month, and announced (somewhat to my surprise) that he was going to major in business at Texas A&M. I strongly encouraged him to be in the Corps, and he agreed. The lemonade was sweet.

The Market

My market forecast was pretty accurate for about 2 years -- I could, in fact, make a decent living day trading. The business got a bad rap, however, from the news media for two reasons:

1) they didn't understand that people who sit at their home computers and place one or two trades a day through an on-line brokerage weren't in the same business as those of us who sat in an office making as many as a hundred trades a day directly on the exchanges, and
2) they didn't understand that the few idiots who didn't practice risk management and who lost everything they had, weren't in any way representative of the rest of us, who were serious professionals making pretty good money. Life was good again. Hear it coming?

The market soured in the first part of 2001. It wasn't that I was losing money, I just couldn't find situations that had enough profit potential without more risk than I was willing to take. Our daughter, Robyn, graduated from TCU in May of 2001 and passed the State Boards to become a Registered Dietician.

I hung in the business through that summer, waiting for the results of the actions that the Federal Reserve was taking to turn things around. When things hadn't gotten better by August, I decided that we were in for at least 2 years of bad trading conditions, and cashed out. When September 11 happened, I added a year to my forecast, and started looking for employment.

Lockheed

In October of 2001, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics won the competition to produce the Joint Strike Fighter, and went on a hiring frenzy. It turns out that they also needed people like me who know how to sell military hardware, software, and services to the US and foreign governments.

I started with LM Aero at the old Carswell AFB in Ft. Worth, Texas, early in 2002, and it felt like "old home week" again. Within a month, I had made contact with my cousin, Bland Smith '72 who is an F-16 test pilot, John Hill '72, and Larry Talafuse '72 (who splits time between Denver and Ft. Worth). Lutz (who works for Boeing, a subcontractor on the LM Aero F-22 fighter) even drops in every now and then to deliver avionics updates.

Within a year I was responsible for the competitive proposal process, tools, and training at three LM Aero sites -- Ft. Worth; Marietta, GA; and Palmdale, CA (the Skunk Works). Robyn moved to Portland, Oregon, where she's a clinical dietician at Adventist Hospital. Thomas graduated from A&M (on time!) in May of 2003, and started work as a Credit Manager with Wells Fargo Financial in Spring, Texas (on I-45 abeam Houston Intercontinental Airport).

Mary Ann survived breast cancer, and, if everything goes as promised, will be granted tenure by early 2004.

Uh oh, life is good again!