Discovering The Mature Lifestyle
Golden Valley vet spends 33 years giving back Page 5
Veterans May Issue
May 15, 2015
Navy provided Fridley Vietnam vet with an education BY SUE WEBBER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Bob Locker remembers hearing about the Navy when he was 7 or 8 years old. “I always thought of the excitement of going different places,” he said. “I joined the Navy and was put into aviation electronics,” he said. “I didn’t even get on a ship.” But 10 years in the Navy during the Vietnam War – from 1959 to 1968 – gave Bob Locker exactly what he was looking for: an education. “It worked just great for me,” he said. Locker, a Fridley resident and commander of the 425-member Fridley American Legion Post, said he enlisted in the Navy because it guaranteed schooling. “In the military, if you’re lucky, you get what you want and like,” Locker said. “I was very, very lucky. I got an aviation education in Tennessee. Because I was honor man there (an award for a student selected by his instructors and classmates), I got to pick what I wanted to go into. I chose to teach pilots to fly. Then I was honor man again and went to another school in Pensacola for four years to study aviation. I was Sailor of the Year one year in Pensacola.” Then he was in Memphis, instructing new students. “During the Vietnam War, there was an awful lot of activity,” Locker said. “There was a lot of bad publicity. You didn’t want to discuss the service with people.” Bob Locker was district commander of the American Legion in After his years in the South, Locker, a native of 2013, overseeing 54 legion posts. (Submitted photo) central Iowa, said he and his wife, Sandy, “wanted to get back up North where people learn in the win- GI Bill. Locker continued his quest for knowledge, attending college at night. ter and play in the summer.” “I stayed with the electronics I learned all of my They built a home in Fridley in 1968, using the
career,” Locker said. He worked for Control Data for 11 years and then for a number of small companies, using the electronics background he acquired in the service. Locker’s work as Legion commander amounts to a full-time job at the local and district levels, he said. In 2012-13, he was commander of the 10th District, comprising 54 posts in an area from Bloomington to Duluth. “I tried to visit as many as I could,” he said. One of his personal projects was to help build a new steel barn on a 610-acre property on North Long Lake, north of Brainerd, that the Legion acquired. Earle Brown, Minnesota’s first highway patrol chief in 1935, asked the Legislature to put together a safety camp centered on school patrols, and then to find a permanent location for it in 1948. After many years of use by thousands of young people under the supervision of highway patrol instructors, the barn had to be torn down. Locker’s project was to find volunteers to get it revitalized. “We raised almost $1 million,” Locker said. “It will be dedicated in September.” He’s also served as adjutant and first vice president of his local post. Locker currently is community service chair at the state level. “I spend lots of time at the state Capitol working on veterans’ items,” Locker said. “They’re always trying to take something away from veterans. We go with our caps on. I was just there a month ago because Sen. Alice Johnson asked me to speak on a bill to allow Purple Heart recipients to use state parks for free. “We spend a lot of time to keep it in [legislators’] EDUCATION - TO PAGE 7