KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY: CSM SHARES LOVE OF FAMILY AND CLASSIC CARS

For Sergeant Major Andrew Larkin, 898th Brigade Engineer Battalion, 81st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, restoring and protecting history is part of what he loves about the Guard.

“I remember when we were up in Northport helping with fires a few years ago, they mentioned they wanted to restore an old building for a new visitor center,” Larkin said. “I told them about our unit and what we do and the Innovative Readiness Training program and we were able to help them restore the old building.”

As a long-time member of the 176th Engineer Company, Larkin and the unit would often remodel and restore older facilities, updating them and giving them new life. In his personal life, that love of restoring and renewing happens in his garage under the hood of an automobile.

“I have always loved cars, restoring them, working on them and I have passed that love down to my son,” said Larkin.

This past October, Larkin was reminded of that love for family and automobiles during a week-long road trip to New Mexico to pick up a piece of his family’s history, his uncle’s 1956 Chevrolet Bel-Air, lovingly known as “Ol’ Blue.”

“My great uncle Lloyd Barlow bought this 1956 Chevy Bel Air sedan in Fort Collins, Colorado on March 12, 1956. It wasn’t anything special, just a rig to get him back and forth from wherever he was working,” said Larkin. “From his telling, he was working in Texas and the Dakotas at the time. Ol’ Blue and Lloyd got to know each other pretty well on the highways of middle America. I guess the car grew on him.”

For Larkin the story of his Uncle Lloyd’s beloved car is one shared by so many families. Classic car lovers often can point to that one vehicle that a relative owned and say to themselves, ‘I wish I had that car, it was so beautiful.’

“I thought it was the neatest car. I even built a model car of a 56 Chevy to give him for Christmas when I was a teenager,” said Larkin. “He took Ol’ Blue to car shows, golfing, cruised it around Albuquerque, and the occasional long road trip until he was 90 years old.”

It isn’t hard to see why Larkin would fall in love with the classic light blue Bel-Air. When the car was re-designed in 1955, Chevy dubbed it the “Hot One” in their advertising campaign. From 1955 to 1957 the reasonably priced mid-size sedan was highly sought after by road trip enthusiasts looking to travel down Route 66 or the Pacific Coast Highway. In 1973 the Bel-Air was featured in the movie American Graffiti and today is still considered one of the most popular classic muscle cars.

“[In] 2021, I got a call from my Dad that Lloyd is in poor health and wants to give me the car. I was humbled and thankful that he would want to keep the car in the family,” said Larkin. “Things didn’t go as planned and we left Ol’ Blue with Lloyd and parted ways with my parents on a plane.”

Larkin’s uncle began suffering from dementia, which has begun to impair his memory and thought process. But Larkin knew how important keeping Ol’ Blue in the family was to his family.

“I stayed in contact with Lloyd over this last year, and while he is in a coherent state, we can talk about old times, family, and forgiveness,” said Larkin.

This past summer Lloyd’s family made the difficult decision to move him into an assisted living center, and was ready to pass Ol’ Blue along to Larkin. So in October, Larkin and his wife Katie traveled down to New Mexico and started the journey of taking Ol’ Blue to his next home.

The Larkins and Ol’ Blue traveled through the states of New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Oregon and Washington taking in some of the scenery, stopping at local restaurants and talking with people at every stop about their new set of wheels.

Now at its new home, Larkin says it is just a matter of time before Ol’ Blue starts making routine visits to Camp Murray. He hopes that seeing the car around the base will let those that work at the installation see him and other leaders in a new light.

“Each of us bring a different flavor to the National Guard. Different backgrounds, cultures, civilian employment, experience, personal interests, and hobbies,” Larkin said. “I believe it’s important for leaders to be human with those we are responsible for, and to share what goes on in our personal lives outside of drill and annual training. Finding shared interests in our hobbies is one way to do that.”

For the first time in nearly three years, employees supporting the State Emergency Operations Center are working under a Level 3- Monitoring activation level. Personnel at the Emergency Management Division made the decision to bring the SEOC to its lowest activation level following the around-the-clock state response to COVID-19 – which resulted in the longest activation for a single event in our state’s history. Prior to the global pandemic, the longest activation of the SEOC occurred following the State Route 530 landslide in April 2014. The nearly three-year activation at either a Level 1 or Level 2 is unprecedented and during that time, employees have come and gone through retirements, promotions or new hirings, with many new employees never experiencing the SEOC in normal operations. Along with COVID-19, the state in the last three years also responded to catastrophic wild fires, civil unrest, winter floods and snow storms, election security threats, an infestation of the highly-invasive European green crab, an outbreak of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, and the Mpox virus.