SGT. Rene Lizee
U.S. Air Force – Radio Technician
Strategic Air Command
Andrews Air Force Base
Nov. ’67 – Nov. ‘71
U.S. Air Force – Radio Technician
Strategic Air Command
Andrews Air Force Base
Nov. ’67 – Nov. ‘71
“I’m a firm believer that you don’t have to go to college. It’s not the end of the world…”
Rene Lizee was born March 5th, 1948, in the small Connecticut town of Willimantic. At that time Willimantic was a typical New England town where industrial companies employed most of the town’s residents. Willimantic’s predominant employer was the American Thread Company. Both of Rene’s parents immigrated to the U.S. from Sherbrook, Canada. His father worked as a lineman for the local utility company back before there were bucket trucks. He was quite adept at climbing tall utility poles. Rene’s mother was a very busy homemaker raising two daughters and seven sons. Rene was the eighth of the nine children. “My mother just had babies and raised kids. She never had a driver’s license. But you know, having nine kids is a lot of work”.
Rene’s father completed only the fourth or fifth grade, but he was the kind of guy who could figure things out and he could get things done. “It’s just amazing what he accomplished with such little education”. His father was a good carpenter and could handle electrical and plumbing work. “My father was a very talented guy. Self-taught”.
One day a friend asked Rene’s father if he could fix his wristwatch. Unlike today, watches were used only to tell time. However, they were very intricate and had numerous moving pieces inside the casing. His father figured out how to fix the watch and then another friend asked him to fix his watch. Word spread and soon he had a viable moonlight business. The business grew so much that his dad quit his job as a lineman and opened a storefront in downtown Willimantic repairing watches. Soon he was also repairing jewelry and before long he had a thriving full-service jewelry store. Two of the boys were worked full time in the store and one daughter was keeping the books.
The Lizee’s were a devout Catholic family, and the children all attended Catholic school for grades K through 8. Two daughters attended the all-girls Baltic Academy run by a Catholic order of nuns. One of his sisters decided she wanted to join the convent but just before she was to take her vows, she reconsidered, left the convent and went on to marry and have three children.
“My parents felt that out of seven boys, one had to be a priest. Well, I was chosen. At the end of eighth grade, it was decided for me that I would go to the seminary”. Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts had recently purchased a rundown, former hospital in the small New York town of Cassadaga just 50 miles south of Buffalo. The tuition was $500 per year which was a manageable payment. “It was affordable because they were going to use the students as workers because there was a lot of work to be done. You were assigned to a brother who was either a carpenter, electrician or plumber. They would rotate you through these job skills…it was sort of like trade school”. Rene didn’t know it at the time, but these skills would come in handy later in life.
Despite the training in the various trades, the school’s primary purpose was to prepare its students to become priests. The school was very small with between 150 and 175 students. Cassadaga was located on the edge of Lake Erie and “there was a lot of snow”. By the end of his second year Rene was homesick and wanted to leave. “They managed to talk me into staying for the next two years”, but along the way Rene discovered girls and the priesthood went out the window. He graduated in 1966 with only 17 of the 45 boys he started with. “Bernie Schulick was the only one that became an ordained priest”.
Rene had developed an interest in radios and electronics. “I subscribed to Popular Electronics, a magazine way back then. I liked building little things and I built myself my own little computer before computers were even a thing”. When he graduated from high school he enrolled in the electronics program at Windham Technical School back in Connecticut.
None of the Lizee boys went to college but all served their country. The family turned out two midshipman, one dogface and four airmen. In 1967 the draft was taking all of the men it could get to support the war effort in Vietnam. Rene completed his first year of electronics school in June of ’67 and then learned he would be drafted. Rene wanted to serve his country but hoped not to see combat. “I didn’t want to get drafted and put in the Marines or Army, so I went to see the (Air Force) recruiter in Willimantic”. Rene told them, “I’m willing to volunteer but I really want electronics”. They told Rene there were plenty of openings in the electronics field and in November of ‘67 Rene found himself on a bus bound for bootcamp at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.
After a 30-day bootcamp Rene waited for his Individual Advanced Training (AIT) orders to report for electronics training. When Rene’s orders arrived, they were for Military Police training. He tried to explain he was promised orders for an electronics role, but he was told, “it says here (in his military file) that you are color blind. You can’t be color blind and be in electronics. You have to be able to tell what color the wires are”. Rene tried to explain he wasn’t color blind and finally Uncle Sam relented and sent him to a doctor to take a test for colorblindness. He took the test and the doctor looked at him and said, “you’re not color blind”!
In December of 1967 Rene received orders to electronics AIT in Biloxi, Mississippi. Luckily for Rene his three-month AIT training would miss the hot and humid summer months of Biloxi. At the end of this training, he received orders to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland working on aircraft radio maintenance. For two and one half years Rene was part of Strategic Air Command (SAC) maintaining radio equipment on B-52 Bombers and KC135 refueling tankers.
In August of 1970 Rene received orders to Vietnam. Before he could deploy, he needed to attend Cryptological School in Fort Walton Beach, Florida for three months. At that time the military would only send servicemen and women to Vietnam if they had at least nine months remaining on their commitment. While he was in school Rene did some quick math and realized he would have only eight and a half months remaining in his commitment when he graduated from school. Rene kept his head down, completed the course and when he received his orders to Vietnam, he pointed out that he had less than nine months remaining in his commitment.
The Air Force, realizing they had made a mistake, quickly offered Rene a $14,000 bonus to re-enlist for three more years. That was quite a sum of money at that time and Rene thought about it long and hard, but in the end, he wanted to get on with his life and find a job. “So, they sent me to Westover Air Force Base in Springfield, Massachusetts where I served the rest of my remaining eight months. When he arrived at Westover, he was joined by his brother Richard who went on to serve 20 years with the Air Force and his brother Norman who served four years like Rene.
At Westover Rene was still part of SAC. When he arrived, they were looking for someone to be on Flight Status, which paid an extra $100/month. As part of Flight Status Rene would be part of the aircraft crew on training flights in case there was a malfunction with the equipment while the plane was in flight. “You had to fly a minimum of eight hours each month in order to qualify for the $100. Rene volunteered and completed the additional high-altitude training required be part of the crew. It was an eye-opening experience to fly on the SAC aircraft. Rene was part of the B52 bomber crew during low level practice bombing runs. He also got a very close look at what midair refueling looked like from the back of a KC135. “We were so close I could see if the pilot in the fighter shaved that day”.
Rene left the Air Force and returned to Connecticut where he landed a job with Hamilton Standard. “I worked for engineers that designed things. They gave me part and plans, and they said build this thing”. While he was at Hamilton Standard his brother married Sue Zurmuhlen. At the wedding Rene met Sues sister Sandi. Both Rene and Sandi were dating other people at the time, but “that all changed very quickly”. A romance blossomed and within a year the couple was married in 1972.
Rene never lost his interested in working with computers. On his nightly drive home Rene listened to commercials on his car radio for Control Data Corporation (CDC). ‘Become a computer technician’ the announcer said. Rene was ready for a change. He and Sandi talked it over and decided he should pursue his dream. Rene enrolled at CDC and the couple moved to Coral Gables, Florida where Rene would attend a nine-month CDC school.
In the eighth month of the nine-month program Sandi’s mother found an advertisement in the Hartford, Connecticut newspaper for a computer technician working with CDC. “That’s the company I’m going to school with”! Rene flew home for an interview and was hired.
His first assignment was with a CDC client, Combustion Engineering (CE). CE designed bridges and he worked on CE’s mainframe computers used to design the bridges. At the time he was working on the CDC 7600, designed by Seymour Cray. The CDC 7600 was the supercomputer of its time. “Back in the day…working on mainframes, integrated circuits were just becoming a popular thing. It was mostly transistors…not vacuum tubes…I don’t go back that far”! Rene recalled the computers taking up entire floors within the CE building. The computers sat on raised floors, roughly two feet off the floor. This allowed for cool air to circulate and keep the computers from overheating and provide space to run the required electric cabling to connect the machines.
CDC manned the data center 24 hours a day and guaranteed a two-hour response time if the computers went down. Every other week Rene would be on call. “I’d get a call at two or three o’clock in the morning that the computers had gone down. Maybe a memory failure. The only way you could troubleshoot was with an oscilloscope. You had schematics to go by, and you knew where there should be a signal”. That assignment lasted 17 years. Rene and Sandi rented an apartment in Willimantic and began looking for a starter house for them and their newborn daughter Shannon. In 1974 they purchased their starter home, and they are still living there today. In 1975 their son Jeff was born.
After the Combustion Engineering assignment ended Rene worked out of CDC’s Glastonbury, Connecticut office as a field technician servicing multiple insurance companies. After 19 years in that role Rene was moved into a management position. He had a team of 35 people to manage, but he wasn’t happy. Rene was a doer, not a manager. In 2010, Rene asked for a severance package and retired.
Rene, like his father, is a man who likes to accomplish things. In retirement, his friend Jim Raynor talked him into volunteering for the Storrs Center Cemetery Association. The cemetery dates back to the Civil War and when Rene arrived, he found 166 years of history recorded on 3x5 index cards stored in small file cabinets. “I came from the computer world…so I immediately jumped on creating a data base and I put everything online”. It took Rene over a year but, now you can find information about anyone buried on the 17 acres of Storrs Cemetery on the internet. The cemetery is still active, and Rene also sells plots and makes arrangements for burials.
Rene is also putting his four years of training in carpentry, electrical and plumbing to good use. “I hire out as a handyman”. A local dentist owns several rental properties, and Rene manages those properties for him. “I get calls…the toilets won’t flush; the lights won’t come on…”. Rene also does kitchen and bathroom renovations and will “add or remove a bathroom”. Rene lives on a small cul-de-sac, and his neighbors are all professors at the University of Connecticut. “I’m the go to person if anyone needs anything fixed” in their homes.
Rene has a knack for meeting people, getting involved and getting things done. He recalled when Radio Shack, the go-to electronics retailer of its time that eventually went out of business, sold early home computers. “The TRS 80…it was a small computer, and you had a cassette recorder…to load the operating system every time you turned the computer on”. Rene was intrigued by this home computer since his job was to maintain large mainframe computers. “I’d like to meet other people who have these things. So, I created a user group”. The TRS 80 was introduced in the summer of 1977, long before the internet was imbedded in the fabric of everyday life. Creating a user group in 1977 was done by word of mouth and the user group exchanged ideas and information in person.
Rene learned Ken Dardick, a local family practitioner, had a TRS 80. Rene called him on the telephone and asked him if he would like to get together and exchange ideas and information. “We got to be good friends”. Rene recalled “we thought let’s meet some other people, so we started advertising and formed a user group. I had up to 15 people in my basement once a month…I showed them how to upgrade, add memory and we all shared knowledge”. “I remember my son had me go to school as a show and tell and I brought my TRS 80 in there and showed the kids how to use it”.
Rene and Sandi also spend time with their good friends and their two children and five grandchildren.
Rene Lizee is one of the 90% of military veterans who did not see combat. But without people like Rene executing the multitude of unsung jobs necessary to keep the other 10% downrange, there would be no military. After the military Rene blended back into the fabric of society, raised a family, volunteered in his community and set an example for others to follow. Rene, the priesthoods loss was everyone else’s gain. Thank you for your service.
“I love what I did with my life, all of the things that I got involved with and I don’t regret a minute…”
Rene Lizee was born March 5th, 1948, in the small Connecticut town of Willimantic. At that time Willimantic was a typical New England town where industrial companies employed most of the town’s residents. Willimantic’s predominant employer was the American Thread Company. Both of Rene’s parents immigrated to the U.S. from Sherbrook, Canada. His father worked as a lineman for the local utility company back before there were bucket trucks. He was quite adept at climbing tall utility poles. Rene’s mother was a very busy homemaker raising two daughters and seven sons. Rene was the eighth of the nine children. “My mother just had babies and raised kids. She never had a driver’s license. But you know, having nine kids is a lot of work”.
Rene’s father completed only the fourth or fifth grade, but he was the kind of guy who could figure things out and he could get things done. “It’s just amazing what he accomplished with such little education”. His father was a good carpenter and could handle electrical and plumbing work. “My father was a very talented guy. Self-taught”.
One day a friend asked Rene’s father if he could fix his wristwatch. Unlike today, watches were used only to tell time. However, they were very intricate and had numerous moving pieces inside the casing. His father figured out how to fix the watch and then another friend asked him to fix his watch. Word spread and soon he had a viable moonlight business. The business grew so much that his dad quit his job as a lineman and opened a storefront in downtown Willimantic repairing watches. Soon he was also repairing jewelry and before long he had a thriving full-service jewelry store. Two of the boys were worked full time in the store and one daughter was keeping the books.
The Lizee’s were a devout Catholic family, and the children all attended Catholic school for grades K through 8. Two daughters attended the all-girls Baltic Academy run by a Catholic order of nuns. One of his sisters decided she wanted to join the convent but just before she was to take her vows, she reconsidered, left the convent and went on to marry and have three children.
“My parents felt that out of seven boys, one had to be a priest. Well, I was chosen. At the end of eighth grade, it was decided for me that I would go to the seminary”. Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts had recently purchased a rundown, former hospital in the small New York town of Cassadaga just 50 miles south of Buffalo. The tuition was $500 per year which was a manageable payment. “It was affordable because they were going to use the students as workers because there was a lot of work to be done. You were assigned to a brother who was either a carpenter, electrician or plumber. They would rotate you through these job skills…it was sort of like trade school”. Rene didn’t know it at the time, but these skills would come in handy later in life.
Despite the training in the various trades, the school’s primary purpose was to prepare its students to become priests. The school was very small with between 150 and 175 students. Cassadaga was located on the edge of Lake Erie and “there was a lot of snow”. By the end of his second year Rene was homesick and wanted to leave. “They managed to talk me into staying for the next two years”, but along the way Rene discovered girls and the priesthood went out the window. He graduated in 1966 with only 17 of the 45 boys he started with. “Bernie Schulick was the only one that became an ordained priest”.
Rene had developed an interest in radios and electronics. “I subscribed to Popular Electronics, a magazine way back then. I liked building little things and I built myself my own little computer before computers were even a thing”. When he graduated from high school he enrolled in the electronics program at Windham Technical School back in Connecticut.
None of the Lizee boys went to college but all served their country. The family turned out two midshipman, one dogface and four airmen. In 1967 the draft was taking all of the men it could get to support the war effort in Vietnam. Rene completed his first year of electronics school in June of ’67 and then learned he would be drafted. Rene wanted to serve his country but hoped not to see combat. “I didn’t want to get drafted and put in the Marines or Army, so I went to see the (Air Force) recruiter in Willimantic”. Rene told them, “I’m willing to volunteer but I really want electronics”. They told Rene there were plenty of openings in the electronics field and in November of ‘67 Rene found himself on a bus bound for bootcamp at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.
After a 30-day bootcamp Rene waited for his Individual Advanced Training (AIT) orders to report for electronics training. When Rene’s orders arrived, they were for Military Police training. He tried to explain he was promised orders for an electronics role, but he was told, “it says here (in his military file) that you are color blind. You can’t be color blind and be in electronics. You have to be able to tell what color the wires are”. Rene tried to explain he wasn’t color blind and finally Uncle Sam relented and sent him to a doctor to take a test for colorblindness. He took the test and the doctor looked at him and said, “you’re not color blind”!
In December of 1967 Rene received orders to electronics AIT in Biloxi, Mississippi. Luckily for Rene his three-month AIT training would miss the hot and humid summer months of Biloxi. At the end of this training, he received orders to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland working on aircraft radio maintenance. For two and one half years Rene was part of Strategic Air Command (SAC) maintaining radio equipment on B-52 Bombers and KC135 refueling tankers.
In August of 1970 Rene received orders to Vietnam. Before he could deploy, he needed to attend Cryptological School in Fort Walton Beach, Florida for three months. At that time the military would only send servicemen and women to Vietnam if they had at least nine months remaining on their commitment. While he was in school Rene did some quick math and realized he would have only eight and a half months remaining in his commitment when he graduated from school. Rene kept his head down, completed the course and when he received his orders to Vietnam, he pointed out that he had less than nine months remaining in his commitment.
The Air Force, realizing they had made a mistake, quickly offered Rene a $14,000 bonus to re-enlist for three more years. That was quite a sum of money at that time and Rene thought about it long and hard, but in the end, he wanted to get on with his life and find a job. “So, they sent me to Westover Air Force Base in Springfield, Massachusetts where I served the rest of my remaining eight months. When he arrived at Westover, he was joined by his brother Richard who went on to serve 20 years with the Air Force and his brother Norman who served four years like Rene.
At Westover Rene was still part of SAC. When he arrived, they were looking for someone to be on Flight Status, which paid an extra $100/month. As part of Flight Status Rene would be part of the aircraft crew on training flights in case there was a malfunction with the equipment while the plane was in flight. “You had to fly a minimum of eight hours each month in order to qualify for the $100. Rene volunteered and completed the additional high-altitude training required be part of the crew. It was an eye-opening experience to fly on the SAC aircraft. Rene was part of the B52 bomber crew during low level practice bombing runs. He also got a very close look at what midair refueling looked like from the back of a KC135. “We were so close I could see if the pilot in the fighter shaved that day”.
Rene left the Air Force and returned to Connecticut where he landed a job with Hamilton Standard. “I worked for engineers that designed things. They gave me part and plans, and they said build this thing”. While he was at Hamilton Standard his brother married Sue Zurmuhlen. At the wedding Rene met Sues sister Sandi. Both Rene and Sandi were dating other people at the time, but “that all changed very quickly”. A romance blossomed and within a year the couple was married in 1972.
Rene never lost his interested in working with computers. On his nightly drive home Rene listened to commercials on his car radio for Control Data Corporation (CDC). ‘Become a computer technician’ the announcer said. Rene was ready for a change. He and Sandi talked it over and decided he should pursue his dream. Rene enrolled at CDC and the couple moved to Coral Gables, Florida where Rene would attend a nine-month CDC school.
In the eighth month of the nine-month program Sandi’s mother found an advertisement in the Hartford, Connecticut newspaper for a computer technician working with CDC. “That’s the company I’m going to school with”! Rene flew home for an interview and was hired.
His first assignment was with a CDC client, Combustion Engineering (CE). CE designed bridges and he worked on CE’s mainframe computers used to design the bridges. At the time he was working on the CDC 7600, designed by Seymour Cray. The CDC 7600 was the supercomputer of its time. “Back in the day…working on mainframes, integrated circuits were just becoming a popular thing. It was mostly transistors…not vacuum tubes…I don’t go back that far”! Rene recalled the computers taking up entire floors within the CE building. The computers sat on raised floors, roughly two feet off the floor. This allowed for cool air to circulate and keep the computers from overheating and provide space to run the required electric cabling to connect the machines.
CDC manned the data center 24 hours a day and guaranteed a two-hour response time if the computers went down. Every other week Rene would be on call. “I’d get a call at two or three o’clock in the morning that the computers had gone down. Maybe a memory failure. The only way you could troubleshoot was with an oscilloscope. You had schematics to go by, and you knew where there should be a signal”. That assignment lasted 17 years. Rene and Sandi rented an apartment in Willimantic and began looking for a starter house for them and their newborn daughter Shannon. In 1974 they purchased their starter home, and they are still living there today. In 1975 their son Jeff was born.
After the Combustion Engineering assignment ended Rene worked out of CDC’s Glastonbury, Connecticut office as a field technician servicing multiple insurance companies. After 19 years in that role Rene was moved into a management position. He had a team of 35 people to manage, but he wasn’t happy. Rene was a doer, not a manager. In 2010, Rene asked for a severance package and retired.
Rene, like his father, is a man who likes to accomplish things. In retirement, his friend Jim Raynor talked him into volunteering for the Storrs Center Cemetery Association. The cemetery dates back to the Civil War and when Rene arrived, he found 166 years of history recorded on 3x5 index cards stored in small file cabinets. “I came from the computer world…so I immediately jumped on creating a data base and I put everything online”. It took Rene over a year but, now you can find information about anyone buried on the 17 acres of Storrs Cemetery on the internet. The cemetery is still active, and Rene also sells plots and makes arrangements for burials.
Rene is also putting his four years of training in carpentry, electrical and plumbing to good use. “I hire out as a handyman”. A local dentist owns several rental properties, and Rene manages those properties for him. “I get calls…the toilets won’t flush; the lights won’t come on…”. Rene also does kitchen and bathroom renovations and will “add or remove a bathroom”. Rene lives on a small cul-de-sac, and his neighbors are all professors at the University of Connecticut. “I’m the go to person if anyone needs anything fixed” in their homes.
Rene has a knack for meeting people, getting involved and getting things done. He recalled when Radio Shack, the go-to electronics retailer of its time that eventually went out of business, sold early home computers. “The TRS 80…it was a small computer, and you had a cassette recorder…to load the operating system every time you turned the computer on”. Rene was intrigued by this home computer since his job was to maintain large mainframe computers. “I’d like to meet other people who have these things. So, I created a user group”. The TRS 80 was introduced in the summer of 1977, long before the internet was imbedded in the fabric of everyday life. Creating a user group in 1977 was done by word of mouth and the user group exchanged ideas and information in person.
Rene learned Ken Dardick, a local family practitioner, had a TRS 80. Rene called him on the telephone and asked him if he would like to get together and exchange ideas and information. “We got to be good friends”. Rene recalled “we thought let’s meet some other people, so we started advertising and formed a user group. I had up to 15 people in my basement once a month…I showed them how to upgrade, add memory and we all shared knowledge”. “I remember my son had me go to school as a show and tell and I brought my TRS 80 in there and showed the kids how to use it”.
Rene and Sandi also spend time with their good friends and their two children and five grandchildren.
Rene Lizee is one of the 90% of military veterans who did not see combat. But without people like Rene executing the multitude of unsung jobs necessary to keep the other 10% downrange, there would be no military. After the military Rene blended back into the fabric of society, raised a family, volunteered in his community and set an example for others to follow. Rene, the priesthoods loss was everyone else’s gain. Thank you for your service.
“I love what I did with my life, all of the things that I got involved with and I don’t regret a minute…”