A Wild, Unexpected Journey!

October 16, 2011 

 

On October 16, 1981, two shy teens from the small city of Mechanicville, New York, population just under 6,000, began a lifetime journey that neither would have anticipated in their wildest of imaginations!

Photos from the first date.It all began when Mac, a 17-year-old farm boy, used a ruse to get a first date with Connie, a 16-year-old girl with six older brothers and one older sister.  You see, Mac was much too shy to simply ask for a date, so he cleverly used his position as Sports Editor of the High School Yearbook to ask Connie if she would assist during the scheduled photo shoot of the school’s football team that Friday evening.  After all, Connie would be a senior the next year and she would make a great candidate to be the Sports Editor for her own High School Yearbook.

Uncertain if Connie would see through the ruse and realize it was actually a planned date, Mac decided he couldn’t let it end with the football game, so he invited her to see a movie the next day.  The movie chosen was “Gallipoli” and neither Mac nor Connie even knew how to pronounce the title.  The movie was about a pair of rural Australian boys who enlisted in the Australian Army and were sent to Turkey during World War I.  One of the stars of the movie was the as-yet-unknown, up-and-coming Australian actor Mel Gibson!  Anyway, all worked out well and Mac felt comfortable that Connie knew the football game and movie were something more than just two friends hanging out.  From that moment forward, the obsessive nature of teenage love found the pair to be nearly inseparable for years to come.

Following that second date on October 17, 1981, it was highly unlikely that anyone could have imagined where life would take the young Mac and Connie between October 16, 1981 and October 16, 2011.  As improbable as their journey may have seemed at the time, let’s review some of the highlights that began that fall evening, 30 years ago, in the little city of Mechanicville.

After a year of spending hours of nearly every single day together, it was time for Mac to head off to college.  In order to avoid a separation that he wasn’t ready to endure, Mac opted to attend nearby Siena College as a commuter.  The relationship remained strong for another year as it came time for Connie to go to college.  Connie opted to attend the Junior College of Albany (JCA), also as a commuter, like Mac.  Upon completing her two-year degree at JCA, Connie decided to attend the State University of New York at New Paltz.  This time, commuting wasn’t an option and the pair would find themselves geographically separated from one another for the very first time in almost four years.

The bond between Mac and Connie remained unbreakable through their college years.  As a computer science major, Mac began having second thoughts about his chosen career path as he entered his senior year.  As a result, he began exploring possibilities in military service, an aspiration that, unknown to Connie, had been part of Mac’s soul since early childhood.  By spring of his senior year, Mac had explored options with both the Air Force and the Navy.  The Navy was recruiting Mac for its Nuclear Power Program and in March 1986 flew him to Washington, DC to interview with Admiral McKee.  It would be Mac’s first time flying in an airplane and Washington, DC was the farthest Mac had ever been from home.  As fate would have it, Mac was not selected for the Nuclear Power Program, but that opened the door for him to pursue his real dream of becoming an aviator.

Shortly after flying to Washington, Mac and Ella flew, along with a handful of Marty’s friends from Siena College, to the island of St. Martin for Spring Break.  Upon their return from St. Martin, the lives of Marty and Ella were about to begin the wild journey that neither would have imagined at any time during the nearly five years they had been together up to this point!

Having passed all the testing required for Naval Aviation, Marty was enlisted into the Navy on May 18, 1986.  On May 30, 1986, still tanned from the trip to St. Martin, Marty was the best man in his brother Tom’s wedding.  Less than two months later, on July 26, 1986, Marty boarded a one-way flight to Pensacola, Florida to begin his Navy career at Aviation Officer Candidate School (AOCS).  For the first time since coming to know one another, Marty and Ella would be geographically separated by more than a thousand miles!  It’s important to realize that, in 1986, there was no Internet, no Skype, no such thing as a cell phone, and long distance telephone calls were considered very expensive, especially when calling “collect”.

After spending less than a month in Pensacola, Marty knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Ella, so he wrote her a letter proposing marriage.  In those days, Marty had little choice but to write the letter by hand since very few people owned a personal computer and even fewer owned a printer.

As an engaged couple and with Marty in the early stages of a career in Naval Aviation, planning a wedding would prove to be a daunting task, at best!  Following graduation from AOCS on November 7, 1986, Marty had to report to Primary Flight Training in Corpus Christi, Texas.  There was no way to predict, due to weather and a variety of other factors, how long Primary Flight Training would take.  For the purposes of planning a wedding date, however, Marty guessed he might be finished with Primary by May 1987, so May 30, 1987, coincidentally exactly one year after the wedding of brother Tom, was selected as the date they would be married.

As time moved forward, it turned out that weather and other delays would keep Marty in Primary past May 1987.  With that being the case, Marty had to put in a leave request with his Flight Leader in order to return to Mechanicville for the wedding.  The leave request was denied and full-blown panic had set in!  Again, as fate would have it, Marty was transferred to a different Flight a month or so before the wedding.  He immediately requested leave from his new Flight Leader.  Though the second leave request was also denied, this Flight Leader offered Marty the opportunity to take the maximum allowable two days of Special Liberty around the weekend of the wedding.  As a result, Marty was able to fly home to Mechanicville on Friday, May 29, attend the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner that night, and get married on Saturday, May 30.  With no time for a honeymoon, the just-married couple flew to Corpus Christi on Monday, June 1.

In early July 1987, Ella returned, on her own, to Mechanicville in order to attend her cousin’s wedding.  With Ella away, Marty received a rather shocking call from his mother on July 6 to say that his “sister” had a baby.  Since both of his sisters were in his wedding just over a month ago and neither appeared to be carrying a child, Marty was perplexed by his mother’s announcement.  Though it was impossible for him to believe, Marty’s niece Allison was born that morning and it turned out Allison’s mother was Marty’s youngest sibling, Suzie.

By the fall of 1987, Marty had completed both Primary and Intermediate Flight Training in Corpus Christi.  Having been assigned to be a helicopter pilot, it was then time for Marty to report to Milton, Florida for Advanced Flight Training in helicopters.  It was around this time that Marty and Ella learned they were expecting their first child, due in early April 1988.

In January 1988, Ella developed toxemia, a condition of pregnancy that would require the premature delivery of the baby.  On January 18, 1988, Sean Martin was born via emergency Caesarean section.  Having severely underdeveloped lungs, Sean Martin remained in a hospital in Pensacola where he eventually lost his fight for life on April 2, 1988.

By early June 1988, Marty and Ella had learned that they were expecting their second child, due in early January 1989.  Having endured a number of hardships rarely experienced by a 23-year-old Naval-Aviator-in-training, Marty finally earned his “wings of gold” on or about June 2.  With wings pinned to his uniform, Marty was set to begin his first fleet assignment flying H-46 helicopters in Norfolk, Virginia.  However, because the H-46 community was so small, there was only one Fleet Replacement Squadron for learning how to fly an H-46 and it was in San Diego, California.  So, off went Marty and Ella on a cross-country drive along the southern states on Interstate 10 in July!  Their little two-tone blue Ford Escort did not have air conditioning and it was too hot to have the hand-cranked windows rolled down.

One of the first bits of training scheduled for Marty upon his arrival in San Diego was a survival school in the southern California desert in August.  The week-long school was designed to train all Naval Aviators on the skills needed to: (1) survive off the land behind enemy lines, (2) evade capture, (3) resist interrogation once captured, and (4) recognize opportunities to escape.  Ella was there to witness the proud aviator ready to conquer the world who then returned a week later as a grubby, much thinner, and very exhausted aviator who had just received hands-on training on how to cope with the possibility of being a prisoner of war.

Marty completed his Fleet Replacement Training in mid-December of 1988, so it was time for Marty and Ella, with Ella being nine months pregnant by now, to move back to the East Coast for Marty’s fleet assignment at Naval Air Station Norfolk.  With a month of leave to use and the two-tone Ford Escort sold, the pair boarded a plane under strict instructions from Ella’s doctor and flew across the country to Mechanicville where they had decided to be for the birth of the baby.

On December 30, 1988, a strong and healthy Jacob William was born at the Albany Medical Center in Albany, New York.  After nearly a month of spending 24 hours a day with Ella and Jacob, Marty had to report to Norfolk in January 1989.  With Jacob so young and no place in Norfolk to call home yet, Marty went to Norfolk on his own to find a place for the family to live and begin his tour of Sea Duty with the Navy.  Not long after Marty located a place for the family to live, Ella and Jacob joined him in their new home across the street from Virginia Wesleyan College in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Sea Duty is a term used to describe Navy assignments with units that occasionally deploy overseas or aboard Navy ships.  The squadron to which Marty was assigned had about sixteen helicopters.  Detachments of about six pilots, six aircrew, a dozen or so aviation maintenance technicians, and two squadron helicopters would deploy aboard a variety of Navy supply ships as needed to support aircraft carrier battle groups that were sent to the Mediterranean Sea for six-month rotations.

Marty’s first deployment was aboard the USS Mount Baker, an ammunition stores ship that would be used to help resupply the USS Forrestal battle group from October 1989 through April 1990.  This deployment and its four or five phone calls over the entire six-month period, was by far the biggest test of Marty and Ella’s ability to withstand long-term geographic separations.

After returning from the Mount Baker deployment, Marty was selected to be the squadron’s next Aviation Safety Officer, a job that required attendance at a six-week course held at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.  As Marty prepared to depart for Monterey, it was learned that Marty and Ella were once again expecting a new child.  While Marty was at school in Monterey, however, Ella had a miscarriage back in Virginia, thankfully with a handful of Navy wives to provide support to her and Jacob in Marty’s absence.

In August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s army in Iraq invaded the neighboring country of Kuwait.  Soon thereafter, President Bush decided to deploy a large number of military personnel to the area of conflict.  Since Marty was the Aviation Safety Officer for the entire squadron, he was not among the initial group of aviators from his squadron that would be deployed to Southwest Asia.  However, as tensions escalated and a deadline for war, “The Line in the Sand”, was established, Marty was assigned to deploy aboard the USS Kalamazoo to support the USS America battle group, which was to be sent to the Red Sea.

Within months of Marty’s return from the Gulf War, Ella became pregnant for a fourth time.  During this pregnancy, Marty would be transferred from Sea Duty in Norfolk to Shore Duty in Scotia, New York.  This time, it was Ella and Jacob who moved first, setting up residence once again in Mechanicville.  On April 20, 1992, Jacob’s little brother, Grady Connors, was born at the Bellevue Maternity Hospital in Niskayuna, New York.

In September 1992, one of Marty’s closest friends from his Norfolk squadron was married in Laguna Beach, California.  With Grady too young to leave behind, Marty, Ella, and Grady flew to California while Jacob remained with family in Mechanicville.

During his time on Shore Duty, Marty attended the University at Albany in Albany, New York to earn a Master of Business Administration degree.  As the time approached for Marty to return to Sea Duty, he decided it was time to separate himself and his family from the excitement of Navy life.

With Marty’s time in the Navy coming to an end, Marty and Ella flew to Atlanta, Georgia where Marty had a series of prospective job interviews lined up.  Around the same time, at the suggestion of a friend from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Marty put in an application to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).  While receiving no suitable job offers from the Atlanta interviews and receiving a number of positive indicators from the FBI, Marty quickly set his sites on a potential career with the FBI.  October 31, 1995 was Marty’s last day of active duty with the Navy. 

Although things were looking good with his FBI application, it was a very slow process to get through background checks, polygraphs, and physicals and get assigned to an opening in a New Agent Class at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.  With six months of unemployment benefits about to run their course and no start date in site with the FBI, Marty and Ella became concerned about their financial prospects as 1996 started moving along.  Then one day, out of the blue, Marty was called to interview for a civilian position as an Aviation Safety Officer for the Navy Helicopter Test Squadron based in Patuxent River, Maryland.  In late March 1996, Marty took the position and moved to Patuxent River.  Since the FBI processing was still moving along steadily in a positive direction, it was decided that Marty would go to Patuxent River while Ella, Jacob, and Grady would remain in Mechanicville.

Around late May or early June 1996, Ella was expecting a child for the fifth time and Marty had finally received word that he was scheduled to begin the FBI Academy on July 21, 1996.  With more great timing, Marty’s brother Ed was set to be married on August 3, 1996 in Boston, Massachusetts.  Since New Agents in Training were prohibited from leaving FBI Academy grounds during the first four weeks of training, Marty had to obtain special permission to be able to attend the wedding in Boston.

Marty graduated from the FBI Academy on November 6, 1996.  Since his first assignment was to be at the Washington Field Office in Washington, DC, there was no rush to leave the area after graduation.  In attendance at the graduation ceremony were Marty’s parents (Tom and Sandy), his brother Tom and family, and Grandma Anne.  Once graduation had ended, they all headed off to Vienna, Virginia where Marty and Ella had found an apartment to rent.  This would turn out to be, by far, the most frightening day Marty and Ella would experience in the entirety of their first 30 years together.  Grady, who was only four years old at this time, was at a playground within the apartment complex with his visiting cousins.  Since it was his first day being at the apartment complex, Grady had wandered off on his own looking for home, but went the wrong way.  When his cousins returned to the apartment, everyone immediately asked where was Grady.  His cousins thought Grady had already returned to the apartment on his own, but he had never made it back.  After several frantic and unforgettable minutes passed, a neighbor from an apartment far away within the vast apartment complex appeared on the sidewalk with Grady by her side.  It appeared that Grady had gotten lost trying to find his new home on his own and had gone to the neighbor for help.

After the relatives had departed for Mechanicville and his own family had settled into the new apartment in Vienna, it was time for Marty to begin his career as a Special Agent of the FBI working out of the Washington Field Office.  By the end of his very first weekend, he would experience direct involvement in the surveillance and arrest of a Central Intelligence Agency operative who had been selling secrets to Russia for two years.  About a month after that, Marty was directly involved in the searches associated with the arrest of an FBI Agent that was also selling secrets to Russia.

Just before Marty arrived at the FBI Academy in July 1996, Trans World Airlines Flight 800 (TWA 800) had exploded after takeoff from New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.  Due to the unknown cause of the explosion and reports of possible missiles being sited near the aircraft at the time of the explosion, the FBI opened a criminal investigation into possible terrorism.  Because the explosion occurred over the Long Island Sound, all the evidence from the airplane was at the bottom of the Sound.  In order to collect the evidence, the FBI employed a number of commercial fishing vessels to bring the evidence up from the ocean floor.  After a few months of at-sea investigation, it seemed that many of the Agents assigned to the fishing vessels were getting sea sick, requiring the vessels to return to land ahead of schedule.  In an attempt to keep the vessels on their assigned locations for the scheduled amount of time, the FBI began tapping Agents with Navy experience to board the vessels.  After helping to catch two spies within his first month on the job, Marty was asked in January 1997 to travel to the New York Field Office to spend a week on a fishing vessel collecting evidence of the TWA 800 explosion that had been sitting on the floor of the Long Island Sound for all those months.

On February 3, 1997, Jacob and Grady welcomed little brother Martin James II to the family.  Martin was born at the Fair Oaks Hospital in Fairfax, Virginia.  With three big FBI cases in his rearview mirror, Marty was afforded the luxury of slowing things down at work while settling into Vienna with Ella and their three young sons.

During the first half of 1998, Marty was involved in helping to investigate an espionage case that led him to take a series of trips to the heart of Africa, two to Uganda and one to Kenya.  By late summer of 1998, Marty’s past skills came to the FBI’s attention once again as the FBI was looking for Agents with computer experience to step into an ongoing undercover operation and fill a two-year assignment.

During Marty’s undercover years, Ella became pregnant for the sixth and final time and, on July 21, 1999, Jacob, Grady, and Martin welcomed their one and only sister, Maggie Callaway, to the family.  Like Martin, Maggie was born at the Fair Oaks Hospital.  Following Marty’s time under cover, his family of six was reassigned to the New Haven Field Office in New Haven, Connecticut.  After purchasing their first single-family home in the small town of Clinton, Connecticut, Marty and Ella finally settled down for the long haul.  Marty and Ella always considered family as their highest priority in life so they decided upon their arrival in Connecticut that there would be no more household moves while the four children were attending school through high school.

In August 2000, the family arrived in Connecticut and Marty’s computer skills quickly earned him an assignment to investigate computer crimes, a very new discipline within the FBI at the time.  To train its computer crime investigators, the FBI had developed a number of one- to two-week courses, many of which were taught at the Academy grounds in Quantico.  So, after two years of almost no separations from his family, Marty spent his first year in Connecticut attending a total of eleven weeks away from home taking FBI computer training.

On September 11, 2001, the United States was victimized by an unthinkable act of terrorism that would change the country and the FBI forever.  Two commercial jets were flown by terrorists into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, one was flown into the Pentagon in Washington, and a fourth was heading for Washington when a group of passengers courageously decided they weren’t going to let it reach its intended target.  On September 12, 2001, Marty was among a number of Agents from the New Haven Field Office that was sent to the Boston Field Office to assist with the investigation at the Logan International Airport where each of the four flights of terror had originated.

The four years between 2002 and 2005 found Marty and Ella together to a degree they hadn’t experienced since the middle of 1986.  During this time, all four children were actively involved in school and sports and the investigation of computer crimes provided little need for Marty to travel.

In June 2005, Marty began investigating the biggest case of his FBI career when it was discovered that a group of young men from Romania successfully used credit card information from a large number of Connecticut residents to withdraw more than $150,000 cash from Automated Teller Machines in Romania.  In order to establish a line of communication with the Romanian National Police that would be necessary to effectively track the individuals responsible for making the unauthorized withdrawals, Marty traveled in March 2006 to Bucharest, Romania where he spent thirty days working directly with Romania’s law enforcers.  Along with a second trip to Romania in June 2008, the case also brought Marty to Richmond, Virginia and Berlin, Germany.

Between 1986 and 2010, Marty had been to many places in Europe, Africa, and Southwest Asia while Ella remained behind in the United States.  Marty decided that, in 2011, it was time for Ella to also enjoy the experience of international travel beyond the boundaries of North America and they spent ten nights in the glorious country of Ireland, both north and south.

With just over five years until Marty would be eligible to retire from the FBI, he and Ella began discussing how and where they wanted to live life after retirement.  After discussing a number of options and the potential impact on the family, it was decided that Marty would apply for a promotion that would require a temporary assignment to FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC for a period of eighteen months.  Taking the temporary assignment as opposed to a permanent transfer allowed Marty to work in Washington while also allowing Martin and Maggie to continue attending school with the friends they had known throughout their lives.

 When you read the history of Marty and Ella from October 16, 1981 through October 16, 2011, you notice a great deal of “Marty did this” and “Marty did that”.  What you haven’t read until now, however, is that there is no Marty without Ella.  None of the things written here would have been possible if it weren’t for Ella being there by Marty’s side, supporting his every move, giving him the strength to take such incredible leaps into adventure, and giving him a reason to always come home, to stay grounded.

Written In Honor of 30 Years of Incomparable Companionship!