Dave Oberg — May 2025 Living Treasure

Interview transcript by Nancy Theiss, Oldham Era

My dad and mom moved from New Jersey to Buffalo, N.Y. soon after my brother drowned while playing with some cousins. He was 3-years-old and drowned in a small creek not 50 yards from my aunt’s house. My mom was so traumatized by his death that she and my dad left for New York, where my dad’s brother was working in the steel mills. Dad got a job there as an apprentice machinist and they settled in a small town, Hamburg, about the same size as La Grange. I was born in 1946 and never knew my brother. Our house in Hamburg was the last house in the village and very close to the surrounding woods and corn fields. My parents, Larry and Edith Oberg, lived there, in that same house, for the rest of their lives. My sister, Elizabeth, is four and a half years younger and currently resides in Arizona.

I graduated high school in 1964 with a strong desire to fly, a career choice made when I was 4 years old. That’s what I wanted to do and I never varied from the goal. While my buddies collected baseball cards, I collected cards of WWII fighter planes!

I played baseball through Little League, then wrestled and played football in high school. I was also very active in Boy Scouts. I had a Scout Master who was one of the finest men I ever met — Chuck Lowe. He formed a troop, and all my baseball buddies joined and five of us were awarded Eagle Scout on the same night after four years of work and fun in the troop.

My mother kept me very close as a child because of my brother’s drowning, but as I got older, she let me fish with my buddies in the village creek, even though I couldn’t swim at the time. It was an enormous gift of trust on her part, and eventually, through scouting, I overcame my fears of the water and got all my Red Cross lifesaving training.

My father and all of my uncles were steel workers and devout union men, all Democrats and pretty hard-nosed about it. Back then the contractual strikes occurred on three-year intervals and if you broke a strike line, someone knocked on the door that night and told the offender, “you won’t be doing that again, will you?”

Times were hard with upwards of 22,000 men out of work from Bethlehem and Republic Steel with no assistance aside from US government corn meal and no work to be had. The men shot deer out of season to feed their families as a result. I remember getting up one night, aged 10 or 12, going with my dad and Uncle Bert to the village church yard, where my uncle had shot a doe. They were very good at it — they could get it unzipped and field dressed and into the trunk in five minutes or less. Headed for home that night, we were stopped by roadblocks by state troopers. My uncle slumped against the door, hid the gun between his legs, while the trooper told my dad to get out and open the trunk. There in the flashlight beam was the doe’s carcass, and the trooper said “What the hell is this?”

My dad in a choked voice said, “I’m feeding my family,” and that New York State Trooper turned away and said, “I don’t have the heart for this — get outta here.” It was a small victory for us, as a family, and a lesson I never forgot ... family first.

We lived in a small house, 30 by 30 and I slept in the loft. I had a morning paper route when I was 11 until I went off to college and also ran a trap line. Up early, by 3:30 a.m., I’d run the traps, then go get the papers and deliver them. The route was more than 3 miles long. I trapped muskrats at 25 cents a pelt and Mom’s freezer always had a couple rolled up in paper bags if I was unable to get to the fur buyer! There were a lot of dairy farms in the area and I shot woodchucks for the farmer’s pastures for 50 cents a piece. The work let me buy most of my own clothes.

I wanted to go to the US Naval or Air Force Academy as the surest way to a military flying career, and get a college degree. I was lucky enough to be accepted to the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colorado. My flight out there in June of 1964 was the first time I had ever been in a commercial airplane! I weighed 180 pounds that summer and after nine weeks of Academy Basic Training, began classes at 163 pounds.

The professors at the US Air Force Academy were nearly all pilots and retained their flying proficiency by flying at least once a month. To get us familiar with military flying, each professor would mentor eight to 10 cadets in a T33 jet trainer. I was sick as a dog the first few times, but eventually got used to it. It quickly became the center of my hopes and dreams. After graduation, I went to pilot training in Del Rio, Texas. I rarely got off the base during those years at the Academy. It wasn’t all drudgery, however. My roommate from west Texas was raised on a ranch and he and I spent many weekends on horseback exploring Colorado’s Front Range. We checked out horses from the Academy stable, packed sleeping bags with our fly rods, a dented coffee pot and frying pan and toured the mountains. John Graham, my roommate, was a helluva horseman and taught me a lot …though I could usually out-fish him.

The mid-60’s were a turbulent era for those of us growing into adulthood and I parted with my generation in 1964 when I took my oath as a USAF Cadet. While the anti-war movement gained momentum on college campuses we were preparing for military service and pilot training. As young officers, the war in Vietnam was a foregone conclusion, and most of us — I’d estimate 90% of our graduating class — went to US Air Force Pilot Training.

Graduating in the upper part of my class, I had hopes of getting a fighter slot, but none were available. I took, instead, an O-1E, the US Air Force version of Cessna’s 180. The plane was the same size as the civilian version but was equipped with wing mounted rocket pods and an armored seat, and was my primary mount for my job as a Forward.

I flew that plane primarily for US Army Special Forces, Green Berets, living with them in the camp at An Loc, lll Corps, Rep. of Vietnam. I worked air strikes, artillery support, helicopter gunships and medevac while they were in the “bush.” I was their eye in the sky. I had an area of operation about the size of two Kentucky counties and if anything happened in there, and if my guys needed anything that could be delivered by air, I took care of them. I flew at 1,500 feet on patrol doing visual reconnaissance looking for the enemy. From 1500 feet, you can see tracks in the mud using binoculars. And if I found the bad guys, I could put in artillery or fighter airstrikes or gunships. And if someone got hurt, I got the medevac helicopters on the way. Those men were my brothers in all but the biological sense and I thought of the war as “us” and our missions above all else.

Flying with one window open, at 100-mph, I could hear ground fire. Thirty caliber fire sounds like a Zippo lighter being closed; kind of a snick sound. If you are hit it sounds like pea gravel thrown against a galvanized garbage can. I was rarely shot at unless I was actively putting in a strike of some sort, as doing so would reveal their positions. I was lucky I was never wounded. But the camp which I supported took 12 casualties of the 34 assigned personnel while I was there. My fellow Forward Air Controller, Al Guarino and I flew every day, sometimes more, and logged over 400 missions each.

The camp itself was diamond shaped with surrounding barbed wire called concertina that protected us from nighttime attack. In addition, the jungle was cleared out over 200-yards so we had a clear field of fire on attackers. Our airplane was pulled inside the wire each night to prevent sabotage. We used a straight section of the dirt road leading to the camp as a landing runway. We flew our missions in camouflage pants and boots with no shirt because of the heat, while sitting on a flak jacket to protect against ground fire coming up from below.

The flying wasn’t all bad, by any means. If there wasn’t anything going on, I would often climb up to 5,000 feet where it was cooler. Flying there I played airborne ‘tag’ with huge eagles, who would turn with me and seemed to be having as much fun as I was … it was ‘play’ and a rare treat in the midst of that terrible war.

After 11 months in Vietnam, I returned to the girl of my dreams … Jeri Ahoyt and together we began a life. Tall, blond, and much smarter than I ever hoped to be, we were married Nov. 7, 1970, a week after returning to the US. We honeymooned in Key West — in November, it’s cold, wet and beachless! My next assignment was the KC135 which is an Air Force refueling tanker. After a brief check out period, I was headed back to Southeast Asia leaving my young bride to put our lives in order. It was the first of four temporary duty assignments back to Thailand and Vietnam, adding up to another 300+ missions and a year of overseas duty.

In April of 1973 we were blessed with the birth of our son, Tyson, and as any of you with children know, life would never be the same. With Ty’s birth, and the promise of continued extensive temporary duty assignments, far from home, hearth, wife and son, we decided to resume civilian life. It was difficult for us both: my love for the Air Force flying and her family’s 20 plus years of service in the Marine Corps and Border Patrol.

Reentering the civilian flying job market was a large gamble as the airlines hadn’t hired in over three years, but once again we were lucky and I landed a job with Braniff flying out of Dallas. Raising our son, virtually alone much of the time, while completing her Bachelor’s degree in elementary education with a minor in math and substituting in local schools, Jeri moved us about the country at six-month intervals. But we were young, strong minded and had great faith in a future together.

After seven years with Braniff, the company went bankrupt … the first of many in the airline shake up of the early 1980s. I quickly found work as a carpenter and six months later, one of my old buddies from Braniff suggested we could start up a charter airline using former Braniff pilots. It worked well for a year and a half but was headed for bankruptcy and I left for a job flying for People’s Express out of Newark. It was fun, paid little and by late 1986, bankruptcy was imminent when Continental bought People’s (Continental was bankrupt before I set foot on the property for those of you keeping track of this tale of woe) and after a year of questionable paychecks, I made the move to UPS here in Louisville.

As a UPS Management and Training Captain, I’ve flown the 727, DC8 and Airbus 30, accumulated over 15,000 hours of flying time and, excluding some of the combat time, loved every minute of it.

Our son, Nathan became a pilot and flew three years in Afghanistan. He was flying Seal and Ranger teams and has more combat flying time than I do. He is now an A-300 Captain with UPS. He’s a great guy, a wonderful father to his four daughters and married (as did his Dad) well above his station. Ty wanted to fly as well but found out through a physical, he was almost blind in one eye. He ended up in the Navy’s nuclear school and went into submarines as chief engineer in the sub Alaska. He is a mid-level engineer on the Navy’s test nuclear reactor.

Kentucky is a well-kept secret in many ways. For the Oberg family, we came for the jobs, mine with UPS and Jeri with the State Department of Education, but what we found was a land of great natural beauty, populated with strong, determined folks who took us to their hearts. I have heard the same characterizations from a host of people who migrated here for one reason and found so very much more. It is our home, has been for 37 years now and we’ll finish our lives here. We stand in this household for the national anthem, and the playing of “My Old Kentucky Home,” and both bring tears to our eyes. For this, we thank you all. We weren’t born here, no sir, but we moved here as fast as we could!

Jeri and I bought land and built our home on approximately 17 acres on Yager Lane, in Oldham County, in 1988. It has a quiet beauty in all seasons and butts up right beside what some are proposing for the ultra-scale data plant. Our family is proud to head up the “We are Oldham County” group to help save the Kentucky land we love.

I’d like to add that when our boys came up to Kentucky with us, we found a Boy Scout Troop headed by Craig Stoghill and Mr. Pearce. Both were outstanding individuals. I joined Craig and worked with him at Troop 650 for about 10 years, taking multiple camping expeditions with the boys, as well as a trip to Philmont Ranch NM for a 100-mile mountain trip and also to the BWCA, Boundary Waters Canoe Area, in northern Minnesota. Great times, and some of my fondest memories. Those boys, now in their late 40’s and 50’s, are men of good character and a joy to those of us lucky enough to see them as youngsters.