[John Rogers]

If it makes any of you youngsters feel better, I learned to weld with a stick in 1970 on Enterprise. Our reactor department head managed to grab several hundred florescent lights for the engineering spaces but the carrier only had two welders at that time and they did not want to go into the "radiation spaces"! So I lied and said "hell yeah I know how to weld and so did some others so we could get the lights. I learned to stick weld standing on a ladder welding the tubes to the overhead that held the lights (two for each light). We had an electrician swap the wires and they sure were brighter than those old 40 watt safety bulbs! The reactor safeguard inspectors were amazed how nice everything looked as we were the first nuclear ship to have them although they wanted to see the paperwork for the mod but it had "been lost"!