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Plains people: Assignment launched airman to the stars
The retired colonel once headed the entertainment program for the Department of Defense.
from: wyomingnews.com
by Jennifer Frazer
CHEYENNE - Rod Hottle was an Air Force colonel who carried toilet paper for the stars.
That wasn't all he did, of course. He had that and about a dozen other jobs over the course of his career, including constructing buildings, overseeing the support of military bases and tending missiles.
He helped fly emergency command planes, which, in the event a nuclear attack annihilated the nation's Strategic Air Command, would be called on to direct the nation's counterattack.
He and his wife raised funds to help rebuild the Warren ICBM and Heritage Museum at F.E. Warren Air Force Base that was destroyed by a burst steam pipe and rebuilt the room themselves.
He was in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001, and saw airplane debris rain down around him. At his offices about a mile away from the Pentagon, he looked out his window and saw pieces of aircraft and ash.
"Those were some bleak days," he said. "I still remember the smell of the Pentagon burning."
Last year he became the security committee chairman for the Cheyenne Frontier Days General Committee after over a decade of Frontier Days service.
Yet in spite of all his accomplishments and experiences, his years spent celebrity wrangling probably, at first blush, rate the most glitz. For two years he ran the entertainment program for the Department of Defense, booking acts and shuttling stars to military bases around the world in the hope of helping service members forget, just for a little while, where they were and what they were doing.
But along with the glamour came the toilet paper.
The toilet paper was necessary, as Hottle put it, because the Army doesn't necessarily provide toilet paper in its portable toilets.
Celebrities tend to be picky about that.
In a hall of Hottle's home north of Cheyenne is a gallery of pictures from those two years of his life. There's Hottle standing next to Rob Schneider, who made him wear his American flag cowboy hat for the picture. There's Hottle in the midst of 13 Baltimore Ravens cheerleaders, who attended his retirement party.
Below them Hottle is standing next to Jay Leno, who's pointing at him and grinning goofily. There he is next to Robin Williams. In another photo, he stands next to rocker JOAN JETT, who once gave him a kiss, severely startling an old woman standing nearby.
But Hottle, a man with a gentle voice and a smile in his eyes, remains meek about the experiences.
"The reason I did it was for the troops," he said. "Life's not a luxury for them."
Hottle was born in Alexandria, Va. He attended T.C. Williams High School, the school immortalized in the film "Remember the Titans," which portrays a 1971 football team that achieves greatness despite their difficulties with racial integration.
Hottle, a junior in the year depicted in the film, was on the cross country team and in the band - so he attended all the football games.
After high school, Hottle entered the Virginia Military Institute out of a desire to serve his country and to follow a family tradition. His father and uncle had spent time in the Navy, while another uncle served in the Air Force.
Hottle chose to join the Air Force.
He was a spelunker who also taught rappelling and rock climbing. He joined two college bands, which was how he met his wife, Deb: The band played her college, and he invited her to a dance in his sophomore year. They married the year after he graduated and have a son named Dale and a daughter named Erin, who is also attending VMI.
For the year after graduation, Hottle drove a delivery truck for the Washington Star while he waited to be called for active duty. He helped distribute papers to the delivery force.
"It was fun," he remembered. "You get out and help kids - little future business people. They don't look it that way, obviously."
His first military assignment was the intercontinental ballistic missile school in Rapid City, S.D. Culture shock ensued.
"The biggest store was a Circle K," he said. "It snowed in September when we got there. It was kind of like, 'Where have we come to?'"
After serving as a missileer there, he was transferred to Riverside, Calif., checking the targeting data onboard missiles.
Four years later he moved to Omaha, where he joined the crew of the Looking Glass mission - a project that kept an Air Force command plane in the air 24 hours a day for 29 years, from 1961 to 1990.
In the event that the United States' underground Strategic Air Command was destroyed, one of the Looking Glass planes would act as an alternate command center. Hottle spent 2,500 hours onboard the plane as nuclear planner and war plan adviser to the general.
His next stop was F.E. Warren Air Force Base, where he held a variety of jobs overseeing crew and facilities.
In 1996 he was transferred back to Vandenberg Air Force Base, where he was a services squadron commander, overseeing food services, housing, child care - everything from cradle to grave, he said, for mortuary arrangements were among his duties.
In 1998 he came back to Cheyenne to be services commander at F.E. Warren, where he built a child care center, a youth center and started planning for a golf course and fitness center.
Then in 2001 he was offered a promotion to colonel and the job as Chief of Armed Forces Entertainment for the Department of Defense.
Thus ensued two whirlwind years escorting entertainers both famous and obscure around the planet for the benefit of the troops.
From January of 2001 to February of 2003, he and a staff of eight took care of and guided celebrities while they were awake and planned their travel schedule while they slept. Hottle slept on the planes, he said.
On a $10 million budget, they put on about 200 shows a year in the Pacific, Europe, Caribbean and the Middle East. The entertainers performed for free.
On one excursion he picked up Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts after the Hollywood premiere of "Ocean's 11" and ferried them to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey to screen the film there before it opened in the states.
They ate with the troops in the dining hall and talked about making the movie in the theater. After 12 hours in Turkey, he dropped them off in London.
On his hall wall hangs an "Ocean's 11" poster with their signatures.
Also on his wall is a copy of the platinum record for JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS' "I Love Rock and Roll." Hottle took the singer to perform twice in the Middle East. She slept in a tent and ate Meals Ready to Eat along with the rest of the troops.
He took the Baltimore Ravens cheerleaders to Kandahar and Saudi Arabia, where their tent floors were covered with dust, and they had only an army blanket and cot to sleep on. Though they were there only two days, some of them cried at night, he remembered. By day, though, they did their best.
"They were troopers," he remembered. "They did a good job, and it was a good experience for them."
On one trip with Jay Leno, they flew for 22 hours straight, refueled in mid-air and saw two sunrises and two sunsets.
Eventually, Hottle retired from the military to come back to his wife and daughter in Cheyenne; his daughter was finishing her senior year in high school. He now works as a program coordinator for United Way of Laramie County, helping to make sure the organization's programs are making measurable differences in their participants' lives.
Connie Sloan-Cathcart, executive director of United Way of Laramie County, said Hottle's military experience, planning abilities and attention to detail are invaluable to his present job.
"He has literally run a city that happened to be a base," she said.
And she thought he would have been a great host for a celebrity to have, not least because of his down-to-earth personality, attention to details - or mobile toilet paper supply.
"He always took care of those details," she said.
He also had to overcome obstacles on a daily basis - dirt runways that softened in the rain, making takeoffs and landings impossible; plotting flights around schedules that shifted like quicksand; warning entertainers to stay on the pavement to avoid ground studded with landmines by Russians long ago.
Hottle's friend Paula Taylor, curator of the Warren ICBM and Heritage Museum at F.E. Warren Air Force Base that Hottle helped repair, said Hottle was an ideal choice for taking on these sorts of obstacles.
"They were being shot at, there weren't always beds, there weren't always blankets," she said. "It wasn't always an easy thing to coordinate. They were looking for leadership, and he was able to come through each time. He was able to give something back by showing them what they were giving to the troops. He could clearly make them see that."
But the troops were giving back too.
From his position watching from behind the "stage" - usually either a hastily constructed wooden platform or the back of a truck - the looks on the faces of servicemen and women helped make up for the privations of the job, he said.
"They're like no other crowd you've had in your life," he said. "It was probably one of the most rewarding jobs I had while in the Air Force. It was about taking care of people."
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