The Manorville Gap Filler ceased operation in the 1968 time frame and a lot of years have sped by since then.

I was site NCOIC from late 66 to end of operation. We travelled daily from the prime site at Montauk to the Gap filler, with a crew size varying from four to six personnel depending on training of replacement personnel as some others rotated out or were discharged. None of us ever lived on the site. However, as I remember we were told that the site had been developed as an early prime radar site during or just after WW2. All that were left of this operation was a few building foundations, but the site was manned during that time. During my time there we never had the time to do any exploring outside the perimeter, we were under time constraints to avoid TDY funding and had to return to Montauk within eight hours of departure. AT no time did my crew or I ever have personnel or USAF weapons on site. There was no fallout shelter on site.

A couple of interesting tales while I was there are:

The site had a building alarm system and it activated one time. The Air Police at Westhampton AFB, (still active then) were contacted and they responded to the alarm. Later we learned that an individual was apprehended who was wanted for a murder at that time. But the interesting part was that the APs went to an abandoned BOMARC site instead of the Gap Filler and there is where they found this individual.

Another neat story is when I was informed one Saturday morning that the Site was called "Off the Air" due to excessive targets. Responding to the radar operations building at Montauk I did indeed find that the monitor there was displaying many targets, a little checking found that they were all active, moving targets and there was a lot of them. During conversations with the Direction Center (then at McGuire AFB, NJ) we learned that the AD (a combination of ops and programmers) had set an arbitary limit of 28 (if memory holds true) moving targets for Manorville (The only Gap Filler within that AD at that time) and would call you down at 29 targets. Well, that morning was a beautiful spring day and every puddle jumper on LI, Conn. and RI were in the air. I got an aeronautical map and pointed out to the AD that a 48 Nautical Mile radius of Manorville covered more large and small airfields than they gave for targets as well as aircraft entering or departing Newark, JFK, etc., and finally got the AD to reevaluate this number. I WON ONE THAT DAY! But to make sure this never repeated, I was able to set up the T-1s so one channel (the most reliable) was set up normally and the second set up to cut down small, slow targets, but I never told anyone about that!! I didn`t mind losing operational rates when we had a problem, but it sure burned me when the operations people did my site(s) in.

When I first started on Gap Fillers at FInley, ND in 61, only radar personnel were assigned, so we were very deeply trained on the T-1 computer system. Sometime in 1963 a QC or IG inspection team were "outraged" that there were no computer troops on any gap fillers. So shortly thereafter T-2 personnel were brought on to the gap fillers. Generally they were very good troops, BUT with the T-2 they were able to replace printed circuit boards with the DC Power applied, HOWEVER on the T-1 this was close to electronic suicide. There were over 2600 diodes in each T-1 channel and replacing boards here could cause voltage spikes (we were using +/- 30 V for digital signals, +/- 250 V and +/- 150 V to provide electron tube power levels) and you had a chance to blow any or all the diodes. Several of the T-2 personnel were barred from touching the T-1 but we made them into good radar troops as they all seemed to like doing routine IF and receiver alignments that we were bored with doing. They also like greasing different radar componets and replacing major mechanical and electronic componets. At Mannorville I had a great T-2 troop assigned, he always asked to change T-1 cards and could do the best COHO radar signal alignments of anyone assigned at that time.