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The military taught him to use telescopes and radio arrays, then sent him to the Learmonth Solar Observatory, at the northwestern tip of Australia, to gather data about the sun.
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Interested in things that happen in the sky and unmoved by the hippie culture around him, Tegnell joined the Air Force, in 1974. While taking an astronomy course there, he attended a lecture by a not yet famous scientist named Carl Sagan. But eventually Tegnell returned to the Bay Area-this time to attend Berkeley, which, by the late nineteen-sixties, was another island of odd people. When Tegnell’s father returned from Korea, the family moved away, and then moved often. “We were an odd group of people,” Tegnell jokes, “and that’s why I’m strange the way I am.” The view was spectacular, almost none of the non-incarcerated residents locked their doors, and almost all of them knew one another and shared the camaraderie of an unusual identity. Yet even given the proximity to the likes of Whitey Bulger, it was a peaceful place to live. The whole of Alcatraz Island is less than a tenth of a square mile, so, despite all the security measures and “ DO NOT ENTER” signs, the inmates and civilians were never very far apart. That included Tegnell, who lived with his mother and grandfather, a guard, while his father was stationed in Korea. At the time-this was in the nineteen-fifties-there was, in addition to the federal penitentiary, a preschool, a post office, and housing for prison employees and their family members. Ken Tegnell’s first home was on Alcatraz.