A Tijuana brass band, a missle silo, and a life of faith
Elliott
Air Force 1st Lt. Bill Jarrell with his 3-month-old daughter Beth in Little Rock, Ark., in a 1975 photo.
Air Force launch officer Bill Jarrell at the underground Titan II missile command console in Little Rock, Ark., in 1975.
Bill and Becky Jarrell with their daughter, Beth Hoving, in Morganton.
Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass was a popular band in the 1960s with an American pop, Mariachi flair. “I had all the records,” Bill Jarrell said, who as a high-school cornet player in Plantation, Fla., formed his own Tijuana-style band.
A local pizza parlor put on a talent show which his group entered. While waiting with the youth group from his church for the winner to be announced, Bill chose the seat next to the pastor’s daughter.
“It was our first date,” he said of Becky. “We ordered a black olive pizza and held hands under the table, except when they announced I won the show.”
From there, Bill went on to play in the band at Florida State University where he earned a math degree. Meanwhile, his father, a Korean War veteran, encouraged him to complete the Air Force ROTC program at FSU.
Bill and Becky were married between their junior and senior years in college. “Every year, we celebrate our real anniversary, our first-date anniversary, with a black olive pizza,” he said.
At one of the ROTC programs, Bill decided to become a Titan II missile officer. The Titan II was a massive, intercontinental nuclear missile hundreds of times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
It was buried in a silo nine stories deep, with the four-man launch crew housed in an underground command center connected to the silo by a tunnel.
From 1973 until 1978, Bill was assigned to the 308th Strategic Missile Wing in Little Rock, Ark. Each missile crew spent 24 hours in the command center on high alert, trained to launch the missile within 60 seconds of receiving a coded message which the commander and deputy commander had to decode independently.
Both officers were required to turn their launch keys simultaneously to initiate a launch, which was programmed to strike one of three targets unknown to them. “That was our job,” Bill said. “That’s what we were trained to do.”
Bill and Becky’s faith was repeatedly tested by five miscarriages over a 10-year period, including one in the ninth month. “I am so mad at you, God,” Becky cried out. “But don’t you dare let go of me.”
In the midst of that decade of darkness, they were blessed with the birth of their only child, Beth, who gave them three grandchildren.
Bill completed an MBA from the University of Utah while he was a missile commander, taking classes and utilizing spare time for studying. In 1978, he sent a resume to Boeing and was hired in Wichita, Kansas as a strategic planning manager.
Boeing used two books for goal tracking, blue for near-term and red for long-range. “My role was to advise the executive staff on how to bring the long-range goals forward,” Bill said.
After moving to Huntsville, Ala., and Binghamton, N.Y., for other positions, Bill was called back to Wichita to represent Boeing as their Kansas lobbyist. Later, he was promoted to director of governmental affairs for Boeing’s nine-state central region, interacting with governors and legislators across the U.S.
In their personal lives, Bill and Becky had become private cultural ambassadors, developing friendships and staying with people in their homes in Russia, with the result that Bill arranged for a Russian folk-art group to perform all over Kansas.
Before long, Bill got a call that he was being considered to become Boeing’s director of the Russian Regional Jet program, consulting with Sukhoi Civil Aircraft in Moscow, even though he had not applied for it. In 2003, he and Becky moved to Seattle, with Bill making frequent trips to Moscow.
By the time he retired, Bill was calling Russia his second home and had been sharing a personal mantra with everyone he met: “If you do an excellent job at what you are doing right now, people are going to recognize that and someone is going to ask you to work for them,” he said.
In 2006, Bill and Becky moved to Waynesville in order to be closer to their grandchildren, who lived in Charlotte. They became active in numerous community organizations, including the Folkmoot International Festival.
Bill became a board member of BBBS (Big Brother Big Sister) of WNC, the Good Samaritan Clinic, the Open Door (soup kitchen), Haywood Pathways (homeless shelter) and also served on the local Chamber Legislative Committee.
Beginning in Little Rock, Bill was active in BBBS, where he mentored seven boys over a 20-year period. He was also a hospice volunteer and a leader in the Haywood County Jail Ministry.
At their church in Waynesville, Bill and Becky were team leaders for Operation Christmas Child, a project of Samaritan’s Purse that delivers shoeboxes filled with toys, school supplies, and personal hygiene items to children around the world. Becky had long wanted to go on a shoebox distribution trip.
Bill made plans to take her to Boone, the international headquarters for Samaritan’s Purse, on her birthday. He had secretly written ahead, with the result that during lunch, someone tapped Becky on the shoulder. It was Franklin Graham. “I have something for your birthday,” he said, handing her an invitation to join the Operation Christmas Child trip to Ecuador in 2012.
Bill served in the Titan II missile program for five and a half years, rising to the rank of captain. Bill and Becky’s lives were structured around being leaders in numerous church youth groups, which they did for 45 years.
In 2024, they moved to Morganton. “Our lives are extremely faith based,” Bill said. “We want to be where God wants us to be, doing what God wants us to do, when He wants us to be there. That’s why we are here, to extend our hearts for volunteerism and community involvement in Morganton and Burke County.”
Tad Elliott is a Navy veteran and hospice volunteer who contributes columns to The Paper.
