“I painted the pipes and the trim all red, white and blue,” said Dean, 63, a retired federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission official now living in Maryland.
Last December, after Dean heard that the officers’ quarters on the decommissioned base were being redeveloped for sale as private homes, he took a nostalgia tour with an eye toward investing in a unit with his two sisters, who had also lived on the base. He was already transfixed by the visit to his old house 45 years later, when he climbed the attic stairs to have a look.
“And there they were,” he said of the painted pipes. “Still the same.”
And that pretty much sealed the deal.