I was driving to Sun Valley Idaho to work at the Sun Valley Lodge as a kind-of post graduate vacation from being serious and hopefully to also save up some money. On the way there, I picked up a hitch hiker on RT 20 and dropped him off at Stanton Crossing. We stopped at the crossing for a while and slept because he was catching a bus there in a few hours and I was ahead of schedule and would be waiting around anyway. After we parted, I found a Trapp Family Lodge ball-point pen in the passenger seat floor.
Fast forward a couple of years, I was engaged to a woman from a Boston Suburb, so living in Vermont someday was a lot less far-fetched than in the previous encounter. My Marine squadron detachment, VMAQ-4 was called to active duty due to the Kuwait invasion and I was in Japan working in some kind of aviation depot. One of the, mostly inscrutable gadgets I came across was an aircraft gun loader for something like a 20mm cannon. The label had it made in Burlington VT.
Eventually, we lived in Vermont for 8 years. When we purchased a house, we rented our condo to a young woman engineer, who worked at the plant which had made the above part:
The General Electric Armament Systems Department in Burlington produced prominent rotary/Gatling guns, including the 20mm M61 Vulcan and the 7.62mm M134 Minigun used on various military aircraft and vehicles.
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