There was a time when John C. ‘Mac' MacCarthy had a job, and it was a pretty nice one at that.

Only a week ago he was a top executive with a big, well-appointed office at Brooks City-Base. But he was forced to retire and is looking for a new job.

“The dog looks at me very weird when I don't leave in the morning,” observed MacCarthy, ex-deputy director of the defunct 311th Air Base Group.

After nearly 95 years, the Air Force is no more at Brooks except for a small cadre of airmen and civilians who are training pilots on the base's centrifuge. The base is gone as ordered by the 2005 base-closure commission, its rich aviation history a whiff of memories for folks like Steve Sullivan, who was there from 1941-48.

Brooks in those days was not like the base that would boast 279 buildings where scientists and researchers studied the effects of flight on pilots and Mercury-era astronauts.

It was modest.

And rustic.

“I'd describe Brooks as a small country town. Everybody knew everybody, everybody knew everything about everybody,” said Sullivan, 92, of Windcrest. “And it was built in World War I, temporary, you know?”

It got bigger and amazingly sophisticated, growing into one of the few research facilities of its kind in the world. But it has shrunk since the closure order, losing 2,800 people.

There were just 13 Air Force civilian workers on duty as the week began, all in Building 749, the base's computer network control center. Don Cosgrove, director of force support, said all of them were ending long careers and had left the base before Thursday's closure deadline.

“I've been out at Brooks since 1969, so it's time for me to retire,” said Cosgrove, a Vietnam veteran. He packed the final box, turned out the lights and handed over the keys to Building 749 to the Brooks Development Authority, which leased space to the Air Force while running the installation as a business and technology park. “I was the last government person out of the base.”

There hasn't been a Friday morning quite like this one in San Antonio since before Britain, France and Germany were locked in trench warfare, American soldiers were called “doughboys” and daredevil pilots guided biplanes from open cockpits.

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Ground was broken on 873 acres of mesquite and heavy brush on Dec. 8, 1917. Initially called Kelly Field No. 5, it was renamed nearly two months later for Sidney J. Brooks Jr., an aviation cadet who died after his plane tipped forward and plunged 2,000 feet, killing him instantly.

The field was home to novice pilot training and saw sweeping developments in American military aviation. It was the first base where instructor pilots and their students trained with dual controls and speaking tubes, reducing the risk of accidents.

It soon was headquarters for the Balloon and Airship School, and a decade later saw some of the first experimental parachute jumps. Sullivan recalled his father and sister working years later in Hangar 11, home of the parachute department, when pilots learned to fly B-25 bombers in 1941.

“Two cadets came in and said they bailed out of a B-25 and we want to give the man who packed our parachutes a box of cigars,” said Sullivan, a retired chief master sergeant. “They brought my sister up. She said, ‘I don't like cigars.'”