The taxi wasn't too bad - as we were parked at "Field's" they let us depart from 28L, which was the landing runway, otherwise the taxi to 28R would have taken longer than the flight!
It did all seem rather big from a Cherokee but, as I'd spent the previous two years at Heathrow, moving around at that height was very familiar from driving around in "Pixie" - the ATC van.
Getting a PPL was part of the 3-year basic training course for controllers in place at the time. Originally, almost all controllers came from an ex-service flying background but by the mid-60s it was obvious this source could not provide sufficient numbers so they introduced the 3-year cadetship for oiks like me who were, more or less, straight out of school. It covered - both classroom and practical - the 3 main ATC disciplines of tower, approach/approach radar and area/area radar together with various ancillaries such as meteorology, navigation, radio and radar theory and so on.
The PPL came early on after the basic licensing course and was followed by refresher flying throughout the rest of the 3 years. After you'd qualified, you could then join the 'Assisted Flying Scheme' where half you're flying costs would be paid by the CAA up to a certain number of hours a year - in those days, it was considered important that controllers had as much flying experience as possible. It also had one or two 'goodies' such as airways route flying where we had to do our own flight planning, navigation and position reporting etc., to get a feel of what it was like from "the other end". Coming back from one trip to Bordeaux, we landed at White Waltham in a Navajo after dusk in the middle of a thunderstorm on a runway lit by the car headlights of the club members but that's another story... The final course was a two week simulator-based course with an airline - I was lucky enough to get BEA on the Trident at Heston which I did in August 1973 before graduating the next month. Great fun and very useful background, too.
However, by the early 80s, cost - it was described as a "Rolls-Royce course" - and the need to train more controllers more quickly to match the rising movement figures meant that the course was cut down - the PPL was the first thing to go - and trainee controllers specialised much earlier in their training. These days, the course is so short and specialised, I think they get shown an aeroplane parked at Hurn!
I'm glad I trained when I did.
Pete
Note the stylish Austin A40 in the foreground putting the everso ugly Rover and Austin Healey to shame! 
